Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century 9781474435758

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Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century Edited by Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P. M. Kerr

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P. M. Kerr, 2018 © the chapters their several authors, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3573 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3575 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3576 5 (epub) The right of Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P. M. Kerr to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements Series Editor’s Preface List of Contributors Introduction Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P. M. Kerr Part I: In the Shadows of War 1. ‘Unconscious of her own double appearance’: Fanny Burney’s Brighton Leya Landau 2. A Breath of Fresh Air: Constable and the Coast Christiana Payne 3. Henry Brougham and the Invention of Cannes Rosemary Ashton 4. The Battle of Torquay: The Late Victorian Resort as Social Experiment James Kneale 5. Encounters with Capitalism on R. L. Stevenson’s Early Coasts David Sergeant 6. Seats and Sites of Authority: British Colonial Collecting on the East African Coast Sarah Longair 7. Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams’: Coastal and Fiscal Boundaries Roger Ebbatson

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Part II: Marginal Progress 8. Saxon Shore to Celtic Coast: Diasporic Telegraphy in the Atlantic World Brian H. Murray 9. Marine Bizarrerie: The Imaginative Biology of the Underwater Frontier Margaret Cohen 10. On the Beach Valentine Cunningham 11. Developing Fluid: Precision, Vagueness and Gustave Le Gray’s Photographic Beachscapes Matthew P. M. Kerr 12. Beyond the View: Reframing the Early Commercial Seaside Photograph Karen Shepherdson 13. Symons at the Seaside Nick Freeman

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Epilogue: Unravelling Philip Hoare

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Index

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Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank the British Association of Victorian Studies; Magdalen College, Oxford; the John Fell Fund, University of Oxford; and the University of Southampton for financial assistance in bringing this volume to fruition. Thanks also to the editorial team and anonymous readers at Edinburgh University Press, as well as to Hannah Field for assistance with proofreading.

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Recent books in the series: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces Lizzy Welby The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons and Dowson Kostas Boyiopoulos British India and Victorian Literary Culture Máire ní Fhlathúin Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form Frederik Van Dam Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination Jenn Fuller Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 Jonathan Cranfield The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity Marion Thain Gender, Technology and the New Woman Lena Wånggren Self-Harm in New Woman Writing Alexandra Gray Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image Lucy Ella Rose Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place Kevin A. Morrison The Victorian Male Body Joanne-Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art Fariha Shaikh The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism Eleonora Sasso The Late-Victorian Little Magazine Koenraad Claes Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century Matthew Ingleby and Matt P. M. Kerr

Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development Joanna Hofer-Robinson Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science Philipp Erchinger Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical Caley Ehnes The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage Renata Kobetts Miller Forthcoming volumes: Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism in Florence Marryat’s Fiction Tatiana Kontou The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities Patricia Pulham Olive Schreiner and the Politics of Print Culture, 1883–1920 Clare Gill Dickens’s Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life Johnathan Buckmaster Victorian Auto/Biography: Problems in Genre and Subject Amber Regis Culture and Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Scotland: Romance, Decadence and the Celtic Revival Michael Shaw Gissing, Shakespeare and the Life of Writing Thomas Ue The Arabian Nights and Nineteenth Century British Culture Melissa Dickson The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth Century British Literature, 1851–1908 Giles Whiteley

For a complete list of titles published visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ECVC Also Available: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Diane Piccitto and Patricia Pulham ISSN: 2044-2416 www.eupjournals.com/vic

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Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the so-called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nineteenth century.

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half-century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’s purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multifaceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys

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List of Contributors

Rosemary Ashton is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and Honorary Fellow of University College London. She is the author of critical biographies of Coleridge, George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and Thomas and Jane Carlyle, and of books on nineteenthcentury intellectual and cultural history including, most recently, Victorian Bloomsbury (2012) and One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858 (2017). Margaret Cohen is Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilisation at Stanford University. Her book The Novel and the Sea (2010) was awarded the Louis R. Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the George and Barbara Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of the Narrative, and is regarded as the foremost critical work in the field of maritime literary studies. Valentine Cunningham is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow and Lecturer in English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Victorian publications include the 1996 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Adam Bede; The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (2000); Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics (2011); and Victorian Poets: A Critical Reader (2014). Roger Ebbatson is currently visiting professor at Lancaster University, having previously taught at the University of Sokoto, Nigeria; the University of Worcester; and Loughborough University. Recent publications include Landscape and Literature 1830–1914: Nature, Text, Aura (2013) and Landscapes of Eternal Return: Tennyson to Hardy (2016). He is a Fellow of the English Association, and a VicePresident of the Tennyson Society.

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Nick Freeman is Reader in Late Victorian Literature at Loughborough University. He has published widely on fin-de-siècle literature and culture, and is the author of two books, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870–1914 (2007) and 1895: Drama, Disaster, and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (2011). His edition of short stories by Arthur Symons was published by the Modern Humanities Research Association’s Jewelled Tortoise imprint in 2017. Philip Hoare is the author of works including The Sea Inside (2013) and Leviathan; or, The Whale (2008), which won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. His latest book, RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR, is published by Fourth Estate. Matthew Ingleby is a lecturer in Victorian literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published several articles and essays about urban culture and spatial representation in the long nineteenth century, and co-edited (with Matthew Beaumont) the collection G. K. Chesterton, London, and Modernity (2013). The British Library recently published his Bloomsbury: Beyond the Establishment (2017), and his monograph Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Production of Bloomsbury: Novel Grounds is forthcoming in 2018. Matthew P. M. Kerr is a lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. He has published articles in Essays in Criticism, Review of English Studies and Dickens Studies Annual, and is currently preparing his first monograph, on the subject of the sea and literary language between 1829 and 1914. He frequently reviews books and exhibitions for Apollo Magazine. James Kneale, senior lecturer in the Department of Geography at University College London, is a cultural and historical geographer interested in historical and contemporary geographies of drink, drunkenness and temperance, and in literary geographies. Having developed an interest both in histories of insurance and in medical investigations of alcohol, he has published work on temperance life assurance (with Shaun French) and weather/climate insurance (with Sam Randalls). He has contributed a chapter on islands to the new Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space. Leya Landau currently lectures at New York University London after teaching at University College London for a number of years. Her

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main research interests lie in the literature of the eighteenth century and the Romantic period, and in the relationship between literature and the city. She has published on Frances Burney, eighteenth-century opera, and women and the Romantic metropolis, and is currently writing a book on women and the urban imagination in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century literature. Sarah Longair joined the School of History and Heritage at the University of Lincoln in 2016, after working for eleven years at the British Museum. Her research examines the history of the British Empire in East Africa and the Indian Ocean world, in particular through material and visual culture, and architecture. Her monograph on colonial culture and the museum in Zanzibar between 1900 and 1945 was published by Routledge in 2016, and she recently wrote (with Leonie Hannan) an IHR Research Guide on history and material culture. Brian H. Murray is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at King’s College London. He has published essays on the Bible in Ireland, H. M. Stanley, the literature of exploration, Dickens’s travel writing, and Victorian Afrocentrism. He recently co-edited (with Supriya Chaudhuri, Josephine McDonagh and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan) the collection Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World. Christiana Payne is Professor of History of Art at Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2007); John Brett, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter (2010); and Silent Witnesses: Trees in British Art, 1760–1870 (2017). She recently co-curated two exhibitions – one on the sea, one on air – at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, as well as ‘A Walk in the Woods: A Celebration of Trees in British Art’ at the Higgins Bedford. David Sergeant is a lecturer at the University of Plymouth. His monograph, Kipling’s Art of Fiction, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. His new project draws on ideas from utopian studies, the environmental humanities and cognitive narratology to explore how the novel has been used since the late nineteenth century to imagine better forms of community, with particular reference to globalisation and the issues it raises. David has also published two collections of poetry, and his poems have appeared in a range of magazines.

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Karen Shepherdson is Reader in Photography at Canterbury Christ Church University and Director of the South East Archive of Seaside Photography, which specifically documents regional coastal commercial photography in Britain and the cultural practice of photographing the population at leisure. In 2019, she will co-curate RESORT, an international exhibition on the British seaside as photographic subject at Turner Contemporary in Margate. Shepherdson is also a photographer and has exhibited in the United Kingdom, North America and Sweden.

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Introduction Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P. M. Kerr

In the latter part of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, the British cultural imagination turned to coasts. Prior to this period, coasts tended to be thought of as uninviting, even dangerous, places – ‘repulsive’, according to Alain Corbin.1 A compound of interlinked developments – in medicine, in aesthetics, in leisure, in law, in military strategy, for example – altered the prevailing mood, however, and during the long nineteenth century, the coast was visited more often, and by an increasingly diverse collection of people. This swell of interest in the littoral meant that coasts began to function as zones of cultural and commercial interchange. In part, this was because coasts became places of literal intermingling, where geologists and quack doctors, composers and painters, holidaymakers and recluses might meet intentionally or accidentally. Geological tourists followed Mary Anning to Lyme Regis in droves to purchase or discover for themselves sea-shells by the sea-shore. And towards the end of the nineteenth century, artists formed colonies at Pont-Aven, St Ives and elsewhere.2 Coasts became common ground for manifold, often contrasting styles of thought and practice. At the same time, though, the coast was as much a place for imaginative projection as actual visitation, and a growing obsession with depicting and defining the coast characterises the period considered by this volume. Increasingly, the coast could seem to be at once a space of clarity, and misty distance, a terminus or breaking-off point, and a place of embarkation – a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality.3 It offered a location for convalescence as well as sublime abandon, for the eking out of a fixed income in old age, but also for reckless gambling, a place for showing off and a place to retire from public view. The susceptibility of

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the coast to such varied conceptions means that it often functioned as literal grounds for their comparison – both a means of discriminating between superficially related considerations, and a point of contact between apparent immiscibles. This disposition toward intermixture need not be a matter of vanishing horizons and vaporous liminality. Indeed, some of the strongest links between the seemingly contradictory understandings sustained by the coast are material and political. Since the Acts of Union 1707 ‘forged’ an archipelagic kingdom with Great Britain at its helm, the apparently stable referent of its shore-line had become symbolically more and more important, even as, due to the expansion of empire and the rise of global capitalism, its coasts were becoming instrumentalised for trade and military manoeuvres as never before. Port and naval cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool, Hull, Southampton, Portsmouth and Plymouth all grew enormously in this period as a result. Throughout, the political, military and economic structures localised along coasts were sustained by, and measured against, the coast’s copious freight of cultural meaning. On an aesthetic level, meanwhile, the sublime ‘lure of the sea’, to borrow Corbin’s useful phrase, emerged in the late eighteenth century, and continued to operate (in increasingly qualified forms) as a test-case of a romantic sensibility throughout the nineteenth century. Such sensitivity to marine sublimity, however, almost instantly proved itself amenable to reconfiguration as commodity. The history of the emergence and democratisation of the seaside holiday, a nineteenthcentury invention (consolidated by the Bank Holiday Act of 1871), turns on the ways in which the value of the coast as a cultural property changed in response to its accessibility. Stubborn excess housing stock in Victorian working-class resorts such as Blackpool, Margate and Scarborough remain as an enduring geographical mark of this continued negotiation. What (and where) exactly the coast was also became a pressing concern at this time. More specifically, the coast became a place of limit-testing, but also a place that prompted renewed consideration of the limit – of governance or control – as a concept.4 This concern produced a set of practical questions of definition and extent. This volume is book-ended by Britain’s coastal blockade of America in 1775 and the remilitarisation of the English Channel in 1914: two moments of heightened attention to coastal boundaries. However, throughout the period, in an attempt to regulate coastal trade, and to establish the outer parameters of nations and where they intersected, the legal definition of coastal extent underwent repeated revision.5 In

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1793, then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Pitt with his estimates of the extent of coastal waters, which he thought might range anywhere between ‘one sea league’ (three nautical miles) and ‘the extent of human sight, estimated upwards of twenty miles’.6 Jefferson’s working through of the question of where the coast starts or ends might be read as a mirror image of Byron’s repeated poetic traversals of the shore-line at which the ‘control’ of civilisation ‘stops’.7 Rising and falling anxiety about incursion led to a recurrent apprehension that Britain’s coastline might be pierced or permeated. Worries that continue to shape British politics – about the dangerous effects of unwonted entry via a Channel tunnel, for instance – began to be voiced much earlier. ‘The time may come, indeed, for the “United States of Europe,” as for “the federation of the world”’ writes James Knowles in 1892; but ‘common-sense’ tells him that such a future is not yet ‘“within measurable distance”’.8 Earlier fear of invasion following the Napoleonic Wars had prompted the reinforcement of coastal bulwarks between the sea and the land with a hundred or so Martello towers built along the south coast from Seaford in East Sussex to the River Alde in Suffolk. These towers were themselves made possible by the large-scale bureaucratic programme of the Ordnance Survey, by which a virtual mastery of the coastal landscape – achieved through mapping – was the precursor to the fortifications. Yet, if the mapping of the British coastline by the Board of Ordnance was in its original intent defensive, its strategy of panoptic circumnavigation was also adapted as a technique of picturesque visualisation.9 Artists such as William Daniell, for example, whose Voyage round Great Britain was published in eight lavish volumes of aquatint engravings and text between 1814 and 1825, introduced a technique of observation that was also a technique of circumscription – of delimiting which coastal views were worthwhile, and indeed how they should be viewed. These programmes of control provide the reverse image, though, of an accompanying condition: the coast’s near-constitutive resistance to control, to delimitation, to being fixed. If Britain’s coastal obsession during the long nineteenth century was connected from the start of the period to cutting the island off from invaders, it grew gradually and concurrently into a fascination with the ways in which Britain’s wooden walls might turn out to be permeable. Romantic, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers all found at the coast both a metaphor, and an occasion, for liminality: the coast acts as what one of the contributors to this volume, Valentine Cunningham, calls ‘the most obviously dramatic literalisation of inbetweenness’

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available in the period.10 Part of the coast’s appeal lay in its capacity to situate forms of conceptual intermixture, so that its centrality to the British imagination in this period lay in its capacity to transcend both metaphoric and literal limits. The cultural meanings accruing to coasts during the long nineteenth century, and the shaping of culture at large by coastal encounters, can be contextualised via the burgeoning scholarly interest in seas and oceans sometimes referred to as the ‘blue humanities’. In Carl Thompson’s phrase, ‘Seas and oceans have . . . been reconceptualised as key sites of both inter- and intracultural exchange, negotiation, and, not infrequently, conflict.’11 At a scholarly level, too, what Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell refer to in their manifesto on the subject as the ‘new thalassology’ calls for ‘the erasure of established disciplinary and historical frontiers’.12 To this end, Philip Steinberg’s influential Social Construction of the Ocean considers ‘the way in which territoriality under capitalism became constructed in such a way as to support the concept of abstract, “emptiable” space’ – mirrored, perhaps counter-intuitively, in a Romantic aesthetic that was seldom conscious of the military, capitalist and imperial contexts of its own model of marine emptiness.13 In what may be the most nuanced thinking-through of what a new maritime history grounded in these ideas would look like, David Armitage implicitly recognises the importance of the distinctions between coasts and seas as vectors for the blue humanities, particularly in his concept of a cis-Atlantic history that traces ‘the result of the interaction between local particularity and a wider web of connections (and comparisons)’.14 Canonical studies of the coastal imagination – Corbin’s Lure of the Sea (1988; trans. 1994), for instance, or James Hamilton-Paterson’s Seven-Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds (1992) – suggestively theorise and historicise coastlines, while leaving much scope for focusing on particular periods and coastal regions or exchanges.15 More recent collections continue this trend, as in Coastal Works: Culture of the Atlantic Edge (2017), which – while focused on transatlantic coastal cultures, capaciously imagined – offers case studies drawn from the eighteenth century to the present.16 Other scholars zone in on particular subsets of representations, as, for instance, in Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2007) by Christiana Payne – a contributor to the present volume – or Tricia Cusack’s edited collection Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge (2012), both of which deal with visual art but not literature, or Gillian Mary Hanson’s monograph on sea-shore and riverbank, which examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature alone.17 Further

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important works document individual aspects of coastal experience; the seaside holiday, for instance, has been valuably explored by John K. Walton and John F. Travis, among others.18 By contrast, this volume attends to the heterogeneity of coastal experiences by tracing an extended but nuanced historical arc, and by adopting a range of disciplinary perspectives: perspectives drawn from literary criticism, but also art history, museum studies and geography.19 British culture of the long nineteenth century became obsessed with enacting and thus revising a coastal imaginary. This process of obsessive redefinition takes place in the context of war, and the rise of globalist capitalism, and is visible in the reworking of picturesque and Romantic aesthetics throughout the period. Many of the most significant figures in nineteenth-century literature and visual art dwelt on the coast in their work and visited it frequently; however, their perspectives on the coast present only partial refractions of a much more pervasive and multiform coastal nineteenth century. Between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century, the coast played a crucial role in quotidian cultural life, even for those who could not visit seaside resorts at Brighton or Cannes. In its capacity to suggest both national specificities and points of transnational intersection, operating as both a limit and a horizon, the space between sea and land supplied even those at a distance from it with a way of looking at once outward and inward. And, while the coast constituted a striking point of intersection for individuals and communities, the cultural and social transformations it facilitated were themselves less geographically restricted than might initially be imagined. Alongside the changing experience of the seaside itself in this period, the means by which the coast came inland are also significant. The coast had become practically accessible to a broad array of individuals by the latter half of the nineteenth century, but it became available much earlier to armchair travellers, the patrons of entertainments such as the panorama, and readers of magazines and handbills. The traces of this coastal infiltration remain, not just in the paintings of Turner or (more hieratically) Lewes’s Seaside Studies (1858), but also in ephemera, in an assortment of exhibits and attractions, and in the popular press. These demotic forms will be the focus of the next section. These media furnish an at once compressed and edgeways approach to the same concerns that drew nineteenth-century culture to the coast: salubrity and salaciousness, war and leisure, nature at once unspoilt and dissected by the marine naturalist.

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Figurative Littoral: Simulated Shore-lines in the Metropolis As early as the 1820s, on the original Chain Pier at Brighton, one could purchase a portable keepsake panorama of the coastal scene, viewed as from a ship offshore, showing the Royal Pavilion, the South Downs in the background, and the pier itself.20 Earlier still, however, a comparable experience could be had miles from the sea-shore, in the centre of London, looking out to sea. From the time it opened in 1794, one of Robert Barker’s original panoramas promised to transport spectators from Cranbourne Street in Leicester Square to the English coast. The first panoramic view available there, shown with a second smaller picture of London, was painted by Barker and his son, and depicted the British fleet lying off Spithead, ‘with a capsizing boat in the foreground and Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight in the distance’. The panorama was supposed to appeal to viewers on the grounds that the pictures appeared as large as life, and nearly as vivid; indeed, when the royal family came for a preview, Queen Charlotte reported that she felt seasick.21 If Queen Charlotte could be seasick in Leicester Square, perhaps even the streets of London were becoming coastal. What should we make of this striking moment at which the coast comes inland by way of a popular entertainment? ‘The panorama’, according to Allan Sekula, ‘is paradoxical: topographically “complete” while still signalling an acknowledgement of and desire for a greater extension beyond the frame’.22 And in this case, almost as important as the shock of immersion in the simulated secondary world of the coast was the motion-sick feeling of being transported without having moved at all, created by the way the panorama encourages its viewers to feel as though they have slipped past the edges of the image, or woozily lost track of them altogether. One of Barker’s competitors at the Great Room registered something like this experience when he proposed that ‘spectators may suppose themselves looking through a window at real objects’, conscious simultaneously of the static frame and the events in process beyond it.23 Of course, the geography of the coast is particularly suited to such a divided perspective, providing a scene in fluid motion, and a settled perspective, firm ground, from which to observe it.24 Coasts also suited the panoramas thematically and aesthetically, since, in the case of the naval panoramas, the frisson of observation comes from the feeling of being at once in the midst of warfare and safely away from it – a kitsch version of the sublime combination of pleasure and fear

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sought by Romantic visitors to the seaside.25 Or, as with the miniature Brighton panorama, the London viewer, like Dickens’s ‘good spirit who would take the house-tops off’, has the opportunity to peer across not only distance but also class boundaries, taking in the strollers on the promenade and the gardens of the prince’s pavilion at a glance.26 Looking at once outward and inward, marking a contestable threshold between classes and aesthetic sensibilities, the Leicester Square panoramas, but also the ephemera that accompanied them, rendered the experience of the coast portable, transportable and available. At the Great Room, for instance, a hundred-foot canvas titled Campus Nautica painted by Robert Dodd enhanced the drama of Barker’s original scene, showing the fleet at Spithead once again, this time in flight from the burning ship of the line, the HMS Boyne. Meanwhile, at Barker’s panorama, double-sided handbills advertised a full-blown battle at sea, Lord Bridport’s Engagement. The panorama could be viewed at Leicester Square in the lower circle, but also on the handbill itself, where a miniature reproduction was printed (Figure I.1). The panorama, in spite of its claims to size, miniaturises and even democratises the coast, not just because the cylindrical pictures at Leicester Square dramatically reproduce the way in which Britain is surrounded by shore-line, but because a portable version of that perspective printed on a handbill could be scribbled on, coloured in, folded up and put in one’s pocket. In the context of naval wars with France, America, Holland and Denmark, Britain’s ensuing dominance of global trade, the expansion of imperial Britain throughout the nineteenth century, and the entrenchment of postRomantic narratives of seaside health and sublimity, it is unsurprising that coastal views remained among the most popular subjects for panoramas in the years that followed. (Walter Benjamin records the term navalorama to describe them.27) For those who responded to the coast at a distance from the seaside, forms of incongruity frequently governed the experience. Many followed the Romantics to the sea-shore in hopes of immersing themselves in nature – even a carefully calibrated sojourn to the seaside without immersion could involve ‘the fleeting experience of a synchronicity between the world and the self’.28 It was, however, precisely the distinction between nature and artifice that the inland coastal aesthetic more regularly called into question. In 1775, for instance, a man named Ambroise impressed audiences in England with a display of so-called Chinese shadows, depicting several scenes, most notably a shipwreck with simulated thunder and lightning.

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Figure I.1 This handbill diagram shows Robert Barker’s Leicester Square panorama of a naval battle. © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 2008: John Johnson Collection: Entertainments folder 6 (60).

The effect of this technical virtuosity was partly dependent on its displacement away from the coast; at least one commentator specified that Ambroise’s shadows ought to be considered ‘absolutely the greatest Amusements that ever were exhibited in the Metropolis’.29

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Other entertainments exploited the sense, implied here, that part of what made amusements such as the panorama or Ambroise’s shadows so stimulating was their power to bring the coast from the margins to the centre. In 1816, for example, a ‘New and Interesting Mechanical EXHIBITION!’, introduced from Paris, concluded with a storm at sea ‘accompanied with all the characteristic Phenomena, an agitated Sea – Clouds, which by degrees obscure the Sky – Lightening, Thunder, &c.’ (Figure I.2). Uncanny mechanism substitutes in this case for sublimity, endlessly repeating those ‘characteristic’ aspects of a storm at sea that the entrenchment of Romantic tropes made seemingly inevitable. Advertised in the year following the cessation of the Napoleonic Wars, the show also featured the thrilling prospect of the French being made to exhibit their own defeat by way of ‘an accurate Representation of the Island of St Helena. The Present Residence of NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.’ But the advertisement makes it clear that the capacity of these Parisian machines to generate a ‘faithful Representation of Nature’ was at least as enticing. This superimposition of natural and artificial reached an early high-water mark with Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon. Opening in the early 1780s in Loutherbourg’s own house in Leicester Square, the ‘Eidophusikon, or Representation of Nature’ achieved its effects with a set of actual superimpositions. Loutherbourg, who had gained a reputation in France as a landand seascape painter, combined the clockworks of the mechanical theatre with both the lighting effects of Chinese shadows and an improved system of scenic transparencies. The show, performed in a smallish box, was a series of three-dimensional, changing prospects including, in various arrangements, a view of Niagara Falls, and the fiery lake from Paradise Lost. Most popular were the seascapes, however, including ‘Moonlight, a View in the Mediterranean, the Rising of the Moon contrasted with the Effect of Fire’; ‘Aurora; or, the Effects of the Dawn, with a View of London from Greenwich Park’; ‘The Sun rising in the Fog, and Italian Seaport’; and a climactic ‘Conclusive Scene, a Storm at Sea, and Shipwreck’.30 (Loutherbourg tried to remove the storm for the second season, but it had to be brought back to meet popular demand.) The piece was well received: according to the European Magazine in 1782, the disparate ‘pieces of clock-work’, the ‘transparencies’, the ‘moving pictures in the panopticon’, ‘the Italian and Chinese shadows’ had all been joined up into a ‘lucid order’ by Loutherbourg, who united in himself ‘the painter and the mechanic’ in order to ‘give natural motion to accurate resemblance’.31

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Figure I.2 At the Strand Theatre in early April 1816, spectators could see a panoramic exhibition of St Helena. © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 2008: John Johnson Collection: London Playbills folder 10 (37).

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Almost a hundred years later, an essay in All the Year Round reprised many of these points regarding the power of Loutherbourg’s storm and shipwreck illusion, and in particular the artist’s excellent ‘treatment of clouds . . . by regulating the action of his windlass, he could direct their movements, now permitting them to rise slowly from the horizon and sail obliquely across the heavens, and now driving them swiftly along according to their supposed density and the power ascribed to the wind’.32 Sound effects were created in various ways: by ‘shaking one of the lower corners of a large, thin sheet of copper suspended by a chain’, or by ‘suddenly striking a large tambourine with a sponge affixed to whalebone springs’ in order to simulate the ‘distant firing of signals of distress from the doomed vessel’. The real excitement came from the knowledge that the apparently natural was in fact artificial, an effect hinted at by All the Year Round’s careful notation of those moments when Loutherbourg’s effects could be produced using nautical technology like the windlass, or marine materials like whalebone. If both Loutherbourg and his Eidophusikon appealed in part because they called boundaries into question – between mechanical and natural, between technician and artist, between Italian and Chinese shadows, between Leicester Square and the Mediterranean coast – other more flagrant forms of marine hybridity occupied the popular imagination in this period, too. Notoriously, 1822 saw the exhibition in London of a particular sort of coastal creature: a ‘mermaid’ stitched together from a haddock and a monkey. It had been imported from Japan, where mermaid manufacture became a cottage industry of sorts.33 The papers were incredulous, but undecided. Defences were penned, including one by Mr Murray, and George Cruikshank printed an illustration that, while satirical, pays no attention to the seam joining the top and bottom halves (Figure I.3). In spite of its dubious origins, P. T. Barnum, inspired by an article in the Mirror and the shillings Londoners had paid to see the mermaid, bought what he believed to be this same specimen in 1843; it had by then migrated to New York. Renamed the ‘Feejee Mermaid’, it was given main billing at Barnum’s Great American Museum.34 However, the fantasy of discovering an animal that would fuse human and marine characteristics did not die with Barnum’s mermaid. In June 1885, for example, for a fee of two pence, the public was invited to view ‘“Jacko” the Performing and Talking Fish’ at 119 Oxford Street in London (Figure I.4). Jacko had been ‘caught in the Tay in Company with the WHALE!’, and it was recommended that ‘ALL PERSONS VISITING THE WHALE SHOULD SEE “JACKO”’, too, who was a ‘Rare Specimen’.35 Attentive visitors may have noticed

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Figure I.3 George Cruikshank’s advertisement for a coffee-house mermaid. © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 2008: John Johnson Collection: shelfmark Human Freaks 3 (48).

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Figure I.4 In 1885, Jacko the Talking Fish charged twopence. © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 2008: John Johnson Collection: Animals on Show 1 (79).

with discomfort the advertisement’s slip of the tongue, which tied Jacko’s capture in the Tay to the line set to ‘catch’ their own tuppence in Oxford Street. The talking fish occupied a place in the Victorian imagination comparable to Barnum’s mermaid – speaking sea creatures (usually seals) were a reasonably common attraction in London in the nineteenth century. Around thirty years before Jacko made his debut, a performing and talking seal or sea lion could be seen in London. At 191 Piccadilly, for the substantial charge of one shilling, the female seal, captured ‘off the Coast of Africa’, would perform tricks with her trainer.36 The seal could roll over on command, and would offer her right or left ‘“hand,” which is really a fore-foot, or fin’ when asked. This was all to demonstrate comprehension. In addition, according to the Morning Post, ‘it has two deep sounds which it repeats as directed, and which bear certainly a striking resemblance to “mamma” and

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“papa” – its desire to meet with “mamma” appearing to predominate over every other feeling’.37 Not all were equally amazed at the virtues of ‘THE GREATEST WONDER IN THE WORLD!!!’, however. The Daily Telegraph, for instance, waggishly asked: ‘Was the “Talking Fish” any relative to the “Rumtifoozle,” the “Podasokus,” the “Oozly Bird,” the “Spotted Girl,” the “Child with two heads,” the “Sockdolloger” Mr. Barnum’s “Mermaid,” or the “Pig-faced Lady?”’, but ultimately claims an unprecedented degree of authenticity: ‘in all our misgivings we were very agreeably disappointed’. The Saturday Review, by contrast, used the talking fish as an opportunity to commentate knowingly on Disraeli’s foreign policy (‘not only had Mr. Disraeli spoken at Aylesbury, but also a Seal had found a human tongue at Piccadilly’).38 While admirers of Barnum’s mermaid and denigrators of Disraeli’s politics met over their appreciation for the talking fish, the illustrations printed in The Performing and Talking Fish: Opinions of the London Press emphasised the closeness of the link between trainer and coastal creature. An illustration in The Leisure Hour, for instance, showed Jenny the seal and her keeper staring into each other’s eyes, faces close enough that their whiskers intertwine. The accompanying essay concludes philosophically by claiming that the Creator’s beneficence ‘toward the humblest of his creatures’ can be detected in the ‘wonderful modifications’ of the seal’s body: ‘the limbs of terrestrial animals, adapted for swift and easy motion amid the waves of the ocean’.39 The seal’s body, that is, appeared to this journalist to be something like a living embodiment of the coast, ‘wonderful’ precisely because it inhabited and embodied the threshold between marine and terrestrial forms of life.40 Increasingly, dreams of modification or adaptation were something to which humans could themselves aspire. Following the publication of Philip Henry Gosse’s The Aquarium (1854), discussed by a number of contributors to this book, the sea-shore’s progress inland picked up pace dramatically. Fish, however, were not all that could be observed swimming in these inland seas. Performing inside ‘crystal aquaria’ or ‘natatoria’, human ‘mermaids’ or ‘naiads’ would perform feats of underwater acrobatics and endurance.41 Ada Webb, ‘Champion Lady High Diver of the World and Queen of the Crystal Tank’, could eat, drink, peel an apple, answer questions, sew, sing, take snuff, write and (improbably) smoke underwater.42 While it was undoubtedly edifying to observe and measure these feats of endurance, the thrill of watching these performances also

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involved observing women and men cavorting in their swimming togs. Popular interest in bathing costume design – satirised in cartoons, or offered up for purchase in clothing catalogues – allowed women to imagine seaside uninhibitedness. Judy, a down-at-heel rival to Punch subtitled The London Serio-Comic Journal, proposed a set of sterling designs to its ‘Lady Subscribers’ in September 1879, for instance, which included a version of male bathing dress for women (‘The Jockey’) and, in the year of the premiere of HMS ‘Pinafore’, ‘The Pinafore’ (Figure I.5). ‘The Sarah’ is ‘of black material with a coffin-nail trimming’, an homage to Sarah Bernhardt’s infamous sleeping habits. ‘L’Assommoir’ is more difficult to parse: it might be a reference to the 1877 novel by Zola (the woman wearing it is chucking a bucket of water at ‘The Jockey’, suggestive perhaps of Gervaise Macquart’s occupation as a laundress); or a theatrical adaptation of it (one opened that year); or perhaps to the shape of the dress, which resembles a bottle.43 The series culminates in ‘The Dolaro’, named for Selina Dolaro, the Victorian musical theatre impresario and performer, manager of the Folly Theatre in the year this cartoon was published.44 The Dolaro is scandalously scant – the illustration incorporates a rare example of Victorian décolletage.

Figure I.5 Judy’s celebrity-oriented bathing suits for the 1879 season.

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There is an unmistakable element of mockery here, of course, designed to contain the imagined transgressions of women by the seaside. Yet, the cartoon’s theatrical in-jokes also help to fashion a discursive environment in which Judy’s ‘Lady Subscribers’ had licence imaginatively to try on these costumes for themselves, while bracketing off the thought (and whatever troubling implications it might have had) as blameless performance. Nor are this cartoon’s jokes and allusions constrained by class or gender: they are knowing and puerile at once, and it is hard to tell at whom they are aimed, and whom they would exclude, encompassing as they do a relatively recondite dig at Zola, the pleasures of slapstick, and a laugh alongside Gilbert and Sullivan and the magnificently populist Selina Dolaro. This cartoon, then, suits the coast’s place in culture as outlined here: it functions even at a distance from the shore as a manifold threshold between high and low cultural forms, between classes, and between genders – a set of competing and overlapping identities that could be slipped into and tested out for fit. In all these examples, we witness the coast, a zone at the literal margins of Great Britain, mobilised and brought to the centre for commercial exploitation. ‘You can do a lot of things by the seaside that you can’t do in town’ may have been the refrain of one popular Victorian song,45 but the possibilities, fads and fixations of coastal life also exerted an influence on literary, visual and material culture that could be felt far inland. Coastal cultures were, indeed, becoming constitutive of national life in this period. If the coast became mobile in the nineteenth century – consumable as spectacle or commodity for Londoners in the metropolis as much as it was a prime destination for their holidays away – this was because it was not marginal to the national culture but central. Since the rise of air travel, Britain’s coasts have less uniformly represented the definitive threshold between the nation and the rest of the world. In the period to which this volume attends, however, the permeable zone where island ends and sea begins constituted a recognisable limit that seemed both to mark out the nation’s identity and to offer a venue for its extension, adaptation and reformation. The final section of the introduction, then, positions individual chapters in relation to the ebb and flow of these larger themes of the book.

‘Break, break, break’ The chapters are divided into two sections. The first, entitled ‘In the Shadows of War’, concerns the ways in which the coast acted as a kind of conduit for defensive, reactionary violence, representing also

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an imaginative bulwark against the manifold forms of breakdown (moral, stylistic, geographical) threatened by modernity. The second section, ‘Marginal Progress’, complements the first by addressing the progressive possibilities the coast offered writers, visual artists and working-class holidaymakers, among others. A break with prior orthodoxies was part of the allure of coastal spaces and the cultures that attended them. As the plural of our title implies, the nineteenth-century coast can be characterised as a zone of multiplicity or, at least, ‘doubleness’ (to quote Leya Landau’s chapter in this volume), the state of being between sea and land forcing or enabling us to look ‘two ways at once’ (to quote Matthew P. M. Kerr’s). Yet might not contradiction and conflict frame with equal sensitivity and productivity the ‘break, break, break’ of the waves against the rocks Tennyson so memorably invoked? As Sarah Longair writes here, in reference to the compromised, coveted coasts of colonial Zanzibar, a scholarly preoccupation with ‘connection and cultural exchange must not . . . obscure examples of disconnection and hostility’. Longair’s rejoinder to an overly upbeat revisionism within colonial historiographies speaks with equal relevance to the cliffs of Dover, which were never really ‘white’ anyway, if we take ‘white’ to mean pure, integrated, innocent – before class, gender, racial or religious divides. On a very literal level, for much of the period under discussion the shadow of armed conflict is cast noticeably over the British coast. In the essays assembled here, war is rarely far from view. In Landau’s chapter on The Wanderer (1814), the early nineteenth-century coast is shown to refract ongoing turbulence following events in France, where, across the Channel, Fanny Burney had spent ten years incarcerated with her husband. For Christiana Payne, despite the personal emotions and formal ambitions that doubtless also attended its construction, Constable’s Hadleigh Castle (1829) cannot be extracted from the militarisation of the mouth of the Thames that followed the ascent of Napoleon. Reading between the lines of Rosemary Ashton’s narrative about the ‘invention’ of Cannes as holiday destination by one of Britain’s leading politicians during those years, it is not difficult to discern the aftermath of that tumultuous time, barely past: in helping to transform a ‘tiny fishing village’ into a ‘thriving seaside resort’ seasonally populated by Anglo-Saxons, cannot Brougham be seen to have secured another outpost of British influence in the Mediterranean, softer than the rock of Gibraltar, but co-opted to the same essential cause of a British nineteenth century? After all, as she reminds us, Cannes’s main claim to fame prior to Brougham’s tourist takeover in 1832 was that it received Napoleon after his escape

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from Elba. Read together, these essays imply the march of war that produced the century’s Martello towers and the march of consumer capitalism that produced its beach resorts constituted not alternative coastal cultures, but two sides of one coin. Those dual themes of coins and conflict hover in the background of the next few essays in the collection, the latter underlying James Kneale’s piece, which reconstructs a series of social contestations about alcohol consumption. These debates pitted the Salvation Army against militias of Anglicans, ‘local elites, publicans and others’, in locations up and down the south coast of England, many of them ‘naval or garrison towns’ full of hard-drinking sailors or soldiers. But while incidents such as the ‘battle of Torquay’ of 1888 may have borrowed from the bellicose rhetoric of an empire engaged in constant war, they also embodied actual (class-related) fractures within society and mobilised crowds against policemen. David Sergeant, meanwhile, draws upon Stevenson’s knowledge of the bloody history of the Highland coast of Scotland, with its memory of the post-Jacobite rebellion Highland Clearances, in order to contextualise the tension his ‘anti-capitalist romances’ constituted in relation to empire and the global economy it sought to enforce. If the gunboats moored ominously off the Scottish coast may have been partly responsible for the antagonism towards imperial domination channelled by Stevenson’s fiction, the naval ships that patrol Zanzibar’s shore-line in Longair’s chapter underline even more strongly the link between military aggression and commercial competition in the 1880s and 1890s. As Roger Ebbatson suggests in his chapter on Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams’, the nineteenth-century British coast was peppered with traces of finance capitalism and empire: for Tennyson, the coast was a place for speculating about capital’s association between the fixed and the mobile, mirrored by verse’s capacity for investing fluid concepts with fixed forms.46 In this case, the coast affords Tennyson a means to consider not only the relationship between the potential fraudulence of global finance and his personal fears about the unstable bases for poetry’s cultural and material value, but also the wider implications of this thought amidst the rumbles of an empire built on moral and financial debt. While in this period the crash of waves against the shore may have always carried with it echoes of gunfire, the ‘break, break, break’ of the nineteenth-century coast was by no means defined exclusively by reactionary destruction. The zone between land and sea was at least as much associated with change and innovation – utopianism, even. As we have seen, the coast was recruited consistently in the 1800s for the project of imperial capitalism’s expansion, through ruthless economic

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competition and material conflict both at home and abroad. But, if we look again, from a different angle, this strange ‘between’ space yields also a reverse side with another set of practices and ambitions that point in various ways to a future quite different from the nineteenthcentury present: a future of internationalism, cooperation, technological and artistic experimentation. Native British cliffs had formed one of the front lines of scientific advancement since John Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1829), but as the chapters in the second half of the volume suggest, the very bottom of the sea, rock pools and crowded workingclass beach resorts all contributed in their quite different ways to making the coast one of the veritable crucibles of a modernity that might seem barbaric and progressive in equal measure. Brian Murray’s chapter balances finely the nineteenth-century coast’s dialectic of creative destruction, showing how the telegraphic cable laid under the Atlantic between the Celtic fringe of Britain and Canada could at once signify ‘the dawn of a new information age and an era of unparalleled peace and prosperity’, and act as a ‘medium for disseminating rumours of war’. Driven by ‘machine dreams of a networked modernity’ we now uncannily inhabit, the story of its construction bears witness to the complex interplay of that ‘archaic twilight’ and those glimmers of the future the horizon upon the ocean seems to express, when viewed from the cliffs. Margaret Cohen’s chapter remains underwater, but likewise concerns the hyper-modern possibilities of that peculiar, deterritorialised zone, a ‘new planetary frontier’. Instead of tracing the attempt of two anglophone nations to achieve greater union whilst repressing internal cultural conflicts, it explores how Britain and France, two countries that had long been enemies, found themselves together in the ‘vanguard’ of exploring the sea floor ‘in the arts as well as in scientific and technological practice’. Her comparative literary methodology, juxtaposing Kingsley and Flaubert, allows us to envision the submarine world as spur to a kind of proto-modernist surrealist writing she names ‘marine bizarrerie’. In Valentine Cunningham’s account, scientific experimentation again relates to new developments within the literary field, though here it is the nineteenth century’s unprecedented fascination not with the fantastic but with ‘ordinariness’ that finds a home on the coast. Introducing Philip Henry Gosse’s books about the British sea-shore, which encouraged Victorians to discover an interest for paddling about in rock pools and marvelling at their neglected contents, the essay links them to George Eliot’s emerging paradigm of the ‘novelist as natural historian’, and the ‘novel as vivarium’.

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Science emerging from the coast did not only inspire nineteenthcentury writers to push their work further than it had gone before – technological advances also bore direct fruit in new forms of visual representation, within the field of photography, for instance. In Kerr’s reading of the marine and coastal photography of Gustave Le Gray, the Frenchman’s favourite subject seems to have resulted in what some commentators at the time called ‘the finest photographic picture[s] yet produced’. The ‘permanence within flux’ captured by the camera fixed upon the coast looking out upon the endless movement of the ocean allowed Le Gray ‘to exceed the capabilities of photographic technology’ then available. While Karen Shepherdson concentrates on a very different though contemporaneous form of photography – non-elite British beach photography by itinerant ‘smudgers’ or ‘bodgers’ – she also finds a synergy between formal innovation and the particular spatial dynamic of coastal locations, not least in the way coastal subjects blurred the line between specificity and abstraction. The rough-and-ready marketplace-cum-stage of the working-class beach resort allowed for the democratisation of the photographic medium, ‘facilitat[ing] sitters in presenting themselves not as they necessarily were, but how they wanted to be seen’, in the technically and culturally avant-garde arena of public space en plein air. As Nick Freeman shows in the final chapter of the volume, Arthur Symons too responded with formal innovation to the ‘aesthetic spectacle’ he witnessed from the coast, meeting the sea’s infinite ‘variation’ with a kind of poetic impressionism unknown before in English poetry. For this ‘decadent’, however, the coast needed to be depopulated and denuded of ‘practicalities’ for its enormous imaginative productivity to be unleashed fully. In order to do this, that nineteenth-century coastal coin, whose two sides – ‘naval rivalries’ and the ‘disgusting vulgarity’ of consumer capitalism – we addressed in the first section of this book, must be tossed nonchalantly into the ‘sea of lead’, in order to pay protomodernistic attention to an ‘indifferent moment as it dies’. The volume ends with a lyrical epilogue by Philip Hoare. Weaving together spectral sounds heard by Guglielmo Marconi, whales mistaken for U-boats, the rise of container shipping, and Virginia Woolf’s re-imagining of Ariel from The Tempest flying across the Atlantic to show her ‘America, which I Have Never Seen’, Hoare brings coastal cultures up to date as he writes of the palimpsests that have shaped and continue to shape the shore-lines he has experienced as a swimmer, a Southamptonian, a cetacean enthusiast, and an acclaimed commentator on the pelagic imaginary.

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If on a material level coasts were being used to a greater degree than ever before, it is perhaps unsurprising that they came to feature so heavily in the cultural imagination. As this volume suggests, nineteenth-century visual culture, literature and music were transfixed with the sea and the coasts. Within poetry, perhaps more than any of the other arts, the coast was a constant inspiration, as Crabbe’s The Borough (1810), Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), Hopkins’s ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (written between 1875 and 1876, published 1918) and Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) all attest. Coasts and the seaside feature in a number of the most important works of nineteenth-century fiction, from Dombey and Son (1847), Moby-Dick (1851) and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) at mid-century, up until Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Lord Jim (1899–1900) towards the fin de siècle. Music and the visual arts are equally preoccupied with coastal scenarios and spaces. Turner’s Margate-produced seascapes loom large in the first half of the century in Britain, but for mid-Victorian realism, few pictures can claim to have been more representative or popular than William Powell Frith’s Ramsgate Sands (1852–4), loved by the people but bought by Queen Victoria. Seascapes are not an exclusively British genre, and the most influential French impressionists returned obsessively to the sea in the second half of the century.47 But British musicians and visual artists turned to the coast during the long nineteenth century with particular obsession and influence. Elgar’s Sea Pictures (1899), the premiere of which featured the famous contralto Clara Butt in a mermaid costume, exemplifies a consistent presence of marine and coastal themes within British musical culture in the nineteenth century (as well as the coast’s amenability to superimpositions of taste and tackiness). While amateur naturalists including G. H. Lewes and Charles Kingsley peered into tide pools in order to observe the wonders of creation in miniature, Ralph Vaughan Williams found there the materials for his maximalist early work Sea Symphony (1910). Turner’s famously ‘indistinct’ view of the coast, Fingal’s Cave, Staffa, was exhibited in 1832 – the very year Mendelssohn’s overture of the same name debuted in London.48 Two years later, in 1834, Turner also painted the Temple of Poseidon in Sounion where, in 1810 or 1811, Byron had scratched his name. During the period addressed by this volume, the coast often acted as a meeting place where modernity and antiquity could be experienced at once.49 Finally, while this book contains essays considering Canadian, French, Scottish and Zanzibari coasts, among others, it focuses on British shores, and on the distinctive qualities of the coasts of a

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group of nations whose borders are almost all maritime ones. The coast is, of course, not an exclusively British invention or preoccupation, but a distinctively British concept of the coast saturates the most consequential histories of national identity, trade and conquest of the long nineteenth century.50 This is no coincidence since it was in part Britain’s relationship to the coast as a place and a concept that drove the expansion of its empire. By 1775, Britain had begun to turn its attention with new intensity outward. Walter Raleigh had suggested in the seventeenth century that sea power was the key to political and economic dominance.51 But by the mideighteenth century, the notion that Britannia might practically and conceptually extend itself across the waves, and by means of the waves, to distant coasts had become both a verbal commonplace and a constitutive element of both British national identity and its military and economic power. Thus, while this volume concentrates primarily on British responses to the coast, this focus invites and permits a reconsideration of the British concepts of the coastal that informed perceptions of the nature of foreignness and rule, commerce and communication. Individual essays concern themselves both with what happens when peculiarly British inventions such as the seaside holiday are exported abroad, and with the ways in which British coastal culture always developed in negotiation with, under the influence of, and in collaboration with influences from beyond its shores. Thus, if this volume is about Britishness, it is also about a particular history of relationality; it describes a historical moment when ideas about the relationship between centre and periphery began to shift, when places of contact and comparison (edges, borders, peripheries) became central.

Notes 1. Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (London: Penguin, 1994), 1. 2. See Laura Newton (ed.), Painting at the Edge: British Coastal Art Colonies 1880–1930 (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2005). 3. Gillian Mary Hanson addresses some of these significances in Riverbank and Seashore in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Literature (London: McFarland, 2006). 4. For a good discussion of such limits, see Kate Flint, ‘The Victorian Horizon’, in The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 285–312.

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5. See John Armstrong, ‘The Role of Short-Sea, Coastal, and Riverine Traffic in Economic Development since 1750’, in Daniel Finamore (ed.), Maritime History as World History: New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2004), 115–29. 6. Thomas Jefferson to William Pitt, 1793, quoted in Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 136. This question of coastal thickness remained unsettled until 1930; Steinberg, Social Construction, 138. 7. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in vol. 2 of Lord Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 184, canto 4, stanza 179, l. 1606. 8. James Knowles, ‘The Proposed Channel Tunnel: A Protest’, The Nineteenth Century, April 1882, 500. See also ‘The Proposed Channel Tunnel: A Protest II’, The Nineteenth Century, May 1882, 657–62. The latter piece was signed by William Morris, among others. 9. The first map was published in 1801, but the project continued until 1891. The headquarters moved to the coast at Southampton in 1846. 10. Valentine Cunningham, Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 215. 11. Carl Thompson, Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day (New York: Routledge, 2013), 22. 12. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, ‘Forum: The Mediterranean and the “New Thalassology”’, American Historical Review 111 (2006): 723. 13. Steinberg, Social Construction, 39. 14. David Armitage, introduction to Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 21. 15. Corbin, Lure of the Sea; James Hamilton-Paterson, Seven-Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds (London: Faber, 2007). 16. Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom and Jos Smith (eds), Coastal Works: Culture of the Atlantic Edge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 17. Christiana Payne, Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2007); Tricia Cusack (ed.), Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Hanson, Riverbank and Seashore. 18. John K. Walton, ‘The Demand for Working-Class Seaside Holidays in Victorian England’, Economic History Review, new ser., 34 (1981): 249–65; John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History, 1750–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983); John F. Travis, The Rise of the Devon Seaside Resorts, 1750–1900 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1993). 19. Though their book focuses on a later period in coastal history, a similar strategy to ours is pursued in Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris (eds), Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside (Witney: Peter Lang, 2009).

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20. One such panorama is on view in the Brighton Pavilion at the time of writing. 21. Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 133, 134. 22. Allan Sekula, Fish Story, 2nd rev. English edn (Düsseldorf: Richter, 2002), 43. 23. Quoted in Altick, Shows of London, 134. 24. Compare Hans Blumenberg’s account of the shipwreck viewed from the safety of the shore. Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 25. In Chapter 2 of this volume, Christiana Payne takes up this dual theme in relation to Constable’s seaside paintings. 26. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 685. 27. Walter Benjamin also cites pleorama, a term for dioramas that charted ‘travels on water’. See The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 528, 531, 548. 28. Corbin, Lure of the Sea, 163–83, 141. 29. Quoted in Altick, Shows of London, 118. 30. Ibid. 121, 119. Altick furthermore points suggestively to the capacity of these themes to traverse class and taste: ‘Tempests and shipwrecks became as common in the commercial shows as they were on the walls of the Academy exhibitions’ (121). 31. ‘A View of the Eidophusikon’, European Magazine, and London Review, March 1782, 182. 32. ‘Stage Storms’, All the Year Round, 10 August 1872, 307. Charles Dickens Jr later recalled that his father had tried his hand at similar sorts of stagecraft in his production of The Lighthouse. See Charles Dickens Jr, ‘Glimpses of Charles Dickens’, North American Review, May 1895, 533. 33. See Richard Carrington, Mermaids and Mastodons: A Book of Natural and Unnatural History (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), 14; Charles Wyville Thomson, The Depths of the Sea (London: Macmillan, 1873), 423–4. 34. Mr Murray, letter to the editor, St Nicholas’ Magazine, January 1823, 34–40, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, shelfmark Animals on Show 1 (74); ‘The Mermaid’, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, 9 November 1822, 7–19, 35–8; Life of P. T. Barnum (Buffalo: Courier Company, 1888), 60–1. John Johnson sources will be abbreviated as JJ in notes from this point. 35. The huge skeletons of whales were a favourite attraction in London throughout the century; see Philip Hoare, Leviathan; or, The Whale (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 245–7.

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Introduction

25

36. The Performing and Talking Fish: Opinions of the London Press (London: R. S. Francis, [1859]), 2, JJ shelfmark Animals on Show 1 (88). The title-page lists the price for attendance: one shilling for adults, sixpence for children. 37. ‘The Talking Fish’, Morning Post, 5 May 1859, quoted in ibid. 9. 38. ‘A Fishy Phenomenon’, The Standard, 5 May 1859; Daily Telegraph, 5 May 1859; ‘Locutus Bos’, Saturday Review, 7 May 1859, all quoted in The Performing and Talking Fish, 13, 11, 4. 39. ‘The Talking and Performing Fish’, The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation, 16 June 1859, 384. 40. These late Victorian hybrids continue an earlier tradition. The popular fascination with such composites gained a certain degree of legitimacy with the publication of Benoît de Maillet’s Telliamed (1748). The second volume discusses ‘l’origine des animaux. . . . leur resemblance avec certains poissons’ (the origin of animals. . . . their resemblance to certain fishes) and moves on to describe ‘des hommes marins’ (seamen). J. A. G. [Benoît de Maillet], Telliamed; ou, Entretiens d’un philosophe indien avec un missionnaire françois [sic] [Telliamed; or, Conversations between an Indian philosopher and a French missionary] (Amsterdam: L’Honoré et Fils, 1748); see Corbin, Lure of the Sea, 99–111. 41. See Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker, The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth (New York: Viking, 1998), 178; Charles Sprawson, Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero (London: Cape, 1992), 33. 42. Dave Day, ‘From Lambeth to Niagara: Imitation and Innovation among Female Natationists’, Sport in History 35 (2015): 365. 43. One review of the stage production noted the ‘marked taste’ of the French ‘for literary nudity’. ‘L’Assommoir’, The Examiner, 8 February 1879, 179. 44. See Sidney Dark and Rowland Grey, Gilbert, His Life and Letters (London: Methuen, 1923), 68. 45. Sprawson, Haunts, 29. 46. See Steinberg, Social Construction, 6. 47. See Steven Z. Levine, ‘Seascapes of the Sublime: Vernet, Monet, and the Oceanic Feeling’, in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations’, ed. Gary Shapiro, special issue, New Literary History 16, no. 2 (1985): 377–400. On nineteenth-century British seascapes, see Payne, Where the Sea. 48. James Lenox, the first to import one of Turner’s paintings to America, called the picture ‘indistinct’; see Martin Butlin, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 1:199. 49. Compare Roger Ebbatson’s Adornian reading of Tennyson’s sirens. ‘“The Sea-Fairies”: The Sirens and the Administered Society’, in Landscape and Literature 1830–1914: Nature, Text, Aura (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 21–8.

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50. Armitage has something similar in mind when he argues that ‘the Atlantic was a European invention’. Introduction, 16. 51. This perspective on history was influentially updated by Alfred T. Mahan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890) and Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812 (1905).

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Chapter 1

‘Unconscious of her own double appearance’: Fanny Burney’s Brighton Leya Landau

To think about Fanny Burney’s coastal imagination involves a radical shift in geography for an author better known for her portrayals of Georgian London, especially in her first two novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782).1 In her fourth and final novel, The Wanderer (1814), a post-Revolutionary narrative set in the 1790s but published in the same year as Austen’s Mansfield Park and Scott’s Waverley, Burney leaves the metropolis further behind to develop a more complex geographical network that takes her heroine essentially to the edge, to the coasts of France and England and, more specifically, to Brighthelmstone, now better known as Brighton, where much of the plot, over two thirds of the novel, unfolds. The Wanderer opens on to the French coast and reaches its denouement on a beach in southwest England. The novel’s progression also closely connected it to the sea and shore: recalling the decade of her incarceration with her husband in France between 1802 and 1812 in the novel’s dedication, Burney described how these early pages had ‘already twice traversed the ocean in manuscript’.2 Wary of ‘venturing upon the stormy sea of politics’, she recounts, diplomatically, how the custom-houses on ‘either – alas! – hostile shore’ had accepted her assurances that her writings contained no seditious material and allowed her papers through. This double bond between novel and coastline – the manuscript as a physical seafaring object and a story set predominantly in the seaside resort of Brighton – suggests a strong link between author, sea and shore. Yet Burney’s relationship with Brighton was more complex than these associations suggest. Her regard for, and experience of, Brighthelmstone shifted and changed over a number of years, offering a varying perspective that, I argue, is mirrored in her writings about the coast, where sea and view are successively

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concealed and revealed, through a range of rhetorical and affective registers, different literary traditions, and alternating prospects of restriction and boundlessness. Burney’s private letters, stretching from youth through to old age, record a long personal connection with Brighton. Written over a number of decades, alongside her fiction, they reveal a portrait of the resort that both reflects and runs counter to the more conventional and popular history of the development of the town in this period. From her twenties onwards, she was a fairly frequent visitor to Brighton; her own dates (1752–1840) connect her to the resort whose first period of expansion is considered to have begun in 1754, the year in which Dr Richard Russell, author of A Dissertation on the Use of Seawater in the Diseases of the Glands, took up residence at the southern end of the Steine, and ended in 1841 with the opening of the London to Brighton railway line.3 Simple chronological mappings and correlations are, however, misleading. Burney’s coastal writings are more than clear surfaces reflecting their histories and settings. To some extent, they reverse the conventional narrative of Brighton’s chronological development. Brighton’s early modern history is of a health resort that came to prominence in the middle of the eighteenth century and later evolved into the most fashionable social Regency town of the early 1800s, surpassing Bath in popularity. Burney’s journals and letters tell a personal story that moves in the opposite direction. They record her first visit to Brighton as part of Hester Thrale’s Streatham social circle in the late 1770s, paying scant attention to its contemporary medical reputation; conversely, her final entries in the late 1820s and 1830s ignore the fashionable Regency crowd and focus increasingly on the resort’s therapeutic properties in a growing awareness of mortality as her body weakened and began to break down in old age. Written over several decades, Burney’s writings also provide a picture of a less familiar transitional period in Brighton’s history, before the Royal Pavilion was completed in 1823 and before Constable and Turner captured its shore-line in their paintings from the mid-1820s onward.4 Her fictional portrayal of Brighthelmstone in The Wanderer is similarly characterised by unfamiliar and unaligned histories and chronologies. Written over two decades and published in 1814, the narrative is set in the post-Revolutionary 1790s, a period central to the novel’s plot and dominant themes. Burney writes, ‘I had planned and begun [The Wanderer] before the end of the last century!’ (The Wanderer, 4). Margaret Doody has suggested that the novel combines the chronological and aesthetic range of first- and second-generation

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Romanticism: its ‘base may be in the early ’90s, but the finished version belongs, in its stylistic combinations, to the era in which it was published’.5 These temporal misalignments link Burney’s depiction of Brighton across her writings. Burney’s younger near contemporary, Jane Austen, composed her last unfinished work, Sanditon (1817), as a timely satire on the vogue for seaside tourism in the early nineteenth century: it depicts a fictional resort in the process of construction, and maintains an arch and acerbic tone throughout its unfinished eleven chapters. Burney’s novel, by contrast, conveys a darker, inwardlooking, at times anachronistic picture of a resort indifferent to its Regency patronage and context, a town that looks out on to the coast of France but whose residents, for the most part, turn their backs to the sea. As this chapter will argue, Burney’s coastal imagination presents a strange double aesthetic: a town governed by a narrow provincialism and a shore-line devoid of an ocean view, and at the same time a sublime seascape that intermittently interrupts the closed prospect with the sudden appearance of a boundless horizon.

Burney and the Sea Little attention has been paid to Burney’s coastal imagination. It is an omission that might partly be explained by the near invisibility of the ocean itself in her writing. Although she describes a number of visits to the seaside in her letters, and The Wanderer is set mainly on the south coast of England, Burney is noticeably reticent about the sea in much of her writing. It is possible that this reticence reflects the ebb and flow of the sea-view in literature in general. There seems to be little consensus on the point at which it becomes a subject worthy of imaginative and poetic response. In Margaret Cohen’s expression, ‘the sea heaves into view as an object of aesthetic contemplation only with Romanticism.’6 Jonathan Raban identifies an earlier period, situating the aristocratic disdain of pioneering traveller Celia Fiennes for the ocean in 1700 ‘on the brink of a great upheaval of ideas about the sea’, only a few years before Joseph Addison declared in 1712: ‘of all objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination so much as the sea or ocean.’7 Addison’s paean to the ocean marked an increasing interest in the sea as part of the aesthetics of the sublime in the first half of the eighteenth century.8 It also anticipated Edmund Burke’s treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), whose rhetoric famously codified a vocabulary and affective register for the oceanic sublime: ‘A level plain of a vast extent of land, is certainly no

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mean idea . . . but can it ever fill the mind with anything so great as the ocean itself?’9 This ‘sublimation of the sea’ provided a vocabulary – the ‘rhetorical sublime’ – for a new kind of lyrical writing about the ocean in the Romantic period.10 Burney’s contemporary, Charlotte Smith, shared with her a close connection to the French and English coasts. Smith lived at different times in Dieppe and Brighton, and a number of her late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poems – including the Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and her two longer celebrated works, The Emigrants (1793) and Beachy Head (1807) – are located on the south coast and look straight out to sea.11 Compared with the lyricism of Smith’s poetry, Burney’s prose exhibits a conflicting relationship with the ocean and its shore. An early engagement with the sea and the coast in private letters describing visits to the seaside is replaced by a steady withdrawal from the ocean in her later writings. Her early diaries indicate a greater familiarity with and interest in the sea. Burney’s early diary describes the strong sensual pleasures of swimming in the ocean. These early accounts reflect the contemporary growing enthusiasm for the physical pleasures of bathing. In these letters, Burney transforms the therapeutic writings of Dr Russell into the sublime language of the plunge into the sea.12 To Day, for the first Time, I Bathed . . . Mr Rishton very much advised me to sea Bathi[ng] in order to harden me . . . I was terribly frightened, & really thought I shou[ld] never have recovered from the Plunge – I had n[ot] Breath enough to speak for a minute or tw[o,] the shock was beyond expression great – but aft[er] I got back to the machine, I presently felt myself in a Glow that was delightful – it [is] the finest feeling in the World, – & will induc[e] me to Bathe as often as will be safe.13

Bathing is experienced here as a powerful and intense pleasure. Invoking Burke’s identification of the sublime as the experiencing of ‘safe’ representations of terror and pleasure, Alain Corbin describes bathing among the waves as ‘part of the aesthetics of the sublime: it involved facing the violent water, but without risk’.14 In this passage, as we will see elsewhere in Burney’s writing, the rhetoric of the sublime bursts through momentarily, only to recede swiftly again, like the ecstatic shock of cold water against her body that fades into a ‘delightful’ afterglow. Burney’s later references to swimming are more muted and abruptly curtailed descriptions. In a letter dated 1 June 1779, she begins to write about her bathing experiences, but is cut off mid-sentence with an aposiopesis: ‘I have never mentioned

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sea Bathing, – but I have practiced it and I – .’15 What editorially is evidently a physical break in the manuscript creates the rhetorical effect of a dramatic silencing that hints at either something scandalous, or simply a failure of language, an inability to find the words to express the sublime pleasures of the ocean. Burney’s early descriptions of bathing in the sea gave way to gentler pleasure, and more healthy and therapeutic uses. On a trip to Brighton with Hester Thrale in 1782, she describes: Mrs and the three Miss Thrales and myself all arose at six o’clock in the morning and ‘by the pale blink of the moon’ we went to the sea-side, where we had bespoke the bathing-women to be ready for us, and into the ocean we plunged. It was cold, but pleasant. I have bathed so often as to lose my dread of the operation, which now gives me nothing but animation and vigour.16

The sublime terror and shock of the first plunge, the ‘dread’ of her early experience, has faded to a more ‘pleasant’ sensation as Burney borrows the language of contemporary medical publications that stressed the benefits of sea-bathing for the cure of chronic invalids with an ‘originally feeble and delicate stamina’.17 Slowly but perceptibly, modesty and propriety temper earlier unrestrained enthusiasm in an increasingly tacit acknowledgement of bathing’s sensuous pleasures and the curiosity it attracted. In a letter to her sister, Susan, in November 1779, Burney reports a conversation in which a Brighton acquaintance, General Selwin, considers Fanny’s claim that she and her sister have enjoyed the pleasures of bathing: ‘Do you think the sea is not big enough to dip Miss Burney? – why I am sure I could Bathe her in a Bason of Water! – so they are all talking of you.’18 This gossipy, prurient interest in the Burney sisters’ swimming experiences eroticises the bathing experience. Significantly, this exchange is shared within a private correspondence. Swimming, however, is absent from her more widely read novels: indeed, none of the female characters in The Wanderer are shown enjoying the pleasures, whether sublime or therapeutic, of bathing.19 This absence from the more public literary medium of fiction reflects an increasing self-consciousness and awareness of the sensual relation of the body to water that develops, over time, into a gradual receding from view of the ocean across Burney’s private journal, letters and novels. The Burkean sublime, a function of the sense produced by ‘biophysical patterns’, is replaced by a different kind of awareness of the body and a corresponding reticence.20

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It is possible that Burney’s growing familiarity with Brighton, in a series of visits over a number of years, accounts for a corresponding decline in the ocean view or the shore as natural points of literary observation and descriptive prose. Burney was not wholly insensible to her coastal surroundings. A trip to Ilfracombe in 1817 occasioned a description that compared the south-west coast unfavourably with Brighthelmstone: ‘The Quay is narrow. . . . When the Sea is up, the scene is gay, busy, & interesting; but on its ebb, the sands here are not clean & inviting, but dark and muddy by places.’21 And yet passages like this, attentive to the quality – albeit inferior – of the shore and coastline, are almost absent from Burney’s descriptions of Brighton. She acknowledges the prestige of owning a sea-view: in a letter to her sister Susan, during one of her early visits to Brighthelmstone in 1779, she praises the location of the Thrales’ house, noting that the ‘sea is not many Yards from our Windows’. In the same letter, she observes: ‘The Country about this place has a most singular appearance: there is not a Tree within several miles. . . . The sea is the great object from all parts.’22 A few months later, in another letter to Susan, Fanny describes a stroll taken with Hester Thrale, ‘by the sea side, pour prendre congée of that sole ornament & support & cause of the Town of Brighthelmstone’.23 The sea-view is clearly identified as the most desirable feature of any point in the resort; but these references rarely include any kind of descriptiveness, only the information that the ocean is visible or nearby. In a casual observation, Corbin remarks that ‘anyone who didn’t know this young girl liked to swim in the sea would find very little in this life-style that would give any pleasure in being near the Channel’.24 The apparent lack of interest in the sea extends to its value as a worthy literary subject, especially when one compares Burney’s writing with the contemporary lyrical poetry of Charlotte Smith. This raises questions about different literary traditions and genres. Writing about the transformation of the sea from the human agency of sailors’ craft into the ‘wild space of raw, natural power’, Margaret Cohen suggests that ‘the literary genres for the elaboration of the sublime . . . were not the mariner’s prose of work, nor even the polite novel, but rather philosophy and poetry’. This is further compounded by the relation of the female novel tradition with literary treatment of the sea during this period: ‘The masculine work of the sea and maritime adventures could be hard to accommodate to the processes of feminisation so visible in the novel in the seventyfive years between Smollett and Cooper.’25 Might indifference to the ocean or coastline, then, suggest that Burney’s fiction was part of a polite female literary tradition that didn’t consider the sea as a worthy literary subject?

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Jonathan Raban has identified a distinct cultural social disdain of the sea, closely associated with the polite female perspective, and traces it to an earlier period when Celia Fiennes travelled side-saddle across the breadth of the country between 1685 and 1703: as Raban notes, ‘her journeys kept on bringing her to the sea’s edge. Yet she saw nothing of the sea . . . at Dover, she saw the coast of France. . . . What intervened between her and these signs of distant civilisation was a colourless blank – a vacancy on which she wasted no words at all.’ Raban recognises this as a feminised form of class snobbery, a sense that the sea was the element of sailors, ‘beneath her notice, one suspects, because it was irredeemably lower class’.26 Burney’s reticence to describe the sea directly in her writing, and in much of The Wanderer, might partly be explained by a particular tradition of polite female sensibility, distinct from the rhetorical sublime: one that embraces a wider geographic and national scope but which perceptibly discriminates between land and sea, and disdains the ocean as a subject worthy in itself of focused or extended attention.

Brighton 1779–1808: The View from the Steine This polite, urbane sensibility is reflected in Burney’s focus on Brighton’s social and cultural milieu – more like the London scene she captured in Evelina and Cecilia – rather than on its physical environment. In fact, at times in Burney’s early visits, Brighton’s social topography seems to be mapped on to that of London. In 1779 Burney wrote to her sister from her room at the Thrales: ‘Mr. Thrale’s House is in West Street, which is the Court end of the Town here as well as in London.’ In the same letter she writes: ‘We have been perpetually engaged either with sights of Company’; a visit to the Major’s house on the Steine prompts her to note that it is ‘the best . . . in the Town, both for situation & fitting up’. Hester Thrale takes Fanny and ‘paraded me about the Town, & took me to the principal shops, to see the World’.27 And like London, Brighton is full of social gossip: one acquaintance ‘has told us sneering anecdotes of every Woman, & every Officer in Brighthelmstone. . . . What strange & absurd rubbish serves to feed these vacant headed persons!’28 The social setting into which Hester Thrale inducted Burney was governed and facilitated between 1770 and 1807 by master of ceremonies William Wade – Brighton’s equivalent of Bath’s Beau Nash. Wade kept registers in the bookshops on the Steine, where newcomers could sign their names so that their presence in Brighton would be subsequently published and publicised in the society columns of the

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local paper. These bookshops appear regularly in Burney’s Brighton letters of 1779. For Burney, slowly adapting to her new authorial celebrity, they afforded voyeuristic opportunities for seeing how her first novel was faring: ‘I saw the 2d Edition of Evelina . . . he took up a volume . . . but he never looked at me, – he read on for some Time with much earnestness, & then, taking the privilege of being a subscriber to the shop, took another Volume, & walked away with both.’29 After the publication of Cecilia in 1782, Burney wrote to Susanna from Brighton: ‘You would suppose me something dropt from the Skies. Even if Richardson or Fielding could rise from the Grave, I should bid fair for supplanting them in the popular Eye, for being a fair female, I am accounted quelque chose extraordinaire.’30 Burney acknowledges that her ‘Authorshipness seems now pretty well known & spread about Brighthelmstone’, and at a Brighton party, a guest asks her: ‘Pray, Miss Burney, have You picked up any Characters at Brighthelmstone for our Comedy?’31 In 1779, she records the opening of a competitor to Thomas’s, ‘the fashionable Bookseller’ where they have previously entered their names: ‘We find he has now a Rival, situated also upon the Steyn, who seems to carry away all the custom & all the Company. This is a Mr. Bowen, who is just come from London.’32 The Steine itself was a popular grassy promenade area where fashionable crowds gathered daily. Its royal associations secured its popular status after the Prince of Wales first visited Brighton in September 1783. He returned in 1784 having been advised to seabathe to improve his health; he took Grove House on the Steine, and continued to visit Brighton until 1827, three years before his death.33 Burney records repeated visits to the Steine in her letters. It also attracted the fashionable and literary bon ton. Edward Gibbon, who came to Brighton in 1781, wrote: ‘I walk sufficiently morning and evening, lounge in the middle of the day on the Steyne, booksellers’ shops etc.’34 Around these bookshops and circulating libraries sprang up smaller shops selling toys, china, lace, millinery and ribbons, and muslin, some of which had been smuggled inland from the nearby shore.35 But the Steine’s early popularity was also framed by its alternating succession of open and attenuated vistas to the north and south of this grassy spot. The author of A Short History of Brighthelmston (1761) described the Steine as ‘a most beautiful lawn . . . which runs winding up into the country among the hills, to the distance of some miles’.36 It also owed its status to its particular location in Brighton, where ‘one gained a sense of release upon this broad grassy expanse . . . [and a]

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wide view of the sea opened to the south’.37 Later descriptions, however, were less kind to the enclosures and alterations the Steine underwent to make it a more respectable and salubrious space for walkers: ‘The Stayne was once a pleasant lounge enough, before it was encircled with houses, and had a view of the hills and corn-fields contiguous to it, but now it is confined, the air impeded, and the rural effect it once possessed is lost.’38 A watercolour painting by John Nixon, View of Brighton (1792), looks inland to the north, across the Steine, rather than out to sea (Figure 1.1). In 1787, Henry Holland erected a new house for the Prince to the west of the Steine, which became the earliest version of what would later become the famous Oriental-style Regency Royal Pavilion. The building was enlarged in 1801 and completely redesigned by John Nash between 1815 and 1822, but even the original Pavilion in 1787 deliberately incorporated into its aesthetic the ‘sight of the sea [that] could be obtained from every window in the mansion’.39 The alternative preferences for open or closed prospects are visible in the different design proposals for the Royal Pavilion. Holland’s

Figure 1.1 John Nixon, View of Brighton, Showing Miss Widgett’s Circulating Library, Marlborough House, the Castle Inn, Assembly Rooms, the Marine Pavilion and St Nicholas’s Church beyond (1792). Pencil, pen, and grey ink and watercolour on artist’s wash-line mount, 39 x 55 cm. © Christie’s Images 2007.

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original plan offered open views of the sea; Humphry Repton’s later, unrealised Designs for the Pavillon at Brighton (1808), conversely, suggested a fairly circumscribed building situated on the edge of Brighton. Rachel Crawford has shown that this plan typified Repton’s new direction for landscape design, which ‘abandoned the illusion of boundlessness and appropriated, rather than excluded, the urban setting’.40 In his Designs for the Pavillon, Repton argued: ‘we cannot give great ideal extent by concealing the actual boundary; we cannot . . . admit distant views of sea and land, while impeded by intervening houses.’41 Repton’s proposal was rejected; nevertheless, his rejected plan offers an alternative aesthetic and view of Brighton that stands in contrast to Holland and Nash’s Pavilion, which was designed to look out to sea from all quarters. In place of expanse and boundlessness, Repton suggests limit and confinement. Repton’s design principle of confinement, however, as Crawford argues, produced its own sublime pleasure of ‘compressed magnitude’; contained within its boundaries, ‘the sublime may be contracted in scope but it has not thereby lost its powers’.42 Burney’s The Wanderer also presents two different prospects of confinement and expanse in its double vision of Brighton. But, as the following section argues, The Wanderer does not offer the architects’ respective visions of expanse and sublime that differ only in scope and concentration; rather, Burney’s two prospects of Brighthelmstone differ absolutely by offering, alternatively, two opposed Brighton perspectives: one that looks narrowly inward and inland away from the sea, and another that interrupts, intermittently and unexpectedly, with a rare glimpse of the oceanic sublime.

Brighton in Transition The more circumscribed view of Brighton was expressed, as late as 1774, by William Gilpin, who described Brighton as ‘a disagreeable place with scarcely an object in it or near it of nature or of art, that strikes the eye with any degree of beauty’.43 In the same period, the Steine was frequently flooded in winter, while a stagnant pool of dirty water faced the Pavilion in its early years. By the 1790s, the town was no longer ‘like London Bridge, half broken down’, or well patched like ‘a worn out shoe’ – these lines from a poem written in 1777 – but it also had not yet become the Brighton of 1814, ‘gay, gambling and dissipated, the elegant residence of an accomplished prince, with its beautiful women and light huzzars, its tandems and

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terriers’.44 This period in Brighton’s history also coincided with the establishment of a military camp near Hove in 1793, following the French Revolution and the establishment of its status as a haven for refugees fleeing the Terror. As the closest cross-Channel point on the south coast to Dieppe (the nearest French port to Paris), Brighton was the destination for most French refugees, even those on their way to Dover in order to set sail again for Belgium.45 As many as 6,000 passports were issued in one fortnight to aristocrats fleeing the September massacres of 1792, and the flood of French refugees took to smaller, secretly hired fishing-boats. It is this transitional period in Brighton’s history that Burney chose as the time frame for The Wanderer.46 The novel itself had taken over fourteen years to complete, and it reached a public familiar with, and attuned to, the Prince Regent and his increasingly ambitious fantasy structure. Looking back on 1814, the artist Benjamin Haydon, who had made the crossing from the French coast to Brighton himself, compared Dieppe with Brighton: ‘The houses of Brighton present their windows to the ocean to let in its freshness and welcome its roar, whilst Dieppe turns her back on the sea, as if in sullen disgust at the sight of an element on which her country has always been beaten.’47 Haydon’s Brighton in 1814 is an outward-looking, sea-facing town approaching the height of its Regency popularity. This is not the Brighton of The Wanderer. As Margaret Doody has observed, ‘by the time Burney published her novel . . . we might expect Brighton to be presented as a glamorous, even decadent, scene.’48 Burney’s fictional portrait of Brighthelmstone, however, is an earlier version of Brighton from the 1790s, a town still undergoing a transformation from its earlier history to its more hedonistic, pleasure-seeking identity.

The Wanderer (1814) This sense of a time lag, between the inception of the novel, its completion, and the version of the south coast of England presented in the narrative, correlates with its extended and complicated period of composition and eventual publication. Much of the novel had been written during Burney’s ten-year exile in France between 1802 and 1812, when her French husband, General D’Arblay, had been detained during the Napoleonic Wars because of his refusal to fight against the English. The novel’s manuscript itself sailed back and forth across the Channel. When stranded at Dunkirk in 1812, Burney asked her husband to send on the manuscript so that she could work on it while

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she waited to travel: on both sides, at French customs and in Dover, Burney was detained and her manuscript checked and almost confiscated on suspicion that it contained seditious material. After a gap of ten years in France, Burney returned to a Brighton that was completing its transformation into a modern, pleasure-loving Regency seaside town. However, the version of the resort that she evokes in the novel, hinted at by her use of the older name – Brighthelmstone – throughout the narrative, is an earlier one. From the beginning, Burney’s narrative seemed out of time: an anachronism. In 1793, in a letter to her father, she had expressed a wish to help the French clergy fleeing the Terror, but seemed unable to do so: ‘This total break into all my tranquility incapacitates me from attempting at this moment to compose any address for the poor suffering clergy.’49 Unlike Edmund Burke, Hannah More and Charlotte Smith, she began this task towards the end of the 1790s and only completed it fourteen years later: her narrative takes on a retrospective stance almost from its inception.50 It also seems significant that she wrote The Wanderer during a period of notable absence from the resort. In 1800, her sister, Charlotte Broome, moved her family to Brighton ostensibly for health reasons. Despite being invited to visit in a number of letters, Fanny resists the seaside during this period. In March 1800, she writes to her father: ‘I had a Letter yesterday from Charlotte confirming her recovery . . . Mr. Broome writes verses to press us to Brighthelmstone – but we are home poultry, & love not to take wing.’51 In 1802, Burney and her husband were incarcerated in France, a period which was to last for ten years. Burney’s period of exile from England during the writing of The Wanderer allows space for memory and imagination to superimpose versions and contexts from different periods of Brighton’s history. Burney’s absence is also indirectly conveyed through the sparse descriptions of the town’s physical environment as the sea recedes further from view. For a novel that locates two thirds of its narrative in Brighton, the near absence of the ocean from its writing is a notable feature. Despite the novel opening and concluding on two different coasts, Brighthelmstone appears in The Wanderer as a mean and sterile place. In Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, where Brighton comprises for Lydia ‘every possibility of earthly happiness’, the historically accurate stationing of a military camp around Brighton and Hove facilitates and accelerates the plot of Lydia and Wickham’s scandalous elopement.52 In The Wanderer, however, the portrait of Brighton seems deliberately to run counter to its contemporary history, aesthetic appeal and popular reputation. The heroine’s descent from gentlewoman to music teacher, and then to

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milliner and seamstress, defines Brighton through work rather than pleasure. Devoid of Regency extravagances and excesses, it appears in Doody’s words as a ‘crazed cold place’, populated by old bachelors, widows and ageing spinsters – a sterile town characterised by weariness, a meanness of spirit and gossip, whose residents ‘are on a coast facing France, but . . . do not look seaward’.53 The Wanderer, however, opens directly on to a darkened sea, on a December night in 1793, with passengers on a boat fleeing France for the safety of the English coast: During the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre, and in the dead of Night, braving the cold, the darkness and the damps of December, some English passengers, in a small vessel, were preparing to glide silently from the coast of France, when a voice of keen distress resounded from the shore, imploring, in the French language, pity and admission. (11)

The boat contains a cast of characters that will reappear intermittently throughout the novel. Seemingly alone in the world and penniless, once safe on English shores at Dover, Ellis (as she is known in the first part of the novel; later her real name, Juliet, is revealed) seeks only incomplete geographies, parts of cities, seaside resorts and pagan ruins that will aid her attempts to escape a forced marriage that she agreed to in France in order to save her friend, the Bishop, a victim of the Terror, and to be reunited with her aristocratic French friend, Gabriella, and her family. Ellis/Juliet has been told to expect a message when she arrives at Dover or, failing this, to head for Brighton, where she is to pick up a letter from the post office to provide her with news and instructions regarding her safety. Receiving no tidings in Dover, Juliet sets her sights on reaching Brighthelmstone. Her desire to travel to Brighton echoes through the early pages of the narrative, establishing an early coastal trajectory in The Wanderer. She voices an increasingly single-minded desperation to reach the seaside resort. Albert Harleigh (an admirer of Juliet from the start, and later her suitor) echoes her frantic utterances before turning to help her: ‘“To Brighthelmstone?” repeated Harleigh; “some of those ladies reside not nine miles from that town. I will see what can be done”’ (28). He is overheard soon afterwards explaining Juliet’s predicament to the other passengers: ‘“Her object is to get to Brighthelmstone”’ (30). In another exchange, with Elinor Joddrel, a Romantic revolutionary figure in the novel and later an increasingly deranged rival for Harleigh’s affections, her interlocutor repeats her request: ‘“I understand you wish to go to Brighthelmstone?” said Elinor’ (31). This

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pattern of query and repetition gives Brighton an early quest-like quality, suggesting a narrative arc that implies that Brighton will yield answers to the many secrets withheld from the surrounding characters – and the reader – at the start of the novel. In establishing an early trajectory – Dover-London-Brighthelmstone – for Juliet in the opening pages of the narrative, The Wanderer also loosens the gravitational pull of London as the default destination of Burney’s early novels and resets the compass towards the country’s coastline. But Brighthelmstone’s appeal is swiftly countered by a rapid narrowing of purpose and experience: The stranger courtsied. ‘I believe I know every soul in that place. Whom do you want to see there? – Where are you to go?’ She looked embarrassed, and with much hesitation, answered, ‘To . . . the Post-office, Madam.’ ... ‘Well, if you merely wish to go to Brighthelmstone, I’ll get you conveyed within nine miles of that place.’ (31–2)

In an alternating rhythm of intense interest and shrinking focus, Brighton is introduced as a longed-for destination and almost simultaneously as small and circumscribed, its population easily knowable and its sole point of interest the post office. It becomes quickly apparent that Burney’s Brighton in The Wanderer is a shrunken and attenuated version of contemporary London. Although they share a cultural vocabulary of eighteenth-century pleasure, Brighton appears as a poor simulacrum of the metropolis. At the centre of Brighton’s sclerotic fashionable crowd is Lady Kendover, whose ‘circle . . . [is] bounded by . . . hereditary habits, and imitative customs’ (229). Set in the 1790s and published in 1814, the narrative overwrites the lyricism of Charlotte Smith’s south coast with an alternative unimaginative, flatter vision. In a cruelly comic passage, Burney delineates a character disfigured by the ocean, which itself remains out of view, in the description of the damage the sea air inflicts on the complexion of Miss Brinville, an ageing beauty unaware that her looks have faded. A former suitor, a young baronet, recaptures his admiration for Miss Brinville in the soft-focus scrim of evening candlelight, only to be confounded and repelled the following morning: He met her upon the Steyn, her complexion and her features were so different to those yet resting, In full beauty, upon his memory, that he looked at her with a surprise mingled with a species of indignation, as at a caricature of herself.

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Miss Brinville, though too unconscious of her own double appearance to develope what passed in his mind, was struck and mortified by his change of manner. The bleak winds which blew sharply from the sea, giving nearly its own blue-green hue to her skin . . . in completing what to the young Baronet seemed an entire metamorphosis, drove him fairly from the field. (235)

In an inversion of Anne Elliot’s recovered bloom in Lyme Regis in Persuasion, published two years after The Wanderer, the sea air and the sea itself with its undulating surface of varying marine hues metonymically lends Miss Brinville’s skin a sickly colour, giving her a startling ‘double appearance’: a delicate beauty indoors at night, and a coarse complexion outdoors next to the sea-shore. This double appearance becomes an apposite image for Brighton’s own aesthetic doubleness in The Wanderer. Like Burney’s early descriptions of the ecstasies she experienced swimming in the sea, the ocean unexpectedly breaks in on the narrative with sudden extravagant and sublime expression. Juliet’s one friend and benefactor in Brighton, Lady Aurora Granville (later revealed to be her half-sister), is teased by her brother for forfeiting an opportunity to gaze upon the ocean: ‘“Aurora, your genealogical studies have lost you a most beautiful sea view”’ (558). Lady Aurora’s neglected ocean vista hints at prospects, views and horizons beyond the purview of the constricted, inward-looking Brighthelmstone of The Wanderer. This is reinforced almost halfway through the novel with the sudden appearance of a new lyrical sensibility, inspired by the view across the ocean. Juliet has been pursuing an anonymous fellow lodger in Brighton, who turns out to be her aristocratic French friend Gabriella, whose letters she has been desperately seeking ever since she arrived on English shores. Running after her to speak to her, she finally catches up with her in the graveyard of what appears to be Brighton’s St Nicholas’ Church, a raised seaward-facing prospect that evokes the position of Charlotte Smith’s speakers in The Emigrants and, later, Beachy Head: The foreigner went on her way, looking neither to the right nor to the left, till she had ascended to the churchyard upon the hill. There stopping, she extended her arms, seeming to hail the full view of the wide spreading ocean; or rather, Ellis imagined, the idea of her native land, which she knew from that spot, to be its boundary. [She gazed at] the beauty of the early morning from that height, the expansive view, impressive, though calm, of the sea, and the awful solitude of the place. (385)

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Juliet recognises Gabriella’s view from this vantage point. Its prospect is the ocean, its sublime boundless expanse eliciting in the mind’s eye the ‘idea of her native land’. The mind’s capacity to reconstruct the French coast through the imagining of the invisible space beyond the horizon generates, in turn, a momentary reanimation of the dead town. Having buried her baby son in the churchyard of St Nicholas’, Gabriella exclaims: ‘“C’est à Brighthelmstone, donc . . . c’est ici que nous demeurions”’ (‘“It is at Brightelmstone, so . . . it’s here we will stay”’) (393). The French cry bestows a temporary Gallic identity on Brighton, one constructed through historical context and new aesthetic categories, as the English coast becomes newly defined through the imagined French shore and the narrative’s fleeting view of the oceanic sublime. Burney may be implying that Gabriella and Juliet’s ability to gaze on the ocean’s vastness and beauty connotes a more refined sensibility than the people around them in Brighton. Untypical of her more habitual reticence about the sea, this passage, like Lady Aurora’s neglected ocean view, reveals something that is for the most part out of sight in the narrative and in Burney’s writing generally. The more Romantic sensibilities of Juliet and Lady Aurora recover a suppressed Brighton prospect, a glimpse of a different coastal aesthetic that emerges briefly before disappearing from sight. The oceanic sublime reverberates through other parts of the novel, as the episode in the churchyard is later visually replicated when Juliet flees to Stonehenge. Wandering through the ‘massy ruins, grand and awful’, she mounts a ‘fragment of the pile . . . [of] the wild edifice’ (765). The circular arrangement of the stones at Stonehenge and raised pile on which Juliet stands here recalls the ‘small elevation of earth encircled by short sticks’ – the grave of Gabriella’s baby son – in the Brighton churchyard that overlooks the sea (385).54 The similarities don’t end there. Beyond the strange primitive stone structure, the surrounding Salisbury Plain resembles, in its wild and untamed expanse, the oceanic sublime: ‘She discerned, to a vast extent, a boundless plain, that, like the ocean, seemed to have no term but the horizon; but which, also like the ocean, looked as desert as it was unlimited’ (765). The simile that Burney reaches for twice in the description of Salisbury Plain is not of desert or wilderness, but of the sea. The primal mystery of Stonehenge can only be conveyed through the register and element of the oceanic sublime; the unbounded expanse of sea glimpsed only briefly in Brighton is used to shape and define the Romantic ruins of English landscape. This view of the sea as limitless sublime expanse temporarily dislodges the narrower version of Brighton that has

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dominated the narrative; its reappearance at Stonehenge by means of recourse to simile reinforces the capacity of the ocean, more than other natural landscapes, to define and shape the sublimity of other panoramas and terrains. In the closing pages of the novel, the ocean reappears as a correlative for Juliet’s outpouring of feelings. When Juliet has been reunited with the Bishop and her uncle the Admiral on a beach in Teignmouth, she waits for company between two rocks, ‘overlooking the vast ocean, with which she had already been so much charmed’ and vents ‘the fullness of her heart’ (859–60). The novel ends on a beach where the ‘female Robinson Crusoe’ is joined by companions looking out on to wider prospects and vistas. Historically, The Wanderer is grounded in the 1790s and, for the most part, its vision of Brighton is an earlier one, too. Yet what Margaret Doody calls the ‘stylistic combinations’ of this 1814 novel discloses competing aesthetics and sensibilities that link it to a later period. Nearly absent from her personal writings, the ocean view is one way that a more lyrical, Romantic, sublime expression overwrites earlier experience and a different, more polite, literary tradition.

Broken Bodies: Burney’s Final Letters The Wanderer focused more on working than pleasure-seeking women in Brighton. Burney’s letters after her return from exile in France show no interest in either of these aspects of the town: instead, bodies, sickness and a view of the shore from indoors characterise the portrait of Brighton in her final years. A number of solicitous letters to her sister Charlotte following her nephew’s death in April 1817 show a concern with her sister’s health and Brighton’s part in aiding her recovery: ‘I have much hope the Sea Breezes so closely followed up may restore you. . . . Pray do not Sit too much by the sea side! Let the air come to your house – & your walks: but beware of the Rheumatism – & pain in the Face!’55 This experiencing of Brighton from indoors, at a distance from the shore and away from the centre of the social milieu, recurs throughout these later letters. Describing a failed attempt to visit Brighton, Burney imagines herself there, her celebrity hidden from the crowds at the Pavilion: I could not there remain invisible, without shutting myself up from all air and exercise; for though I should not be thought of at the Pavilion itself, so many acquaintances & even Friends, visit it continually, that I could not without incurring displeasure be at Brighton . . . and hide myself away from all Enquirers.56

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In November 1823, Burney visited Brighton to spend time with Charlotte. She writes to her niece, Charlotte Barrett: ‘I have had the greatest satisfaction of spending a month with your dearest Mother at Brighton. . . . But while the Air of Brighton has braced her Nerves, perpetual occupation has saved her from the melancholy ruminations into which she is apt to ponder.’57 The following year, she laments the coast’s weakening appeal: ‘I am sorry Brighton has lost its charms – it was a sort of Magnet to Health with my dear Sister.’58 By the 1820s, Brighton had become almost exclusively medicalised; the social gatherings that had characterised Burney’s early visits in the late 1770s and 1780s are absent from these late letters: ‘I saw no company – none, at Brighton . . . the long illness of Clement has led [Charlotte] to much shutting up herself.’59 ‘Brighton’ has replaced ‘Brighthelmstone’ in a nod to more modern times and sensibilities, but the trips Burney describes are increasingly recuperative in purpose. Brighton’s topographical features and social character become increasingly invisible; what remains in her private letters is a connection to its therapeutic and medical history. Burney’s ageing body reverses Brighton’s trajectory of a health resort that has transformed into the coastal epicentre of Regency fashion. In 1833, she described the ‘recompensing effects’ of those ‘hale sea breezes’ in hopeful anticipation of a visit to see Charlotte.60 In 1837, she made a final visit to Brighton. Her eyesight was failing by then. In June, she wrote to Charlotte: ‘I think I shall be permitted to travel to you at Brighton in the autumn . . . I am inconceivably better in all but my eyes.’61 Her final visit inspires a valedictory paean to the seaside town she had been visiting intermittently for sixty years, and she gives thanks for Brighton’s restorative powers and her own partly recovered vision: ‘My Eyes, my sweet Charlotte I thank Heaven, are really mended & braced by my kind visit to Brighton and Brightoneers.’62 Burney’s temporarily restored sight is a fitting image for her final contemplation of Brighton. Her writing often seemed to look away from the coastline. This occasional blindness to the ocean allowed her work to fix its gaze on prospects and aspects of the resort that others tended not to see: the conditions for working-class women and the myopic provincial perspective of an inward-looking social circle in The Wanderer, alongside the exiles and émigrés from France familiar from writers like Burke, Smith and More. It is also a deliberately dual perspective – appropriate for a town and heroine using two different names – that overlays the Regency excesses of 1814 with a less developed stage in Brighton history. It is a bifocal view that looks backward to the post-Revolutionary 1790s

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from the seaside hedonism of the novel’s year of publication. New seaside architecture would appear in the 1820s with the completion of the Chain Pier and the Marine Parade in 1823 and 1828 respectively, alongside new ocean-facing benches, pedestrian promenades, houses and esplanades, whose purpose was to enable visitors ‘to breathe the sea air and gaze at Channel waters’.63 Burney’s view, written over a number of decades and across different literary forms and genres, offers a more complicated and interrupted prospect. Its status as a pleasure resort gradually disappears along with its ocean: apart, that is, from the occasional sublime view of the ocean. Repressed for so much of her writing, it breaks through briefly but powerfully in early letters and in The Wanderer, allowing Brighton to defy any singular vision in Fanny Burney’s increasingly complex geographical, and in this case coastal, writings.

Notes 1. Burney’s third novel, Camilla (1796), with its more provincial setting, had already marked a departure from London and metropolitan pleasures in Burney’s fiction, although geography arguably plays a less central role in Camilla than in her other three major works. 2. Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4. All further references are to this edition. 3. See Edmund W. Gilbert, Brighton: Old Ocean’s Bauble (London: Methuen, 1954), 87; Richard Russell, A Dissertation on the Use of Seawater in the Diseases of the Glands . . . (London: W. Owen, 1769). 4. See especially John Constable’s Brighton Beach with Colliers (1824), The Sea near Brighton (1826) and Chain Pier, Brighton (1826–7); J. M. W. Turner’s The Chain Pier, Brighton (c. 1828), Brighton from the Sea (c. 1829), Ship Aground, Brighton (1830) and Brighton Beach with Bathing Machines (1830). [Ed.: a number of the Constable paintings are discussed in the following chapter of this volume.] 5. Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 363. 6. Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 117. 7. Jonathan Raban (ed.), The Oxford Book of the Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8; [Joseph Addison], no. 489, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 4:233. 8. See Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (London: Penguin, 1994), 126.

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9. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in The Early Writings, vol. 1 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. T. O. McLoughlin, James T. Boulton and William B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 230. 10. The phrase ‘sublimation of the sea’ is Margaret Cohen’s. See Novel and the Sea, 106–32. It marks a ‘shift from a depiction of the ocean known in the intimacy of human practice to the ocean as “space itself”’ (117). For the rhetorical sublime, see Anne Janowitz, ‘Sublime’, in Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright (eds), A Handbook of Romanticism Studies (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 57. 11. See also Smith’s shorter lyric poems, ‘The Sea View’, ‘An Evening Walk by the Sea-Side’ and ‘Studies by the Sea’, in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 12. Gilbert, Brighton, 56. 13. Frances Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 27 August 1773, Teignmouth Journal, in The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide, Stewart J. Cooke and Betty Rizzo, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988–), vol. 1: 1768–1773, ed. Troide, 302. 14. Corbin, Lure of the Sea, 73. According to Janowitz, Burke’s treatise suggests that sublimity takes place only when faced with ‘safe’ representations of terror and pleasure. ‘Sublime’, 56. 15. Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 30 May–1 June 1779, in Early Journals, vol. 3: The Streatham Years, Part I (1994), ed. Troide and Cooke, 297. An editor’s note explains: ‘FB abruptly ends the journal here, leaving the recto and verso blank.’ 16. Frances Burney quoted in Corbin, Lure of the Sea, 75. 17. See A. P. Buchan, A Treatise on Sea-Bathing, with Remarks on the Use of the Warm Bath, 2nd edn (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1810), 146. 18. Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 16–?18 November 1779, in Early Journals, 3:441. 19. In a comic moment towards the end of The Wanderer, Albert Harleigh steps into a bathing machine on Teignmouth beach where Juliet’s uncle, the Admiral, and her guardian, the Bishop, are enjoying a private conversation, in order to plead his love for Juliet. 20. Janowitz, ‘Sublime’, 57. 21. Burney to M. d’Arblay, 5–9 July 1817, in The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay), ed. Joyce Hemlow, Curtis D. Cecil and Althea Douglas, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–84), vol. 10: Bath 1817–1818 (1982), ed. Warren Derry, 543. 22. Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 26 May 1779, in Early Journals, 3:271, 276. 23. Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 6–9 December 1779, in ibid. 450. 24. Corbin, Lure of the Sea, 256. 25. Cohen, Novel and the Sea, 104, 103. 26. Raban, Book of the Sea, 7.

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27. Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 26 May 1779, in Early Journals, 3:271, 274. 28. Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 30 May–1 June 1779, in ibid. 282–96. 29. Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 29 May 1779, in ibid. 290–1. 30. Burney quoted in Doody, Frances Burney, 150. 31. Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 15 June 1779, in Early Journals, 3:300. 32. Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 12 October 1779, in ibid. 378–9. 33. Gilbert, Brighton, 89. 34. Edward Gibbon quoted in Clifford Musgrave, Life in Brighton: From the Earliest Times to the Present, rev. edn (Chatham: Hallewell, 1981), 67. 35. Musgrave, Life in Brighton, 77–8. 36. Anthony Relhan, A Short History of Brighthelmston: With Remarks on Its Air . . . (London: printed for W. Johnston, 1761), 1–2. 37. Musgrave, Life in Brighton, 78. 38. George Saville Carey, The Balnea; or, An Impartial Description of All the Popular Watering Places in England . . . (London: W. West and C. Chapple, 1799), 62. 39. Recollections of Brighton in the Olden Times by a Native thereof, 1853, quoted in Gilbert, Brighton, 91. 40. Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 82. 41. Humphry Repton, Designs for the Pavillon at Brighton (London: printed for J. C. Stadler, 1808), 2. 42. Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, 87. 43. William Gilpin, Observations on the Coasts of Hampshire, Sussex and Kent, 1774, quoted in Gilbert, Brighton, 87. 44. Carey, The Balnea, 70; Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from His Autobiography and Journals (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1853), 1:245. The poem originally appeared in A Rural Ramble: To Which Is Annexed a Poetical Tagg, or Brighthelmstone Guide (1777). 45. Musgrave, Life in Brighton, 106. 46. In a letter to the Prince’s sister, Burney alludes to the ‘sketch of the Fairy Palace . . . with all its witchery & enchantement’. Frances Burney to Princess Elizabeth, c. 6–7 January [1817], in Journals and Letters, vol. 9: Bath 1815–1817 (1982), ed. Derry, 299. 47. Life of Haydon, 1:245. 48. Doody, Frances Burney, 328. 49. Burney to Dr Burney, 29 September 1793, in Journals and Letters, vol. 3: Great Bookham 1793–1797 (1973), ed. Hemlow, 14. 50. Burke’s appeal, ‘The Case of the Suffering of the Clergy of France’, had appeared in The Times on 18 September 1792, and Hannah

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51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Leya Landau More’s ‘A Prefatory Address to the Ladies, &c. of Great Britain, in Behalf of the French Emigrant Clergy’ appeared in April 1793. Burney to Dr Burney, 13 September 1800, in Journals and Letters, vol. 4: West Humble 1797–1801 (1973), ed. Hemlow, 445. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 177. Doody, introduction to The Wanderer, xx. Doody also refers to Burney’s version of Brighton as a ‘semi-urban coastal Sussex that seems much more provincial than Camilla’s provincial world in Hampshire . . . small-town . . . barren, and unlovely’. Frances Burney, 328. Margaret Doody calls the grave ‘a miniature and more transitory Stonehenge’. Frances Burney, 366. Burney to Charlotte Broome (née Burney), 15–16 November 1818, in Journals and Letters, vol. 11: Mayfair 1818–1824 (1984), ed. Hemlow, 25–7. Burney to Charlotte Broome, [pre-19 February]–8 March 1819, in ibid. 79. Burney to Charlotte Barrett, 9 December 1823, in ibid. 465. Burney to Charlotte Barrett, [late 1824?], in ibid. 572. Burney to Esther Burney, c. 16–23 December 1823, in ibid. 470–1. Burney to Charlotte Broome, 16 November 1833, in Journals and Letters, vol. 12: Mayfair 1825–1840 (1984), ed. Hemlow, 807. Burney to Charlotte Broome, 12 June 1837, in ibid. 924. Burney to Charlotte Broome, 13 December 1837, in ibid. 944. Corbin, Lure of the Sea, 269.

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Chapter 2

A Breath of Fresh Air: Constable and the Coast Christiana Payne

Constable is usually thought of as a painter of inland countryside: he is famous for his depictions of canal scenes and meadows, enlivened by country labourers and animals. In contrast, his coastal paintings might be considered as a somewhat peripheral part of his output. Yet, as Anne Lyles has recently pointed out, ‘coastal and marine subjects form an important part . . . of his full range as a landscape painter’, and it could be argued that they are central to his concerns with light, atmosphere and weather.1 There were many reasons why Constable was keen on coastal scenery. The coast was an excellent place to study the clouds and the sky, and the movement of waves and wind. It played a key role in the development of his mastery of what he called the ‘chiaroscuro of nature’: those evanescent effects that gave life, contrast and dynamic movement to landscape painting. In addition, coastal scenes engaged many of his deepest beliefs and emotions. In the long nineteenth century, the coast had a threefold significance. Firstly, as the edge of the land and site of frequent shipwrecks, it symbolised birth, death and immortality. Secondly, as boundary of the nation, it needed to be well protected against enemy invasion, which was a very real threat in the early 1800s and haunted the national consciousness for the rest of the century. Thirdly, the coast was a location where invalids, especially consumptives, hoped to be restored to health – a place of fresh breezes, a source of easy breathing and life-giving fecundity.2 Constable’s sketch Hove Beach (Figure 2.1), with its solitary figure on the beach, gazing out to sea, is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting The Monk by the Sea (1809). Constable was almost certainly unaware of the Friedrich work, but the paintings may have a common origin in English poetry. The German poet

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Figure 2.1 John Constable, Hove Beach (c. 1824). Oil on paper laid on canvas, 31.7 x 49.5 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Heinrich von Kleist wrote that Friedrich’s painting seemed to be dreaming Young’s Night Thoughts, and that part of the attraction of gazing at the sea from the shore consisted in the idea that the human soul has come from there and must return.3 Edward Young’s long poem, Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742–5), repeatedly uses the ocean as a metaphor for eternal life. Young imagines the human soul waiting to embark across the sea of death, beyond which there are ‘worlds unknown’. He advises his readers to ‘walk thoughtful on the silent, solemn shore, / Of that vast ocean’.4 Although he was an avid reader of poetry, Constable is not definitely known to have read Young’s poem. However, it was very popular in his lifetime, and the ideas were sufficiently widespread for him to have been affected by them. It was certainly well known to some of his artistic contemporaries. Young’s Night Thoughts was illustrated by William Blake, made a strong impression on Samuel Palmer, and was apparently one of the three volumes J. M. W. Turner carried around with him in his travelling-box.5 It was translated into French and German, and went through many English editions up to the mid-nineteenth century.6 Although the connection with Young is somewhat speculative, we are on stronger ground when we consider the influence of Wordsworth,

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whom Constable is known to have admired. The famous lines from the Immortality Ode, first published in Poems (1807), express ideas similar to those of Young: Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.7

The ‘immortal sea’ is a metaphor for the eternal life from which the human soul comes and to which it must return after death. Wordsworth, like Young, assumes that death is not an ending, but a voyage to a new life, just as a journey across the sea results in a landing on a distant shore. These metaphorical readings of the sea and coast were combined with belief in a benevolent Christian God, a belief that was certainly shared by Constable. In a letter to his great friend, Archdeacon John Fisher, Constable writes admiringly of Fisher’s reference to the ‘everlasting voice’ of the sea.8 Fisher, in turn, may have got this idea from Robert Southey’s lines: ‘Great Ocean with its everlasting voice, / As in perpetual jubilee, proclaimed / The wonders of the Almighty’.9 And, as we shall see, Constable’s contacts with the coast came at crucial times in his life, when thoughts of birth and death were uppermost in his mind. The coast was also a protective, political boundary, the edge of the nation. In the early nineteenth century, this identification was particularly powerful, as a consequence of the Napoleonic Wars. Visitors to seaside resorts would see the Channel fleet patrolling the coasts, protecting them from enemy action. The invasion threat reached a peak in the summer of 1803, after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens. Constable spent nearly four weeks on an East Indiaman, the Coutts, earlier in this year – a time of temporary peace with Napoleonic France. He went on board and sketched Nelson’s ship, the Victory, at Chatham; travelled down the Thames to Gravesend, Deal and Dover; and made many studies of shipping, probably with the idea of a career as a marine painter.10 Constable’s childhood and early adulthood had already been marked by recurrent threats of revolution and invasion, especially in his home area of East Anglia. He was fiercely patriotic and right-wing throughout his life, fearful of demagogues, agitators and the rabble. He was an avid reader of John Bull, the ultra-Tory newspaper; opposed Parliamentary

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reform because it would give the government into what he called the dregs of the people; and was deeply suspicious of the French. For Constable, as for many of his contemporaries, the English Channel was a barrier to the contagion of revolution, as well as a protection against an invading enemy. Thirdly, the coast was a place to go in search of health and convalescence, where sea-bathing might restore the animal spirits and cure depression, and where the fresh air and sea breezes could be beneficial to those with respiratory diseases. Constable spent several holidays in Brighton, where his wife Maria went to relieve her tuberculosis. However, the association of the coast with health was balanced by the ever-present consciousness of the dangers of the sea. Shipwrecks were extremely common in Constable’s lifetime. His coastal scenes, more often than not, show stormy weather and waves whipped up by the wind. This choice of effects emphasises the health-giving properties of the sea air, which was constantly being cleansed and renewed by the wind. Unlike today’s tourists, who seek warmth and sunshine on the beach, early nineteenth-century visitors were more interested in the bracing and exhilarating properties of the sea air. At times, however, Constable’s obvious delight in such effects appears to shade over into a much darker vision of the sea as the harbinger of death. The sea and coast were important to Constable’s family. His uncle served in the Royal Navy, and Constable himself grew up at East Bergholt, not far from where the River Stour enters the sea at Harwich. Flour produced at Flatford Mill was taken down the Stour to Mistley (on the estuary just south of Ipswich) and then on to London in his father’s ship, the Telegraph.11 Constable’s voyage on the Coutts in April 1803 took him from Chatham past Sheerness and Margate round the North Foreland to Dover. In 1816, he spent seven weeks near the Dorset coast on his honeymoon (see below). Later on, from 1824 to 1828, there were regular visits to Brighton. He produced two large coastal scenes for exhibitions: The Chain Pier, Brighton and Hadleigh Castle, the latter based on a site he had visited in 1814 and presumably passed on his Coutts voyage in 1803 (see Figures 2.7, 2.8). In the early 1820s, he also painted a number of pictures of Harwich and Great Yarmouth: he could have visited Harwich easily from East Bergholt, but, curiously, there is no record of him ever visiting Great Yarmouth (see Figures 2.3, 2.4). The coast as Constable knew it, therefore, was the so-called invasion coast of south-east England, the broad beaches where Napoleon threatened to land in his flat-bottomed boats, protected by the Martello towers that were being built in his lifetime. Hadleigh Castle is the relic of

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an earlier time of war with France, protecting the approaches up the Thames to London. In October 1816, Constable’s married life began with a seven-week honeymoon in John Fisher’s house, at Osmington near Weymouth. Here the two couples went on walks along the shore and on the hills above the sea. Constable’s sketches from that period show a new interest in the sky and in stormy weather: he seems to have been stimulated by the coastal setting and its associations to branch out in a new direction in his art. The couple in his small sketch Weymouth Bay have been interpreted as Fisher and his wife, but they might equally well have an autobiographical significance, representing a young couple setting out together to face whatever storms life may bring (Figure 2.2).12 This sketch became the basis for one of the mezzotints engraved by David Lucas for Constable’s publication of 1829, English Landscape Scenery. In the mezzotint, however, the couple have been replaced by anonymous working figures, suggesting that Constable felt the earlier composition was too personal. The scene had other connotations as well. In 1830 Constable gave a proof of the mezzotint to Mrs Leslie,

Figure 2.2 John Constable, Weymouth Bay (1816). Oil on canvas, 20.3 x 24.7 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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the wife of his eventual biographer, Charles Robert Leslie, the man who replaced John Fisher as Constable’s closest friend after the latter died in 1832. He accompanied the gift with a letter which shows that he was aware of the association of the area with the death of John Wordsworth, brother of the poet and cousin to Mrs Fisher: ‘I shall now to give value to the fragment I send you, apply to it the lines of Wordsworth – “. . . That sea in anger / And that dismal shoar.” I think of “Wordsworth” for on that spot, perished his brother in the wreck of the Abergavenny.’13 John Wordsworth was the captain of the Earl of Abergavenny, which sank off the coast of Weymouth on 6 February 1805. The poet wrote his ‘Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont’ in July 1806. Wordsworth writes of how he ‘could have fancied that the mighty Deep / Was even the gentlest of all gentle things’; but since his brother’s death by drowning, everything has changed: ‘Not for a moment could I now behold / A smiling sea, and be what I have been.’14 This poem is likely to have been well known to Constable before his honeymoon, as Sir George Beaumont was an early friend and patron of his. One can only speculate on the conversations in Fisher’s house during that holiday in 1816, but thoughts of new beginnings, and tragic endings, in life were evidently associated with the symbolism of the sea and shore. Maria, Constable’s new wife, was probably pregnant by the time they left in December, as she had a miscarriage in February. A new interest in weather is also evident in the National Gallery’s Weymouth Bay, probably produced on this honeymoon but possibly adapted later from a sketch done at that time. Constable shows a storm clearing off, with an astonishing arrangement of clouds which has been described as ‘perhaps the most distinctive and individual sky Constable had yet painted’.15 Though it looks sketchy – and the ground has been left bare for the sand – it is quite large at 21 by 30 inches, the size of canvas Constable preferred for the pictures he painted entirely in the open air. It is assumed that Constable witnessed this cloudscape on the spot, but it is uncannily similar to the cloudscape in a painting by Jacob van Ruisdael, Wheat Fields, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. There was a painting by Constable, a copy after The Cornfield by Ruisdael, in the sale of the artist’s possessions after he died (number 52).16 Perhaps Constable sketched the cloud formations because they reminded him of a Ruisdael painting. Whatever the precise nature of the relationship with the earlier painting, it is significant that it was on the coast that Constable first felt able to produce such effective perspective and movement in his clouds.

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Constable also painted a picture of Weymouth Bay from the Downs above Osmington Mills (now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), looking towards the Isle of Portland – an exhilarating expanse of turf, sea and sky. It is the same size as the National Gallery picture, but more finished, though the foreground is still quite sketchy. Neither painting was exhibited or sold and they probably would have been too lacking in ‘incident’ for contemporary tastes – another painting of Weymouth Bay, which Constable exhibited in 1819, was described by one critic as ‘a sketch of barren sand without interest’.17 To modern eyes, used to excessive tourist development, it is precisely the emptiness of these scenes that makes them so attractive, however. More successful commercially were the pictures of Harwich and Yarmouth. Rather shockingly, he produced at least three replicas, or versions, of each one and used the same sky for them all – even though they were oriented in opposite directions, so that in the Harwich pictures the clouds move away from the land, while in the Yarmouth pictures, exactly the same formation is moving towards the coast. A Harwich Lighthouse was exhibited in 1820, a Yarmouth Jetty in 1823 (Figures 2.3, 2.4). Harwich is close to East Bergholt and there is a sketchbook drawing of the scene. But there are no surviving preparatory studies at all for the view of Yarmouth, nor is there any other evidence that Constable ever went there.18 As well as

Figure 2.3 John Constable, Harwich: The Low Lighthouse and Beacon Hill (c. 1820). Oil on canvas, 33 x 50.8 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Figure 2.4 John Constable, Yarmouth Jetty (c. 1822–3). Oil on canvas, 32.4 x 51.1 cm. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. Gift of the Manton Art Foundation in memory of Sir Edwin and Lady Manton. Bridgeman Images.

selling versions of these compositions, he gave them away to friends, and their reactions show that the pictures were appreciated because they reminded their viewers of the health-giving effects of a visit to the seaside. Mr Pulham wrote to thank Constable for a Harwich Lighthouse in 1824: I do not know that you could have pleased me more, than by giving me a Resemblance of a scene, that brought to my mind the remembrance of many a youthful Ramble over the very spot you have so faithfully delineated . . . I think I feel myself benefitted by the sea air.19

Constable wrote to a friend, the bibliographer John Martin, in 1831 that ‘my poor friend Dr Gooch used to put a similar picture of Yarmouth which I did for him – on the sopha [sic] while he breakfasted as he used to say on the sea-shore enjoying its breezes – ’.20 Dr Gooch was given the picture in gratitude for his care of Constable’s wife – and like her he was in need of sea breezes, as he also suffered from consumption.21 By the time he exhibited Yarmouth Jetty, Constable had spent two summers at Hampstead making systematic studies of skies and

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clouds. He annotated these with notes about the wind speed, using the Beaufort scale, which had originally been developed for use at sea.22 Therefore, when he started making studies on the coast again at Brighton in 1824, he was extremely knowledgeable about meteorology. He was obviously prepared to use these cloud studies for future paintings: on one of them, a cloud study now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, he noted that it was ‘very appropriate for the coast at Osmington’.23 Constable argued in one of his lectures on landscape that painting was a ‘science’, which should be pursued as ‘an inquiry into the laws of nature’, but it is rather surprising that he was prepared to use a sky he had recorded in Hampstead for a coastal scene, where, presumably, the atmospheric conditions, including the behaviour of the wind and the degree of pollution, would have been quite different.24 It was in May 1824 that Constable first sent his wife and children down to Brighton: as he wrote to Fisher, ‘this warm weather has hurt her a good deal, and we are told we must try the sea’, so they took a house close to the beach, which evidently had a view of the sea.25 There is no evidence that Constable or his wife bathed in the sea when they were in Brighton – in fact, Constable was doubtful about the efficacy of bathing for the children and told Maria she should not make them bathe if they did not want to.26 Instead, they took advantage of the walks and the fresh air, and the views that could be seen from the windows and on the nearby beach. Maria also did some sketching. On 23 May 1824, Maria wrote to Constable: ‘I do nothing but study skies all day, it is a fine situation for that.’27 And later that year, in October, she wrote: ‘We have a fine gale today and a grand sea . . . I have not been able to stir out to day for the wind.’28 Constable’s first Brighton sketches demonstrate a heartfelt response to the wide spaces and the opportunities for observing the clouds as they rolled across the sky. He adopted a broad, panoramic format for some of his sketches, and most of them show stormy or at least cloudy weather. Brighton Beach, with Colliers (Victoria and Albert Museum) is exceptional in showing sunshine and blue sky. The inscription on the back was made partly for the benefit of Constable’s friend John Fisher, who was godfather to his daughter Maria: 3d tide receding left the beach wet – Head of the Chain Pier Brighton Beach July 19 Evg. 1824 – My dear Maria’s Birthday Your God-daughter – Very lovely Evening – looking eastward – cliffs & light off a dark grey [?] effect – background – very white and golden light.29

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It is significant that Constable chose to make a sketch on a family birthday, when one might suppose he had other demands on his time. Was he thinking of Wordsworth’s ‘immortal sea’ from which little Maria, now five years old, had come? This sketch was one of a series lent to Fisher in 1825. Fisher had asked Constable to lend him a sketchbook, so that his wife could make copies from it to improve her drawing skills; Constable responded by sending a batch of sketches to his friend in January 1825, writing, ‘I have enclosed in the box a dozen of my Brighton oil sketches – perhaps the sight of the sea may cheer Mrs F – they were done in the lid of my box on my knees as usual.’30 (Mrs Fisher had been ill with inflammation on her chest.) As with the paintings owned by Pulham and Gooch, there was an assumption that looking at paintings of the coast would have beneficial effects similar to those experienced by actually visiting and breathing the sea air. Returning them to Constable three months later (Constable had asked for them back ‘at your leisure but the sooner the better’), Fisher enclosed as a ‘remunerating fee’ a set of sermons by William Paley, which he said were ‘fit companions’ for the sketches, being ‘exactly like them: full of vigour, and nature, fresh, original, warm from observation of nature, hasty, unpolished, untouched afterwards’.31 The exchange of sermons for sketches – and sermons by the man who had done more than anyone else to popularise the idea of the ‘Argument from Design’, that is, the argument that the perfection of the world proved the existence of a benevolent Creator – strongly implies that Constable’s sketching was regarded by both men as having a spiritual dimension. Perhaps this was Constable’s state of mind when he made a sketch on New Year’s Day in 1826, The Sea near Brighton: one of the very few occasions when he sketched out of doors in the winter (Figure 2.5). It was also a Sunday. It is puzzling that he would have sat out on the beach for two whole hours at this time of day, presumably leaving his family indoors. He may have hoped that the painting would serve as an act of praise of the Creator, equivalent to worship in church, as well as a charm to ensure a better prospect for his wife’s health in the new year. It is not clear how far Constable was aware that Maria’s illness was terminal. The symptoms of tuberculosis, or consumption, were well known, but the name of her disease is never mentioned in his correspondence. After she died, he drew analogies between his state of mind and the increasingly stormy landscapes that he produced. It was in the later Brighton sketches that some of the most spectacular storms appear. Stormy Sea, Brighton (1828) dates from their last visit, just a few months before Maria died, and its stormy subject and rough

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Figure 2.5 John Constable, The Sea near Brighton (1826). Oil on paper laid on card, 17.5 x 23.8 cm. Inscription on reverse: ‘Brighton. Sunday. Jany 1st 1826. From 12 till 2 P. M. Fresh Breeze from S.S.W.’ © Tate, London 2017.

palette knife technique have been linked to Constable’s emotional turmoil at this time (Figure 2.6). With sketches like these, it is tempting to think that painting the sea had a therapeutic benefit for Constable, soothing his mental and emotional health just as the breezes soothed his wife’s physical condition. Most of Constable’s Brighton oil sketches concentrate on sea and sky. However, he was also making drawings of the human activities going on in the resort, and at one point had a commission for twelve drawings, which were to be engraved in London and published in Paris.32 His initial reaction to Brighton, a fashionable and growing resort in the 1820s, was not at all favourable. He was famously dismissive of its modern aspects in a letter to John Fisher: Brighton is the receptacle of the fashion and off-scouring of London . . . the beach is only Piccadilly . . . by the seaside. Ladies dressed & undressed – gentlemen in morning gowns & slippers on, or without them altogether about knee deep in the breakers – footmen – children – nursery maids, dogs, boys, fishermen – preventive service men (with hangers and pistols),

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Figure 2.6 John Constable, Stormy Sea, Brighton (c. 1828). Oil on paper laid on canvas, 16.5 x 26.7 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. rotten fish & those hideous amphibious animals the old bathing women, whose language both in oath and voice resembles men – all are mixed up in endless and indecent confusion. The genteeler part, the marine parade, is still more unnatural – with its trimmed and neat appearance & the dandy jetty or chain pier, with its long and elegant strides into the sea a full ¼ of a mile. In short there is nothing here for the painter but the breakers – & sky – which have been lovely indeed and always varying.33

Constable appears to have been shocked by the social mixing and ‘indecency’ he found in Brighton. He was also contemptuous of the new building in the resort which he found ‘unnatural’. Nevertheless, the marine parade and chain pier provided the subject for his only big exhibition painting of Brighton, The Chain Pier, Brighton (Figure 2.7). It is likely that Constable hoped its subject matter would appeal to a buyer who had spent a holiday in the town, although in the event it was not a commercial success, and stayed in his possession until his death. This painting is very different from his sketches but it still manages to accommodate the breakers and the sky – indeed, as Timothy Wilcox has pointed out, this painting includes a sky which is the largest in area that he ever painted.34 Constable’s correspondence shows that he thought of the coast as a place for healthy air and fecundity. In April 1825, he writes

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Figure 2.7 John Constable, The Chain Pier, Brighton (1826–7). Oil on canvas, 127 x 182.9 cm. © Tate, London 2017.

to Fisher of the coast at Osmington, the ‘air of which is a delicious mixture of warmth and freshness’, and how it will settle his (that is, Fisher’s) wife to rights.35 Perhaps the sea air also had aphrodisiac qualities for him. In September 1826, he went to Brighton alone, to fetch back his two sons who had been staying there with a family friend. While he was there he wrote to Maria: I wished much for you when I heard – and saw – and smelt – the dear old sea, which has always done you so much good, and certainly there is no such place for children – and moreover they swarm here . . . if I may judge by appearances, Old Neptune gets all the Ladies with child – for we can hardly lay it to the men which we see pulled and led about the beach here.36

Constable seems to have overcome his initial prudishness to see the coast as a good place for flirtation and procreation. Brighton, of course, already had a strong reputation for sexual pleasures, thanks to the residence of the Prince Regent. Constable’s idea that it is Old Neptune, rather than the male invalids in evidence on the beach, that gets the women pregnant conjures up images of the delights of bathing that are reminiscent of the drawings of Thomas Rowlandson.

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It was during these Brighton years that Constable had major success in France, selling several pictures to two French dealers, Arrowsmith and Schroth, and winning gold medals at the Paris Salon of 1824 and at Lille in 1825. He resisted invitations to pay a visit across the Channel, however. On 22 June 1824, he wrote to Maria: ‘I hope not to go to Paris as long as I live. I do not see any end it is going to answer.’37 A few weeks later, he reported that the French critics were angry with the French artists for admiring his works; he writes to his wife: ‘All this is funny enough, and very amusing, but they can’t get at me on this side of the water, and [I] will never forsake old England, the land of my happiness.’38 Although he later relented somewhat from this stance, and was more positive in later letters about the likelihood of a visit to Paris, the idea of old England, and the need for protection against France, the traditional enemy, seem to have inspired Constable’s last major painting of the coast, Hadleigh Castle (Figure 2.8). Hadleigh Castle was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1829, entitled ‘Hadleigh Castle. The mouth of the Thames – morning after a stormy night’. Constable made his first drawing of the subject in

Figure 2.8 John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames – Morning after a Stormy Night (1829). Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 164.5 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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June 1814, when the Napoleonic Wars seemed to have ended with the Treaty of Fontainebleau, but were in fact to resume in the ‘Hundred Days’ leading up to Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. He wrote to Maria Bicknell, who at that point was his fiancée: ‘At Hadleigh there is a ruin of a castle which from its situation is a really fine place – it commands a view of the Kent hills, the Nore and North Foreland & looking many miles out to sea.’39 It was obviously the view that really seized Constable’s imagination, especially since it looked towards the Nore, a large sandbank at the mouth of the Medway, next to the naval dockyards at Sheerness where warships were stationed. The view from the castle in 1814 would have reminded him of his trip on the Coutts in 1803, also made at a time when the war seemed to be over. In Constable’s correspondence, the painting is often referred to simply as ‘the Nore’.40 The ruin of the castle, built by Edward III in the thirteenth century in the face of an earlier threat from France, dominates the left-hand side of the painting, but on the right and in the distance the rays of the sun break through the clouds to shine on the Nore, and the shipping sheltering there, as well as on the dockyard town of Sheerness. In the foreground, a shepherd and a herdsman go about their peaceful everyday activity, protected by the Royal Navy from the disruption that would have ensued if Napoleon had invaded. Both in 1814 and in 1829, the latter part of Constable’s title, ‘morning after a stormy night’, would have had a metaphorical significance, the ‘stormy night’ being the years of war. This theme gave him the excuse to paint a splendidly stormy sky. The subject also had a more personal significance for Constable. On that visit in 1814 he had met the vicar who had christened him, and he had written to Maria that he ‘was always delighted with the melancholy grandeur of a sea-shore’.41 When he took up the subject again in 1828, that impression of melancholy was made all the more intense by Maria’s recent death. He jokingly referred to himself as a ‘ruin’ in this period of his life: did he think of the stretch of water between the two sides of the Thames estuary as being like the uncrossable gulf that separated him from his beloved wife? Sheerness is lit up by the rays of the morning sun, like a distant prospect of a promised land, or a heavenly one. In 1829, when he published English Landscape Scenery, Constable included four coastal scenes amongst the twenty-two plates. In the letterpress to one of these, Sea-beach, Brighton, he wrote: ‘Of all the works of the Creation none is so imposing as the Ocean; nor does Nature anywhere present a scene that is more exhilarating than a

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sea-beach, or one that is so replete with interesting material to fill the canvass [sic] of the Painter.’42 This accolade is perhaps surprising, as Constable painted few exhibition pictures of the coast, but his coastal sketches obviously had great significance for him. He gave away small coast scenes as presents to friends, and lent the sketches to his friend John Fisher. They are associated with events such as his own birth, his daughter’s birthday, the start of his married life, and the beginning of a new year. For Constable, the coast was the boundary between earthly and heavenly life, but also between ‘old England’ and the foreigner, and it was a place where his interest in skies and weather could develop freely, bringing the health-giving sea breezes back into his pastoral landscapes, and thus to his legacy as the quintessential painter of rural England.

Notes 1. Anne Lyles, ‘“Turner, Calcott and Collins will not like it”: Constable, Brighton and the Sea’, in Christine Riding and Richard Johns (eds), Turner and the Sea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 158. 2. See Christiana Payne, Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2007), especially chapters 1, 3 and 4. 3. Heinrich von Kleist, ‘Emotions upon Viewing Friedrich’s Seascape’, in E. G. Holt (ed.), The Triumph of Art for the Public, 1785–1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 173. 4. Edward Young, ‘Night V: The Relapse’, in Night Thoughts (London: printed for C. Whittingham, 1798), p. 108, ll. 669–70. 5. On the importance of Young to Blake and Palmer, see Christiana Payne, ‘“A mild, a grateful, an unearthly lustre”: Samuel Palmer and the Moon’, Burlington Magazine, May 2012, 336. For Turner and Young, see W. Thornbury, The Life of J. M. W. Turner, R. A. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1897), 364. 6. Harold Forster, Edward Young: The Poet of the Night Thoughts (Harleston: Erskine Press, 1986), 341ff, 387ff. 7. ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, in William Wordsworth: Selected Poems, ed. Walford Davies (London: Dent Everyman, 1975), p. 110, ll. 162–8. 8. John Constable to John Fisher, 29 August 1824, in John Constable’s Correspondence, ed. R. B. Beckett, 6 vols (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1962–8), vol. 2: Early Friends and Maria Bicknell (1964), 171. 9. Robert Southey, Roderick, the Last of the Goths, 3rd edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1815), 1:14.

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10. See Graham Reynolds, The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 1:45–51. 11. Constable’s Correspondence, vol. 1: The Family at East Bergholt, 1807–1837 (1962), 5–6, 15. 12. Mark Evans, Stephen Calloway and Susan Owens, John Constable: The Making of a Master (London: Victoria and Albert Museum Publishing, 2014), 68. 13. Constable’s Correspondence, vol. 3: The Correspondence with C. R. Leslie, R. A. (1965), 28–9. 14. ‘Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont’, in Wordsworth: Selected Poems, pp. 127–8, ll. 11–12, 37–8. 15. Timothy Wilcox, catalogue entry in Edward Morris (ed.), Constable’s Clouds: Paintings and Cloud Studies by John Constable (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2000), 46. 16. Seymour Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 35. 17. Graham Reynolds, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 1:32. 18. Ibid. 108. 19. Mr Pulham to Constable, 18 July 1824, in Constable’s Correspondence, vol. 4: Patrons, Dealers, and Fellow Artists (1966), 92. 20. Constable to John Martin, c. July or August 1831, in Constable’s Correspondence, vol. 5: Various Friends, with Charles Boner and the Artist’s Children (1967), 89. 21. Anthony Bailey, John Constable: A Kingdom of his Own (London: Chatto and Windus, 2006), 187. 22. John Thornes has found that a form of the scale was used in twentythree of the forty-nine surviving inscribed sky studies. J. E. Thornes, John Constable’s Skies (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 1999), 58. 23. This cloud study is dated 5 September 1822. 24. R. B. Beckett (ed.), John Constable’s Discourses (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970), 69. 25. Constable to Fisher, 8 May 1824, in Constable’s Correspondence, vol. 6: The Fishers (1968), 57. 26. John Constable to Maria Constable, 9 September 1825, in Constable’s Correspondence, 2:388. 27. Maria Constable to John Constable, 23 May 1824, in ibid. 316. 28. Maria Constable to John Constable, 26 or 27 October 1824, in ibid. 368–9. 29. See Evans, Calloway and Owens, John Constable, 72. 30. Constable to Fisher, 5 January 1825, in Constable’s Correspondence, 6:189. 31. Fisher to Constable, 8 April 1825, in ibid. 196.

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32. This was a commission from John Arrowsmith. See 17 December 1824, in ibid. 184. 33. Constable to Fisher, 29 May 1824, in ibid. 171. 34. Wilcox, catalogue entry in Morris, Constable’s Clouds, 93. 35. Constable to Fisher, April 1825, in Constable’s Correspondence, 6:198. 36. John Constable to Maria Constable, September 1826, in Constable’s Correspondence, 2:433–4. 37. John Constable to Maria Constable, 22 June 1824, in ibid. 340. 38. John Constable to Maria Constable, 7 July 1824, in ibid. 356. 39. John Constable to Maria Bicknell (later Maria Constable), 3 July 1814, in ibid. 127. 40. See Payne, Where the Sea, 73–5. 41. Constable to Maria Bicknell (later Maria Constable), 3 July 1814, in Constable’s Correspondence, 2:127. 42. Andrew Wilton, Constable’s ‘English Landscape Scenery’ (London: British Museum Publications, 1979), 42.

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Chapter 3

Henry Brougham and the Invention of Cannes Rosemary Ashton

When Henry Brougham, first Baron Brougham and Vaux, died in his villa in Cannes in May 1868 at the age of eighty-nine, he was well known for his many achievements in the fields of politics, law and education, and also as the man who put the Mediterranean town on the map. The south of France had been a holiday destination and playground for well-off British families for nearly a century. Cannes’s near neighbour, the much bigger town of Nice, was particularly associated with English visitors, especially after a visiting clergyman, Lewis Way, had helped to fund the construction of the Promenade des Anglais as a way of supporting starving local inhabitants after a particularly harsh winter in 1821 to 1822. But Cannes had been a tiny fishing village until it was discovered by Lord Brougham in 1834 and subsequently turned into a famous and thriving seaside resort, favoured by literary visitors from Edward Lear in the mid-1860s to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in the 1920s, and since the late 1930s famous as the venue for an annual film festival. Lear celebrated one of his winters in Cannes with an illustrated limerick: There was an Old Person of Cannes, Who purchased three fouls and a fan; Those she placed on a stool, and to make them feel cool She constantly fanned them at Cannes.1

Fitzgerald set his troubled last novel Tender Is the Night (1934) partly in Cannes, which he represents as still occupied by masses of English people, as it had been since the middle of the previous century. As it happens, the story of Brougham’s connection with Cannes is extremely well documented, in part because he was a wealthy

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English milord who cultivated close friendships with French politicians and with the so-called bourgeois king, Louis Philippe; in part because of his undeniable importance in the history of the reform of British institutions from the 1810s onwards; and in part also because of his extraordinary self-advertising personality and the notoriety he attained during his long and hyperactive life. During the 1820s he was one of the three most caricatured men in Britain, along with George IV and the Duke of Wellington.2 From the founding of Punch in 1841, Brougham was mentioned – usually unfavourably and often with an accompanying cartoon – in almost every number of the magazine in the 1840s and 1850s (Figure 3.1). The French connection is prominent in Punch’s close attention to Brougham; the magazine followed his doings in Paris and Cannes almost as much as they did his activities in the House of Lords or the courts on the northern circuit. As for Cannes itself, the town celebrated and commemorated its benefactor in 1878, the centenary of his birth, by naming a small square in the web of narrow streets behind the harbour after him and erecting a handsome statue. A small book of sixty-two pages was published the following year by M. Horace Retournay. Cannes: Lord Henry Brougham et le centenaire dates the popularity of Cannes as a resort to Brougham’s arrival there in the winter of 1834. It had come about by accident. Brougham, accompanied by his only child,

Figure 3.1 ‘Henry Brougham Swimming at Cannes’, Punch, July– December 1845, 260. Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd, www.punch.co.uk.

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twelve-year-old Eleanor Louise, had been returning to London from Italy when he found himself unable to spend the night in Nice, as planned, because an outbreak of cholera had closed the town; instead they stayed overnight in Cannes, at that time a fishing port of 3,000 inhabitants.3 Brougham was so taken by the place that he returned every winter until his death in 1868. In his book, Retournay notes that the municipal council, in naming the square after Lord Brougham and erecting its statue, had wished to honour ‘ce fondateur de la prospérité du pays, de Cannes, ville de saison’ (‘this founder of the prosperity of the country, of Cannes, city of season’). A recent historian of Cannes notes that the town now numbers 70,000 inhabitants.4 In January 1835, Brougham bought land in the nearby countryside and planned his château, which he had constructed in the Italian style, with gracious gardens and fountains, naming it Château Eléonore in honour of his daughter. The Times reported in October of that year that the foundations had just been laid on the estate bought by Brougham, and that ‘nothing will be more smiling than the situation of this château. Facing the St Margaret Islands (the abode of the iron-masked man), it will command the pretty basin that spreads to the west of Cannes. The view is a delightful one.’5 The building was completed in 1838 and Brougham escaped there as often as he could, though his beloved Eleanor died in 1839 at the age of sixteen or seventeen. (Brougham’s wife suffered from ill health and increasing mental problems and was kept very much in the background of his busy life.) In December 1920, The Times noted that Château Eléonore had been put up for sale. Brougham, according to the article, had been given personal permission by Louis Philippe to call his villa a château; it contained seventeen bedrooms, ‘beautifully matured gardens’, a lodge, gardener’s cottage and over 600,000 square metres of forest land.6 Château Eléonore still stands today in the midst of lovely gardens, but is now divided into apartments and surrounded by more recently built villas, all tastefully set into the hilly landscape overlooking the sea to the west of Cannes. In the centre of town, near the Place Lord Brougham, is another square named after a visitor who discovered Cannes in the same year as Brougham. The author of a play about Oliver Cromwell (1822) and the novella Carmen (1845), Prosper Mérimée was appointed in 1834 to the post of inspector-general of historical monuments. As part of his work he visited Cannes in December of that year, declaring that despite the time of year, there was not a cloud in the sky, no wind, a magnificent sun, ‘and there are wild strawberries growing in the woods’. Mérimée settled in Cannes permanently in 1861, meeting Brougham often. (It was apparently also at his suggestion that Edward Lear spent the winters of 1866 to 1867 and 1867 to 1868 in Cannes.)7 By this

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time, Brougham had brought many British friends and acquaintances to his southern paradise. Margaret Maria Brewster, daughter of the celebrated inventor of the kaleidoscope Sir David Brewster, who had been a fellow student of Brougham’s at Edinburgh University in the 1790s, refers incessantly to her father’s friend in her short book, Letters from Cannes and Nice, published in 1857. Her account of living in Cannes for most of the winter season, from November to the end of May, contains historical and geographical information about the region, including its connections to the Man in the Iron Mask and Napoleon, who landed near Cannes in March 1815 after his escape from Elba, but is mainly concerned with giving a picture of the British community gathered there, all of them attracted by the magnet which was Brougham. He is the fount of all wisdom. When seeking to impress on the reader the loveliness of the air and climate, Margaret Brewster quotes the oracle: To give you an idea of the comparative clearness of this atmosphere, I must tell you that Lord Brougham made a calculation, and found that in one hundred and eleven days at Cannes, there were only three days in which he could not make experiments upon light, while at Brougham Hall [Brougham’s family seat in Westmorland], in one hundred and eleven days at the same season, there were only three days in which he could make those experiments!8

Two pages later, she describes taking a tour of Château Eléonore, the library of which Brougham generously makes available to visitors. In the years since Brougham’s arrival, about nine or ten other English families have taken or built villas among the hills surrounding Brougham’s château, including the Duchess of Gordon, the Duchess of Manchester, Lord Londesborough and Lady Oxford. A number of English churches have sprung up in or near Cannes, including a Quaker meeting and a Plymouth Brethren place of worship, as well as a Scottish church which Margaret herself attends. Shortly before leaving France in May 1857, Margaret visited Brougham at home. She found the seventy-eight-year-old in his library, ‘looking pale from a recent severe illness, but full of his usual vigour and activity’. He showed her ‘a large stuffed snake’ found on St Margaret’s Island and a mosquito fossil 12,000 years old.9 If Brougham is the leading light among the British visitors, with his fine château, his acres of hunting land in the interior, his encyclopaedic knowledge of history and his experiments in science, the local inhabitants of Cannes have a lot to be grateful for, too, writes Margaret:

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The port was constructed in 1836, at the instance of Lord Brougham, to whom Cannes owes so much of its prosperity; and, since its erection, the commerce of Cannes has flourished in a surprising manner. It is now the third port of exportation in the French part of the Mediterranean. . . . Oil, perfumes, corks, anchovies, and sardines, are the principal sources of its revenue, which is rapidly increasing.

Brougham told her that the anchovies of Cannes were so famous that people from other places forged the Cannes mark on their barrels. Brougham ‘was seriously requested some years ago to use his influence with his friend the Duc de Broglie, then in power, to have this particular forgery made a capital offence’.10 Since Brougham was a radical Whig lawyer who did much to reform the law so as to reduce draconian punishments, it is unlikely that he acceded to this request. Indeed, the third Duc de Broglie himself was a liberal politician who had been France’s foreign minister from 1832 to 1836 and the French ambassador to London between 1847 and 1848, before giving up politics in disgust at the accession of Louis Napoleon, who took the title Emperor Napoleon III at the end of 1851. Brougham’s activities in France were followed eagerly – if increasingly sardonically – in the British press, in which he had already figured prominently for several decades for his doings in Britain in Parliament, law court and many a council room. The York Herald was among the newspapers which commented in April 1844 on his visit to France, and the influence he was thought to wield there. Quoting a French paper, the brief article reads: Lord Brougham will leave Paris, for London, on the 17th. He has been, since his arrival here, in frequent communication with the King, with whom he seems to be more than ever in favour. . . . It has been rumoured that his lordship has been acting as a mediator for a loan to the French government, for the railroads which are in contemplation.11

Brougham himself claimed in the autobiography he wrote near the end of his life that he had been a frequent visitor at royal receptions in the Tuileries, and that Louis Philippe regularly asked him for information about Britain.12 In France, Brougham seems to have been admired without the admixture of suspicion which clung to his reputation at home. One reason for this was undoubtedly his expertise in the language – in 1845, he published an account of the lives and works of Voltaire and Rousseau in French. He was courted as an influential politician

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who knew all the leaders of British politics, and his active interest in science – witnessed by Margaret Brewster in Cannes – found him demonstrating his experiments on light using a ‘curious apparatus’ of his own invention to a ‘numerous and brilliant’ audience in Paris in January 1850.13 At home, Brougham’s familiarity with all things French was noted by his erstwhile friend and political colleague, the radical Whig Member of Parliament Thomas Creevey, during the debates leading up to the passing of the Reform Act of 1832. Creevey, who had observed Brougham’s brilliance and the ‘endless mine of his intellectual resources’ at the hustings in Liverpool in 1812 but had even then suspected that with Brougham there was ‘always some game or underplot out of sight’, observed in September 1831 how Brougham conversed easily with the elder statesman Talleyrand.14 Giving him one of the many nicknames he had coined for Brougham – they included Wickedshifts, Beelzebub, Achitophel, the Arch-fiend and Bruffam – Creevey marvelled even as he mocked: Old Wickedshifts and I had a most agreeable duet to Stoke, or at least within 3 miles of it, when he had fairly talked himself to sleep. . . . Sefton and I were more astonished at him than ever. By his conversation with old Talleyrand it appeared most clearly that [he] had been intimately acquainted with every leading Frenchman in the Revolution, and indeed with every Frenchman and every French book that Tally mentioned. He always led in this conversation, as soon as Tally had started his subject.15

It seemed that nothing and no one was unknown to Brougham. Though always controversial, self-seeking and reckless, he had an extraordinary influence and significance in British public life, particularly in the period from 1800 to 1834 – in other words, up to the time of his discovery of Cannes. Who was he then? In his autobiography (which nowhere mentions his marriage), he included ‘Notes about Henry’ written by his mother in 1826: ‘From a very tender age he excelled all his cotemporaries [sic]. Nothing to him was a labour – no task prescribed that was not performed long before the time expected.’16 That this glowing assessment was not merely an expression of maternal pride is borne out by the bare details of his education and career, as well as by a host of gaping observers. He was sent to Edinburgh High School at the age of seven and was ‘dux’ (top of the senior class) at the age of twelve, too young to go to university, though ready intellectually. He did attend Edinburgh University, graduating in philosophy and law at eighteen. In 1802, he co-founded the great Edinburgh Review with Francis Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, and

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wrote long articles on every subject under the sun for twenty years, as well as writing regularly in The Times. He became a successful lawyer in England and a radical Whig MP. In 1820, he successfully defended Queen Caroline against her estranged husband George IV’s efforts to divorce her and exclude her from his coronation. In 1825, he advised the notorious courtesan Harriette Wilson as she defended her Memoirs against the charge of libel. (‘Publish and be damned’ was what the Duke of Wellington apparently told her when she threatened to expose his affair with her; many others, including Brougham himself, paid up rather than see their names entwined with hers in print.17) In his busiest decade, the 1820s, Brougham helped George Birkbeck found the London Mechanics’ Institution and the Infant School Society; in 1826, he was the prime mover in the founding of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which aimed to educate the masses through cheap publications written by experts in their field. David Brewster wrote the treatise on optics. Brougham himself wrote the introductory treatise, a clever, breezy survey of the whole field of contemporary science, from mathematics to natural philosophy, the solar system, electricity and – topically – the workings of the steam engine.18 In 1826, he was also the most active member of a group of dissenters, Jews and agnostics who came together to establish the University of London – now University College London – on non-religious principles and with a modern syllabus. At the same time he agitated in Parliament against slavery, for full-scale legal reform and the extension of the franchise, for Catholic and Jewish emancipation, for extending education to include the working class, and in particular for the Reform Act of 1832. In a two-week period in 1828, Brougham made two of the most famous speeches ever delivered in the House of Commons. On 29 January, he took Wellington’s conservative government to task for ignoring the educational needs of the country. His sounding phrase, ‘the schoolmaster is abroad’, was repeated hundreds of times in newspapers, becoming in due course one of the many jokes made at Brougham’s expense, but it was a joke which arose out of initial admiration for Brougham’s philanthropic and progressive beliefs, as well as his mental stamina and powers of oratory. A few days later, on 7 February 1828, he made the longest speech ever given in Parliament – nearly seven hours – on the need for root and branch reform of every part of the nation’s laws. Brougham was a phenomenon. A speech delivered in University College London in 1897 by George Vivian Poore, professor of medical jurisprudence, surveyed the early

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years of the university and Brougham’s outstanding contribution (he was its first chairman of council, a position he held from the opening of the university in 1828 until his death in 1868): His mind was like a dry sponge; it soaked up everything in the shape of knowledge it came across, and before he was thirteen he had learned everything they could teach him at the High School in Edinburgh. He learned languages, science, philosophy, and everything else without the least trouble . . . Lord Brougham was a man of enormous industry, and was connected with the foundation of the Edinburgh Review, and to show you what his mind was, it may be stated that he wrote nearly the whole of one number of the Edinburgh Review and that his articles ranged over a great variety of subjects, from Chinese music to the operation of Lithotomy. His versatility was astounding and it is recorded that [Samuel] Rogers, the poet, when he saw Lord Brougham driving off from Panshanger [Lord Cowper’s country house] said, “There goes Solomon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Chesterfield, and a great many other persons, in one post-chaise!”19

For all his brilliance, and his undoubted contributions to law reform and the spread of education, Brougham’s career could not be counted a success. He was subject to fits of depression and even madness; in Parliament, he was reckless and often treacherous towards his own party. During his four years as Lord Chancellor in Lord Grey’s reforming Whig cabinet from 1830 to 1834 he achieved remarkably little; it was an open secret that Grey had given him the post in order to get him out of the Commons and into the Lords, where he could do less damage to the government. He never held high office again, though he continued to agitate for law reform in the Lords and to seek office for himself. But increasingly he was a figure of ridicule. There is no satisfactory biography of Brougham, partly, no doubt, because he was such a polymath and hyperactive figure, and partly – I believe – because his letters tend to be undated and are written in the most execrable handwriting. But one could fashion a biography of him through the public prints, one which would be as much visual as verbal. Brougham was a gift to caricaturists. His appearance was easy to exaggerate – he was tall and thin and had a prominent nose. His name, too, was adaptable – it allowed him to be represented as a broom, or as a man wielding a broom, whether in the guise of his famous schoolmaster (holding a birch broom with which to chastise wayward pupils) or in his lawyer’s wig and gown, doing the job of cleaning the Augean stables of the legal establishment. When he took to wearing trousers made up to his own pattern, he began (by about

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1830) to be pictured wearing these favourite black and white check trousers – soon called ‘broughams’ and observed by everyone including Dickens, who met him on the streets of Paris in November 1846 wearing his check trousers ‘and without the proper number of buttons on his shirt’.20 The trousers are to be seen in many a number of Punch, usually on Brougham himself but sometimes attached to political colleagues and rivals, including the radical Joseph Hume and the conservative Duke of Wellington.21 Gladstone actually took to wearing black and white check trousers in real life when he became friendly with Brougham in the late 1850s.22 Another invention of Brougham’s, in addition to the check trousers, was the light one-horse carriage which also bears his name, and which was first built in 1838 under his personal direction. The original prototype is in the Science Museum. This was a genuinely useful item, but it too did duty among the caricaturists of its inventor. In the 1840s, when Brougham was reckoned to be trying to get back into political office, Punch draws a ‘hack brougham for sale’ which has Brougham’s famous profile for a chassis.23 Of his three inventions, the trousers were unsurprisingly the most ephemeral; the one-horse carriage outlasted most other horse-drawn vehicles and was still being advertised for sale or rent in 1904, but was of course superseded by the motor car soon after that.24 As for Cannes, it has lasted and will no doubt do so for many generations to come.

Notes 1. Edward Lear, ‘There Was an Old Person of Cannes’, in The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense, ed. Vivien Noakes (London: Penguin, 2001), 364. 2. See Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 12 vols (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1870–1954), vol. 10: 1820–1827 (1952) and vol. 11: 1828–1832 (1954) – both volumes edited by M. Dorothy George. 3. See Ted Jones, The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers (London: Tauris Parke, 2007), 33. 4. M. Horace Retournay, Cannes: Lord Henry Brougham et le centenaire (Marseilles: F. Robaudy, 1879), 50; Jones, French Riviera, 34. 5. Untitled article in The Times, 5 October 1835, 5. 6. Advertisement for Knight, Frank and Ruley, The Times, 2 December 1920, 26. 7. Jones, French Riviera, 36, 37.

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8. Margaret Maria Brewster, Letters from Cannes and Nice: Illustrated by a Lady (Edinburgh: T. Constable, 1857), 31. 9. Ibid. 33, 48, 97, 192, 229–30. 10. Ibid. 172–3. 11. ‘Foreign News’, York Herald, 20 April 1844, 5. 12. The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham, Written by Himself, 3 vols (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871), 3:511–12. 13. ‘Lord Brougham in Paris’, Illustrated London News, 26 January 1850, 55. The article quotes from the French paper Galignani. 14. Thomas Creevey, 17 October 1812, in The Creevey Papers: A Selection from the Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Thomas Creevey, M.P., ed. Herbert Maxwell (London: John Murray, 1912), 171. 15. Creevey, 20 September 1831, in ibid. 578. The claim that Brougham ‘had been intimately acquainted with every leading Frenchman in the Revolution’ is, of course, impossible, as Brougham had been a child in 1789. 16. Life of Brougham, 1:3. 17. See Kenneth Bourne (ed.), The Blackmailing of the Chancellor: Some Intimate and hitherto Unpublished Letters from Harriette Wilson to Her Friend Henry Brougham, Lord Chancellor of England (London: Lemon Tree Press, 1975). 18. See Rosemary Ashton, Victorian Bloomsbury (London: Yale University Press, 2012), 61–2. 19. George Vivian Poore, ‘The History of University College’, 14 June 1897, University College London Special Collections, College Collection A20 POO. 20. Charles Dickens to John Forster, [22 and 23 November 1846], in The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 4: 1844–1846, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 660; Dickens to W. W. F. Cerjat, 27 November 1846, in Letters of Dickens, 4:663. 21. For the Duke of Wellington and Joseph Hume in check trousers, see the cartoons on pages 190 and 231 of Punch, January–June 1845. 22. See Michael Lobban, ‘Brougham, Henry Peter, First Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, 2004, (last accessed 2 January 2018). 23. See Punch, July–December 1845, 82. 24. A search under the word brougham in The Times from 1865 to 1904 brings up 14,222 items.

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Chapter 4

The Battle of Torquay: The Late Victorian Resort as Social Experiment James Kneale

Introduction Coasts can be considered marginal or liminal sites – beyond the land, or between land and sea – and this has led some commentators to suggest that they may offer the possibility for social transformation. Rob Shields combined Foucault’s heterotopia or ‘spaces of otherness’ with Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of carnivalesque festive culture and other theories of marginality to suggest that sites like Brighton’s beach may offer ‘moments of discontinuity in social space . . . moments of “in between-ness,” of a loss of social co-ordinates’, and hence the possibility of social change.1 Kevin Hetherington, more sceptical about the ‘romance of the margins’, notes that heterotopia do possess social codes, though these must be different to the spaces beyond them.2 Social and cultural historians have been similarly cautious, suggesting that this potential may have become tamed in late Victorian resorts; that seaside leisure was itself a form of ‘social control’; or that this reading misses other, subtler interpretations.3 Certainly Mass Observation accounts of Blackpool holiday visitors in the 1930s noted that drinking seemed to dissolve the class and gender distinctions observed back home in Bolton: ‘Here, through drink, the great crowds are fused more than ever into one more common mass of work-free humanity.’4 While Victorian resort and coastal spa towns had their origins in fashionable eighteenth-century tourism, they grew at extraordinary rates between 1801 and 1851. The population of fifteen ‘watering places’ in England and Wales grew by 254 per cent over this period, outstripping the growth of the fifty-one manufacturing

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towns recorded by the 1851 census over the same period. Much of this growth came from eleven coastal resorts – Brighton, Ramsgate, Margate, Worthing, Weymouth, Scarborough, Ryde, Cowes, Ilfracombe, Dover and Torquay – which grew by 314 per cent.5 In fact, John Walton suggests that the seaside resort was a particular kind of industrial town, ‘with health and pleasure as its products’, possessing an infrastructure or ‘industrial plant’ of hotels, sea defences, promenades and so on.6 Manufacturing centres and resort towns grew together: The development of the seaside holiday and coastal resort as commercial phenomena were part and parcel of the industrialisation process, growing in step with it and integrated into its interactions of demand and supply from the beginning, rather than being mere consequences or side-effects of a more dynamic set of developments.7

This population growth brought new problems to the coast, just as it had with ‘shock cities’ such as Manchester: the need for improved sanitation, housing and policing; political reform; and the coordination of new development. Town and cities became sites for experimentation, exploring new ways of living, forms of government, relationships between markets and institutions, and more. The coastal resorts also had to grapple with these challenges. Here a culture of recreation, amelioration and leisure might be truly transformative, curing (if only temporarily) the ills created by industrial society. This seems to fit the liveliness of resorts like Blackpool or Ramsgate, where working-class visitors from nearby cities mixed in holiday crowds, but it is harder to imagine smaller, more decorous towns like Bournemouth or Torquay as laboratories for social transformation. In fact, it seems likely that resorts of this kind did present opportunities to develop new forms of culture, government and behaviour, but that these social changes were not at all progressive. This chapter examines the culture of the late Victorian coast through a specific focus on drink and temperance and a discussion of the ‘Battle of Torquay’, a series of disturbances that convulsed that staid resort town in 1888. This ‘Battle’ was prompted by the town’s attempts to suppress the activities of the Salvation Army, and by the Army’s refusal to be cowed; the problem eventually had to be resolved by Parliament. While this was in some ways a unique instance of these tensions, the Army was met with violent opposition all along the south coast of England, and it is possible to trace a line of coastal disturbances from east to west through Hastings, Eastbourne, Brighton, Shoreham-by-Sea, Worthing, Ryde, Cowes,

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Poole, Weston-super-Mare and Torquay between 1881 and 1888. Temperance offered its supporters a form of improvement based on health, rational recreation and polite civil society, but was strongest in the new industrial towns of northern and central England and in the Celtic fringes where nonconformity was well established. In seaside towns such as Torquay, temperance activists had to contend with Anglican suspicion, a genteel desire for order, and a Local Board set on municipal reform, as well as opposition from local elites, publicans and others. After examining the character of resort towns like Bournemouth and Torquay, and the ways in which drink and temperance troubled their calm, this chapter introduces Torquay in more detail. We then turn to the Salvation Army and their opponents before considering the Battle of Torquay itself. This took the form of a clash between rival ideas of improvement: between a social welfare programme emphasising temperance and working-class agency on the one hand, and a more patrician and conservative concern for social niceties on the other. In Torquay, this tension – visible in many other towns along the English coast – took a particularly exaggerated form.

The Late Victorian Coast: ‘An uncharted wilderness of villas’? In July 1884, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to W. E. Henley, signing himself ‘Yours ever R. L. S. of Bournemouth, Davos, Torquay, Mentone, Nice, Cannes and Hyères esq., Invalid’.8 Stevenson spent a good deal of time in these British and European health resorts, staying at Bournemouth for three years and visiting Torquay in 1865 and 1866.9 Bournemouth did have its attractions; Henry James was a frequent visitor to Stevenson’s Bournemouth household in 1885, for example, when visiting his sister Alice, herself an invalid. Still, John Walton notes ‘the general regime of the mid-Victorian seaside resort was often criticised for dullness . . . especially where invalids predominated, as at Bournemouth and Torquay, or where local leaders put religion, morality and public order before entertainment’.10 The smaller Devon resorts were even less exciting: ‘Quiet, decorous watering places entertaining comparatively small numbers of holidaymakers, and also providing retirement homes for a select group of affluent people who retired there after successful careers in business, the professions or the colonial civil service.’11 ‘Ilfracombe is decidedly not a fashionable watering-place’, as Punch put it.12

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Stevenson would later describe the three years he spent cooped up in his house at Bournemouth as living ‘like a weevil in a biscuit’.13 One of the central characters of The Wrong Box (1889), the novel Stevenson wrote with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, is, like Stevenson, despatched by his doctor to ‘the purer air of Bournemouth’, ‘that uncharted wilderness of villas’.14 Bournemouth and Torquay epitomised the respectable Victorian seaside health resort, but as Walton points out, ‘one man’s dullness was another’s decorum’.15 In these resorts, late Victorian coastal culture was characterised by a particular form of improvement, of genteel leisure attracted by the health-giving properties of sea-bathing or favourable climate, and local boosters took care to develop and protect these amenities.16 The southern coast was not always so dull, however, as others had different ideas about what counted as improvement. A month after Stevenson arrived at Bournemouth, just a few miles down the coast at Poole, an alderman and teetotaller named John Joseph Norton accused the publicans of breaking the licensing laws and the police of refusing to prosecute them. Norton had hired two private detectives (one, Henry Williams, an ex-policeman) to provide the evidence he needed, claiming, for example, that the local superintendent of police had been seen to drink twenty glasses of gin and water in one of these pubs in a little over two hours.17 Norton issued forty-one summonses against the police, publicans and others. On the first day of the case, he had to be guarded by the police; that night a torch-lit procession, estimated to be six or seven thousand strong, paraded and burnt an effigy of the alderman.18 There was more trouble when the case reopened, and Norton and the detectives had to be protected by twenty policemen. The crowd, waving a white flag, repeatedly attacked the group; Williams even drew a revolver, though he did not use it.19 The case ran for some years, and Williams was sentenced to seven years in prison for perjury.20 The drama played out in Poole introduces what contemporaries called ‘the drink question’ to Stevenson’s ‘uncharted wilderness of villas’. Drink had long haunted the older naval and garrison towns of the south coast, with mariners ‘ubiquitous denizens of the landscape of drink’ in early modern Southampton.21 Other port cities, such as Liverpool, were notorious for drunkenness by the middle of the nineteenth century.22 As a result, they had attracted the interest of the temperance movement, which had landed on the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and England from America at the beginning of the century. By 1876, Plymouth – described by the brewer and Liberal MP Michael Thomas Bass as ‘a nest of teetotallers’ – had acquired

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a sailors’ rest (teetotal lodgings for Royal Navy seamen) as a result of the efforts of moral reformer Agnes Weston. Weston, who opened another sailors’ rest in Portsmouth in 1882, was encouraged by the work of Sarah Robinson, the ‘Soldier’s Friend’, who established the Soldiers’ Institute in Portsmouth in 1874.23 However, Poole, Bournemouth and Torquay were very different towns to Plymouth or Portsmouth. Temperance found it harder to establish itself in these Anglican, conservative, ‘drier’ towns. Norton’s actions in Poole are surprising, then, but in fact there were many other disturbances along the south coast in the 1880s, as the Salvation Army clashed with local publicans, drinkers and elites. The ‘Battle of Torquay’ was simply one of the most significant of these disturbances. Norton’s experience in Poole suggests three things that are relevant for the remainder of this chapter. First, these seaside towns had to deal with ripples of social upheaval, caused by unprecedented rates of growth. Second, these upheavals could be occasionally violent. Third, these ripples could take on national importance. In Poole, the judge criticised the use of an agent provocateur – and an ex-policeman to boot – as a ‘spy’ or ‘informer’ in what should be a police matter; the case was really one of the powers and responsibilities of the police.24 As we will see, local scandals might become a test of national legislation in even the most decorous coastal sites, shining a spotlight on both the local state and the police.

Torquay: Improvement, Health and Temperance Torquay had become the seventh largest resort in England and Wales by 1851, with 13,707 inhabitants, and was the fifth fastest-growing resort between 1801 and 1851, during which time its population increased by 740 per cent. This growth slowed in comparison to other resorts in subsequent decades, but Torquay was still the twelfth largest English or Welsh resort in 1911, with 38,771 inhabitants.25 The town was ‘the most specialised and successful early example of the residential winter resort’, with its wealthy villa residents spending part of the summer on the Continent.26 Torquay also benefited from its own railway line from 1848 – stealing a march on Ilfracombe, its North Devon rival – and had developed a summer season for more ordinary visitors by the end of the century. However, the town’s conservative reputation and distance from any great urban centres meant that it would never rival the late Victorian resorts of Sussex, Kent, Essex, Lancashire or Yorkshire. The town’s development was carefully watched over by several local

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landowners, who also provided Torquay’s MPs; the most important of these was the Palk family, planning, for example, Ellacombe, ‘the hive of the industrial population’.27 As the Palks’ estate steward, the solicitor and banker William Kitson oversaw the building of new roads and villas as the chair of the new Improvement Commissioners in 1835, and then of the Local Board of Health from 1850. Despite its importance for the reputation of health resorts, sanitation in the poorest part of town was lacking, with Kitson refusing to build baths for the working classes. The imposition of high building standards also made workingclass housing prohibitively expensive.28 Torquay’s policing was also run by the local elite, as Jacqueline Bryon makes clear. The town’s rapid growth may have prompted the passing of its Local Improvement Act, granted relatively early in 1835, which gave the town new powers against ‘nuisances’ or anti-social behaviour. The most common of these were drunkenness, cases of bad language, furious driving, and obstructing the highway, and the Commissioners were keen to prosecute those who sullied the town’s reputation. The Local Board of Health extended these powers in 1850, but in 1856 the County and Borough Police Act threatened the town’s autonomy. Too small to warrant its own force under the new Act, Torquay would have to be absorbed into the County force, which might leave it with fewer police, at higher costs. Members of the Local Board opposed this move, but were unable to keep control of the town’s policing. Bryon explains: The key factor in wanting to retain local control must surely have revolved around the fact that the government of Torquay was in the hands of a small number of local families and to lose control of the police would undermine their sphere of influence, particularly in the help and attention that they might give to visitors. This was especially important in the development of Torquay as a fashionable watering place. Any possible reduction in the number of police officers would have had a detrimental effect on what was perceived to be a town with little crime.29

Torquay, Bournemouth and some other resorts followed the spa towns and the new ‘hydro’ or hydropathy resorts (themselves closely associated with temperance) in offering visitors health as well as relaxation.30 Torquay’s mild climate helped it establish a reputation as a winter resort, with the medical writer Robert Scoresby-Jackson noting that ‘Torquay has for many years been the resort of invalids afflicted with pulmonary, and particularly with phthisical complaints’.31 This shaped the town’s reputation in negative as well as positive ways. Torquay’s MP was

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described as ‘the representative of the pulmonary interest’ in the 1870s, and Augustus Bozzi Granville’s widely read if gossipy review of watering places described it as ‘the south western asylum of diseased lungs’, noting the constant coughing and expectoration of hotel guests, the patients promenading in respirators, who looked ‘like muzzled ghosts, and are ugly enough to frighten the younger people to death’, and the ‘frequent tolling of the funeral bell’ over the resort.32 But Granville was impressed by the mild climate and this was borne out by later studies like Scoresby-Jackson’s Medical Climatology. The evidence amassed by Scoresby-Jackson included meteorological measurements made by Torquay resident Edward Vivian. Vivian was a banker, in partnership with Kitson, and a justice of the peace. He was also an amateur geologist who explored Kents Cavern with William Pengelly and corresponded with Darwin; an artist, founding the local art school; a social scientist who spoke at the British Association; a prize breeder of chickens; and one of the Directors of the United Kingdom Temperance and General life-insurance company. Vivian had been teetotal since his twenties, and encouraged temperance in the town. Torquay had a teetotal Temperance Society from 1843, which had 800 members by 1846; Vivian was president for many years.33 Other temperance institutions in the town included three alcohol-free British Workmen’s ‘Public Houses’, the first opening in 1872, as well as local Bands of Hope, Good Templar Lodges and Church of England Temperance Societies.34 The thoroughly liberal Vivian brought together health, leisure, science and the arts in Torquay, and temperance played its part in the shaping of the resort’s reputation for healthfulness and its polite culture of leisure. Vivian did not speak for the whole town in terms of his views on drink, though. Sir Lawrence Palk, the town’s Conservative MP for nearly thirty years, wrote to Vivian to say that while he thought ‘the Law is much too lenient to drunkenness’, he ‘could not support in Parliament a Bill which should deprive the Working Man and his family, from obtaining that refreshment to which he is accustomed’.35 Palk made a similar point when opposing the Bill that became the 1872 Licensing Act; he supported moderate temperance reform in order to reduce drunkenness and crime, but thought the Act would be particularly hard on the rural poor.36 Late Victorian Torquay was fashionable but not ‘fast’, then, growing first as a winter resort for invalids, and gaining summer visitors later in the century. If it was a manufacturing town, as Walton suggests, its main products were peace and quiet; its culture was polite, but perhaps a little dull. A safely Conservative seat, it still had room

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for Liberals such as Vivian, and its Natural History Society and other popular institutions bore testament to a thriving middle-class society. Still, there were pockets of working-class housing, some old and unreformed, with fishing continuing in the nearby hamlets of Paignton and Brixham, and a large population either in hotel employment or in service. This was the context in which the Salvation Army found itself when it arrived in Torquay in 1882.

The Salvation Army and the Skeleton Army William and Catherine Booth founded the East London Christian Mission in 1865, settling on the title ‘Salvation Army’ by 1878. The Army grew rapidly through evangelical work until the mid-1880s, when the Booths began to concentrate on social work amongst the homeless, prostitutes, drunks and the sick. In Darkest England and the Way Out, published in 1890, claimed that poverty affected a tenth of the population, offered Salvationist ‘rescue work’ as the solution, and developed a vision of reformed ‘colonies’ in and beyond British cities. Both E. P. Thompson and Victor Bailey have criticised the idea that the Army represented a form of evangelising middle-class ‘social control’, outlining its connections to and similarities with late nineteenth-century socialist and labour movements, not least in its criticisms of sweated labour and unemployment.37 As well as gathering in respectable working-class members, the Army recruited from within the ‘submerged tenth’ and championed women – from Catherine Booth to the ordinary ‘Army lass’ – and working-class men as agents. An Army containing reformed drunkards and former ‘fallen women’ was inevitably at odds with polite, Anglican society, and as we will see its street processions, music and preaching also brought the Army into conflict with the police and with local bye-laws. Bailey concludes, ‘the Salvation Army corps, no less than temperance bands or trade-union and co-operative-society branches, was the beneficiary of an emerging working-class consciousness.’38 The Army stirred up a violent reaction in many places, but its most notable enemies were local ‘Skeleton Armies’, a term apparently first used to describe the opposition the Salvationists encountered in Westonsuper-Mare in 1881, and used in print later that year. 39 Groups had formed to challenge the Army before this, though, such as the ‘Massagainians’ of Basingstoke in 1880, where the Riot Act was read and troops used. The ‘skeletons’ were a parody of the Salvationists, flying banners and flags, as in Poole, and making ‘rough music’; one such band, formed in Bethnal Green in November 1882, aimed ‘to put down the

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Salvationists by following them about everywhere, by beating a drum and burlesquing their songs to render the conduct of their processions and services impossible’.40 While no other source mentions ‘skeletons’ at Torquay, Robert Sandall claimed that Torquay’s banner ‘had a yellow banner with three B’s – beef, beer and ’bacca!’ This slogan was a parody of the Salvationists ‘Soup! Soap! Salvation!’ but also celebrated three of the central motifs of nationalism and popular Toryism. The response to the Salvationists went beyond parody and rough music, though; Robert Sandall’s history states that at least 669 soldiers were seriously assaulted in 1882; one woman was killed in Guildford in that year, and another in Shoreham in 1883.41 Victor Bailey’s careful study of these disturbances shows that the Salvation Army faced vigorous opposition in at least sixty towns and cities from 1878 to 1891, stretching across England but disproportionately concentrated in the south. While there were riots in Sheffield, Oldham and Birkenhead, as well as in London, they were much more common in small and medium-sized towns: in declining manufacturing centres, such as Honiton; in older provincial towns left behind by the new English cities, such as Basingstoke or Guildford; and in small resort towns, such as Weston-super-Mare – in fact all the way along the south coast, from Hastings to Torquay.42 Bailey suggests that this pattern reflects the absence of an industrial working class in these towns; in northern and Midlands counties, the Salvationists found either sympathetic nonconformist support, or a culture that might oppose the Army without riot; in the southern counties, and perhaps in London, ‘there was an “old culture” which in some ways was less inhibited and “non-respectable,” rudely rejecting the values of temperance and respectability, but which was equally often deferential and jingoist’.43 The case of Stockport, a respectable northern town, where ‘skeletons’ formed up to protect Salvationist processions from other ‘roughs’, would seem to support this interpretation. For Bailey this was ‘a confrontation within working-class culture’.44 Local authorities also opposed the Salvation Army, fining and imprisoning soldiers for open-air prayer, meetings and processions. This ‘persecution’ spread further than the disturbances discussed above, including prosecutions in Manchester, Coventry and Croydon as well as Weston-super-Mare, Truro, Hastings, Penzance and at least ten other towns and cities. While street music was recognised as a nuisance by many – but not all – middle-class urbanites, it was not simply the noise of drum, tambourine and accordion that provoked local authorities into action; processions and meetings were accused of blocking roads and impeding traffic.45 The justices were also accused of failing to protect Salvationists from their opponents; in Honiton

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and Salisbury, magistrates either refused to prosecute ‘skeletons’ or imposed small fines.46 However, the legal validity of these proclamations against the Army was doubtful; as Salvationists pointed out, it seemed perverse to ban a procession on the grounds that it would cause a disturbance, and then charge the Salvation Army, when it was the skeletons who rioted. In 1882, Salvationists challenged the proclamation of Weston-super-Mare’s ban on processions, and the High Court found in their favour in Beatty v. Gillbanks. Without a basis in common law for these bans, local authorities turned to bye-laws and three resort towns – Hastings, Eastbourne and Torquay – went as far as including new police powers into local Acts of Parliament. Salvationists detected the hand of the drink trade in this opposition. The Bethnal Green skeletons’ subscription list apparently included the names of local publicans, beer-sellers and butchers; elsewhere ‘men were given drink and set on by beer-sellers to assault Salvationists’, as they were at Basingstoke.47 At Exeter in 1884, the mayor, a publican, led the attempt to suppress the Army.48 As Victor Bailey has demonstrated, other Salvationists, their supporters and even local magistrates identified the drink trade as the organisers of this ‘persecution’.49 Paul O’Leary provides further examples of opposition to temperance processions, including those of the Salvation Army, in South Wales from the 1850s to the 1870s, noting that drink and drink-sellers were often implicated.50 Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the leader of the UK Alliance, which campaigned for permissive legislation to allow local prohibition from 1853, listed the Army’s enemies in March 1883: These outrages are not carried on solely by the roughs and vagabonds who appear. I have no hesitation whatever in saying that in many places they are connived at, if not permitted, by authorities who ought to be responsible for the peace and order of the community. And I say more – I say that it is utterly impossible that such a state of things could exist without the liquor traffic.51

As high-profile advocates of total abstinence, the Army united those elements of the working classes who were hostile to temperance, local elites and the drink trade – exactly the forces who lined up to oppose Norton in Poole. (Not surprisingly, when Poole’s corporation banned the local Corps from marching, Norton marched at their head.)52 In Torquay, the Army found itself opposed by the town’s conservative elite, but this local disturbance turned out to rest on a legal issue of national importance.

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The Battle of Torquay The Torquay and Harbour District Bill was largely concerned with the purchase and reconstruction of the town’s harbour, and the financing of this work, but it contained clauses relating to public health and public order so it had to be referred to the Select Committee on Police and Sanitary Regulations, to prevent local authorities from granting themselves powers ‘which deviate from, or are in extension of, or repugnant to, the general Law’. Amendments were made to the 38th clause, which had originally banned all non-military processions with music, so that it only applied to Sundays.53 Later newspaper discussions suggest that one of the motivations for this clause, borrowed from similar legislation enacted for Eastbourne and Hastings, was that Torquay’s economy depended on invalids, who were more sensitive to noise; the Army constituted a threat to ‘the peaceful languor’ of Torquay.54 P. W. Wilson’s excitable biography of the banjo-playing Evangeline Booth suggests that her appearance in Torquay prompted this response: ‘“Ten pounds to the man who will quiet her,” shouted irate proprietors of hotels along England’s southern seaboard.’55 The campaign started slowly, as Salvationists arrested in January under the new Act had their convictions quashed by the Queen’s Bench.56 Towards the end of February, eleven marchers were convicted, choosing to go to prison rather than pay a fine.57 In the Commons, the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, told James Stuart, MP for Hoxton and later leader of the London Progressives, that 600 Torquay ratepayers had written to him to say that they knew nothing about the clause in the Torquay and Harbour District Bill; the next month, the Local Board in Torquay received ‘an influentially-signed memorial’ endorsing their actions as they met to order further proceedings against Salvationists.58 The trouble continued into May, with a claim that the Army, with 2,000 supporters, surrounded and ‘hustled’ the police; Major Roberts and four others were arrested and convicted.59 One Salvationist told the Birmingham Daily Post that the contest was an attack on the Army by the town’s wealthy elite: ‘those who are prosecuting this crusade against the Salvation Army and the working classes, whose cause is one, are the villa residents, who live quite out of the town and neighbourhood where the Salvation Army carries on its work.’60 The Pall Mall Gazette’s correspondent agreed, saying that the Army ‘is fighting the battle of the masses. . . . On the other side are ranged local “society,” black-hatted respectability, the Church, practical Toryism, the Army’s “betters” generally.’61 This was certainly the view of Roberts, the Army Major arrested in

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May: ‘because Satan was not able to raise a “skeleton army” from amongst the “masses” as he had done in several other places formerly, he succeeded in raising “a persecuting army” from amongst “the classes.”’62 However, other reports do suggest that local ‘roughs’ attacked the Torquay Salvationists.63 On the other hand, another writer to the same paper protested that the Board’s actions were intended to safeguard the town’s economy: The choice of a holiday should be guided by the presence or absence of the “Army.” . . . The town of Torquay, like all watering-places, depends largely upon the influx of summer and winter visitors, and the town authorities are, I am sure, taking a wise and commonsense step in studying the comforts, not only of themselves, but of their visitors.64

Cardiff’s Western Mail agreed, suggesting that Section 38 was formulated ‘in order to secure reasonable quiet in a watering-place much frequented by invalids’.65 The special character of Torquay became an important issue, and the argument became a question of jurisdiction. On being told by the chair of the justices that the bench was only observing the law of the land, one Army bandsman replied: ‘But it is not general. How is it that we can go to Mary Church [the next parish] and play, sir?’66 When Colonel Pepper read the court the opinion of the Lord Chief Justice, who had pronounced in 1882 that musical processions could not be made illegal, another magistrate, William Blundell Fortescue, rose to his feet to exclaim, ‘but a different law prevails in Torquay!’67 In Parliament, the Army’s supporters included James Stuart, Wilfrid Lawson, Henry Fowler and other Liberal MPs, who called on the Home Secretary to suspend the sentences.68 Beyond Parliament, the Army could count on the backing of the Pall Mall Gazette, which argued: ‘The Salvationists at Torquay are unquestionably doing a political service to their country . . . it is affording an object-lesson of the danger of tyranny and violation of our common liberties, to which local legislation is always exposed.’69 This was all the more important because another Torquay Bill was making its way through Parliament, the Piers and Harbours Provisional Order (No. 2) Bill, which included new Police clauses. The radical (and sensationalist) Reynolds’s Newspaper cheered on these ‘ecclesiastical democrats’, concluding: ‘These prosecutions are chiefly the result of a conspiracy between the publicans and the parsons. Both deplore the loss of customers on Sunday through the action of the Salvation Army.’70

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The Salvationists had also begun to win over some of the people of Torquay. Edward Vivian was the senior magistrate at Torquay but he refused to support the other justices in their treatment of the Army. Roberts claimed that Vivian refused to sit on the bench at all while clause 38 was in force.71 Torquay ratepayers sympathetic to the Salvationists spoke at the mass rallies held in Exeter to celebrate the end of the sentences of imprisoned bandsmen.72 Ordinary Torquay residents took their side, too. In May, the Pall Mall Gazette described one Sunday procession, led by Evangeline Booth, who was protected from the crowd by some of the locals; as the paper noted, ‘fortunately the Salvation Army have plenty of friends among the roughs of the town.’ The journalist added: ‘The mass of the working people of the town are in favour of the Army, both because of the persecution it has undergone, but also because of the excellent practical work it has done during the last six years.’73 In fact, most of the Salvationists who were charged and imprisoned were locals. Of the twenty-four men convicted (some of them more than once) between 24 February and 7 March 1888, ten were from Torquay, another six from within ten miles of the town, and five more from elsewhere in Devon; it’s impossible to establish the homes of the final three men. All were labourers, porters, sailors or fishermen.74 Late in May, Henry Fowler stated his intention to bring in a Bill to repeal clause 38, with the support of the Torquay MP, Richard Mallock. The Local Board ‘had shown itself disposed to defer entirely to the decisions of Parliament’, and halted its prosecutions at the end of May.75 The Home Office agreed ‘the opportunity should be taken to bring the local into harmony with the general law’.76 Fowler’s Bill repealing clause 38 was passed in June 1888.77 When the second Torquay Bill was read, Fowler ‘asked the House to ensure that what was lawful ten miles from Torquay and elsewhere throughout the country should be lawful in Torquay’.78 The Bill was referred to a Select Committee, which agreed to a clause depriving Torquay of any special powers, which was then agreed by the House.79 The Battle of Torquay was over.

Conclusions The Battle of Torquay was just one of many incidents where antidrink feeling, and opposition to the Salvation Army, generated legal challenges and disturbances along the English coast in the 1880s. The

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trouble in Torquay was characterised by opposition from the ‘classes’ rather than violent disorder from the ‘masses’. The aim of Kitson and others on the Local Board seems to have been to protect the tranquillity of the resort. There was little discussion of the customary rights of drinkers, as there had been in Poole. However, Torquay went further than most towns in seeking an Act of Parliament to ban Salvationist processions after Beatty v. Gillbanks made common-law bans illegal. General Booth claimed that 125 summonses had been taken out against Salvationists in 1888, but the only place where they were found guilty was Torquay.80 This situation was to last only six months before Fowler’s Act repealed clause 38, but during that time the Local Board’s powers exceeded national legislation. The Salvation Army were keen to use the courts to defend their rights, and they successfully established that they had the right to preach, march and play music on the streets, unless Parliament brought in national legislation to stop them. The conflict continued for a little longer elsewhere, as Eastbourne used its own local Act for a short period in 1899, and the Army blocked the Strand against the instructions of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner in the same year, but no authority could now seek to make a special case for its peace and quiet.81 As Victor Bailey points out, disturbances like the Battle of Torquay show how conservative resort towns responded to new forms of working-class culture.82 They also shine a light on the nature and activities of local elites. Torquay’s ban on musical processions was partly an attempt to preserve the peace and quiet that gave the town its character, and which allowed it to prosper as a successful resort for the better class of visitor. Kitson, Palk and others had carefully controlled the development of the town so as to avoid undermining its appeal. Bailey is right to suggest that the Salvationists offered a challenge to local elites; Kitson’s Torquay was certainly decorous, but the Salvation Army could still identify people within the town who needed rescuing. The Local Board’s sense of progress and improvement clashed with that of the Army. In this way, Torquay came to be the site of two rival social experiments. To return to the question with which we began, then, Torquay’s marginality was not a function of its liminal position, and it did not host a lively (and possibly transformative) holiday culture like that of Blackpool or Brighton. The centralisation of police powers and testing of national legislation with regard to public order happened elsewhere, of course, but for a few years ‘a different law prevail[ed] in Torquay’. Torquay was out of step with larger cities inland because it was carefully controlled by a small and conservative political elite

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who disliked external influences. While the town grew quickly, making bold reforms essential, it remained relatively small and extremely traditional. Seeking to protect the town’s tourist economy and its reputation, Torquay’s leaders tried to avoid being drawn into the County Police after 1856, and sought to go beyond national legislation to prevent noisy processions in general and the Salvation Army in particular. Torquay was to be its own place, loosening its responsibilities to Devon or Great Britain. It might not fit Hetherington’s definition of a heterotopic site, but for a few years in the 1880s Torquay was a place apart, a specialised town built to restore the health and happiness of well-heeled visitors even if it meant adopting different laws regarding public order. Newspapers around the country applauded the town’s spirited resistance to the Salvationists, and demanded national legislation. Punch, for example, called for a Bill ‘for putting a stop to all such processions – including bodies of Salvationists tramping about on Sundays with tambourine girls . . . as have not yet received police permission for one occasion only’.83 For the readers of Punch, the 38th clause of Torquay’s Harbour Act might have represented a progressive step, and the Salvation Army’s social work simply a form of nuisance. Torquay might well have offered one possible future for coastal towns – an aggressively decorous one – but the story of the Battle of Torquay reminds us that while social experiments might have incubated on the coast, politically these were more likely to be conservative than progressive.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–7; Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), 83–4. 2. Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge, 1997). 3. Tony Bennett, ‘Hegemony, Ideology, Pleasure: Blackpool’, in Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Wollacott (eds), Popular Culture and Social Relations (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1986), 135–54; A. P. Donajgrodzki (ed.), Social Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1977); Darren Webb, ‘Bakhtin at the Seaside: Utopia, Modernity and the Carnivalesque’, Theory, Culture and Society 22 (2005): 121–38. 4. Gary Cross (ed.), Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s (London: Routledge, 1990), 163.

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5. 1851 UK Census, ‘Population of Six Classes of Towns in Great Britain’, table 36, vol. 1: England and Wales, Divisions I–VII, p. xlix. 6. John K. Walton, ‘The Seaside Resort: A British Cultural Export’, in ‘The Sea’, issue 9 of History in Focus, Autumn 2005, (last accessed 2 January 2018); John K. Walton, ‘Seaside Tourism in Europe: Business, Urban and Comparative History’, Business History 53 (2011): 900–16, 902. 7. Walton, ‘Seaside Tourism’, 901. 8. Robert Louis Stevenson to W. E. Henley, July 1884, in Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Ernest Mehew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 267. 9. See Mehew, ‘Student Days in Edinburgh: Engineering and Law’, in ibid. 4; Stevenson to Thomas Stevenson, April 1866, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 1:6. 10. Selected Letters of Stevenson, 286; John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History, 1750–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), 169. 11. John F. Travis, The Rise of the Devon Seaside Resorts, 1750–1900 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1993), 118. 12. ‘A Devonian Period’, Punch, 14 September 1889, 124. 13. See Mehew, ‘Three Years in Bournemouth: July 1884–August 1887’, in Selected Letters of Stevenson, 266. 14. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrong Box (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 12. 15. Walton, English Seaside Resort, 169. 16. For Bournemouth, see Richard Roberts, ‘The Corporation as Impresario: The Municipal Provision of Entertainment in Victorian and Edwardian Bournemouth’, in John K. Walton and James Walvin (eds), Leisure in Britain, 1780–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 137–57. 17. ‘Extraordinary Licensing Prosecutions’, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post; or, Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 20 August 1884, 3; ‘The Licensing Prosecutions at Poole’, Hampshire Advertiser, 27 August 1884, 2; ‘Police Intelligence: The Poole Licensing Prosecutions’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 16 November 1884, 4. 18. ‘Extraordinary Licensing Prosecutions’, 3. 19. ‘General News’, Birmingham Daily Post, 11 September 1884, 5; ‘The Licensing Sessions at Poole’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 14 September 1884, 12. 20. P. T. Winskill, The Temperance Movement and Its Workers: A Record of Social, Moral, Religious, and Political Progress (London: Blackie, 1891), 2:42–3; ‘Assizes at Winchester’, Hampshire Advertiser, 15 November 1884, 4.

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21. James R. Brown, ‘The Landscape of Drink: Inns, Taverns and Alehouses in Early Modern Southampton’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2007), 109. 22. David J. Beckingham, ‘Gender, Space and Drunkenness: Liverpool’s Licensed Premises, 1860–1914’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102 (2012): 647–66. 23. ‘Licensed Victuallers’ Protection Society’, The Times, 7 December 1871, 6; Mary Conley, ‘Weston, Agnes (1840–1918)’, in Jack S. Blocker Jr, David M. Fahey and Ian R. Tyrrell (eds), Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 2:647; Mary Conley, ‘“You Don’t Make a Torpedo Gunner out of a Drunkard”: Agnes Weston, Temperance, and the British Navy’, Northern Mariner/Le Marin du nord 9 (1999): 1–22. 24. ‘Assizes at Winchester’, 4. 25. Walton, English Seaside Resort, 49–50, 53–4, 65. 26. Ibid. 20, 39. 27. History, Gazetteer and Directory of Devon, 1878–1879 (Sheffield: William White, 1878–9), 798. 28. Walton, English Seaside Resort, 129, 119. 29. Jacqueline Bryon, ‘The Uniqueness of Torquay: Government and AntiSocial Behaviour in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Law, Crime and History 3 (2013): 80. 30. Alistair Durie, ‘Almost Twins by Birth: Hydropathy, Temperance and the Scottish Churches 1840–1914’, Scottish Church History Society 32 (2002): 143–63; Janet Grierson, Temperance, Therapy and Trilobites: Dr Ralph Grindrod, Victorian Pioneer (Malvern: Cora Weaver, 2001). 31. Robert E. Scoresby-Jackson, Medical Climatology: or, A Topographical and Meteorological Description of Localities Resorted to . . . (London: John Churchill, 1862), 337. 32. Andrew Brice, The Grand Gazetteer . . . (Exeter: printed for author, 1759), 551, quoted in Travis, Rise of the Devon Seaside Resorts, 116; Augustus Bozzi Granville, Southern Spas, vol. 3 of Spas of England and Principal Sea Bathing Places (London: Henry Colburn, 1841), 461, 483, 492. 33. National Temperance Chronicle and Temperance Recorder, 1 January 1846, 10. 34. J. T. White, The History of Torquay (Torquay: White, 1878), 348. 35. Lawrence Palk to Edward Vivian, undated (c. 1866), Torquay Museum, HP P52 (iv) AR 3331. 36. HC Deb 3 July 1872 vol. 212 cc601–18. 37. E. P. Thompson, ‘Blood, Fire and Unction’, New Society, 11 March 1965, 25; Victor Bailey, ‘In Darkest England and the Way Out’, International Review of Social History 29 (1984): 133–71.

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38. Bailey, ‘In Darkest England’, 141. 39. Victor Bailey, ‘Salvation Army Riots, the “Skeleton Army” and Legal Authority in the Provincial Town’, in Order and Disorder in Modern Britain: Essays on Riot, Crime, Policing and Punishment (London: Breviary Stuff Publications, 2014), 16–33; Robert Sandall, The History of the Salvation Army (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1950), vol. 2: 1878–1886, 195. 40. Sandall, History, 174, 193. 41. Ibid. 179–81. 42. Bailey, ‘Salvation Army Riots’, 18–19. 43. Ibid. 25. 44. Sandall, History, 181; Bailey, ‘Salvation Army Riots’, 25. 45. J. Winter, London’s Teeming Streets 1830–1914 (London: Routledge, 1993), 70–9. 46. Sandall, History, 170–1. 47. Ibid. 193, 172, 174. 48. Ibid. 189. 49. Bailey, ‘Salvation Army Riots’, 22–3. 50. Paul O’Leary, Claiming the Streets: Procession and Urban Culture in South Wales, c. 1830–1880 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). 51. Sandall, History, 172. 52. Salvation Army International Heritage Centre, C/POE Salvation Army UK Territorial Poole Corps. 53. Special Report from the Select Committee on Police and Sanitary Regulations; with the Proceedings of the Committee, HC 178 1886. 54. ‘Public Processions’, Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 11 May 1888, 5. 55. P. W. Wilson, General Evangeline Booth of the Salvation Army (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 95. 56. The Cornishman, 19 January 1888, 3; North Devon Journal, 9 February 1888, 6. 57. North Devon Journal, 23 February 1888, 3. 58. Daily News, 23 March 1888, 3; North Devon Journal, 5 April 1888, 3. 59. The Cornishman, 3 May 1888, 5. 60. G. N. Pepper, Birmingham Daily Post, 4 May 1888, 4. 61. ‘“The Right of Procession”: The Struggle at Torquay’, Pall Mall Gazette, 9 April 1888, 1–2, 2. 62. Colonel Roberts, The Battle of Torquay and One Month’s Experience in the Devon County Prison, Salvation Army International Heritage Centre, Pam/R.29, 1–2. 63. For example, Pall Mall Gazette, 28 May 1888, 6; Wilson, Evangeline Booth, 100. 64. E. Yenison Collins, Birmingham Daily Post, 7 May 1888, 5. 65. Cardiff Western Mail, 23 June 1888, 2. 66. George Railton, ‘Further Prosecutions at Torquay’, War Cry, 17 March 1888, 1.

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75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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Ibid. 2. Birmingham Daily Post, 18 May 1888, 5. Pall Mall Gazette, 18 May 1888, 4. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 20 May 1888, 4. ‘The Torquay Prosecutions’, War Cry, 24 March 1888, 9; Roberts, Battle, 2. ‘Great Demonstration at Torquay’, War Cry, 17 March 1888, 2. Pall Mall Gazette, 7 May 1888, 6. Salvation Army International Heritage Centre, Torquay Prosecutions: Prison Records (February/March 1888), Salvation Army UK Territorial Torquay (1) Corps, C/TOR. Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 5 July 1888, 4; Daily News, 30 May 1888, 3. Report Made by the Home Office to the Select Committee on Police and Sanitary Regulations as to the Torquay Harbour and District Bill, HC 215 1888, p. 1. Torquay Harbour and District Act (1886) Amendment: A Bill to Repeal the Thirty-Eighth Section of the Torquay Harbour and District Act, 1886, HC 279 1888. Birmingham Daily Post, 5 July 1888, 4. Birmingham Daily Post, 18 July 1888, 5. William Booth, ‘What Is the Salvation Army?’, William Murray’s Magazine . . ., March 1889, 289–302, 300. Punch, 6 July 1889, 12. Bailey, ‘Salvation Army Riots’. ‘Legislation for the Session’, Punch, 28 January 1888, 48.

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Chapter 5

Encounters with Capitalism on R. L. Stevenson’s Early Coasts David Sergeant

In the summer of 1868, as part of his training to join the family trade of lighthouse engineering, an eighteen-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson was sent north from Edinburgh to the coastal towns of Anstruther and Wick, to take part in the works being carried out there. As his letters home show, he did not much enjoy the experience. Nevertheless, six years later, as a law student in Edinburgh trying to enter the world of letters, he reworked his time in northerly Wick for an essay, ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’, published in The Portfolio magazine; and then later still, in 1888 – and by this time an established author – he wrote another positive account in the essay ‘The Education of an Engineer’, published in Scribner’s Magazine. Given the difference in readership and literary method between letters and essays, it might be no surprise that the accounts of the same coast differ in each. However, tracking exactly how the essays recast the unpalatable shores of the letters allows us not only to register the pressures which dictated this recasting – evident sometimes only by their displacement and transfiguration – but to observe how the coast interacts with Stevenson’s literary method and self-fashioning, with its emphasis on a visual aesthetic and an untroubled romantic freedom. This also allows for a recognition of how Stevenson’s approach to the coast in his essays is bound up with the culture of nineteenth-century tourism. A reading of the long story ‘The Merry Men’ (1882), published when Stevenson was still trying to establish himself as an author, will then show how these forces manifest differently again in fictional narrative. As in letters and essays, the coast becomes a site of encounter with various aspects of late Victorian capitalism. However, as with more famous works such as Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), in ‘The Merry Men’ Stevenson

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attempts a re-imagination of the romance that can resist the imperatives driving capitalism, and which solder it to the mass market as a symbiotic form. Given the family trade, you might say that Stevenson was born to the coast – though given the places in which he ended up residing, from France to California to Samoa, you might just as easily ask, which coast? Not, it seems, those encountered on his 1868 visits in Scotland. Writing to his mother from Anstruther, a coastal town in Fife, he lamented how he was ‘utterly sick of this grey, grim, seabeaten hole. I have a little cold in my head which makes my eyes sore; and you can’t tell how utterly sick I am and how anxious to get back among trees and flowers and something less meaningless than this bleak fertility.’1 The wine and food were poor (‘I haven’t seen fruit since I left’), the boat-builders ‘the most illiterate brutes with whom [he] ever had any dealing’, and gentlefolk in short supply (‘of neither genus have I as yet encountered a specimen’). In the more northerly Wick, he grumbles about the streets ‘full of the Highland fishers, lubberly, stupid, inconceivably lazy and heavy to move’ – by which he means discourteous, in that they jostle him off the pavement.2 The town is bare, grey, dirty and grim, the people quarrelsome, drunk, and often – as Highlanders – mutually incomprehensible to the lowlander Stevenson. As he writes, two gunboats are moored off the coast and a ‘double supply of police’ in evidence because the fishermen have not been paid due to the failure of the fishing season.3 The work is hard: he comes back one day ‘not a bit the worse of it, except fore-mentioned state of hands, a slight crick in my neck from the rain running down, and general stiffness from pulling, hauling, and tugging for dear life’.4 Even taking into account a possible desire to sway his parents’ opinion about his future vocation, Stevenson’s animus seems unfeigned. Six years later, in 1874, and no longer destined for an engineering career, he could still write to his brother of wanting to obtain caravan and horse and go ‘yachting on dry land . . . only trees and nice inland scenery, instead of sea-coast places, which I loathe’.5 Nevertheless, in 1874 Stevenson also published the essay ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’ in which he mused at length on the need to ‘think ourselves into sympathy with the great features of a country’, even though they might prove unpleasant on first encounter.6 As his example he took a desolate, unnamed northern landscape which we can recognise as the coast around Wick. However, the work and society which went into making Wick and its environs unpleasant in Stevenson’s original encounter have all but vanished. The only social detail inherited from the letters is the local people

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greeting each other with the words ‘“Breezy, breezy,” instead of the customary “Fine day” of farther south’ – presumably because it adds a cheering touch of colour, without anything as dispiritingly unpicturesque as disgruntled Highland fishermen, or a day’s exhausting work on a cold sea (335). In order for the ‘unpleasant’ place to be enjoyed in the essay format, it has to be sublimated into its natural features alone. In the earlier letter, in contrast, though Stevenson described ‘as fine a piece of coast scenery as ever I saw’, his treatment worked out to it from the town, and then immediately seemed more interested in the ‘tribe of gypsies’ living in one of the caves, precursors of the feckless pirates of Treasure Island (‘The men are always drunk, simply and truthfully always’).7 If some of the documentary roots of this place’s unpleasantness are suppressed, then so is the experiential mode which was key to registering it. At the start of the essay, in a prose dense with visual vocabulary, Stevenson established pleasure in landscape as a question of the aesthetics of seeing, the ‘picturesque’ (333). However, as soon as he comes to actually delineate the pleasure experienced in this landscape (by escaping the omnipresent wind) it is bodily comfort that emerges as fundamental: The reader knows what I mean; he must remember how, when he has sat himself down behind a dyke on a hillside, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through the crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with warmth, and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away hills all marbled with sun and shadow. (336)

Neuroscientific research has found that observing (or reading about) actions activates neurons which are used in carrying out that action. Vittorio Gallese has described how ‘in order to understand the intended goal of an observed action, and to eventually re-enact it, a link must be established between the observed agent and the observer’, and has proposed that ‘this link is constituted by the embodiment of the intended goal, shared by the agent and the observer’.8 At this key point, itself concerned with embodiment, it is as if Stevenson instinctively moves to direct address so as to strengthen the link between agent-narrator and observer-reader and, thereby, the realisation of the bodily experience which is their newly shared goal. The passage tries to claw back to visual pleasure in the ‘beautiful’ country, and away from the body, just as at the essay’s end the shelter/exposure contrast is developed into a vaporously abstract reflection on how wind and human life seem ‘moments in the being of the eternal silence’ (340).

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The roots of the ‘enjoyment’ cannot be so easily left behind, however, and the paragraph succeeding this sinks gratefully back into a sensual, sunshiny warmth: ‘The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that had been saturated all day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, was like the breath of a fellow-creature’ (340). The simple bodily pleasure of being warm and relieved from physical hardship is the only trace of the biographic displeasure Stevenson took in this coastal region, with his wracked hands and head cold and sore eyes; work and other people have been almost entirely erased, being figured, if at all, only by the wind. The celebration of such idle pleasure is aimed at the world of work; and while here the pleasure is bodily, the essay also flaunts culture to a similar end, as Stevenson quotes Shelley, Wordsworth, Pierre de Brantôme, Pierre-Jean de Béranger via Poe, and Wuthering Heights. His status as a well-educated man seemingly free to wander out ‘three afternoons in succession’ is flaunted (338). However, by the time of ‘Enjoyment’, the work Stevenson had in his sights was not so much the engineering he had been engaged in in Wick, but the metropolitan professional world toward which he had been headed off by his father, engaging to study law at Edinburgh University, even while he continued with his attempts to launch himself as a man of letters. Elsewhere Stevenson’s writing repeatedly expresses his contempt for the world of professional money-getting, with banking, more often than not, the exemplary punch-bag, while his early essays and travel writing celebrate a life of itinerant and purposeless wandering. Thus, while the ‘enjoyment’ of the essay depends on the recasting of an at least partly manual and outdoor trade, whose unpleasantness mingled the climatic with the cultural, the form it emerges in, a sort of bohemian pastoral, is directed against a different capitalist moment and location, in support of Stevenson’s self-fashioning at an early stage in his literary career. The role of all the elements traced thus far – climate, a visual aesthetic, embodiment, work, culture – becomes clearer when we follow their replaying through the same coastal landscapes in a later essay, ‘The Education of an Engineer’ (1888). The essay starts in Anstruther – the ‘grey, grim, sea-beaten hole’ of the first letter quoted above – with Stevenson admitting that his taste was already for a life of letters. This facilitates a recasting of the harbour in which he toiled: In those days, though I haunted the breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the sake of the sunshine, the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the sea-face, the green glimmer of the divers’ helmets far

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below, and the musical chinking of the masons, my one genuine preoccupation lay elsewhere, and my only industry was in the hours when I was not on duty.9

The point of noting the discrepancy between such a passage and the letters is not, of course, to arraign Stevenson for hypocrisy or mendacity, but to try to take account of the narrative recasting this coast had to undergo to become palatable to him (and to a readership who would celebrate him as a picturesque romantic icon), and of the forces determining this transfiguration.10 Here Stevenson’s attention to his ‘only industry’, writing, comes with a recasting of other forms of industry – diving, masonry – as a pleasing spectacle, a tissue of colour, purposeless movement and musical sound, while Stevenson’s own ‘duty’ seems to consist of pervading the scene with the unproductive detachment of a ghost.11 Given the mediating work done by climate in ‘Enjoyment’ – where a bubble of peaceful sunshine redeemed the coastal harshness, and a correlate site at the top of Cologne cathedral also dwelt in sunny warmth – it is striking that the pleasantness here involves sunshine; while his juvenile writing also took place ‘in weather . . . so warm that I must keep the windows open; the night without was populous with moths’ (366–7). Perhaps it was so, though a letter from Anstruther in late July describes a Mr and Mrs Fortune arriving on an evening visit ‘glittering with mistdrops’, and these recollections jib against the ‘grey, grim, sea-beaten hole’ of the same letter, and the ‘heavy westerly gale’ which lashes against his window earlier that month.12 From where did this climatic grammar come? By the age of fourteen, Stevenson had travelled widely on the summertime Continent, including residencies of several months in Mentone on the French Riviera. Tellingly, when attempting to convey the bleakness of northern Scotland in ‘Enjoyment’ he had noted: ‘To one who had learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested contrast’ (334). Tempting, perhaps, to say that a preference for Mediterranean shores over northern Scottish ones is hardly surprising – some of the Highland fishermen might also have preferred the warmth of Mentone. Indeed, perhaps more of their children would have survived to adulthood if they’d had the class advantages of Stevenson: the entry for Wick in the New Statistical Account of Scotland (1834–45) notes that ‘pulmonary consumption is not frequent amongst the adults’ because ‘infants with any weakness about the chest’ – of the sort Stevenson also suffered from – generally die of whooping-cough or ‘by different pectoral affections’.13

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It is, of course, Stevenson’s professional, middle-class background that allows him to splice together as contingent neighbours not just the shelter of a dyke and a cutting wind, but a southern European and a northern Scottish coastline. The money provided by his parents not only funds his exposure to these sunnier coasts, but enables the detachment from any particular place needed to yoke the two side by side. Stevenson’s journeys to the warmer south were linked to his fragile health, but as Maria Frawley has made clear, the nineteenth-century culture of invalid travel was bound up with the expansion of a wider travel industry and culture of tourism.14 This expansion parallels the growth of a capitalism possessing the same mobility, and taking advantage of the same cultural and technological developments. Stevenson’s writing of his formative experiences on the Scottish coasts might have been pitched against the banality of metropolitan capitalism rather than the icy labour of engineering (which nevertheless had to be excised to enable this pitch); but the climatic vocabulary it drew on to power this opposition was itself implicated in the increasingly global workings of that capitalism. ‘Education’ is less determinedly aesthetic than ‘Enjoyment’ and includes an account of the coastal work Stevenson encountered. However, this is still reworked into something less obviously productive: [Wick] lives for herring, and a strange sight it is to see (of an afternoon) the heights of Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking fishers, as when a city crowds to a review – or, as when bees have swarmed, the ground is horrible with lumps and clusters; and a strange sight, and a beautiful, to see the fleet put silently out against a rising moon, the sea-line rough as a wood with sails, and ever and again and one after another, a boat flitting swiftly by the silver disk. (378)

Like the musical masons in Anstruther, the people amongst whom Stevenson lived and worked are transformed into something more congenial, in this case via a picturesque distancing, though as long as they remain proximate the transformation must be more unpleasant (‘swarmed’, ‘horrible’). The distaste reflects Stevenson’s middle-class distrust of the lower-class masses that surrounded him, accentuated by his linguistic and cultural difference from the Highlanders and Islanders. Revealingly, the details Stevenson picks out for recasting are echoed by an 1883 Tourists’ Guide to Sutherland and Caithness, which notes the view of the fishing fleet at sea (especially by ‘night from the deck of the Aberdeen steamer’) as ‘one of the most beautiful

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sights on this coast’, and celebrates the colourful ‘babel of sound’ resulting from the mingled fishing communities.15 Katherine Haldane Grenier has described how, while there was some ambivalence in nineteenth-century guidebook producers about how best to accommodate Scotland’s industrial and commercial spaces, in the end ‘characterisations . . . were weighted decisively towards “romance”’.16 Tourism not only allows Stevenson’s importation of Mediterranean sunshine to the northerly Scottish coast, but via its picturesque and romantic preferences also influences what gets excluded from and included in the essayistic scene.17 Similarly, his treatment of Wick in ‘Enjoyment’ resembles the 1873 edition of Black’s Picturesque Tourist, which moves quickly away from the town to the unsettled coast nearby, and the castles which ‘give a picturesque character to the scenery’ (Stevenson had also mused over castles).18 His original letters home, in contrast, describe ‘dissatisfied fish-curers, knee-high in brine, mud and herring refuse’, and so lie closer to the entry on Wick for the New Statistical Account, which describes the horrendous overcrowding that results from the addition of ‘not fewer than 10,000 persons’ during the fishing season, ‘with the great consumption of spirits, and the very filthy state of the houses, shores, and streets, with putrescent effluvia steaming up from the fish-offals lying everywhere about’.19 Stevenson’s recasting of the Wick social scene in ‘Education’ also resonates with the transformation of Highland Scotland into a harmless site of romance amenable to tourism, a process bound up with the mid-eighteenth-century defeat of the Jacobites, the poverty and displacement inflicted by the Highland Clearances, and the concomitant strengthening of the Union into the Victorian age. Iain Sutherland has described how much of Wick’s visiting labour during the herring season were victims of the Clearances in Sutherland, Ross and Inverness: ‘many of these people, whose only language was Gaelic, walked across the hills to the town, a journey of well over 100 miles which could take a week or more to complete.’20 Stevenson does not join in the romantic transformation of the Highland population of Wick as actively as the 1883 Tourists’ Guide, which quotes the driving force in that transformation, Walter Scott, when describing the harbour stocked with ‘stalwart Highlanders from the Western Island . . . in great numbers, adding to the babel of sound the “accents of the mountain tongue”’.21 Instead, the threat that once attached to the Highlanders is retained but transformed as they now constitute the discontented urban masses so feared by the nineteenth-century middle class.22 And so Stevenson’s romanticising goes to work on that threat, as the simmering conflict between fishermen, employers and

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creditors in ‘a bad year’ becomes ‘an exciting time’ when ‘an apple knocked from a child’s hand was once the signal for something like a war; and even when I was there, a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities’ (379). The unrest of urban labour is transformed into a piquantly vital game, safeguarded by the hovering presence of corrective power. The effacement of labour in ‘Education’ is thus double. On the one hand, it works like the earlier ‘Enjoyment’ to excise or alchemise the lower-class, industrial presence of Wick. On the other, it celebrates a romantic outdoor existence as a bulwark against middle-class metropolitan drudgery. Hence Stevenson’s engineering work becomes a different kind of play via his descent in a diving bell, which is made both the highlight of his training and the telos of the essay, from which he emerges again: Out of the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of sanguine light – the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson. And then the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a gray sea, and a whistling wind. (384–5)

Typically, after a final combination of colourful illumination and the spurious expenditure of cultural credit (the Macbeth reference), the climate reverts to something more grimly monochromatic. The essay then sympathetically praises engineering as a ‘way of life’ in ‘the open air’, a form of romantic adventuring unfortunately compromised by its also requiring office-work, ‘drudgery between four walls’ (385). As in ‘Enjoyment’, the recasting is directed not against engineering, from which Stevenson had extricated himself by the time he wrote both essays, but the middle-class professions which were more plausible destinations for him. For our final Stevensonian coast we turn to a fiction, the long story ‘The Merry Men’, which he described as ‘a story of wrecks, as they appear to the dweller on the coast . . . a view of the sea’.23 Although based on a different shore-line to that seen so far – the Isle of Erraid in the Inner Hebrides, renamed Eilean Aros in the story – it also draws on Stevenson’s engineering travels, and like ‘Enjoyment’ and ‘Education’ uses the climate, the body and coastally situated romance to negotiate concerns about the overbearing imperatives of capitalism. However, the distancing and conversion of everything that is troubling, which came so easily in the essays, no longer seems sustainable once Stevenson has set the same historical forces loose in the field of fiction.

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The story begins with the first-person narrator, Charles Darnaway, carefully delineating the topography: Aros, surrounded by treacherous seas, with a particularly dangerous set of breakers called ‘The Merry Men’. The narrator then moves to the cultural and generic setting, listing some supernatural tales told about Aros by the ‘country people’.24 These initially read like an attempt to impart a titillating pre-modern strangeness to this world; just as the idea that supernatural beliefs survived in the Highlands and Islands was prized by tourists, as Grenier has described, for offering a ‘vicarious connection with the irrational’, a welcome break from utilitarian modernity.25 However, it is an early sign of how ‘The Merry Men’ will be troubled that Charles makes no pretence of believing these ‘old wives’ stories’ (68), and even the locals seem less than convinced – given that they tell one other tale ‘with more detail and gravity than its companion[s]’ (69). It is this tale, of a wrecked Armada ship laden with treasure, that has drawn the narrator back to the island inhabited by his Uncle Gordon, daughter Mary and their servant Rorie: by finding the treasure he can ‘bring back our house of Darnaway to its long-forgotten dignity and wealth’ (69), and marry Mary. As with its companion piece Treasure Island – published within six months of ‘The Merry Men’ and echoing it at every level – a biographic reading easily explains Charles’s motive: at the time of writing, Stevenson was desperate for an income that would allow him and his wife of two years’ standing financial independence from his parents.26 However, although the plot tries to articulate the Armada wreck as a source of future wealth, the narration seems more inclined to dwell on its irrecoverable loss: The Espirito Santo they called it, a great ship of many decks of guns, laden with treasure and grandees of Spain, and fierce soldadoes, that now lay fathom deep to all eternity, done with her wars and voyages, in Sandag bay, upon the west of Aros. No more salvos of ordnance for that tall ship, the ‘Holy Spirit,’ no more fair winds or happy ventures; only to rot there deep in the sea-tangle and hear the shoutings of the Merry Men as the tide ran high about the island. It was a strange thought to me first and last, and only grew stranger as I learned the more of Spain, from which she had set sail with so proud a company, and King Philip, the wealthy king, that sent her on that voyage. (69)

We have noted how the supernatural stories told by the country people gesture towards a more imaginatively satisfying pre-modern community for which the romance, at the time of Stevenson’s using it, could only be a plangent cipher, rather than any genuine expression of an

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alternative. The same applies to the wreck: the narrative’s strong instinct is that it should be unavailable, preserved in its otherness. Charles’s ‘thought’ works to make ‘strange’ the only tale told by the locals with the conviction of truth: to convert their history into romance. Stephen Arata has suggested that by aligning his ‘desire for plunder’ with his uncle and some avaricious Spaniards, the story expresses Stevenson’s ‘bad conscience’ that he, along with other lowland writers such as Scott, is ‘guilty of enriching [himself] by in effect ransacking [his] country’s past’ through the use he makes of the Highlands.27 However, Charles hardly seems eager to get at the wreck’s riches; rather, this is a duty arising from archival tasks on which he has been ‘set to work’ by his Principal at Edinburgh University, the scholarly work a cipher for the kind of office-bound employment bemoaned in ‘Education’ (69). It is the requirement to work that compels the monetisation of romance, the turning of what can be pleasantly mourned – in that it both gives play to the imagination, and offers a temporary release from the here and now – into mere cash, material reward for unwilling labour. The way in which capitalism subverts even a mourning that sets out to be in opposition to it bears comparison with Stevenson’s dilemma as a writer of romances in opposition to capitalist conformity, who is also trying to make money from that writing in a capitalist market – a double bind, in which the preferred escape route is only that because it is part of the problem, and thus not so much an escape route as a privileged panic room. This also accounts for the conflicted guilt and self-hatred that Arata has described in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), with Stevenson as an increasingly successful professional author in the inconvenient position of holding the middle-class professionalisation of authorship in contempt.28 The romance in ‘The Merry Men’ just wants to be left alone, but unlike in the essays, where the writer constructed a detached bubble of sunshine from whose vantage point tempestuous reality could be safely transformed into a picturesque natural scene, the narrator is already engaged to turn the romance into banal reality. Shipwreck has become just another vulgar employment; his uncle’s house, which had formerly possessed an authentic peasant purity, has been transformed by shipwreck pickings into a middle-class residence, with brocade curtains, a clock and a ‘table set for dinner with the finest of linen and silver’ (71). Indeed, in one subtending dimension of the story the uncle’s increasing madness and destruction can be seen as retribution for his failure to preserve the island as a pre-modern space – like the country people with their lacklustre tales, he is irritatingly complicit in the romance’s destruction. However, his presence also makes it

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simultaneously impossible for it to be this space, as his historicised religiosity and cultural difference constantly impress upon the narrator his own intractable outsider-hood (as Stevenson experienced it in Wick, and as David Balfour will experience it in the same region, in the far more self-aware Kidnapped). Hence the story ends with the island nicely cleared, and, in this reading, ready to become something closer to the kind of depopulated coastal refuge constructed in the essays. Indeed, in a later essay about the Isle of Erraid, there is a similar contrast between Stevenson’s experiences on it as a site of peopled work, and the terrain beyond the settlement and any ‘living presence’ in which he ‘delighted chiefly’: a place of ‘sea-bathing and sun-burning’ in which the younger Stevenson is portrayed as already looking regretfully ahead to ‘the grinding slavery of competition; the toil of seventy years, dear-bought bread’, to the ‘loath submission, as of the sacrificial bull . . . under the yoke of destiny’.29 As the narrator approaches his coastal objective, the climatic grammar familiar from the essays re-emerges in a strangely altered form. In the essays, the sunlit tranquillity helped soothe a harshly prevailing reality into something distanced or transformed, and thereby enjoyable. At this point in ‘The Merry Men’: As I walked upon the edge I could see far and wide over the sandy bottom of the bay; the sun shone clear and green and steady in the deeps; the bay seemed rather like a great transparent crystal, as one sees them in a lapidary’s shop; there was naught to show that it was water but an internal trembling, a hovering within of sun-glints and netted shadows, and now and then a faint lap and a dying bubble round the edge. The shadows of the rocks lay out for some distance at their feet, so that my own shadow, moving, pausing, and stooping on the top of that, reached sometimes half across the bay. It was above all in this belt of shadows that I hunted for the Espirito Santo; since it was there the undertow ran strongest, whether in or out. Cool as the whole water seemed this broiling day, it looked, in that part, yet cooler, and had a mysterious invitation for the eyes. (82)

The sea in the essays had been a cold, unpleasant thing, except when the writer was enjoying it, at which point it became sunny, calm. However, it is as if this pleasant-making conversion goes too far in ‘The Merry Men’, to the point that its desirability only betrays its uncertainty: the ominous trembles, the dying bubble. Peace and disturbance, cold and heat, sunlight and dark, become tangled where they were formerly separate and securely amenable to allegorising. For the first time it is a cold and not an implicitly warm sea which invites entry,

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but – unsurprisingly, given how far this reverses Stevenson’s usual conjuring – it is intimated that this attraction is deceptive. Once encountered in narrative, the coastal romance begins to appear treacherously ambiguous, a weird mix of attraction and threat – properties which are given a more vital life by the nearly-contemporary Long John Silver in Treasure Island. At this moment of hesitation the sun does its saving work – ‘but the strong sun upon my shoulders warmed me to the heart’ (83) – and boosts the narrator into the water. His first dive brings up a buckle which he drops with a sound ‘like a falling coin’ (84). And then, suddenly, it is as if this tiniest of contacts with capitalism unleashes an act of imaginative empathy so disproportionately powerful we also realise the immense threat that even the prospect of a single coin can represent: The sight of this poor human relic thrilled me to the heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a desolate melancholy. I held it in my hand, and the thought of its owner appeared before me like the presence of an actual man. His weather-beaten face, his sailor’s hands, his sea-voice hoarse with singing at the capstan, the very foot that had once worn that buckle and trod so much along the swerving decks – the whole human fact of him, as a creature like myself, with hair and blood and seeing eyes, haunted me in that sunny, solitary place, not like a spectre, but like some friend whom I had basely injured. (84)

Physicality was disguised or suppressed in the visually oriented romance of the essays. But here the body assumes its true prominence, with the ‘sailor’s hands’ coming so soon upon his own ‘hand’, as if the two thereby connect in a handshake; with the rough hoarseness of the voice transferring into those hands, through a kind of synaesthesia of proximity; with the translation of ‘trod’ into ‘swerving’ nimbly evoking movement. Such empathetic actualisation was sublimated into nature in ‘Enjoyment’, with ‘the hot, sweet breath of the bank . . . saturated all day long with sunshine, and now exhaled . . . into my face . . . like the breath of a fellow-creature’ (340), but in ‘The Merry Men’ it assumes its true, human place. Important, too, that this location remains ‘sunny, solitary’, the climate of detached pleasure polluted now by the narrator’s avarice. The emphasis on this figure being not like a ghost but a friend is a brilliant overleaping of the insipid supernaturalism with which the story is stocked – indeed, of the rather tiresome stock figure of Uncle Gordon, who with his servant is the only character to credit that supernaturalism.

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The uncle is conveniently distanced by accent and class, and then even more conveniently by madness, and so his heavily trailed comeuppance in a watery death is little more than an emasculate formality. However, the determinate difference between this conjured figure and the uncle is one not of class but of an empathetically engendered otherness, commensurate here with physicality: a realisation so total it oversteps the boundaries between self and other.30 In the essays, Stevenson’s romance aesthetic worked as a bland pacifier of late Victorian capitalist realities, while in some of the early fiction, such as the Florizel stories of The New Arabian Nights, it is deployed as a series of tropes to be smoothly manipulated.31 However, in ‘The Merry Men’ Stevenson attempts a re-imagination of the romance whereby it becomes a vehicle he has to think through, but which resists him as much as gives him access: an electric circuit he credits with giving rise to many of humanity’s best qualities – bravery, generosity, a heroic responsibility for others – but which now, warped and corroded by a new historical moment, disturbs his attempts to send those same qualities back through it and into the world. This is not to say that Stevenson was struggling to be a realist: he still incorporates many of the properties identified in the essays as belonging to the romance, such as an eloquence of action and externality, and the consequent emphasis this places on an eloquent, sub-allegoric structural unity (compare his description of ‘The Merry Men’ as a ‘fantastic sonata’, the musical analogy implying a structural unity and a synonymic correspondence between surface and depth).32 Indeed, there is something reminiscent of Shakespearean romance in Stevenson’s use of the mode: in its tacit – and, sometimes, not so tacit – admittance of itself as a preposterous, insubstantial form that can nevertheless attain a shocking, transformative human connection if credited with empathetic imagination. Compare the change of the buckle into the dead sailor with Leontes in The Winter’s Tale touching what begins to him as a statue but becomes his seemingly-dead wife, when the wondrous but merely ideational becomes physical and quotidian: ‘O, she’s warm! / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating.’33 And for Stevenson’s narrator at this moment it is a solidarity that transcends or resists history, in that the dead man could be an Armada sailor or from the recent wreck, ‘a man of my own period in the world’s history’ (84): but the two are made the same, first through their mortal vulnerability to shipwreck, which trumps the contingent and potentially estranging divisions of nation and period; and second, through the narrator’s imaginative cancelling of the dehumanisation that can creep in under the guise of history, whereby

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the dead are converted into a passive resource to be consumed by the present, be that material (for the money they carried) or ontological (as a cipher to populate a self-serving backstory to your own pre-eminent existence). Indeed, Stevenson connects these two, showing how material greed had prevented the imaginative outreach from the self. As the narrator dives for a second time, the bay’s climatic key changes, losing its ‘green, submarine sunshine [that] slept so stilly’ (84). It is closer now to the deathly ooze in which Alonso believes Ferdinand lies bedded in The Tempest: a realm where the inspiriting touch of imagination is replaced by the material touch of mortal fact, ‘cold and soft and gluey’, where ‘crabs and lobsters’ trundle in their ‘carrion neighbourhood’ (85). Part of the fascination of the sun-glint ocean, so easily made an anthropomorphic conceit, is that Stevenson is strongly aware of its dismal reality. This also accounts for its frequently being paired with the cry of gulls in his writing. Of course, at one level this simply reflects reality: the two go together. But in Stevenson the call of seabirds can be disturbing for inviting anthropomorphic associations – they cry, scream – which he simultaneously knows are meaningless. In The Wrecker (1892), the looting scene from ‘The Merry Men’ is replayed as the narrator reluctantly rifles property that had belonged to ‘warm bodies’, in a ‘dim cabin, quivering with the near thunder of the breakers and pierced with the screaming of the fowls’, while earlier ‘the irrational screaming of the sea-birds saddened [him] like a dirge’.34 The first murder in Treasure Island results in a human scream accompanied by an indifferent ‘troop of marsh-birds . . . darkening heaven, with a simultaneous whirr’.35 The only thing to ‘disturb’ the pleasant sheltered place in ‘Enjoyment’ was the ‘sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined crags’ (338), and at the end of ‘The Merry Men’ the drowned bodies will only re-emerge ‘at the far end of Aros Roost, where the seabirds hover fishing’ (106) – a hint of carrion in their presence, as there is in The Wrecker, where they herald the encounter with the eponymous wreck: ‘innumerable as maggots, there hovered, chattered, screamed and clanged, millions of twinkling sea-birds’ (177). Telling, too, that the seventeen times the word form million occurs elsewhere in that novel it is in connection with money: the ocean and capitalist modernity are one in their carrion indifference, all the more disturbing for hovering on the edge of an assimilable anthropomorphism. From buckle to coin to bone, as Charles’s second dive brings up the remains of a man’s leg. There then follows one of those moments when Stevenson manages to indict our own willingness to consume

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the romance without properly imagining it: without giving it the human dimension his narrator achieved with the buckle. Mankind is a material creature, slow to think and dull to perceive connections. The grave, the wreck of the brig, and the rusty shoe-buckle were surely plain advertisements. A child might have read their dismal story, and yet it was not until I touched that actual piece of mankind that the full horror of the charnel ocean burst upon my spirit. (85)

What were ‘plain advertisements’ to him were also that to us; only it is not any dullness but our willingness to consume the narrative riches dangled before us which has prevented our registering the reality of this man’s death. Stevenson had disrupted a generic structure oriented around consumption by showing how it must desecrate a human with hands and eyes like ours; and yet, even if we realised that, we also immediately relapsed into a romance trajectory hauling inexorably forwards to its telos of gain. Once the narrator has emerged, he prays ‘long and passionately for all poor souls upon the sea’ and the ‘horror’ (85) is lifted from him.36 Such religiosity risks seeming false or vapid to our more secular age, but it is a genuine vehicle in Stevenson’s work for the qualities he also values in romantic heroism: a noble generosity, an unqualified service of others. As David Daiches has observed, even in his supposedly radical student days Stevenson ‘saw himself as a Bohemian Jesus putting compassion and understanding above the letter of the law’, while ‘his deeply Scottish sense of morality troubled him all his life’.37 If Stevenson is out of step with the economic and social realities of late nineteenth-century culture, it is just as much because he has actually thought through his commitment to Gospel principles as it is because he espouses romantic principles which are everywhere contravened, or which in the popular romance are enlisted into the service of imperialism. Nevertheless, ‘The Merry Men’ does quickly settle into a complacent relationship with ‘that great bright creature, God’s ocean’ (85), and mad Uncle Gordon is a convenient typological mule on which to carry away everything disturbing in it. Such an ease will be abolished by Treasure Island, where characters such as Long John Silver are rendered with a far more troubling closeness to the romance’s norms, and in which the narrator himself, Jim Hawkins, is in no way insulated from the money-getting and the nightmarish coast it produces. ‘The Merry Men’, in contrast, ties up into a neat but flaccid knot. The lack of conviction with which Charles pursues his uncle’s murder of a shipwrecked sailor, and his relief at finding this took place in a state

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of diminished responsibility, compare bizarrely with the empathy called forth by the buckle. The difference is that the uncle – like the black castaway and resolving final shipwreck – is drafted in from a genre template that has little to recommend it but convenience. The climactic storm is a windy stand-in for the human misery that ‘The Merry Men’ only really confronts during the narrator’s dive. The germ of the story is in that moment, and uncle and storm and wrecks sit over it like a body made laboriously of straw, trying to pass itself off as the heart. In this sense the romance slips back to perform a similar evasive function to climate and nature in the essays – and it is telling that in Treasure Island the weather remains incongruously serene throughout, with the principal danger coming from men. Perhaps this is why Stevenson – as his wife Fanny told Henley in a letter she dictated – ‘turned cold’ to the story ‘before it was done’, and even two years later, on his own account, was meaning ‘to make [it] much longer, with a whole new denouement, not yet quite clear to me’.38 But the changes were never made, and so the story ends still with the bodies loosed into the charnel sea.

Notes 1. Robert Louis Stevenson to Margaret Stevenson, 28 July 1868, in The Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. A. Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), vol. 1: 1854–April 1874, 136. 2. Stevenson to Margaret Stevenson, 5 September 1868, in ibid. 141. 3. Ibid. 142. 4. Stevenson to Margaret Stevenson, 18 September 1868, in ibid. 150. 5. Stevenson to Bob Stevenson, September 1874, in Collected Letters, vol. 2: April 1874–July 1879, 56. 6. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’, in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima edn, ed. Will D. Howe and Lloyd Osbourne (London: Heinemann, 1921–3), vol. 24: Sketches/ Criticisms, 333. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 7. Stevenson to Margaret Stevenson, 11 September 1868, in Collected Letters, 1:141–2. 8. Vittorio Gallese, ‘The “Shared Manifold” Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001): 36. 9. Stevenson, ‘The Education of an Engineer’, in Works, vol. 12: ‘Memories and Portraits’; ‘Random Memories and Other Essays’; ‘A Family of Engineers’, 375–6. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 10. See Alex Thomson, ‘Stevenson’s Afterlives’, in Penny Fielding (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 147–9.

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11. ‘Enjoyment’ reached out to Wordsworth, and it is possible that this passage recalls ‘Tintern Abbey’, specifically the lines ‘The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion’. That poem also looks plangently back to the author’s youth, when ‘colours’ and ‘forms’ in nature were self-justifying, needing no ‘interest / Unborrowed from the eye’. The lines were obviously resident in Stevenson’s head: he later gives them a more satiric cast when a shady lawyer quotes them in The Wrecker. William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey . . .’, in Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802, ed. Fiona Stafford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 195–6, ll. 77–8, 80, 83–4. 12. Stevenson to Margaret Stevenson, 7 July 1868, in Collected Letters, 1:130. 13. The New Statistical Account of Scotland (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1834–45), 15:117. There were also sporadic outbreaks of cholera, diphtheria and typhus even after piped water reached the harbour in 1846 and greatly reduced their danger. See Iain Sutherland, Wick Harbour and the Herring Fishing (Wick: Campus Bookshop, 1983), 30. 14. Maria H. Frawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). For nineteenthcentury tourism, see also James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 15. Hew Morrison, Tourists’ Guide to Sutherland and Caithness (Wick: William Rae, 1883), 52–3. 16. Katherine Haldane Grenier, Tourism and Identity in Scotland 1770–1914: Creating Caledonia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 68. 17. John Glendening has traced a similar picturesque imperative at work in the Wordsworths’ accounts of their Scottish tour. See The High Road: Romantic Tourism, Scotland and Literature, 1720–1820 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 18. Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Scotland (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1873), 583. Ironically, the guide’s main focus in the town itself is the expensive new harbour upon which Stevenson had been working in 1868, and which by 1873 had been ‘almost entirely destroyed’ by the – gratifyingly violent? – storms (582). 19. New Statistical Account, 15:121. Also, while ‘maniacs are very rare . . . [i]diots and fatuous persons are remarkably common’ (122) – perhaps the author had been jostled off the pavement one too many times. 20. Sutherland, Wick Harbour, 28. 21. Morrison, Tourists’ Guide, 52. 22. Christopher Harvie links Stevenson’s distaste for the realist novel with it seeming ‘to imply some appalling social upheaval’ as ‘the only possible resolution of the social problems’ it disclosed. See ‘The Politics of Stevenson’, in Jenni Calder (ed.), Stevenson and Victorian Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 118.

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23. Stevenson to W. E. Henley, mid-July 1881, in Collected Letters, vol. 3: August 1879–September 1882, 213. 24. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’; ‘The Merry Men’ and Other Tales (London: Dent, 1968), 68. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 25. Grenier, Tourism and Identity, 105. 26. Darnaway Street in Edinburgh gives directly on to Heriot Row, site of the Stevenson family home. 27. Stephen Arata, ‘Stevenson and Fin-de-Siècle Gothic’, in Fielding (ed.), Edinburgh Companion, 64. 28. See Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33–53. 29. Stevenson, ‘Memoirs of an Islet’, in Works, 12:100–2. 30. John Robert Moore describes how ‘The Merry Men’ was influenced by an obscure predecessor in which a character dies after being tempted by the devil to dive for Armada treasure. Stevenson humanises such debased supernaturalism. ‘Stevenson’s Source for “The Merry Men”’, Philological Quarterly 23 (1944), 135–41. 31. The ‘Latter-Day Arabian Nights’, entitled ‘The Suicide Club’ and ‘The Rajah’s Diamond’, ran in London magazine between June and October 1878. 32. Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, c. 3 July 1881, in Collected Letters, 3:206. 33. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 5.3.109–11. Stevenson mentioned in multiple letters that he was planning to call the volume of stories in which ‘The Merry Men’ would appear Tales for Winter Nights. See Stevenson to W. E. Henley, c. 3 July 1881, and Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, 3 July 1881, in Collected Letters, 3:204, 207. 34. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrecker, in Tales of the South Seas, ed. Jenni Calder (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), 180, 178. 35. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 78. 36. Uncle Gordon earlier exclaimed at ‘the horror – the horror o’ the sea!’ (75); perhaps this lodged in a corner of Conrad’s mind. 37. David Daiches, ‘Stevenson and Victorian Scotland’, in Calder (ed.), Stevenson, 23. 38. Fanny Stevenson to W. E. Henley, mid-July 1881, in Collected Letters, 3:212; Stevenson to Thomas Stevenson, 19 April 1884, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala edition, ed. Sidney Colvin, 5 vols (London: Heinemann, 1924), 2:303.

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Chapter 6

Seats and Sites of Authority: British Colonial Collecting on the East African Coast Sarah Longair

Aliye kalia kiti cha enzi ndiye mtawala. (The one who sits on the throne is the ruler.) Swahili proverb

In the rich tradition of proverbs in kiSwahili, the language of the Swahili people of coastal East Africa, this saying alludes to the authority and responsibility bestowed upon the person seated on a throne. It also holds, according to the compiler of this list of proverbs, a broader metaphorical meaning: ‘The one who possesses an article at the time is its owner’ – in short, finders, keepers.1 Such a mind-set was certainly shared by a number of British officers in the colonial world. However, to brandish colonial collecting in East Africa as a simple snatch-and-grab exercise blinds us to the variety of modes of British and European engagement with the meanings embedded within material culture, particularly that produced on the Swahili coast. As we shall see in this chapter, many did not seize or acquire material arbitrarily, but were acutely aware of the political and cultural significance of objects as well as appreciating their aesthetic value. Several of those taking up residence in the region responded to local modes of domestic display, albeit with an aim of using such visual and material strategies to entrench their power on the coast. The geographical and temporal setting of this chapter offers a wealth of insights into the particularities of cultural interactions that occur in these zones connecting the sea and the hinterland. The development of Swahili culture on the East African coast – the word Swahili itself derived from coast in Arabic – exemplifies how these

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liminal regions became cosmopolitan spaces. Influence from across the Indian Ocean and mainland Africa through millennia-old mercantile links and migration was evident in the cityscape, communities, language and religion of East Africa’s coastal towns such as Mogadishu, Kilwa, Mombasa and Lamu. By the nineteenth century, the Omani Busaidi dynasty ruled the coastal region from their base in Zanzibar Town. This urban centre was home to a mixed population which, in addition to the Swahili majority, included a significant minority community of South Asian migrants who dominated the finance and service industries. The twice-yearly monsoon winds brought traders from the Persian Gulf and Southern Arabia who typically resided in Zanzibar Town for six months of the year. European incursions increased throughout the nineteenth century into this region of diverse peoples: first explorers followed by diplomats as consulates were established on the coast. The suppression of slavery intensified in the 1870s and 1880s, demanding a greater naval presence as Royal Navy ships patrolled the coastline. By 1890, Britain and Germany had agreed boundaries for their new colonial territories. This also coincided with the period when the Royal Navy was deliberately instilling wider public interest in its activities, encouraging what has been described as a ‘cult of the navy’.2 Therefore evidence of successful naval campaigns in the East African arena held particular significance. The period from 1890 to 1910 therefore represents a consolidation of European rule within the context of overlapping mercantile, cultural, economic and political interests in this coastal region. This chapter will discuss the varied British responses to these coastal encounters in Zanzibar and the East African arena in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 I will investigate this through the histories of two chairs now in the British Museum collection. They are viti vya enzi (s. kiti cha enzi) – chairs of power, a form of throne used by Swahili rulers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both are fine examples of this widely admired Swahili art form. Their distinctive style had developed over several centuries, culminating in the nineteenth-century version, characterised by the ebony frame, twine webbing panels, intricate ivory inlay and footrest. The first, hereafter Chair I, is a well-preserved chair currently on display in the museum’s Sainsbury African Galleries (Figure 6.1). This chair was donated to the British Museum by the widow of Sir Basil Cave, a colonial officer first stationed in Zanzibar in 1895, who rose to become British Agent and Consul General before his departure

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Figure 6.1 Chair I, kiti cha enzi acquired by Sir Basil Cave, K.C.M.G., C.B., when British Agent and Consul General in Zanzibar between 1903 and 1909, and donated to the British Museum by Mrs Cave in 1962. British Museum, Af1962,03.1, © The Trustees of the British Museum.

in 1909. Chair II is of a similar style, significantly larger and even more elaborately decorated, but in poorer condition (Figure 6.2). Admiral Sir Edmund Fremantle acquired this chair in Witu, a Swahili town on the East African coast, in 1890. It was displayed in various settings before being transferred to the British Museum in 1992, where it is now kept in the stores. In common with seats in many cultures across the world, these chairs had symbolic and functional purposes. The notion of a throne or seat of power was familiar to Europeans encountering Swahili culture, and the fine artistry ensured they were highly sought after. Furthermore, they were portable – their design with pegged sections at right angles meant they could be easily disassembled.4 In this chapter, I will explore how the political

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Figure 6.2 Chair II, kiti cha enzi that was the state chair of the Sultan of Witu. The chair was acquired by Admiral Sir Edmund Fremantle in 1892 at the destruction of Witu, and transferred to the British Museum from the National Maritime Museum in 1992. British Museum, Af1992,05.1, © The Trustees of the British Museum.

became entangled with the cultural in the history of changing ownership and display of these Swahili chairs of power. As the burgeoning literature indicates, objects and their biographies are essential to our understanding of cultural encounters.5 Tracing these histories yields perspectives upon exchanges between different cultures which can be overlooked when solely relying upon written accounts. With the focus of this volume upon coastal cultures, material culture is, I argue, a vital source through which to examine interactions on the East African coast in the colonial period. The coastal space was a porous region through which ideas, people

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and things moved. Analysing the histories of objects provides further evidence of the cultural and political dynamics of the ‘contact zone’, the term for such sites of encounter coined by Mary Louise Pratt. In these settings, ‘peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’.6 Objects play various roles within these spaces.7 They themselves might be in transition – traded commodities which changed in meaning and value during their passage through the coastal setting. Beads, for example, were used as currency by mainland communities in the interior of the continent and were key imports into East African port cities.8 Other objects, such as the chairs discussed in this chapter, embody the impact of cultural exchange and artistic influence in the coast upon material culture. Modes of display of such objects and their transferral to other sites effected further transformations upon the meaning of objects. The pioneering work of Prita Meier has demonstrated the importance of the merging of traditions of interior display between Swahili, Arab and European communities on the coast.9 The East African coast in the period of high imperialism is therefore a revealing site for investigating the politics of collecting material culture. Rather than present object biographies in the strictest sense of the concept, I will use these chairs, which themselves represent the cultural fusion that takes place in coastal regions, to examine this critical period in East African history. The people and events with which the chairs are associated were central to the establishment of British power over the coast and subsequently the East African empire. The sites and strategies of display illuminate British responses to Swahili culture and the expression of imperial expansion in East Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Forms of display simultaneously represented domination and interpretation of local culture. British officers were influenced by overlapping forces and impulses: both the peripheral cultural setting and the metropole; by careers defined by mobility around imperial spaces; and by shifting sets of relationships between local communities. As such this chapter demonstrates the rich possibilities of placing objects at the centre of a discussion about interactions in coastal spaces with a backdrop of colonial expansion. I will first briefly trace the longer history of cultural contact on the coast and the early examples of British interaction with and interpretations of Swahili culture. Each chair will then be discussed in turn to address themes central to the analysis of coastal culture: firstly, assimilation and appropriation; secondly, contestation and conflict.

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The chairs were located in a variety of sites, including a Swahili palace, a British colonial official residence, a large-scale Victorian exhibition, and three metropolitan museums. The comparison of these settings reveals how these inherently coastal objects could form part of different narratives. Throughout, I will examine the varied ways in which objects represent the deployment of colonial power – through conquest but also more subtle modes of diplomacy and negotiation through display strategies informed by local practice.

Coastal History and Coastal Collecting For millennia before Zanzibar’s commercial heyday in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the East African coast had been part of the Indian Ocean trading network. The relatively predictable and reliable twice-yearly monsoon winds created an interconnected mercantile space linking the port cities of the Indian Ocean rim from East Africa, the Gulf, South Asia and the Far East. It was in this context that Swahili culture in East Africa developed. For example, the origins of the kiSwahili language lie in the Bantu language family, but the vocabulary contains many words derived from Arabic – a natural result of these mercantile links and settlement from Arabia, which also spread Islam down the coast in the eighth century. Archaeological finds from first-millennia ce coastal cities present fascinating evidence of the lengthy influence of Indian Ocean trade upon the coast.10 Before the twelfth century, ceramics from China and Arabia were available on the East African coast and incorporated into tombs, mosques and significant buildings. Such traditions endured: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Swahili and Arab houses often included niches designed to display foreign ceramics. Under the highly successful Omani ruler of the early nineteenth century, Seyyid Said ibn Sultan al Busaid, Zanzibar became the predominant trading hub on the coast for slaves and ivory, and exporting locally produced cloves. Seyyid Said formally moved his capital to Zanzibar in the 1840s. Zanzibar Town expanded as Omani landlords and South Asian merchants and financiers constructed large palaces of mortared coral. By the time the British took an interest in the mid-nineteenth century, inspired by a combination of commercial and humanitarian interests, the city was thriving. As Jeremy Prestholdt has written in his analysis of consumption on the Swahili coast, mid-nineteenth-century travellers analysed the local peoples, describing the Swahili as a hybrid race – and such hybridity indicated degeneracy as the people appeared to exhibit the

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most negative traits associated with black and Arab populations.11 However, unlike travellers, British consuls and later administrators responded to the coastal culture and environment with different agendas. Many of those who served in East Africa were posted there after experience in India or another colonial territory. Officers living for long durations in the region looked more favourably upon the coastal culture. Some undertook research to understand the longer history of Swahili interaction with the Indian Ocean world. They also responded to local aesthetics. For example, Sir John Kirk, the influential and much-admired British consul from 1868 to 1886, was the first to attempt seriously to examine archaeological ruins on the coast and record local traditions. He amassed a significant collection of Chinese ceramics, which he displayed on the walls of his house in a style reflecting local Swahili arrangements.12 The example of ceramics indicates how the East African coast was a region typified historically by exchange and response to external influences which were then shaped and adapted locally. The British were the latest in a succession of overseas rulers who responded to these traditions.

Chair I: Assimilation and Appropriation Before examining the first kiti cha enzi in detail, it is necessary to explain further the history of these chairs. Their form incorporates myriad cultural influences, while their symbolic value and use also testify to shifting patterns of power on the coast. Prior to the consolidation of Busaidi power on the East African coast in the early nineteenth century, only rulers of Swahili city-states and established families possessed such chairs – in a simpler form to that discussed here – which acted as sacred relics, much like drums and horns.13 The establishment of the Busaidi dynasty led to a decline in their use by Swahili rulers and weakening of their symbolic meaning. Meier cites Ludwig Krapf, a German visitor in the 1840s, who reported that local rulers no longer possessed them, and evidence suggests that the Busaidi Sultans deliberately restricted the use of these highly charged symbols of power.14 Simultaneously these chairs continued to be produced in some quantity by local artists and were avidly collected by Europeans. It was at this time that the artists developed the nineteenth-century form of the chairs – the distinctive and complex symmetrical patterns of abstracted flora and fauna set into the decorative ivory inlay on the cresting rail. As a key export commodity, ivory had historically symbolised mercantile power on the Swahili coast. Meier’s important new work highlights

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the futility in tracing particular cultural influences for these chairs: earlier scholars have attempted to interpret the form as deriving from Mamluk Egypt, early modern Portugal or nineteenth-century South Asia. Instead, she argues that ‘in such borderland cultures as the Swahili coast . . . material models imported from elsewhere are always physically reconstituted and symbolically refabulised’.15 One reason for the chairs’ popularity with Europeans and Omani Arabs on the coast was their supposed ancient history as seats of power – in spite of the fact that almost all known examples at this time were in fact nineteenthcentury. The Europeans concentrated upon their possible Portuguese origin, interpreting central features as modified versions of Christian crosses. Less important than the validity of this interpretation is the way in which Europeans embraced the ‘ancient’ history of interaction on the Swahili coast through its material culture. Within this more general context of the manifold meanings of the viti vya enzi, we turn now to Chair I (see Figure 6.1). It is a particularly fine and well-preserved chair with the characteristic decorative cresting rail including various floral shapes and small animals – probably leopards – facing inward at either side. The back section is formed of a more complex set of panels than the more conventional variety with six or nine twine panels. This central section incorporates further ivory inlay patterns in triangular wooden frames connected by ivory pegs. This first known owner of this chair was Alexander Stuart Rogers, First Minister to the Sultan in 1901. Born in India, Rogers was educated in Britain and returned to the subcontinent to take up a post in the Punjab Police. He then moved to East Africa in 1890 as part of a police force for the newly created Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC). He became the Company’s representative at Witu, then an independent Sultanate on the East African mainland coast which struggled in the late 1880s and early 1890s to resist first German then British colonial ambitions. The Sultanate was finally subdued in 1893. Rogers then became Sub-Commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate when the British Government took control in 1895 after the dissolution of the IBEAC. Rogers’s residency at this time was in a palace in Lamu, a Swahili town renowned, like Zanzibar, for its stone architecture. We are fortunate that he took or commissioned a series of photographs of the interior of his house which clearly demonstrate his engagement with local Swahili ‘logics of display’, to use Meier’s term, expressing a distinctive Indian Ocean identity. These photographs reveal his meticulous, symmetrical arrangement of locally acquired Chinese ceramics in the upper niches of the walls, for which purpose these apertures

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were designed. Also popular in this period was furniture from Bombay. Rogers’s Bombay blackwood bed, prominently featured in the photographs, incorporated intricately carved Indian floriate and figurative designs. His album contains a separate photograph solely of the headboard of this bed, perhaps indicating pride in ownership of this impressive piece of craftsmanship. Two viti vya enzi appear in these photographs although neither is Chair I. Nonetheless, the presence of these chairs – as we have seen, popular at this time with Europeans and others – as well as the Bombay furniture and the ceramic display demonstrate his self-fashioning as a European with an understanding of Swahili aesthetics and expressing his career which spanned the Indian Ocean.16 In 1901, Rogers was appointed as First Minister of the Sultan of Zanzibar’s Government and Regent to the young Sultan. Soon after this prestigious promotion, Rogers commissioned the young Vice Consul and semi-trained architect John Sinclair to build him a new residence. This was itself an eclectic design assimilating aesthetic traditions of the various cultures present at the coast: Swahili, Omani, British and Indian.17 Focusing upon the interior of this palace (Figure 6.3), we can see how, with the embellished polylobed niches, Sinclair adapted the

Figure 6.3 Alexander Rogers’s residence in Zanzibar. Rogers Collection. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library GBR/0115/Y30468C/27.

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plain style present in existing palaces, such as Rogers’s Lamu residence.18 This allowed plentiful space for Rogers to arrange his extensive collection amassed during his wide-ranging career. Elsewhere in my work, I have identified the varied material present here, which included a portrait of Sultan Barghash (c. 1870–88), swords, shields, animal trophies from mainland game, Bombay blackwood furniture, and Persian carpets. Such a combination of objects of diverse origin was typical of elite households in Zanzibar. However, there is a particular aura of colonial dominance created by the denigration of two sacred drums, belonging to the Mwinyi Mkuu, the former leader of one of the Swahili communities on the island, used here as tables on the right-hand side of the photograph.19 Visible in this image are four viti vya enzi lining the walls. Four was the typical number of chairs owned by elite households in the nineteenth century. One of these, on the far left, only partially visible, is very likely to be Chair I. The design on the cresting rail matches exactly, with the leopard at the far end. The chair diagonally opposite has a similar form of back design – revealed by the shadow on the wall – although its ivory inlay is not visible. Close inspection of the photograph reveals that the two chairs on the left-hand side of the image appear to have swords lain over their arms across the seat – perhaps to prevent guests from sitting upon them, suggesting that they were part of the formal display rather than functional objects. It is clear from the form of the chairs that they were designed to be seen straight-on or against a wall. For example, examination of Chair I shows that no decoration is present on the reverse side, where the wood and twine have been left in a much rougher state. In the original context for the Swahili elite, the chairs were reserved for use by dignitaries, while in Rogers’s palace they assumed a similarly rarefied status, fitting in with his overall symmetrical scheme for the room. It is very likely that it was Rogers who purchased this chair from a craftsman on the coast, whether in Lamu prior to arrival in Zanzibar or specifically for display in his new residence. Its fine condition suggests it has not been used regularly. Meier describes how Sultan Barghash in the 1870s and 1880s seized these objects and gave them to British officials ‘who attempted to deactivate their power by putting them on public display as items of Swahili heritage – that is, as objects of the past that had no authority in the present’.20 While their original spiritual authority had been lost, the chairs in Rogers’s palace represented his knowledge and appreciation of Swahili material culture, appropriating this elegant art form and framing his encounters as First Minister with the island’s leading political figures. Displayed within a reception room in an island with a diverse urbane community,

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such material engagement served to legitimate European rule and entrench British presence on the coast. It will be recalled that it was not Rogers or his descendants but Basil Cave’s widow who donated Chair I to the British Museum in 1962.21 This transfer of ownership of the chair can be explained by further examination of the political context within Zanzibar. In the early years of the Zanzibar Protectorate a form of ‘dual government’ existed – with the Sultan’s Government led by a British First Minister, and the British Agency and Consulate, responsible to the Foreign Office, as separate and often competing bodies. Such was the uneasy form of rule established following the encroachment of British influence in coastal East Africa. In contrast to Rogers’s confident and imposing image presented in his palatial residence, his political career as First Minister in Zanzibar was less than distinguished. Basil Cave, as Agent and Consul General in 1905, expressed concerns to the Foreign Office about Rogers’s capabilities and conduct.22 Cave listed many issues including Rogers’s inability to control the young Sultan, but it was his alcoholism and fondness for gambling that worried Cave most gravely. This behaviour seriously affected his health and had ‘a bad effect on the tone of the community’. Any discussion of administrative business after lunch was ‘to all intents and purposes . . . an impossibility’.23 In the end, Rogers took retirement, evidently under pressure from the Foreign Office, while on six months’ leave in England for his wedding in late 1905.24 He never returned to Zanzibar, and Cave took over the First Minister’s residence and relocated the British Agency there. By tracing individual objects where possible, it seems that the bulk of Rogers’s collection remained in Zanzibar and was ‘inherited’ by the colonial government. This was not uncommon as officers did not transport all their furniture between postings. But given the apparent care and attention which Rogers paid to his collection, it is probable that the awkward circumstances surrounding his resignation meant that prized possessions were left in Zanzibar which he might, in other circumstances, have brought with him back to Britain. Chair I next appears in the records when Mrs Cave donated it to the British Museum in 1962. Her husband had died in 1931. Unfortunately there is no extant correspondence where she shared information about the object’s history, but it is likely to have remained in their possession after their departure from Zanzibar in 1909 when they were transferred to Algiers and then to Britain. More than simply souvenirs or curiosities, the display of such objects in the metropolitan sphere was a means of representing overseas experience. This was of particular significance to those who on return were jolted from acting as semi-autonomous rulers

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in colonial territories to less prestigious roles in the metropole. It was the second of such chairs to be acquired by the British Museum. The acquisition register notes it was ‘typical Zanzibar Arab work’, suggesting little specific knowledge of its Swahili meaning had been transferred through its owners.25 In the late nineteenth century, such objects were readily available and popular, but with the wave of decolonisation sweeping across East Africa in the early 1960s the Museum may have been keen to acquire such material as instability appeared on the horizon. The chair now stands in the Sainsbury African Galleries, where it has been on display since the galleries’ opening in 2000. I do not wish here to analyse closely the curation, but to highlight the role of this object in the gallery’s narrative. The space is arranged with objects from across the continent generally grouped by material.26 The chair is exhibited alongside other wooden items, including Yoruba palace doors from present-day Nigeria and stools from various communities, themselves symbols of power. The rubric of the gallery means that other Swahili objects are displayed some distance away. For example, at the time of writing, the display of kanga – Swahili patterned cloths also the result of coastal cultural synthesis – lies in the textiles section on the opposite side of the gallery. The chair’s interpretive label explains in brief its origin and meaning on the East African coast. Here, however, the chair is part of a narrative celebrating the artistic diversity of the African continent, comparing and contrasting woodcarving techniques and the way in which power is invested in seats of various forms.

Contestation and Conflict It is tempting to write a story of coastal cultures as the harmonious enmeshing of traditions and cultures within this liminal zone where identities can be formed and reformed.27 While of critical importance to our understanding of the coast, the focus in these zones on connection and cultural exchange must not, however, obscure examples of disconnection and hostility. Coasts, as the boundary for sea-based expansion, have throughout history been the site of violence and resistance, contestation and competition. As Tricia Cusack reminds us, ‘the sea-shore may constitute a frontier that invites exploration, or exploitation.’28 Subsequent to such incursions, cultural fusion may ensue through, for example, migrations of new peoples with a regime change or as a result of new trading possibilities and partnerships. But friction and inequality between peoples often exist simultaneously. The seizure of the second kiti cha enzi was the material symbol

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of the attempted resistance by a small Swahili community to European coastal expansion as well as rivalry between Western powers.29 The controversial subjugation of the Sultanate of Witu is a good example of the attempt by a small state to play the great powers against one another, as they competed to secure a coastal foothold. This Sultanate lay north of Zanzibar on the mainland coastline. A former colonial officer described Witu as ‘a tempting morsel for some Power to gobble up, though, as it proved, a tough morsel’.30 The then Sultan, Fumo Bakari, reportedly known as Simba (meaning lion), claimed independence from the Sultan of Zanzibar. In 1887, the Sultan had initially welcomed German protection, in the form of a mercantile company, against the British. The German Emperor presented the Sultan with rifles, and the German company provided the Sultan with further arms and ammunition.31 This venture was unsuccessful, the Germans withdrawing by 1890 when the region passed to the British, who then recognised the sovereignty of the Sultan of Witu. In an unauthorised aggressive move, a small group of ten Germans, led by a former member of the company named Küntzel, re-entered the territory to exploit its resources and forests without seeking the Sultan’s permission. Küntzel remonstrated against the Sultan for ordering him to cease his activities, whereupon the Sultan’s soldiers encountered the party and killed nine Germans. German appeals to Britain to punish the Sultan were initially refused, but by October 1890 Admiral Fremantle had been ordered to bring Sultan Fumo Bakari to account through a punitive expedition. Fremantle led forces from various sources: the IBEAC police (including Rogers), troops sent by the Sultan of Zanzibar, as well as his own men from HMS Boadicea. In the lead-up to the attack, Fremantle warned that they might face forces of up to 5,000 men and he could not muster an army of this size. In the event, Fumo Bakari fled after skirmishes en route to Witu, and the town was deserted by the time the Admiral entered. In his report of the attack printed in the London Gazette in January 1891, Fremantle described entering the Sultan’s Palace, where he found ‘some articles of value – a tusk, a handsome gun (a present from the German emperor), the German Emperor’s portrait, the Sultan’s state chair, and a good many guns, chiefly trade guns, besides some papers and a magazine full of powder’. He decided with Captain Curzon-Howe to destroy the town, saving ‘the most valuable articles and all papers’,32 and soon it was up in flames. Fremantle assigned Chair II the status of ‘state chair’. We do not know how he gained this information – whether implied by its location within the palace, perhaps on a raised area, or whether a local interpreter explained it to him. On visual inspection, it is clearly a

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notable object of high status, and even without others to compare it to at the time, Fremantle clearly appreciated its significance (see Figure 6.2). It is the largest and most impressive of the British Museum’s viti vya enzi. It is thirty centimetres taller and twenty centimetres wider than Chair I, and has even more intricate detail in its inlay. The cresting rail has the three plant-like forms symmetrically placed around the centre, with small crosses on either side. Between the leaves are small circular ivory pieces which feature across the back. The back in fact does not have any twine panels: it is entirely decorated in ivory inlay, carved ivory sections, pegs and wooden grilles. As can be seen, many ivory pieces have been lost and the twine panels at the base are badly damaged. Nonetheless, through its scale and virtuosity of the artistry, it is clear that this was a particularly prestigious piece, enhanced by its palatial setting. As Sultan Fumo Bakari was one of the few remaining Swahili independent rulers by the end of the nineteenth century, his throne may have been one of the only ones which retained its indigenous symbolic value. Fremantle’s dispersal of these so-called trophies in Britain and their subsequent histories demonstrate how the Sultan’s collection could be displayed and presented in manifold ways to serve political and cultural purposes. These objects could be politically useful. The tusk was presented to Queen Victoria soon after the campaign, as revealed by a note from the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, in Fremantle’s correspondence. He reported: ‘It will give Her Majesty much pleasure to accept from the officers and men engaged in the Vitu [sic] expedition the Tusk which they desire to give the Queen.’33 As such, this gift was a means of materially bringing the campaign to the Queen’s attention with a characteristically ‘African’ object in the form of an elephant’s tusk. As well as soliciting royal gratitude for the service of his men, Fremantle may have hoped to gain some form of post-event endorsement from the Crown. The campaign itself came to be controversial. One source of contention was the engagement of British naval forces in a punitive expedition on behalf of Germany. Pride in his success as well as a desire to present his victory on a national stage may have driven Fremantle to participate in the Royal Naval Exhibition in 1891. This large-scale spectacle in Chelsea, with more than 5,000 exhibits, was a phenomenon encouraged officially and eagerly taken up by the public. A total of 2,351,683 visitors attended the exhibition.34Activity by the Navy in East Africa was the arena in which they were currently most active. The long chronology included in the exhibition catalogue charted naval history from the time of Alfred, via the defeat of the Spanish Armada

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and Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar.35 The objects from the Witu campaign therefore brought current affairs to an exhibition where the vast majority of objects were relics from the celebrated maritime victories of the Age of Sail. Of particular interest when considering the changing meaning of these objects, the preface of the exhibition catalogue explained that the organisers had decided to restrict the exhibition ‘to purely national objects. The exigencies of space, apart from other considerations, rendered it imperative to exclude foreign exhibits.’36 In this context, objects of overseas origin – including those from Africa, India, the Arctic, the Pacific and elsewhere – were rendered ‘national’ through association with British naval activity and British ownership. The Sultan of Witu’s kiti cha enzi and the German gun seized from the palace were both displayed in the Arts Section in the Blake and Nelson galleries, catalogued in the subsection of ‘Relics &c’. The catalogue reveals that the ‘handsome gun’ was by this time in the possession of Lord Cottesloe (Admiral Sir Thomas Fremantle, Edmund’s brother) – presumably a present on the latter’s return. According to the catalogue, the rifle had been a gift from the German Emperor to the Sultan of Witu. As such its display represented a kind of ‘double domination’. The rifle symbolised victory over not only an African ruler, but also a European rival whose incursion into a sphere of British influence had successfully been overcome. Displayed separately, the state chair was unsurprisingly interpreted in the catalogue entry to emphasise the Navy’s involvement: State chair of Fumo Bakari, Sultan of Witu, found in the Sultan’s Palace and removed on the capture and destruction of that town on 27th Oct., 1890, by an expedition composed of officers and men of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines from the following ships belonging to the East India squadron, Boadicea, Turquoise, Conquest, Cossack, Brisk, Kingfisher, Redbreast, Pigeon, Humber, and of 150 Police of the Imperial British East African Company.37

The seizure of a ‘state chair’ – implying a throne – here was easily interpreted by the public as symbolic of uprooting a ruler. It is unlikely that many would have been able to locate Witu on a map, and no further details about the chair’s indigenous origin were given. The catalogue concentrated solely upon the victorious crews. It is likely that the brass plaque still attached to the chair was screwed into it for this display, permanently embellishing it with a short description of its seizure and the destruction of Witu.

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At the level of the individual object in this exhibition, it is clear how they were used to illustrate naval victories supported by the interpretation in the catalogue. When stepping back to consider the entire display, however, the chair, in spite of its size, was subsumed into a mass of naval relics, ephemera, paintings and models. Reports and images from The Graphic and the Illustrated London News impress upon the viewer the sheer quantity of material, typical of contemporary trade and imperial exhibitions. The Witu gun and chair do not appear to have been exhibited together, and both were inserted alongside unrelated material, such as Nelson’s telescope or a lock of that naval hero’s hair (of which there were at least fourteen different examples dotted around the exhibition). The chair itself would have appeared distinctive at least, while the gun’s exotic history required explanation in an exhibition which included several hundred weapons. The chair was then returned to the Fremantle family who, on the death of Sir Edmund in 1929, offered it to the Royal Naval Museum. In his letter to the museum, Fremantle’s son, Sir Sydney, described it as a ‘curious piece’ which could be viewed at the family house near Sloane Square. The museum’s trustees were eager to accept it and planned to put it directly on display.38 It then became part of the National Maritime Museum collection on its establishment in 1937. The German gun seized at Witu also came into the possession of Sir Sydney, who donated it to the National Maritime Museum in 1954, along with Edmund Fremantle’s papers two years later. The Sultan’s two objects were therefore temporarily reunited in the same institution but separated by department – one became part of the ethnographic collection, while the gun was stored with other weapons. The chair stood then in the museum’s stores until 1991, when it was transferred to the British Museum, accessioned into the latter institution in 1992. In an inversion of the case of the Royal Naval exhibition, the chair’s seizure from the Sultan of Witu is of less importance in the British Museum collection. The chair’s significance here is as a part of the Africa department’s Swahili collection – one of three complete examples of viti vya enzi held by the museum. Alongside those in better condition – the damage possibly the result of its violent and turbulent history – Chair II serves to represent the diversity of the form and cultural influence on the Swahili coast. Paradoxically, in contrast to Chair I on display which was one of many acquired by Rogers and possibly never owned by a Swahili family, Chair II in its original context had greater significance as an individual object, the seat of power of an independent and spirited coastal ruler.

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Conclusion The history of the British Empire is inherently linked to coastal encounters. Coasts were the sites of initial incursions by merchants and explorers as they established footholds across the globe. As the sea-borne empire expanded still further into new regions, coasts remained vital even once territorial gains inland were made. Major coastal port cities – from Bombay and Cape Town to Hong Kong and Sydney – remained points of communication, trade and administration. The imperial experience was lived through the coast. The histories of these two viti vya enzi bring into focus the varied cultural relations that occur in coastal zones. I have used them to explore British cultural entanglement in a region which itself had long been a space of exchange between the interior and the ocean. Analysing seats is a particularly useful lens as these have crosscultural meanings – unlike more explicitly exoticised non-European material culture. The form of these chairs makes them especially suitable for assimilation into a European aesthetic. The stories of acquisition also allow us to compare the different modes of global expansion, further enriching our understanding of activities on the ground. The British response was not uniform: the naval and colonial officers used these chairs to make different statements about domination and power. Even years after the ‘first encounter’ with the world beyond Europe, coastal sites remained pivotal and complex sites of engagement in the imperial world.

Notes

1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

Epigraph: Hellen Byera Nestor, 500 Proverbs (Haya): Methali: Emigani (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1977), 6. For this translation, see Swahili Proverbs: Methali Za Kiswahili, University of Illinois, (last accessed 3 January 2018). Jan Rüger, ‘Nation, Empire and Navy: Identity Politics in the United Kingdom 1887–1914’, Past and Present 185 (2004): 160. The work of Robert Bickers and others has focused on the diversity of British responses to the imperial experience. Robert A. Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See Prita Meier, Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 155. The work of Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff has been enthusiastically taken up by anthropologists and historians analysing colonial histories of encounter. See Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of

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6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

133

Things: Commoditisation as Process’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91; Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, World Archaeology 31 (1999): 169–78; Chris Gosden and Chantal Knowles, Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). I have previously applied this methodology to analysing colonial Zanzibar through a set of Swahili regalia. See Sarah Longair, ‘Recovering and Reframing the Regalia of the Mwinyi Mkuu in British Colonial Zanzibar’, Museum History Journal 3 (2010): 149–70. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. For example, Emma Poulter has examined how the object becomes the contact zone; see ‘Hybridity – Objects as Contact Zones: A Critical Analysis of Objects in the West African Collections at the Manchester Museum’, Museum Worlds 2 (2014): 25–41. Karin Pallaver, ‘“A Recognised Currency in Beads”: Glass Beads as Money in Nineteenth-Century East Africa: The Central Caravan Road’, in Catherine Eagleton, Harcourt Fuller and John Perkins (eds), Money in Africa (London: British Museum Press, 2008), 20–9. Prita Meier, ‘Objects on the Edge: Swahili Coast Logics of Display’, African Arts 42 (2009): 8–23; Meier, Swahili Port Cities. Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 37–8. Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 151. Meier, ‘Objects on the Edge’, 14–15. Meier, Swahili Port Cities, 160; Longair, ‘Recovering and Reframing’, 155–7. Meier, Swahili Port Cities, 158–60. Ibid. 157; James de Vere Allen, ‘The Kiti Cha Enzi and Other Swahili Chairs’, African Arts 22 (1989): 54–88. Claire Wintle has argued persuasively for the way in which domestic display expresses imperial identities. See ‘Career Development: Domestic Display as Imperial, Anthropological, and Social Trophy’, Victorian Studies 50 (2008): 279–88. See Sarah Longair, Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897–1964 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 69–109. It is possible that Sinclair was influenced by the stepped arches in the interior of some Zanzibari mosques or from European models, such as those on the Alhambra which circulated widely in architectural circles thanks to the publications of Owen Jones.

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19. These objects are examined in detail in Longair, ‘Recovering and Reframing’. 20. Meier, Swahili Port Cities, 160. 21. Mrs Cave also donated a second chair at this time, of a similar size to the viti vya enzi. It is a hybrid design clearly showing European and Indian influence with twine panels, a deeply carved decorative frame and distinctive spiral stretchers and supports. This one also belonged to Rogers and passed to the Caves. The chair’s museum number is Af1962,03.2. 22. The National Archives (TNA): FO 403/377, Consul General to Head of Africa Section, Foreign Office, 2 September 1905. 23. Ibid. 24. TNA: FO 403/377, Sultan Ali bin Hamud to Foreign Secretary, 26 October 1905. 25. British Museum (BM) Ethnographic Department Accession Register, 1962, 10 February 1962. 26. Christopher Spring, Nigel Barley and Julie Hudson, ‘The Sainsbury African Galleries at the British Museum’, African Arts 34 (2001): 21. 27. Tricia Cusack, ‘Introduction: Exploring the Water’s Edge’, in Cusack (ed.), Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 3. 28. Ibid. 5. 29. A contemporaneous example of seizure of artefacts is Annie E. Coombes’s analysis of the punitive expedition to Benin in 1897 and the manipulation of the episode in British newspapers. See Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Yale University Press, 1994), 7–48. 30. Robert Nunez Lyne, An Apostle of Empire: Being the Life of Sir Lloyd William Mathews K.C.M.G. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936), 106. 31. Ibid. 107. 32. National Maritime Museum (NMM) Sir Edmund Fremantle Papers: FRE 137. This item is a clipping from page 76 of the London Gazette on 6 January 1891. The emphasis in the first quotation is mine. 33. NMM: FRE 138c, Ponsonby to Fremantle, 7 December 1890. 34. W. Mark Hamilton, The Nation and the Navy: Methods and Organisations of British Navalist Propaganda, 1889–1914 (New York: Garland, 1988), 92. 35. Royal Naval Exhibition Committee, Royal Naval Exhibition, 1891: Official Catalogue and Guide (London: W. P. Griffith and Sons, 1891), xxxv. 36. Ibid. xxxiv. 37. Ibid. 346. 38. NMM: NMM5 Callender Correspondence I file, 1929 Fremantle, Boyle to Sydney Fremantle, 15 April 1929.

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Chapter 7

Tennyson’s ‘Sea Dreams’: Coastal and Fiscal Boundaries Roger Ebbatson

Tennyson became acquainted with Dr Matthew Allen through the Tennyson family’s involvement with Allen’s asylum at High Beech in Essex, which was situated close to their home in Epping. Septimus Tennyson was treated briefly at this institution, where John Clare was a long-term patient. Allen had enjoyed a chequered career, having twice been imprisoned for debt and been involved in a failed soda-water factory in Scotland. He was a Sandemanian who, having acted as an apothecary to the York asylum, somewhat dubiously acquired a medical degree in 1821 and subsequently opened the High Beech asylum in 1825. In 1840, Allen informed Tennyson of ‘plans he had for becoming so rich that he would no longer have to run an insane asylum’.1 This new project was for a steam-powered woodturning machine called a pyroglyph, and as R. B. Martin observes, ‘Allen’s ebullience must have been attractive to Tennyson when he was in such a depressed state, and when he offered Tennyson a chance to become rich . . . the lure of wealth was too much.’2 As described by Valentine Cunningham, the scheme was one whereby ‘chairs, tables, rood screens, and so on, were to be reproduced in large numbers’, in ‘a money-making mass-production line to meet a Victorian taste for solid furnishings’.3 In November 1840, Tennyson paid Allen £900, with further payments eventually totalling some £4,000, and the poet’s sisters also subscribed a considerable sum, despite the timely warning of Edward Fitzgerald that Allen was ‘not a man to be trusted’.4 By late 1842, the ‘crash of the wood-turning scheme had come about with a frightening rapidity’ and Tennyson was now ‘trying to get out of his association with Allen’, at which juncture he characterised himself as ‘a penniless beggar and deeply in debt’.5 In all, the Tennyson family had unadvisedly invested some

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£8,000 in Allen’s scheme, which terminated in the doctor’s death from heart failure in 1845, after which Tennyson recouped a portion of his heavy losses. It was some years later, in the late 1850s, that Tennyson would address this financial imbroglio poetically in ‘Sea Dreams’, first published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1860 and subsequently in his 1864 volume, Enoch Arden and Other Poems. Tennyson’s narrative concerns a ‘gently born’ city clerk and his wife, ‘an unknown artist’s orphan child’, who, alarmed by their young daughter’s ill health, retreat to the sea-coast from ‘the giantfactoried city-gloom’ where they live.6 This city clerk, it may be suggested, belongs to that new cultural cadre identified by Walter Benjamin as ‘educated in the classics’, and credited, for instance, with the invention of lithography.7 The clerk is haunted by an act of disastrous credulity through which he has been tricked by a sanctimonious fraudster into investing his life savings in spurious Peruvian mining shares. Having arrived at the coast, the piously inclined couple seek solace by attending a chapel service, only to encounter a ‘heated pulpiteer’ who announces ‘the coming doom’ with a grimly apocalyptic fervour. They escape to the sea-coast, ‘lingering about the thymy promontories’ (l. 38), but when they attempt to sleep that night they are disturbed by the stormy groundswell of the sea, ‘scaled in sheets of wasteful foam’ (l. 53). The couple are then fully awakened by the child’s cries, and the husband speaks ruminatively about his sense of betrayal at the hands of the fraudster, exclaiming, ‘“the sea roars / Ruin: a fearful night!”’ (ll. 80–1). The donnée of Tennyson’s poem, focusing as it does on the clerk’s situation, precisely corresponds to Freud’s analysis of the ways in which what he terms repose without stimuli ‘is threatened from three sides: by chance external stimuli during sleep; by interests from the previous day that will not subside; and in an unavoidable way from the stirrings from unsated repressed drives that are just lying in wait to express themselves’.8 The clerk proceeds to narrate a dream in which he entered one of the sea-caves and encountered a visionary woman, and then witnessed an apparent wreck, which he interprets thus: ‘“My dream was Life; the woman honest Work; / And my poor venture but a fleet of glass / Wrecked on a reef of visionary gold”’ (ll. 133–5). He goes on to tell of a recent encounter with the religiose fraudster, who oozes ‘all over with the fat affectionate smile / That makes the widow lean’ (ll. 151–2). His wife protests the man’s innocence, but the husband counters by telling her how ‘oft at Bible meetings’ (l. 190) the man ‘did his holy oily best . . . To spread the Word by which himself had thriven’ (ll. 191, 193) – a sardonic sub-textual reference to Allen’s

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religious publications.9 In the wife’s own ensuing dream-narrative, the coastal cliffs are envisaged as cathedral-like structures, and she subsequently informs her husband that the agent of the fraud has ‘suddenly dropt dead of heart-disease’ (l. 264). Following her earnest appeal the husband reluctantly offers his enemy forgiveness, and the couple finally fall asleep. As Patricia Davis has observed, the poem’s ‘discordant’ voices serve to ‘magnify the moral and spiritual confusion of a class for whom self-help had become an obsession, and profit a utilitarian idol’.10 The plot of Tennyson’s critically overlooked poem places it within a significant nineteenth-century vogue for the literary exploration of financial fraud, and the text may be read within this cultural context. ‘Sea Dreams’, that is to say, explores, albeit on a more intimate scale, widespread social issues of financial duplicity centred upon the newly prominent and controversial figure of the fraudster. It is a poem which may thus be related to international literary trends of the period, as exemplified in Russia by, for example, Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (1836) and Dead Souls (1842), Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859), and a range of texts by Fyodor Dostoevsky; in English fiction by Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857), Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), or Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), and by theatrical representations of financial misdealing such as G. H. Lewes’s The Game of Speculation (1851) and Dion Boucicault’s School for Scheming (1847);11 in France by the novelsequences of Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola; and classically in the United States by Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857). Mary Poovey has appositely noted how, paradoxically following the passage of new company law in 1856, ‘financial fraud almost certainly became more common’ even than in the 1840s (notable for the ‘railway mania’ presided over by George Hudson). Poovey identifies that figures such as ‘mismanaging company directors and embezzling clerks join[ed] fraudulent promoters in the pantheon of iniquity’.12 While Tennyson’s couple view their move to the sea-coast as a liberating retreat from urban fiscal turpitude and stress, a reading of ‘Sea Dreams’ may be framed by reference to Georg Simmel’s sociology of money, which suggests otherwise. Simmel writes pertinently that the ‘punctuality and exactitude’ imposed by the new nineteenth-century monetary system is ‘by no means accompanied by an equivalent inner conscientiousness in the ethical sphere’. To the contrary, he maintains, ‘money tempts us to a certain laxity and thoughtlessness of action’, and he goes on, in terms applicable to both Dr Allen and the clerk’s

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pious fraudster: ‘Thus persons who are otherwise honest may participate in deceitful “promotions,” and many people are likely to behave more unconscientiously and with more dubious ethics in money matters than elsewhere.’13 In a passage which strikingly echoes the tone and setting of Tennyson’s poem, Simmel writes: ‘Once the act has flowed into the great ocean of money . . . then it can no longer be recognised, and what flows out no longer bears any resemblance to that which flowed in.’14 Elsewhere Simmel further tellingly evokes ‘the sea, which, with its foam waiting to drain away only to come flooding back in, with the purposeless circulus vitiosus of its movement, reminds us only too painfully of our own inner life’. The sea, Simmel maintains, thus ‘mirrors our destiny and unhappiness’.15 It is certainly the case that the sea symbolism deployed by Tennyson offers a multifaceted range of meaning and implication: the couple’s oceanic dreams take the form of ‘wish images’ imbued with semi-mythical connotations and offering consolatory respite from the challenges of urban commerce. When the clerk and his wife escape the ‘Apocalyptic millstone’ conjured up by the doom-laden chapel preacher (who may be based upon the controversial London cleric the Reverend Edward Irving), they ‘[pace] the shore’ and ‘[run] in and out the long sea-framing caves’ (ll. 32, 33), the natural world offering an alternative to the dreary imprisonment embodied in a tendentious and gloomy religiosity. At the same time the verse, in conjuring up ‘perilous places o’er a deep’ (l. 11), gestures towards the terms of the aesthetic sublime as embodying possibilities of financial ruination, and these implications are more fully evoked in the ensuing storm, with ‘dead claps of thunder from within the cliffs / Heard through the living roar’, in which ‘the sea / Roars ruin’ (ll. 55–6, 80–1). These ominous connotations, signalling the fractures and hauntings embedded in subjectivity, are partly balanced but not outweighed by the clerk’s dream of how he was subject to the tide, ‘And I from out the boundless outer deep / Swept with it to the shore, and entered one / Of those dark caves that run beneath the cliffs’ (ll. 86–8). The clerk’s exploration of the cave might be framed by Freud’s contention ‘that the common fantasy of returning to the womb is a substitute for . . . coital desire’,16 and it is here, significantly, that he encounters the ambiguous vision of the ‘giant woman’. Tennyson strikingly evokes the ‘motion of the great deep’ in his rhythmical command of the pentameter, and yet this natural phenomenon is still ineluctably bound to that lesser human world, the woman attributing her strength to ‘working in the mines’ (l. 110). The clerk quizzes this mythical figure, proceeding ‘to ask her of my shares’ (l. 111) and

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envisaging his ‘poor venture’ as ‘but a fleet of glass / Wrecked on a fleet of visionary gold’ (ll. 134–5). What Angela Leighton has to say of Tennyson’s early poem ‘The Lover’s Tale’ is also relevant to a reading of ‘Sea Dreams’: ‘It is as if the narrative and dramatic drive is constantly blocked by a language that circles in on itself, in a whirlpool of introspection.’17 This rhapsodic and intense response to the seascape reaches its climactic phase in the wife’s responsive dream ‘of that same coast’ in which a ridge Of breaker issued from the belt, and still Grew with the growing note, and when the note Had reached a thunderous fullness, on those cliffs Broke, mixt with awful light. (ll. 204–8)

The cliffs become transformed, in her vision, into ‘huge cathedral fronts of every age’ (l. 211). As Leighton remarks of ‘The Lover’s Tale’, we may detect here ‘a figure for what is outer and inner, the “outer sea” being a breaking force which might, any time, break in’. Indeed, Leighton’s diagnosis of Tennyson’s verbal music is particularly apt to a reading of ‘Sea Dreams’, speaking as she does of ‘these drowning places, of cavern and stream, of rumours, moans and melodies’.18 The couple’s tactical retreat from modernity is enacted through this coastal imaginary, which as a luminal, peripheral space registers a possibly pre-Oedipal desire for the maternal body. The poetic representation of the sea-coast in this text, that is to say, rejects the Victorian discourse of progress in favour of atavistic retreat and fantasy, the element of the fantastic reaching its apogee in the wife’s architectural dream-vision: she saw That all those lines of cliffs were cliffs no more, But huge cathedral fronts of every age, Grave, florid, stern, as far as eye could see, One after one; and then the great ridge drew, Lessening to the lessening music, back, And past into the belt and swelled again Slowly to music: ever when it broke The statues, king or saint, or founder fell; Then from the gaps and chasms of ruin left Came men and women in dark clusters round, Some crying, ‘Set them up! They shall not fall!’ And others, ‘Let them lie, for they have fallen.’ (ll. 209–21)

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The origins of this striking passage may be directly traced to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–3), a second-hand copy of which Tennyson had acquired in 1836. Dennis Dean observes that the youthful poet ‘began to read it thoroughly’ as part of his keen interest in geology, an interest which would surface to notable effect in In Memoriam, a text which, Dean points out, then itself ‘became part of the literature of geological controversy’.19 ‘Sea Dreams’ specifically embodies Tennyson’s response, scientific and poetic, to the western coast of the Isle of Wight, to which the Tennysons had moved in 1853, an island where, Dean notes, ‘Eocene sandstones and marls join Cretaceous chalk in spectacularly contorted formations’. Tennyson’s walks in this environment, in Dean’s account, ‘took him along Freshwater Cliffs to those weathered chalk remnants, the Needles; to various cliffs and caves; to views of Alum Bay, with its brilliantlycolored vertical strata of anticlinal sandstone’.20 It has been observed that ‘from the late 1830s on, Tennyson read a range of writers on geology’ and that, once he had settled in the Isle of Wight in 1853, the poet had access to Hanover Point, ‘famous for dinosaur footprints . . . and even fossil tree-trunks’, and to the younger tertiary strata at Alum Bay.21 Tennyson’s indebtedness to the relatively new science of geology, in this text and elsewhere in his work, might be fruitfully theorised through the poststructuralist frame of Jacques Rancière, who sees the modern world as comprising ‘a vast fabric of signs, ruins and fossils’, creating what he terms ‘the new poetry’ which is to be equated ‘to the work of the philologists, archaeologists and geologists’. Indeed, Rancière maintains, apropos nineteenth-century literature, that this new poetry is characteristically ‘that of the geologist’, one who recreates cities from out of a few teeth, repopulates forests from out of ferns imprinted on fossilised stone, and reconstructs races of giant animals from out of a mammoth bone. The truth of literature is inscribed in the path opened up by these sciences which get lifeless debris to talk: fossils for the palaeontologist, stones or folds of terrain for the geologist, ruins for the archaeologist.22

The collapse of the statues may be read as a reinflection of that which has been termed ‘the ousting of the biblical creation and the need for interpretation of this strange geological language’,23 the wife’s dreamvision seemingly hinting at a loss of religious belief consequent upon the couple’s treatment by both the ostensibly Christian fraudster and the hellfire preacher. She also, however, eloquently bears witness here

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to what Patrick Brantlinger, in Fictions of State, evocatively designates ‘the towering, sublimely phallic properties of debt’.24 Tennyson’s poem, that is to say, dramatises the problematic articulation between the individual psyche, the dream-world of the unconscious, and the seeming implacability of socio-economic forces. The clerk’s wife here confronts a version of the Kantian sublime, in which, as Slavoj Žižek maintains, ‘Beauty calms and comforts; Sublimity excites and agitates’, the ‘sentiment of Sublimity’ thus becoming ‘attached to chaotic, terrifying, limitless phenomena (rough sea, rocky mountains)’.25 The young woman experiences a range of feelings which accord with Kant’s proposition that the sublime generates ‘a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude’, and ‘a simultaneously awakened pleasure’.26 She confronts what Žižek defines as ‘nature in its most chaotic, boundless, terrifying dimension’.27 Jacques Derrida has remarked, apropos the Kantian sublime, that the ‘example of the ocean does not come fortuitously’; to the contrary, Derrida observes, ‘the abyss threatening to swallow everything’ is irrevocably tied to the image of ‘the ocean of the poets, the spectacular ocean’. The sublime, he further contends, with some relevance to the clerk’s wife, ‘is not in nature but only in ourselves’.28 The ‘huge cathedral fronts’ with their collapsing ‘statues, king or saint’ of the wife’s dream resonate with the trope of sublimity: Henri Michaux describes ‘images where the straight lines invested with an upward momentum are naturally vertical, cathedral lines’, ‘mounting indefinitely’ towards broken lines ‘in a continual seism’ such that they ‘crack, divide, crumble and shred’. The sublime, in Michaux’s account, is ‘marked by streaming, sparkling, extreme seething, in which all remains ambiguous’.29 In Tennyson’s text, the sublime refracts what has been defined as ‘a heightened time during which the self is radically altered by something that presses on us from beyond our normal reality’.30 That alteration, in the wife’s case, reinflects Peter de Bolla’s contention that ‘the distinguishing feature of the discourse of the sublime is that it produces an overplus which it cannot command or control’, in the elicitation of a ‘discursive excess’ to which Tennyson’s text bears striking witness.31 The penultimate moment of the poem takes the form of a lullaby sung by mother to child: What does little birdie say In her nest at peep of day? Let me fly, says little birdie, Mother, let me fly away.

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Roger Ebbatson Birdie, rest a little longer, Till the little wings are stronger. So she rests a little longer, Then she flies away. What does little baby say, In her bed at peep of day? Baby says, like little birdie, Let me rise and fly away. Baby, sleep a little longer, Till the little limbs are stronger. If she sleeps a little longer, Baby too shall fly away. (ll. 281–96)

From this performance the wife elicits the concluding reflection that, as the child sleeps, ‘“let us too, let all evil, sleep. / He also sleeps – another sleep than ours. / He can do no more wrong”’ (ll. 297–9). This passage has predictably been critically dismissed as redolent with a suffocating mid-Victorian excess of sentiment, but it may more productively be construed as a type of textual ‘caesura’ through which, as Walter Benjamin remarks with reference to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘along with harmony, every expression comes to a standstill, in order to give free reign to an expressionless power inside all artistic media’.32 It is this ‘expressionlessness’, Benjamin would argue, that ‘completes the work’ by transforming it ‘into a torso of the symbol’.33 By emptying out the ressentiment felt by the defrauded clerk, the wife’s lullaby performs the function of an interruption which then enables closure. The incursion into the text of the hypnotic simplicity of the tetrameter rhythm, rather than signalling a mawkish sensibility, works its effects by injecting what in Benjaminian terms constitutes a ‘counter-rhythmic rupture’. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin identified interruption or caesura as crucial in the development of a materialist interpretation of social and economic history, a technique which, in his words, ‘blasts the epoch out of the reified “continuity of history”’, exploding the ‘homogeneity of the epoch’ and, in a phrase which echoes the vision of disintegrating statues, ‘interspersing it with ruins’. The lullaby marks the Benjaminian ‘arrest of thoughts’ which will enable ‘the materialist presentation of history’ in a formation which illuminates that duplicity embedded in capitalist structures embodied in the clerk’s experience.34 The interruption, whilst apparently a soothing interlude, acts as a rupture in the fabric of the text, exposing the illusion of wholeness or closure. The sleep of the child, and the complex dream sequences of the parents, both refract and

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illuminate Benjamin’s contention that capitalism ‘was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe’ to the extent that ‘the first tremors of awakening serve to deepen sleep’. The conditions of economic exploitation to which the couple have been exposed by the fraud, as Benjamin phrases it, ‘find their expression in the dream and their interpretation in the awakening’.35 The unbroken sleep of the baby thus dialectically calls up the problematic of fiscal turpitude, exploitation and ruin registered in the troubled quasi-Gothic imagery of the parental dream-world. This is, in sum, a text which embodies and stages a debate between two opposing discursive patterns, those of poetry and commerce. Indeed, the two voices may be taken, as Davis suggests, as embodying ‘contending impulses within Tennyson himself’.36 The sublimity of the couple’s dream-visions registers an attempt to locate the poetic universe somewhere above and beyond the harsh economic sphere from which they have fled. As Barbara Johnson remarks of Baudelaire, though, in such texts the exchange system ‘has by no means disappeared, since it serves as a negative point of comparison for the production of poetic value’. There is therefore, as Johnson suggests, ‘a resemblance between Poetry and Capital, through their common way of transcending a system of equivalences in the very process of perpetuating it’. That is to say, ‘the circulation of language as poetry is strikingly similar to the circulation of money as capital’, to the extent that ‘the “poetic” could indeed be defined as the surplus-value of language’. What Tennyson explores in this dialogic poem is the way in which, in Johnson’s terms, the ‘denial of its relation to other codes might be constitutive of poetry as such’, the poetic text unwittingly ‘inscribing a capitalistic model behind the structure of poeticity’.37 This ‘obliteration and forgetting of the process of production’ in the poetic text leads to what Johnson characterises, in terms echoed by the wife’s dream, as ‘the erection of a fixed, statufied form’, ‘a monument set up against the horror of castration’. In this way poetry becomes a ‘dream of stone’ which is at the same time ‘constituted by a process of mutilation’. Read in these terms, ‘Sea Dreams’ may thus be construed as ‘a heterogeneous cultural text strained by conflicts among codes’.38 Tennyson’s reference to the ‘rogue’ who has duped the clerk into purchasing ‘strange shares in some Peruvian mine’ (l. 15) may be further contextualised with reference to the mid-Victorian period. As Brantlinger remarks of this conjuncture: ‘Behind the shady financier with his colonialist recipes for bankruptcy looms the spectre of an empire founded on debt, both financial and moral, a prosperity

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and progress more shadow than substance, a metaphorical dialectic of enlightenment.’39 Some years after the publication of the Enoch Arden volume a financial journalist noted, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, how speculators would tend to favour Peruvian investments, ‘in memory of the famous mines of Petosi’, while warning that ‘Peruvians have had the bottom knocked out’ of the market ‘by the subsidence of the guano deposits’.40 Tennyson’s debate with himself over his catastrophic investment might be juxtaposed with the poet’s expectations concerning his 1864 collection in which ‘Sea Dreams’ was included, originally to be titled ‘Idylls of the Hearth’. The Laureate anticipated sales of some £2,000 from this volume, but in fact earned £8,000 from it in 1864 alone – ironically matching the sum which the Tennyson family had squandered on the pyroglyph. Thus a poem which staged the issues of debt and fraud participated in what Brantlinger characterises as the ‘fetishistic transformations of debt into wealth and wealth into debt’ through the aesthetic product, defined as ‘a commodity in search of buyers’.41 In conclusion, ‘Sea Dreams’ may be interpreted as Tennyson’s internal dialogue with himself concerning his disastrous involvement in the wood-turning imbroglio, in a textual debate in which he attempts to come to terms with the polarisation of his personal feelings between ressentiment and acceptance, and with the textual dialectic between the economic and the aesthetic. As such, the text orchestrates the way in which, as Dominick LaCapra maintains in his account of Bakhtinian thought, internal dialogisation ‘introduces alterity or otherness into the self’. This form of writing, LaCapra adds, ‘renders personal identity problematic and raises the question of the constitution of the subject of discourse with relation to the word of others’.42 ‘Sea Dreams’ is a text whose undecidability seems to be the effect of a kind of double or multiple voicing of utterance reflective of its setting within the coastal imaginary – an internal dialogisation dramatising the points of view and internal processes of not only the city clerk and his wife but also the ambivalently poised and conflicted author, both victim and beneficiary of the emergent capitalist economy.

Notes 1. Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 254. 2. Ibid. 3. Valentine Cunningham, ‘The Poetry and Poetics of Violent Feelings’, Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 14 (2000): 195.

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4. Martin, Tennyson, 256. 5. Ibid. 268, 269. 6. ‘Sea Dreams’, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Longman, 1969), pp. 1,095–105, ll. 2, 5. All further references to this poem are to line number in this edition, and are included parenthetically in the body of the text. 7. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 53, 57. 8. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. Helena RaggKirkby (London: Penguin, 2003), 12. 9. Allen had published On the Temper and Spirit of the Christian Religion, based upon his York sermons, in 1820, with a revised version in 1831. 10. Patricia Elizabeth Davis, ‘Challenging Complacency: The “discords dear to the musician” in Tennyson’s “Sea Dreams”’, Victorians Institute Journal 14 (1986): 85. 11. See Jane Moody, ‘Risk, Belief, and Liability on the Stage’, in Francis O’Gorman (ed.), Victorian Literature and Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91–109. 12. Mary Poovey, introduction to Poovey (ed.), The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 18. Poovey notes the contemporary publication of such financial exposés as Morier Evans’s Facts, Failures and Frauds (1859) and Malcolm Meason’s Seamy Side of Finance (1886). 13. Georg Simmel, ‘Money in Modern Culture’ (1896), in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 253. 14. Ibid. 15. Georg Simmel, ‘The Alpine Journey’ (1895), in Simmel on Culture, 221. 16. Freud, Outline of Psychoanalysis, 80. 17. Angela Leighton, ‘Tennyson’s Hum’, Tennyson Research Bulletin 9, no. 4 (2010): 318. 18. Ibid. 319, 325. 19. Dennis R. Dean, Tennyson and Geology (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1985), 8, 19. See also Lyall Anderson and James Taylor, ‘Tennyson and the Geologists, Part 1’, Tennyson Research Bulletin 10, no. 4 (2015): 340–56. 20. Dean, Tennyson and Geology, 20. 21. Michael Taylor and Lyall Anderson, ‘Tennyson and the Geologists, Part 2: Tennyson and the Saurians’, Tennyson Research Bulletin 10, no. 5 (2016): 421, 422. 22. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 19, 16. 23. Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), 33. 24. Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 128.

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25. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 202. 26. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 106. 27. Žižek, Sublime Object, 203. 28. Jacques Derrida, in Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), 43, 44. 29. Henri Michaux, quoted in Morley (ed.), The Sublime, 24. 30. Morley (ed.), The Sublime, 18. 31. Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 300. 32. Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elected Affinities’, in Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 341. 33. Ibid. 340. 34. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 474, 475. 35. Ibid. 391, 392. 36. Davis, ‘Challenging Complacency’, 87. 37. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 36, 38. 38. Ibid. 47, 48. 39. Brantlinger, Fictions of State, 45. 40. Alexander Innes Shard, ‘Speculative Investments’, in Poovey (ed.), Financial System, 176. The article first appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in September 1876. 41. Brantlinger, Fictions of State, 45. 42. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 312.

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Chapter 8

Saxon Shore to Celtic Coast: Diasporic Telegraphy in the Atlantic World Brian H. Murray

Introduction: Green Atlantic? In the first official message sent from America to Britain on the shortlived transatlantic telegraph cable of 1858, American President James Buchanan congratulated Queen Victoria on ‘the great international enterprise accomplished by the skill, science, and indomitable energy of the two countries’ and expressed his hope that ‘the Atlantic Telegraph, under the blessing of heaven, [may] prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilisation, liberty, and law throughout the world’.1 In this interpretation of events, the elision of space and time enabled by the telegraph had, as its inevitable consequence, the end of ideological conflict and the universal acceptance of an Anglo-American imperial destiny. Modern commentators have questioned the complacent assumptions of this politically charged celebration of transatlantic union between the so-called Anglo-Saxon peoples, and also drawn attention to the realities which undermined this myth (faltering technology, frustrating delays, scrambled messages).2 However, few have questioned the assumption that this was, for good or ill, a distinctly Anglo-American event. Yet the various submarine cables laid between 1857 and 1866 did not connect Washington to Westminster – nor even Great Britain to the United States – but Valentia Island (off the south-west coast of Ireland) to Newfoundland (a self-governing colony of the British Empire). The electrical bond between the two great Anglo-Saxon nations was thus facilitated by a wire connecting two rather remote outposts of the Empire’s Celtic fringe. As yet, little attention has been

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paid to the effect of this distinctly Celtic provenance on perceptions and representations of transatlantic telegraphy. The ‘annihilation of time and space’ is one of the most persistent clichés surrounding the popular perception of Victorian modernity, but the telegraph could also enforce the remoteness and isolation of Atlantic coastal cultures. In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate the imaginative significance – as opposed to the practical utility – of Atlantic telegraphy for the inhabitants of Newfoundland and Valentia, while also suggesting some of the ways in which this Celtic provenance coloured popular perception of the Cable as a product of Anglo-Saxon ingenuity. By considering the Cable from the perspective of the coastal cultures of Valentia and Newfoundland, I aim to bring to the surface some of the tensions implicit in nineteenth-century fantasies of Anglo-American progress. By examining two interlinked coastal cultures of the Atlantic, I will be drawing on David Armitage and Michael Braddick’s concept of a ‘British Atlantic World’. Characterised by ‘permeable boundaries’ and ‘created by the interactions of migrants, settlers, traders and a great variety of political systems’, this Atlantic world was crisscrossed by connections which ‘were vectors for the transmission of ideas and became the means by which identities were constructed and reconstructed’.3 The relation between transatlantic intellectual exchange and identity formation is particularly relevant to the development of telegraphic networks, which quickly became a medium for transmitting global news. As Benedict Anderson has powerfully demonstrated, it is precisely the ‘sense of simultaneity’ and ‘temporal coincidence’ generated by telecommunications and print journalism that enables the formation of recognisably modern forms of national and ethnic identity.4 In his ground-breaking study The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has asked us to pay closer attention to those ‘intermediate concepts, lodged between the local and the global’ – such as diaspora – which ‘offer an alternative to the nationalist focus’. Observing the maritime backgrounds shared by many nineteenth-century black radicals, Gilroy notes the privileged position of sailors ‘moving to and fro between nations, crossing borders in modern machines that were themselves micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity’.5 In Kevin Whelan’s rose-tinted reflection on transatlantic Irish radicals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is likewise through the ‘constant motion of the ships [that] tied and untied connections across and between disparate worlds’ that a ‘commonality’ emerges, as a harmonious blend of black and green combines to create ‘an incipiently “red” Atlantic of a newly internationalised proletariat’.6 Peter O’Neill and David Lloyd are a little more wary, and are surely

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wise to question the motivations of scholars in search of ‘the multicultural ethical capital that accrues to those who can demonstrate a history of suffering comparable to that of (other) racialised minorities’.7 In the pursuit of an attractively countercultural Green Atlantic, we need to avoid the lure of eliding the role of interracial conflict in the complex narrative of ‘how the Irish became white’ in the New World.8 It is only by accepting the reality of Irish participation in slavery, colonisation and empire that we can acknowledge an Atlantic world in which ‘moments of solidarity were counterpointed by moments of brutal interracial competition’.9

The Oldest Colonies Although it has become a historical orthodoxy to speak of Ireland as Britain’s ‘first colony’, for many nineteenth-century commentators this honour was claimed by Newfoundland – as a result of John Cabot’s voyage of 1497 under commission to Henry VII. Like commercial shipping routes, submarine cables sought the quickest route between two points on the coast, and so often replicated earlier patterns of migration. For this reason, telegraphic networks often reconnected coastal cultures which had a history of mercantile and cultural exchange. During the eighteenth century, large numbers of seasonal workers of both sexes crossed the Atlantic from the southeast of Ireland and the south-west of England to work in cod fisheries along the Newfoundland coast.10 The name for Newfoundland used by Irish speakers on both sides of the Atlantic, Talamh an Éisc, literally translates as the ‘Land of Fish’. Expeditions to the seasonal fishing grounds of Newfoundland generally originated in the English West Country, stopping off to recruit fishermen and labourers at the port of Waterford. As a result, the sources of early migration to Newfoundland were extremely localised – mostly restricted to the counties of Waterford and Wexford in the Irish south-east, and Devon and Dorset in the English West Country. In fact, the majority of Irish involved in the cod fishery in this period originated from within a thirty-mile radius of Waterford City.11 These early episodes of seasonal migration established connections that made Newfoundland a popular destination for the Catholic Irish during periods of mass migration in the early nineteenth century. The situation was encouraged when Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters were granted freedom of conscience and full political rights in Newfoundland in 1784. By the end of the eighteenth century,

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Catholics outnumbered Anglicans, a situation unique among the British North American colonies.12 The most dramatic period of transatlantic emigration from Ireland was during the Great Famine of 1845 to 1848, but the bulk of Newfoundland’s Irish population had arrived earlier – between 1780 and 1835 – in response to overpopulation and a shortage of pastoral land in rural Munster. Seasonal migration to the fisheries soon gave way to longer-term settlement, and in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, between 30,000 and 50,000 Irish arrived in Newfoundland.13 The port towns of the West Country also retained strong links with England’s ‘first colony’ throughout the nineteenth century. In the preface to his friend D. W. Prowse’s History of Newfoundland (1895), the English critic Edmund Gosse described his native Poole in Dorset as ‘almost an offshoot of Newfoundland. It was the English port and emporium of the colony, and each owed to the other a great part of its prosperity.’14 In 1827, aged seventeen, his father, the naturalist Philip Gosse, had journeyed to the colony as an indentured shipping clerk. As the author of The Aquarium (1854) and A Year at the Shore (1865), Gosse is widely credited with spurring a craze for the natural history of the British coastline, but it was as a West Country migrant to Newfoundland that he first discovered his vocation for marine zoology and his faith in evangelical Protestantism.15 Recounting his Newfoundland days in 1868, Gosse recalled an atmosphere ‘much like that in Ireland during the late Fenian conspiracy’. In the small settlement of Carbonear, where the ‘social state pulsated with Ireland’s’, the vastly outnumbered Protestant population were continually confronted by ‘dark threatening glances and muttering words’.16 Tensions between the West Country English and the Irish are the keynote to almost every historical and political account of the colony. One of the earliest histories, Newfoundland, the Oldest British Colony (1883) – by an Irish Presbyterian minister at St John’s, Moses Harvey, and the English journalist Joseph Hatton – is typical in presenting the social history of the island in thoroughly dialectical terms: a struggle between the colony’s ‘two elements, the Celtic, or Irish, and the Saxon, or English’.17 The fact that the population was divided equally along lines of ‘race’, religion and party affiliation for most of the century helped to enforce the popular ideological opposition between the progressive, sober, Protestant Saxon and the romantic, emotive, Catholic Celt.18 Throughout the nineteenth century, Newfoundland had a tendency to mirror forms of anti-colonial and sectarian strife conventionally classed as ‘Irish problems’. Although the United Irish rebellion of 1798 had little direct impact on the island of Great Britain, it did

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spread to Newfoundland, where Irish troops at the St John’s garrison staged a belated mutiny in 1800.19 Likewise the campaigns of the Irish ‘Liberator’ Daniel O’Connell – first for Catholic Emancipation and later for the repeal of the Act of Union – were followed closely in Newfoundland, and the struggles of the Mother Country were frequently equated with the local grievances of the Newfoundland Irish.20 As Gertrude Gunn has shown, ‘conditions in the new land fostered memories of wrongs in the old’ as Irish migrants to Newfoundland ‘found the English still their masters in industry and government, still their betters in wealth and status’.21 As in Ireland, sectarian divisions aggravated regional and cultural differences. In the capital St John’s – an overwhelmingly Irish city – a series of powerful Irish-born bishops exerted influence over the political and social life of the city. Many of Newfoundland’s leading clergy were Franciscans who – like the bulk of immigrants – had come from the province of Munster. Ecclesiastical interference by Irish bishops in local elections in 1840 and again in 1861 led to sectarian rioting and a direct complaint to Rome by the British government.22 During the tenure of the radical nationalist bishop Anthony Fleming (1829–37), two orders of Irish nuns (the Sisters of the Presentation and the Sisters of Mercy) were introduced to Newfoundland as the Church embarked on a massive building programme of churches and schools. This architectural and institutional transformation of the Avalon Peninsula was funded largely by donations from Irish seal hunters (in cash) and fishermen (in salt cod).23 The remarkable power of Irish Catholic clergy led many English and Protestant settlers to fear the consequences of an empowered Irish majority. Conservatives regarded the Liberal Party’s campaigns for ‘Responsible Government’ – a form of ‘home rule’ which had already been granted to most North American colonies – as an ominous foreshadowing of Irish Catholic oligarchy.24 In the autumn of 1851, Newfoundland’s Governor, John Gaspard Le Marchant (1803–74), successfully persuaded the Colonial Office against the granting of Responsible Government, asserting that it would give the Irish Catholic bishop of St John’s, John T. Mullock, ‘the most unlimited and uncontrolled sway’ over the island. In 1852, Mullock expressed explicit backing for the reforming Liberals in a rebarbative public letter, which provoked further unease among the embattled defenders of ‘Protestant Union’ with the British mainland.25 Following several elections fought almost entirely along sectarian lines, Newfoundland and Labrador finally became a self-governing colony in 1855, after an election won by the Liberals. The Liberal leader, Philip F. Little, a Catholic lawyer from Prince Edward Island,

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had secured a narrow victory after assembling a fragile coalition of middle- and upper-class interests and the support of Newfoundland’s Dissenters.26 In the same year that the island achieved Responsible Government, a Catholic Cathedral was consecrated at St John’s. Here transatlantic connections were literarily built into the edifice. Constructed ‘in the style of a Roman basilica’ from Galway limestone and Dublin granite, the church was adorned with altars to the Irish patrons St Patrick and St Bridget, and decorated by two of Ireland’s premier sculptors, J. E. Carew and John Hogan (both Waterford men).27 The basilica towered over the nearby Anglican Cathedral and was a powerful symbol of what the historian Colin Barr has called ‘Hiberno-Roman Imperialism’. In Newfoundland and elsewhere, Irish Catholic bishops had continually exploited their close connections to both Rome and the British Empire to aggressively promote Irish clergy and Irish forms of worship in the English-speaking settler colonies.28 The consecration of the Cathedral was followed by a lavish dinner hosted by ‘The Benevolent Irish Society’, at which the President offered a series of toasts which neatly encompass the divided loyalties of the Newfoundland Irish: the first to Pope Pius IX, then Queen Victoria, next the President of the United States, and finally to ‘Old Ireland as she ought to be, / Great Glorious and free, / First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea’.29 The predominantly Catholic Liberal Party remained in power between 1855 and 1861 – a unique moment of ‘Catholic ascendancy’ in the British Atlantic World.30 This was the Newfoundland that welcomed the arrival of the Atlantic Cable in 1857.

Anglo-Saxon Electric For many contemporary commentators, the global spread of the electric telegraph had the potential to do for the diffusion of ideas what the railway and the steamship had done for the movement of people. During the 1850s and 1860s, the telegraph network expanded exponentially: by 1850, there were just over 2,000 miles of telegraph line on the island of Britain, but by 1867 there were over 80,000 miles.31 The original transatlantic cable of 1858 failed after a few weeks and sent fewer than 500 messages in total, but the connection was re-established after the American Civil War when, in July 1866, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s colossal paddle steamer the Great Eastern laid the second successful cable. For commentators on both sides of the Atlantic, the cable signified the dawn of a new information age and an era of unparalleled peace and prosperity between the

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Anglo-Saxon nations. The telegraph was simultaneously ‘hailed as an instrument of humanising interconnection and celebrated for its ability to transmit neutral, disembodied discourse’.32 The pulsating cables of the telegraph network were quickly adopted as a manifestation of the Anglo-Saxon life force. The belief that the telegraph could unite disparate groups not only in space and time but also in sentiment was widespread. In his poem ‘Passage to India’ (1868), Walt Whitman envisaged a form of benevolent globalisation, in which all nations are eventually ‘welded together [by] seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires’.33 In his Song of the English (1896) – a hymn to ‘Greater Britain’ – Rudyard Kipling devoted a section to ‘deep-sea cables’, which allowed ‘the words of men, [to] flicker and flutter and beat’ across the ocean floor and united the global English diaspora in mutual accord.34 These, and many similar odes to submarine telegraphy, combine enthusiasm for the free trade in ideas with an older assumption that Britannia naturally, and rightfully, rules the waves. We see some of the same tropes in the lavish volume published to commemorate the cable expedition of 1865 – a collaboration between the English painter Robert Dudley and the Irish journalist William Howard Russell.35 The pair had already achieved success with a similar volume on the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra in 1863.36 Dudley was appointed as the ‘official artist’ aboard the Great Eastern with an eye to further myth-making. Russell had established his reputation as a journalist during his ground-breaking coverage of the Crimean War for The Times – his success partly owing to his adept use of overland telegraphic networks – and he had more recently demonstrated his transatlantic credentials with a series of influential reports on the American Civil War. As Simon Cooke has shown, Dudley and Russell’s Atlantic Telegraph offers a ‘pictorial narrative which exceeds its brief as a record and constructs the voyage as an affirmation of political and economic power, scientific superiority, and imperial values’.37 Dudley’s lively illustrations – originally watercolours – help to enliven Russell’s often dry and technical exposition with dramatic scenes of industry and seamanship, which emphasised the heroism of the common tar and the jobbing engineer. These scenes of industry are interspersed with dashes of the maritime sublime: the cable ships battling with surging seas and hostile leviathans. However, it is Dudley’s rendering of the Cable’s termini at Valentia Island and Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, which are most significant to our present discussion (Figure 8.1). Here the rain, steam and speed of Dudley’s earlier images give way to a gentler landscape aesthetic. The precisely rendered cliffs and

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Figure 8.1 ‘The Cliffs Foilhummerum Bay: Point of the Landing of the Shore End of the Cable, July 22nd’, from W. H. Russell and Robert Dudley’s The Atlantic Telegraph (1865). Photo credit: Bill Burns, atlantic-cable.com.

bays of Valentia echo Russell’s detailed description of the topography, the foreground populated by the usual ragged, picturesque peasants. But the barefoot Irish locals are not only the object of the viewer’s gaze: they are themselves spectators. The assembled audience applaud as the cable is dragged uphill from the sea to a small clifftop station. In the top right of the frame, banners are raised by the crowd; in the top left, a bonfire burns in celebration. These primitive forms of semaphore echo the achievements of the engineers below, while also enforcing the sense of progress from primitive to modern modes of communication, and from parochial insularity to imperial ambition. Thus the remoteness and isolation of the coastal culture of Valentia serves to enforce the sense of miraculous modernity, and sentimental simultaneity, enabled by the telegraphic network.

A View from the Islands The telegraphic connection between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland was realised in 1853 with the Anglo-Irish Cable between Port Patrick in Galloway and Donaghadee in County

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Down (regions which shared a distinctly Ulster Scots and Presbyterian coastal culture). The laying of the cable coincided with the marriage of the chief engineer, Charles Tilston Bright. As Bright’s son later noted in a biography of his father, the ‘expedition was graced by the presence of [my father’s] bride, who was thus able to assist at the telegraphic union of Great Britain and Ireland’.38 In this case, the national marriage metaphor implied an unequal bond of submission and centralised power, as Bright’s son makes clear: ‘In later years, when referring to this expedition, Sir Charles used humorously to remark that, so long as we had telegraphic communication with Ireland, there could be no possible need for discussing the question of Irish Home Rule.’39 In September 1856, with the aim of bridging the Atlantic by telegraph, Bright joined forces with the American financier Cyrus Field under the auspices of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. Although Field himself contributed a sizeable share of the capital, and ensured the cooperation of the United States government, the majority of shares were purchased by shipping merchants in Manchester, London, Glasgow and Liverpool.40 The choice of Newfoundland enabled the company to build upon the pioneering work of another English engineer, Frederic Newton Gisborne, whose Newfoundland Telegraph Company had established the first submarine cable in North America between New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island in 1852.41 Valentia Island, off the coast of County Kerry, presented the most favourable conditions for the European terminus of the cable, being, in Bright’s words, the nearest point to ‘the outstretched hand of the American continent’.42 Indeed, Valentia was described in many contemporary reports as ‘the nearest parish to America’ – a nice example of the way in which the telegraphic and transatlantic imagination could render global connections in local terms.43 When the initial expedition was launched from Valentia in 1857, most British newspapers described Arcadian scenes of festivity, as the Catholic peasantry, Protestant landlords and the representatives of the Crown rejoiced in mutual accord. The cable, it seemed, had forged a bond between the United Kingdom and the United States, while also cementing the fragile union between Britain and Ireland. It was ‘a well-designed compliment’, suggested the Liverpool Daily Post, and indicative of the future fraternisation of the nations, that the shore rope was arranged to be presented at this side of the Atlantic to the representative of the Queen, by the officers and men of the United States Navy, and that at the other side the British officers and sailors should make a similar presentation to the President of the great republic.

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At Valentia, proceedings were ‘watched with intense interest’ by an assembly of dignitaries, including the Queen’s representative in Ireland, the Lord Lieutenant (George Howard, Earl of Carlisle), and the ‘directors of the railway and telegraph companies’. When at length the American sailors jumped through the surge with the hawser to which it was attached, his Excellency [the Lord Lieutenant] was among the first to lay hold of it and pull it lustily to the shore. Indeed every one present seemed desirous of having a hand in the great work; and never before, perhaps, were there so many willing assistants at the long pull, the strong pull, and the pull all together.44

After this somewhat uncharacteristic physical display – his Excellency was better known for his exertions in Latin verse – the Lord Lieutenant addressed the assembled crowd on the beach, laying particular stress on the local benefits of this global achievement (Figure 8.2). You are aware . . . that many of your dear friends and near relatives have left their native land to receive hospitable shelter in America. Well, then, I do not expect that all of you can understand the wondrous mechanism by which this great undertaking is to be carried on. – But this I think you

Figure 8.2 ‘The Lord Lieutenant Addressing the Assemblage after the Landing of the Shore End of the Cable’, Illustrated London News, 22 August 1857, 197. Author’s own collection.

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will all of you understand. If you wished to communicate some piece of intelligence straightaway to your relatives across the wide world of waters – if you wished to tell those whom you know it would interest in their heart of hearts, of a birth, a marriage, or, alas, a death, amongst you, the little cord which we have now hauled up to shore will impart that tidings quicker than the flash of lightning (loud cheers).45

Needless to say, the expense of telegraphic communication was entirely prohibitive to the kind of intimate traffic in interpersonal news imagined here.46 And yet telegraph boosterism was never confined to a strictly elite or Anglo-American sphere. On his consecration as Catholic Bishop of St John’s in 1850, John Mullock had already begun to tout the advantages of Newfoundland as a hub for telegraphic and steam communication between Europe and the United States.47 In a letter to the St John’s Courier in November 1850, he expressed his hope that ‘the day is not far distant when St John’s will be the first link in the electric chain which will unite the Old World and the New’.48 In similar terms, the Irish press emphasised the potential for the telegraph to counteract the perceived isolation of Valentia. In August 1858, for example, the Dublin Freeman’s Journal announced that ‘Trinity Bay in Newfoundland, and Valentia Bay on the western coast of Ireland, have become two of the most important points on either continent’.49 In the regional Kerry papers, exhaustive attention was paid to the ceremonial and social role played by Valentia’s aristocratic landowner Sir Peter Fitzgerald, the ‘Knight of Kerry’. On the landing of the cable in August 1858, the Kerry Evening Post was typical in congratulating ‘Europe and America in general – Ireland in particular – and more particularly still our own Kingdom of Kerry’. According to the Post, it was not just male dignitaries but women, too, who followed the exuberant example of ‘Mrs. Cole Hamilton, a lovely bride from the County Tyrone’, by assisting the men in dragging the cable up the beach, as ‘gloves of all shades were seen with a pitch hue, and hands that might be models for a sculptor or a painter for form and whiteness, were made to look like those of our gallant tars’.50 But neither were these ceremonial gatherings at Valentia a mere in-house celebration for the Protestant ascendancy. At the launch of the 1857 expedition, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Ardfert, Dr David Moriarty, praised the telegraph companies as ‘representatives of a power whose empire is greater than that of Rome or of Britain – I mean the power of science’. But he also vaunted the landing of the Cable as a local achievement. In a shamelessly self-aggrandising

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ecclesiastical simile, he even equated the cable expedition with the legendary voyage of ‘Saint Brendan, the first bishop of this diocese’, who, in ancient times, had ‘set sail from the Northern Head of Valentia’ to discover a ‘vast continent’ beyond the western ocean.51 The one explicitly imperial speech of the day testifies to the complexities of Irish identification with the cable and its British imperial context. A key representative of Catholic middle-class professionalism, the physician and telegrapher Sir William O’Shaughnessy had pioneered the widespread use of the telegraph in India against much local resistance. In his response to the Knight of Kerry’s toast to ‘Our Indian Empire’, O’Shaughnessy unleashed a tirade against the Sepoy mutineers. Expressing his hope that ‘those rank traitors’ would meet the ‘punishment that their terrible crime deserved’, O’Shaughnessy pleaded with the government never again to ‘trust their arsenal to a native army, or our wives and children to the custody of those barbarians’.52 As C. A. Bayly has shown, the Indian mutineers had targeted the telegraph during the rebellion of 1857, but the telegraphic network was also instrumental to the initial success of British counter insurgency.53 O’Shaughnessy’s denunciation would have carried particular weight in Munster, a province characterised by both a large military presence and a frequently rebellious population. In contemporary newspapers, reports of the Atlantic cable appeared alongside accounts of the Indian Mutiny, enforcing the message that telegraphy was a useful agent not only of international diplomacy but also in placating colonial subjects. Official events, such as the dinners and balls orchestrated by the Knight of Kerry, did much to promote the message of Anglo-American concord, but the complicity of the local population was not always assured. Among the expectant and enthusiastic crowds lining the cliffs of Foilhummerum Bay, Valentia, W. H. Russell observed the fluttering of many flags, but only a ‘faint suspicion of Stars and Stripes and Union Jack’. In the main, the spectators were flying banners with more local affiliations, ‘the Irish green, with harp, crown surmounted’ and the ensign of the Fitzgeralds, once a rebellious Norman clan, now represented by the paternal Toryism of the Knight of Kerry. Protestant in religion and Tory in politics, Russell had earned his journalistic stripes covering riotous Irish elections of the 1840s and his gaze was far more critical than that of other visiting journalists.54 Unlike his artistic collaborator Dudley, Russell affords us a close-up of the local populace, including the sight of vats of seething potatoes and the ‘reek’ of bacon and whiskey.55 The initial jubilation of the summer of 1857 was short-lived. The first cable snapped four days into the voyage. A subsequent

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expedition in 1858 was successful in establishing communication between the continents, but this too failed after several weeks. In the meantime, Charles Bright was the recipient of a knighthood, hastily conferred by the new Lord Lieutenant (Lord Eglinton) at the Vice-Regal Lodge in Dublin in August 1858. At the same time, the English cardinal Nicholas Wiseman was passing through Dublin on his own triumphal procession. Wiseman was descended from the same class of Waterford merchants that had forged seasonal links with the Newfoundland fisheries, and as the first cardinal of an English diocese since the Reformation, he had done much to further Catholic interests at Westminster. Addressing Bright in an after-dinner speech, he concluded by stressing the links between the impoverished coastal cultures of Ireland and Newfoundland. I can imagine a poor mother in the west of Ireland . . . sitting on the farthest crag that juts into the Atlantic, contemplating that waste of waters no longer as a desolate wilderness which separates her from those she loves, but as a means of instant communication with them, as a way of making known to them her joys and her distresses, and of receiving back in a few hours words of consolation and of promise. It will unite the hearts of many now estranged; and though it may look rather chimerical to consider instances of this individual reciprocal communication as of frequent or of common every-day occurrence, yet it will sweeten the bitterness of separation, and make emigration no longer an exile.56

As Wiseman suggests, however, the fantasy that the cable would facilitate daily communication between Irish mothers and their migrant sons and daughters was indeed ‘chimerical’. But this did not stop even the Irish press from suggesting that the operation of the cable had somehow elevated these marginal, coastal cultures into important hubs in a globalised information age. In the Freeman’s Journal, the small wooden telegraph house where operators worked to decode, transcribe and retransmit messages was depicted as simultaneously remote and pivotal. In their cabined isolation and coastal seclusion the operators would ‘occupy the grand standing point between two worlds’. With the daily history of the world opened to them with a full knowledge of the movements of the great nations of the earth, the operations of trade, the state of the money market, and all those matters which make up the sum total of all that is considered worth knowing in a worldly point of view – if those operatives don’t become philosophers with such opportunities, they are not deserving of the position.57

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Resisting the Cable Networks like the telegraph, and the kinds of discourse and metaphors they generate, can never be securely tied to a single ideology. As Laura Otis has suggested, the telegraphic web could ‘convey the terrible efficiency of centralised power networks’, but it could also highlight the ‘importance of local bonds in any given region’. By strategic acts of local resistance, ‘oppressed individuals anywhere in the system can resist the will of a remote tyrant’.58 As the century progressed, the notion of a diasporic Irish Atlantic community became associated with increasingly violent forms of nationalism, culminating in the ‘Fenian outrages’ of the 1860s. Many of these activities were promoted and financed by wealthy Irish-Americans. And it was through their ‘circum-Atlantic modes of organisation’ that groups like the Irish Republic Brotherhood were able ‘to transform emigration and exile into political instruments’.59 If the most obvious global context for the Atlantic Cable of 1857 was the British battle with mutinous India, the story which framed the reception of the Cable in 1865 and 1866 was the increasingly militant (and militarised) forms of Irish nationalism emerging from the ashes of the American Civil War. The British government suspended habeas corpus in Ireland in February 1866 in anticipation of Fenian rebellion. And in February 1867 there was a short-lived Fenian rising in Kerry – originating in Cahersiveen, the nearest mainland town to Valentia Island. As one contemporary commentator noted in the nationalist newspaper The Nation, the presence of the Atlantic Cable was tied to the geography of the rebellion. ‘Caherciveen was distant from soldiers and from the railways which would bring the soldiers’ and by sabotaging the ‘telegraphic wire the district could be isolated at once’.60 The summer of 1867 saw violent riots between Protestants and Catholics across Britain and a destructive bombing campaign in London.61 As Jonathan Gantt has noted, the Fenian campaign was popularly interpreted along racial lines: as ‘a reaffirmation of Celtic barbarism’.62 Throughout the 1850s, the telegraph had been hailed as the manifestation of Anglo-Saxon superiority, but for the conspiratorial Fenians, this new technology became a site of contention and subversion. Taking advantage of the increased speed of news in a telegraphically enhanced Atlantic world, ‘Fenian newspapers reported regularly to their readers on anticolonial and antislavery insurgencies in various regions of the empire.’ In 1857, the Indian Mutiny had given Irish conservatives an excuse for valorising loyalty to Anglo-American order and progress, but in 1865 Fenian propagandists were quick to seize upon the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica as symptomatic

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of the innate brutality of Anglo-Saxon empire.63 The Kerry Evening Post had celebrated the arrival of the Cable in 1858 as a victory for Anglo-Irish civility. But in July 1865 a short notice announcing the landing of the cable at Valentia was overshadowed by a much longer account of a ‘Fenian Display’ at Kilkenny – during which each volunteer ‘carried a bludgeon, dressed with something “green,” on his shoulder’.64 On 9 August, the Post reported ‘the failure of the Atlantic cable and its severance from the Great Eastern’. The same page carried an extended account of ‘The Fenians in America’ – suitably emblematic of the limitations of Anglo-Saxon affinity and the rise of transatlantic Fenian terror.65 With the final successful reactivation of the Atlantic cable in July 1866, news of Fenian activities crisscrossed the Atlantic in newspaper columns headed with the words ‘By Telegraph’. In fact, the Fenian uprisings may have been the first transatlantic media event to be significantly shaped by the new technology. On 16 June 1866, a series of telegrams arrived (via a Canadian steamship) announcing ‘The Invasion of Canada’. A force of ‘500 to 2000 Fenians’ had ‘crossed the Niagara River’, where they immediately set to cutting local telegraph wires and destroying ‘a portion of the track of the Grand Trunk Railway’.66 On the eve of rebellion in Munster, the nationalist newspaper The Nation reported that the Knight of Kerry had addressed his tenants at Valentia on the follies of Fenianism. Expounding a ‘heavy argument to prove that no possible change in the existing order of things could be for the better’, Fitzgerald declared that Valentia had reaped the benefits of ‘one of the greatest undertakings that had ever been devised by science or carried out by the energetic perseverance of man – that is, the Atlantic Telegraph’. The commentator in The Nation was, however, sceptical about the benefits of the Cable to the local population. A wonderful undertaking indeed, but one that can scarcely have any appreciable effect on the condition of the people of Valentia, to say nothing of the people of Ireland. That wonderful instrument is worked by a very small staff of men, with a machine made up of a few small bits of zinc and copper. When national prosperity and national feeling are the subjects to be talked of, the Telegraph station at Valentia may safely be left out of the calculation. It is just about as important an establishment in that point of view as a coast-guard or police station.67

It is significant that a nationalist journalist should equate the telegraph with the disciplinary apparatus of the state at a time when ‘the whole country [was] filled with British troops’ and the ‘Government

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so much on the alert that a thousand men could not get together in any part of Ireland without their having immediate intelligence of it’.68 In February 1867, the New York newspapers received reports via the Cable of ‘the landing of two ship-loads of Fenians at Valentia’ and relayed a ‘wild rumour that the Fenians will attempt to cut the cable’. On 16 February, the New York Sun announced ‘that the land lines through Ireland connecting London with the Atlantic Cable’ had been severed. Meanwhile in New York the same news ‘excited new hopes in the Irish population in this city. Ever anxious to hear something from their native land, the exciting news flashed across the cable sent them into a state of almost uncontrollable excitement.’69 The Atlantic Cable had been intended as a channel for peaceful and profitable communication between the two great Anglo-Saxon nations of the Atlantic, but during the Munster rebellion it became a medium for disseminating rumours of war. Rendered passive or picturesque in most heroic accounts by triumphant Anglo-Saxon journalists and engineers, Valentia was now telling its own story. This brief moment in the history of the Cable, when news flowed from rebel Kerry to Fenian New York (though not to Dublin or Westminster), is indicative of the critiques and counter blows that always lurked below the surface of the triumphalist myth. On this one occasion at least, the force of Anglo-Saxon solidarity was briefly trumped by the rebellious spirit of transatlantic Fenian insurrection. British and American shareholders, investors and government supporters had little to gain by emphasising the cable as a bond between two rather querulous cultures of the Celtic coast. Yet even in representations complicit with the dominant narrative of ‘AngloSaxon’ empire, we have seen an archaic twilight of primitive folk culture mingled with machine dreams of a networked modernity, as the industrial is brought into dramatic collision with the maritime picturesque. By reading the Atlantic telegraph through the lens of the coastal cultures upon which it impacted, we already begin to detect a quiet critique of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ technocracy.

Notes 1. Robert Munro Black, The History of Electric Wires and Cables (London: Peter Peregrinus, 1983), 26. 2. Clare Pettitt, ‘Time Lag and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Transatlantic Imagination’, Victorian Studies 54 (2012): 620. 3. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, introduction to Armitage and Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, 2nd

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

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edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4–5. Similarly, Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor draw attention ‘to the ways in which ideas of crossing and connection have helped to rethink the ways that national identity has been formulated’. Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor (eds), Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006), 24–5. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 6, 12. Kevin Whelan, ‘The Green Atlantic: Radical Reciprocities between Ireland and America in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 232. Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd, introduction to O’Neill and Lloyd (eds), The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xvii. In a provocative essay, Noel Ignatiev explores ‘how the Catholic Irish, an oppressed race in Ireland, became part of an oppressing race in America’. See How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1995), 1. O’Neill and Lloyd, introduction, xix. John J. Mannion, Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada: A Study of Cultural Transfer and Adaptation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 18. The important role played by Irish women in the Newfoundland fisheries is discussed by Willeen G. Keough, ‘Unpacking the Discursive Irish Woman Immigrant in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Newfoundland’, Irish Studies Review 21 (2013): 62–4. For later developments, see Shannon Ryan, ‘The Newfoundland Salt Cod Trade in the Nineteenth Century’, in James Hiller and Peter Neary (eds), Newfoundland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Essays in Interpretation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 50. John J. Mannion, introduction to Mannion (ed.), The Peopling of Newfoundland: Essays in Historical Geography (St John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1977), 8; John Mannion, ‘Irish Merchants Abroad: The Newfoundland Experience, 1750–1850’, Newfoundland Studies 2 (1986): 127–88. Hans Rollmann, ‘Religious Enfranchisement and Roman Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland’, in Terrence Murphy and Cyril J. Byrne (eds), Religion and Identity: The Experience of Irish and Scottish Catholics in Atlantic Canada (St John’s: Jesperson Press, 1987), 34–52; John P. Greene, Between Starvation and Damnation: Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1999), 7. Donald Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Toronto: P. D. Meany, 1993), 258; Mannion, Irish Settlements, 15, 18; George Casey, ‘Irish

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14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Brian H. Murray Culture in Newfoundland’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 12 (1986): 208; Mannion, introduction, 5. Edmund Gosse, preface to D. W. Prowse, A History of Newfoundland: From the English, Colonial, and Foreign Records (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1896), ix. Ann Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, 1810–1888 (London: Faber, 2002), 29–59. P. H. Gosse, ‘Anecdotes and Reminiscences’, Cambridge University Library, MS Add.7017, 291, quoted in ibid. 57. Joseph Hatton and Moses Harvey, Newfoundland, the Oldest British Colony (London: Chapman and Hall, 1883), 434. Johanne Devlin Trew explores the continued contest between Irish, English and Canadian identities in ‘The Forgotten Irish? Contested Sites and Narratives of Nation in Newfoundland’, Ethnologies 27 (2005): 43–77. The classic study of the essentialising opposition between Saxon and Celt is L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, CT: University of Bridgeport, 1968). More recently, see Robert J. C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). Aidan O’Hara, ‘The Entire Island Is United?’, History Ireland 8 (2000): 18–21. Greene, Starvation and Damnation, 48. Gertrude E. Gunn, The Political History of Newfoundland, 1832–1864 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 182. Mike McCarthy, The Irish in Newfoundland, 1600–1900: Their Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs (St John’s: Creative Publishers, 1999), 174; Gunn, Political History, 51–73, 157–75; Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 447–8. Greene, Starvation and Damnation, 62–6. Gunn, Political History, 128–31. Greene, Starvation and Damnation, 221–5. Gunn, Political History, 123–40; Greene, Starvation and Damnation, 273–4. John Thomas Mullock, The Cathedral of St John’s Newfoundland (Dublin: James Duffy, 1856), 1–2. Colin Barr, ‘“Imperium in Imperio”: Irish Episcopal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century’, English Historical Review 123 (2008): 611–50. Mullock, Cathedral of St John’s, 31–3. This is a slight misquotation from Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, most likely borrowed from one of Daniel O’Connell’s speeches. In Moore’s original poem, the persona addresses an allegoric beloved rather than Ireland explicitly: ‘Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free, / First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea.’ For O’Connell’s use of the quotation, see Robert Hush, The Memoirs, Private and Political, of Daniel O’Connell, Esq. (London: W. Johnson, 1836), 497.

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30. Gunn, Political History, 141–75. 31. Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 129. 32. Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 19. 33. Walt Whitman, ‘Passage to India’, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 531. 34. Rudyard Kipling, The Seven Seas (New York: Appleton, 1896), 9–10. 35. W. H. Russell, The Atlantic Telegraph (1865; repr. Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1972). The book was based on Russell’s earlier dispatches to The Times, which the editor John Delane had praised as ‘a miracle of lucidity, which on such a subject [is] not easy’. John Black Atkins, The Life of Sir William Howard Russell (London: John Murray, 1911), 2:125–6. 36. W. H. Russell, A Memorial of the Marriage of H.R.H. Albert Prince of Wales and H.R.H. Alexandra Princess of Denmark (London: Day and Son, 1864). 37. Simon Cooke, ‘Robert Dudley and the Atlantic Telegraph’, The Victorian Web, 18 November 2013, (last accessed 5 January 2018). 38. Edward Brailsford Bright and Charles Bright, The Life Story of the Late Sir Charles Tilston Bright (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1899), 1:80. 39. Ibid. 88. 40. Ibid. 118–19. 41. Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 635–7. 42. Bright, Life Story, 1:103. 43. The full quotation reads: ‘The nearest parish to America, as the people of this remote part of the Kingdom of Kerry delight to designate the romantic little island of Valentia.’ ‘The Atlantic Telegraph’, Liverpool Daily Post, 8 August 1857, 3. 44. Ibid. 45. ‘The Transatlantic Cable’, Freeman’s Journal, 7 August 1857, 3–4. 46. In 1866, the minimum charge was £20 for a message of up to twenty words. By the end of the century, this had dropped to around a shilling per word. 47. Greene, Starvation and Damnation, 227; Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 464. 48. Quoted in Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 634. 49. ‘The Atlantic Cable Termini’, Freeman’s Journal, 23 August 1858, 3. 50. ‘The Atlantic Cable’, Kerry Evening Post, 7 August 1858, 2. Thanks to Peter Hession for his invaluable advice on Irish regional newspapers. 51. ‘The Transatlantic Cable’, Freeman’s Journal, 7 August 1857, 3–4. 52. Ibid.

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53. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 318–20. 54. Russell was born in Jobstown, near Dublin, in 1820 to a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother, but raised as an Anglican. Atkins, Life of Russell, 1:3–4, 17–20; Alan Hankinson, Man of Wars: William Howard Russell of ‘The Times’ (London: Heinemann, 1982), 16–27. 55. Russell, Atlantic Telegraph, 43. 56. Wilfrid Ward, The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897), 2:302–3. 57. ‘Atlantic Cable Termini’, 3. 58. Otis, Networking, 225–6. 59. O’Neill and Lloyd, introduction, xix; Amy Martin, ‘Fenian Fever: CircumAtlantic Insurgency and the Modern State’, in O’Neill and Lloyd (eds), Black and Green Atlantic, 20–32. 60. ‘The Insurrection in Kerry’, The Nation, 2 March 1867, 435. 61. Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Rose, The Fenians in England, 1865–1872 (London: John Calder, 1982), 33–94; John Newsinger, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1994), 40–65. For popular literary responses to Fenian activity, see Luke Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonisation, and Irish Culture (Galway: Arlen House, 2004), 61–76. 62. Jonathan Gantt, Irish Terrorism in the Atlantic Community, 1865–1922 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 47. 63. Martin, ‘Fenian Fever’, 21, 27–31. 64. ‘Fenian Display’, Kerry Evening Post, 22 July 1865, 3. 65. ‘The Atlantic Cable’ and ‘The Fenians in America’, Kerry Evening Post, 9 August 1865, 3. 66. ‘The Invasion of Canada’, The Nation, 16 June 1866, 675. 67. ‘Meeting at Valentia’, The Nation, 5 January 1867, 313. 68. Ibid. 69. ‘Reception of the Fenian News in America’, The Nation, 2 March 1867, 435. The article is quoting from the New York Sun.

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Chapter 9

Marine Bizarrerie: The Imaginative Biology of the Underwater Frontier Margaret Cohen

For hundreds of years, Western culture had almost no knowledge about the realm beneath the surface of the sea inimical to human physiology. Most information came from what people fished up or found on shore. Skilled mariners used sounding lines, as well, and assessed depth from the visual aspect of the water’s surface. Starting in the 1830s, however, in the most industrially developed societies of the globe, engineering innovations were pioneered which started to permit extended movement, observation and representation of conditions underwater.1 The emerging sciences of marine biology and oceanography also played a role in accessing ‘the bejewelled palaces which old Neptune has so long kept reluctantly under lock and key’.2 This lyrical language comes from a contemporary review of The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (1854), a how-to book on specimen collecting and aquarium maintenance by Philip Henry Gosse, inventor of the modern public aquarium. As the reviewer observed, the modern aquarium, both scientific tool and popular spectacle, was another medium for unveiling an environment at once at our doorstep, and sustaining life on land, yet simultaneously remote, and toxically impenetrable without technological assistance. The new technologically aided access to the undersea environment led to innovations and discoveries in science, engineering and warfare. From the first glimpses into Neptune’s bejewelled palace, the novel biology and conditions of this environment also inspired the arts. As biologists and engineers started to communicate knowledge about the depths, they revealed a realm belonging to our planet yet with physical properties, flora and fauna differing dramatically from known environments on land. They communicated this knowledge to general audiences through books, magazines, illustrations and popular spectacles,

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such as the aquarium. Publics were fascinated by this new planetary frontier. Before this access, writers and artists imagined it as a hell or horrific graveyard, whose fatal depths were scattered with wrecks and corpses, as well as sunken treasure.3 Fantasies of life in these depths ranged from terrible monsters to fantastic, alluring if trickster creatures such as mermaids and sealchies. Inspired by scientific and technical information about the world beneath the waves, creators in literature and the other arts then filtered this information through the traditions and idioms of their media and repertoire to create influential new imaginative and aesthetic motifs. This chapter describes one influential imaginative motif emerging in the 1860s in Great Britain and France, countries in the vanguard of imagining the underwater frontier in the arts as well as in its scientific and technological practice. This motif is what I call ‘marine bizarrerie’, which I take from a non-fictional work popularising marine biology by Victorian polymath Charles Kingsley, a minister and novelist, with a keen interest in contemporary biology. We can see Kingsley expressing this motif from the title of his non-fictional guide to coastal naturalism, a practice which was becoming increasingly popular in the 1840s and 1850s. In Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore (1855), Kingsley noted the ways in which marine organisms transgressed hitherto accepted categories and boundaries as part of their appeal. My chapter’s title comes from a term used by Kingsley to describe this transgression in the case of coral, provocatively seeming to straddle the boundaries of animal, plant and mineral, and, moreover, the distinction between the singular and the multiple. Who, he asked, ‘would have dreamed of the “bizarreries” which these very zoophytes present in their classification?’4 In Glaucus, Kingsley described this bizarrerie as part of the enticement of coastal naturalism, which he recommended as an alternative to more dissolute and enervating forms of leisure. Seven years later, Kingsley took creative inspiration from the strange and wonderful marine environment in his children’s novel, The WaterBabies (1862–3), ‘which has never been out of print since’ its first publication.5 The Water-Babies is the first fictional narrative, to my knowledge, with extensive sections set in an underwater environment, which, although not realistic, is constructed using knowledge afforded by the opening of the underwater frontier. And throughout this tale of a little chimney sweep transformed by fairies into a waterbaby and sent on a journey from a stream into the ocean, Kingsley uses marine bizarrerie to explore fantastic, whimsical, and at the same time culturally resonant alternatives to normative notions of

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gradual development and growth so important in Victorian fiction, as in other areas of Victorian culture and science. Kingsley presented marine bizarrerie, this chapter suggests, in a whimsical, exuberant mode. However, this emotional tone is only one way to conceive of underwater creatures’ transgressions of normative boundaries, which would captivate writers and artists for the next century, running at least through to surrealism, and films such as marine biologist and surrealist Jean Painlevé’s L’Hippocampe (The sea horse; 1934). I thus conclude with a darker version of such transgression, which emerges in a brief but powerful portrayal of an underwater reef also inspired by the opening of the underwater frontier. While in exile on the Channel Islands, Victor Hugo wrote Les Travailleurs de la mer (The toilers of the sea; 1866), where he delineated monstrous, unformed and menacing physical life. Such an emotional tone would be as important to the portrayal of bizarrerie as Kingsley’s whimsy across the next century. The sea’s association with life forms strange and monstrous by terrestrial terms predates marine biology and indeed reaches back to the enchantment of antiquity. Kingsley, indeed, offers an emblematic figure for the pre-modern imagination of such category-crossing in the myth he evokes through his title for his non-fictional handbook: Glaucus. In the version recounted by Ovid, Glaucus is a fisherman changed into a sea god. The change occurs when he sees a fish he has just caught come back to life and jump into the water after eating a strange herb on the beach. Tasting the herb himself, Glaucus is overcome by an overwhelming longing for the sea. The sea gods receive him as one of their own, after purifying him of his mortality. His metamorphosis includes adaptations that are both suited to the new environment and aesthetic echoes of it.6 In Glaucus’s words, speaking to Scylla, a land nymph with whom he is in love, after his change, he ‘beheld this beard, so green in its deep color, and I saw my flowing hair which now I sweep along the spacious seas, and my huge shoulders with their azure colored arms, and I observed my leg extremities hung tapering exactly perfect as a finny fish’.7 For Scylla, dwelling on land, Glaucus is bizarre in a way that is shocking, and she rejects him before she undergoes her own adaptation to the marine environment, due, according to Ovid, to the wrath of jealous Circe, in love with Glaucus herself.8 If Glaucus’s sea form is frightening to Scylla, Circe’s love for him suggests his attractiveness, offering an ambivalent portrayal of such strangeness. The ambivalence would continue into the modern imagination of the unknown depths when global ocean travel took off.9 The most famous expression in English literature is Ariel’s song

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in The Tempest describing a human’s ‘sea-change’ into ‘something rich and strange’ through drowning. As Steve Mentz writes, there is a ‘terrifying’, if alluring, quality to ‘Ariel’s description of a radical physical metamorphosis’, with its ‘glittering’ promise of submarine treasure.10 When Kingsley revitalised Glaucus in 1855, however, he imagined sea change as invigorating rather than fatal, when viewed as the acquisition of knowledge. Thanks to the take-off of marine biology, in Kingsley’s case, humans now found a path to commune with aquatic life without relinquishing their lives. He wrote of ‘standing on the shore at low tide’, longing ‘to walk on and in under the waves . . . and a solemn beauty and meaning has invested the old Greek fable of Glaucus the fisherman’.11 A century before the spread of leisure scuba, Glaucus fulfilled the longing to walk under the waves through Kingsley’s descriptions of specimens in vivid language, utilising literary and imaginative rhetoric, and harmonious chromolithographic illustrations. Kingsley’s fascination with literary techniques as a means to convey this environment is evident from the work’s epigraph from Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The passage chosen is the alluring vision of strange marine creatures, which leads the ancient mariner to offer a blessing and thus lift his curse: the silvery, perhaps bioluminescent ‘water snakes’, which ‘moved in tracks of shining white’.12 In The Water-Babies, Kingsley would dive beneath the waves inspired by science in a completely fictional, indeed, fantastical work. Two related but different aspects of aquatic biology solicited particularly rich imaginative elaboration: the strange forms of water life and the way in which they change state, or, to use the terms of Kingsley’s friend Gosse in The Aquarium: ‘the variety of phase, and . . . uncouthness of form, under which some of the meaner creatures are presented to us. And this is very specially the case with the inhabitants of the sea.’13 Gosse made these comments before describing a variety of marine worm, the Rough Syrinx, of which, he added, he had received a particularly fine specimen from Kingsley. The event that opens literary access to the underwater environment in Kingsley’s novel is grim: the moment when Tom, an abused little chimney sweep, falls into a stream when he seeks to escape the harsh conditions of his life. In a work of social realism, this event would be named: drowning. In The Water-Babies, it opens the path to cascading metamorphoses, starting with Tom’s transformation into what Kingsley dubs a water-baby, an amphibious creature with gills, which in Tom’s case resemble the ruffles of the collars found on babies’ dresses. To justify this shift of his tale into fantasy, Kingsley

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points his reader to the life cycles of marine biology. Kingsley writes, if ‘anyone says that it is too strange a transformation for a land-baby to turn into a water-baby, ask him if he ever heard of the transformation of Syllis, or the Distomas [varieties of marine worm], or the common jelly-fish’ (43). With this parallel, he reminds his readers of the resonance between the literary notion of metamorphosis reaching back to antiquity and its modern biological appropriation. This appropriation dates to the early modern era when the term came into circulation for ‘the process of transformation from an immature form to a different adult form that many insects and other invertebrates, and some vertebrates (e.g. frogs), undergo in the course of maturing’ (OED, s.v. ‘metamorphosis’). The first biological usage of metamorphosis cited by the OED is from the transactions of the Royal Society in 1665 to describe the silkworm’s life cycle.14 For biologists before the middle of the nineteenth century, the chief species characterised by metamorphosis were insects and plants. At this time, however, scientists were fascinated by the diversity of metamorphoses they discovered characterising aquatic life. Thus, Charles Darwin commented on the metamorphosis of underwater creatures in The Origin of Species. After introducing crustaceans among examples of the ‘wonderful changes of structure [that] can be effected during development’, Darwin continued: ‘Such changes, however, reach their acme in the so-called alternate generations of some of the lower animals.’ He then gave the example of the radically different stages in the life cycle of the jellyfish: It is, for instance, an astonishing fact that a delicate branching coralline, studded with polypi and attached to a submarine rock, should produce, first by budding and then by transverse division, a host of huge floating jelly-fishes; and that these should produce eggs, from which are hatched swimming animalcules, which attach themselves to rocks and become developed into branching corallines; and so on in an endless cycle.15

Now, Darwin would have been uncomfortable to think of ‘wonderful’ changes of structure as bearing an imaginative charge. Indeed, Ian Duncan emphasises Darwin’s struggle to wrest the highly figurative language of biology away from metaphor. He quotes Darwin: ‘the terms used by naturalists of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, &c.’ – we might add metamorphosis – ‘will cease to be metaphorical, and will have a plain signification’.16 For Darwin, Duncan points out, this effort to subdue the figurative dimension

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to language is an aspiration rather than a reality, and ‘Darwin must keep wrangling with the metaphoric substance of his argument’. Kingsley, in contrast, enjoyed the emotional, imaginative potential of the strange and wonderful features of marine flora and fauna, and used them to anchor his fantasy environment in an analogy to fact. Thus, throughout his initial establishment of Tom in the new underwater environment, Kingsley emphasises the analogy between biological metamorphoses and the events he describes. Along with the comparison to marine worms and jellyfish, the newly aquatic Tom resembles a waterborne insect sloughing off its skin, ‘as a caddis does when its case . . . is bored through, and away it goes on its back, paddling to the shore, there to split its skin, and fly away as a caperer’ (44). As Tom’s journey continues, the energy of marine metamorphosis pervades his adventures encountering the strange life of the underwater world. In these encounters, descriptions of uncouth forms, to reprise Gosse’s phrase, are particularly dramatic when they include ‘variety of phase’. While in the stream, Tom, for example, meets in the muddy shallows with ‘a very ugly dirty creature . . . which had six legs, and a big stomach, and a most ridiculous head with two great eyes and a face just like a donkey’s’ (52). However, as Tom is rudely taunting him, the creature tells him to leave him alone, as ‘I want to split’, and then starts to swell, puff and stretch out, ‘and, at last – crack, puff, bang – he opened all down his back, and then up to the top of his head. And out his inside came the most slender, elegant, soft creature’, which, when it sits in the warm sun, grows ‘strong and firm; the most lovely colours began to show on its body, blue and yellow and black, spots and bars and rings; out of its back rose four great wings of bright brown gauze; and its eyes grew so large that they filled all its head, and shone like ten thousand diamonds’ (52–3). Other appearances of new characters exhibit the strange appearance and tendency to transformation of marine life, even when they belong to the animal class of mammals, and thus in fact undergo a more progressive development and growth. This includes the animals introduced as ‘a great ball rolling over and over down the stream, seeming one moment of soft brown fur and the next of shining glass: and yet it was not a ball; for sometimes it broke up and streamed away in pieces, and then it joined again’ (58). This kinetic force, straddling basic distinctions like animal and mineral, soft and hard, single and plural, albeit in a different way from coral, will prove to be a cute-looking but mean mother river otter and her pups.17

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A story of spiritual regeneration would be one understanding of the outcome of Tom’s fantasy underwater journey, as he grows in a stream, swims to the Atlantic, and then finds mythical St Brandan’s isle, now the submerged home of the water-babies, to the Other-endof-Nowhere, and then to Peacepool and Mrs. Carey, before growing up and becoming a great man of science. This didactic interpretation is fostered by passages in the text encouraging children not to be mean, not to steal, to be brave, and to do their lessons, for example. However, Kingsley’s narrative is continuously disrupted by unexpected digressions and events, which do not further a tale of moral improvement, and which, moreover, Kingsley satirises at moments in the text. From Dorothy Coleman to Brian Alderson, critics point to Kingsley’s fondness for Rabelais as a model for such disruption.18 As Coleman writes of the Rabelaisian quality to Kingsley’s narrative, Tom ‘is let loose in the water-kingdom where the adventures are . . . very different from the possible or probable events in a novel’. She continues, ‘within this simple tale there are digressions, descriptions of surrounding nature, poetic excursions into the fauna and flora of the water-world, verse interludes in every chapter, erudition and great encyclopedic ramifications, and a nonchalant attitude on the part of the author.’19 Rabelais was, of course, an author key for Mikhail Bakhtin, to introduce his notion of a heteroglossic text, with abrupt transitions of genre and style, translating the anthropological spirit of carnival into literature. If we extend The Water-Babies’ inspiration by marine biology from its content to its form, we might find an analogy between the chaotic movement unleashed by life under the water and the poetics of Kingsley’s narrative. Coleman, indeed, gives evidence for such a parallel between Kingsley’s disruptions of narrative and underwater biology when she indicates that the text’s Rabelaisian qualities intensify after Tom is established as an amphibious creature.20 Uncouthness of form and variety of phase in the marine world are a fitting occasion, and perhaps an inspiration, for Kingsley’s iteration of Rabelais’s carnival. A good example of such abrupt and dramatic shifts would be the opening to chapter 3, after Tom has been transformed by the fairies into a water-baby. The chapter opens with an epigraph from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’: the moment just after the mariner’s blessing of the strange life of the sea cited in Kingsley’s Glaucus.21 From poetic epigraph, the tale picks up with a seemingly conventional declarative sentence about events – ‘Tom was now quite amphibious’ – before in the next sentence undoing the declaration with a question about the meaning of this word, enabling Kingsley to slide to

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a dictionary definition. However, Kingsley’s definition of amphibious is a cracked definition that starts to deviate from conventional usage in terms of both the etymology and the explanation. In the following paragraphs, he again narrates an event that would seem to set his narrative off in a mimetic direction, even if the mimesis is of a fantastic underwater world: ‘Tom was amphibious; and what is better still, he was clean.’ The narrative then questions the reality of the world it imagines (‘who can tell?’), before swerving to poetry, this time from Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’. Kingsley then jumps into nonsense after elevated romantic poetry to mock ‘the great fairy Science, who is likely to be queen of all the fairies for many a year to come’, before a paratactic list, yoking a semantic network of adjectives around the authority of reason. This list, like the dictionary definition, also goes astray and starts to morph, via the sound of words in its list, from ‘inductive, deductive’, to ‘seductive’, into a send-up of the use of Latinate words to summon authority. When Gillian Beer discusses the parallels between Victorian literature and science in Darwin’s Plots, she observes that ‘the concepts of metamorphosis and of transformation were organised . . . by that third, crucial, term . . . Development’. In Beer’s explanation, ‘metamorphosis and development offer two radical orders for narrative’, one which emphasises movement as well as dramatic alteration in appearance, and the other where change is accomplished across time. For Beer, ‘the tension between the two orders and the attempt to make them accord can be observed in the organisation of many Victorian fictions. Causal relations preoccupy novelists and biologists alike.’22 The notion of development in fictional prose is most obviously treated in the Bildungsroman, a favourite nineteenth-century narrative scaffolding. At the same time, Beer notes a literary counter-current. She writes: In light of this emphasis upon irreversible growth and succession, we can understand the force of one popular form of Victorian fantasy, that which disturbs the necessary sequence of growth. So, Alice in Wonderland grows small again, and then finds herself, and parts of herself, varying inconveniently in size according to which side of the mushroom she nibbles.23

Kingsley’s narrative, published two years before Alice in Wonderland, and perhaps shaping it as well, is certainly part of this family of texts. The marine inspiration of its carnival shows how science stimulates the imagination’s violation of everyday plausibility.

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We have seen Kingsley’s word for the kind of violation of norms characterising marine life in Glaucus as the Frenchified bizarrerie. Most likely he used the word for its foreign overtones to fortify the sense of outlandishness. But the move across the Channel was warranted: a number of Kingsley’s literary contemporaries identifying with the French-based movements of symbolism and decadence also were fascinated by the strange ways in which marine creatures transgressed categories. They framed this transgression, in contrast, with morality very different from Kingsley’s childhood tale – not that Kingsley would have been disconcerted by this use, given his love of Rabelais. In A Touch of Blossom, Alison Syme notes the affinity of strange underwater life with non-normative sexuality in both literature and art, in a lineage running from the symbolist Flaubert and Odilon Redon’s illustrations to his La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The temptation of Saint Antony) to the painter Sargent and, somewhat later, Proust. Thus, for example, she describes Flaubert’s description of the Chaldean sea god Oannes, at the conclusion to La Tentation de Saint Antoine, as evoking ‘an informe world where “hermaphroditic beasts” slumbered in dark waters, and “finger, fin and wing were confounded”’.24 The context for these references supports their connection with marine biology, for Flaubert mentions not just a god, but the biological phylum of molluscs: I have dwelt in the shapeless world, where slumbered hermaphrodite animals, under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the depths of gloomy waves – when the fingers, the fins, and the wings were confounded, and eyes without heads floated like molluscs amongst human-faced bulls and dog-footed serpents.25

When Syme qualifies Flaubert’s Oannes as informe, she is using a term of art from surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille to characterise the revivifying, if disconcerting, surrealist defiance of conceptual boundaries. For Bataille, the ‘formless’ refers to entities that transgress order and form, implicitly challenging the abstractions of philosophy. Bataille associates such a quality with invertebrate animals ‘like a spider or an earthworm’, prone, in his image, to be squashed.26 Such viscerally creepy images illustrate the informe’s associations with a darker emotional register than Kingsley’s exuberant abrupt shifts of narrative content and poetics. Bataille’s informe also does not exhibit the surprising processes of abrupt transformation, which are the other crucial element to Kingsley’s marine carnival along with

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bizarrerie of form. The informe frighteningly appears like arrested development, although in the case of Flaubert, the text is by no means static, morphing from one vision to another. Despite the pervasive nightmarish quality to these visions, the text concludes with a weird but also more energised instance of category transgression, in Saint Antony’s visions after resisting temptation. In the narrative’s conclusion, Flaubert echoes the eyes without heads from his earlier marine vision, however with an emotional valence of potentiality: ‘little globular bodies as large as pins’ heads, and garnished all round with eyelashes. A vibration agitates them.’ In a queer dissolution of boundaries, this vibration inspires Saint Antony to long in ecstasy to meld in physical, embodied, fashion with all manner of different organisms of the animal kingdom: ‘O bliss! bliss! I have seen the birth of life; I have seen the beginning of motion. . . . I feel a longing to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl. I would like to have wings, a tortoise-shell, a rind, to blow out smoke, to wear a trunk, to twist my body, to spread myself everywhere, to be in everything, to emanate with odours, to grow like plants, to flow like water, to vibrate like sound, to shine like light.’

For Antony, the essence of this wish is ‘“to be outlined on every form, to penetrate every atom, to descend to the very depths of matter – to be matter!”’27 With his oceanic longing to penetrate and become all matter, perhaps Antony identifies a fascination, indeed, eroticism, of the material, palpable in The Water-Babies as well. In a short article, which is a prelude to Darwin’s Plots, Beer emphasises the ‘sexual energy’ of the novel as well as its ‘sensuality . . . where everything is presented to us through physical experience’.28 Beer writes of Kingsley’s emphasis on ‘the prodigality of creation, the thronging lower world of the deep sea’, when Tom enters into the pelagic section of his journey. In The Water-Babies, Kingsley steeps Tom in the fecundity of matter epitomised by the teeming generative powers of the sea. This generative power is most often feminised, as in Tom’s visit to Mother Carey, who creates the world from her throne, or as is the case with the maternal powers who watch over the water-babies on their isle. A year before The Water-Babies, the French historian Jules Michelet would offer a related sensuous, and at times sexual fantasy of the sea in La Mer (The sea; 1861), a work drawing on the take-off of marine sciences to create a modern oceanic mytho-poetics. There, Michelet

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endows the seas with a vitality associated with love and generation. For Michelet, hunger, such a problem on earth, is not known in the sea, where even a drop of water is teeming with nourishing microorganisms, which leads Michelet to compare sea water, ‘légèrement blanchâtre et un peu visqueuse’ (‘whitish, viscous’), to milk.29 Subsequent writers and artists will queer this affirmative association of the teeming sea with love. One affirmative instance in the spirit of Kingsley’s marine carnival is the treatment of the sea horse by the marine biologist and surrealist filmmaker Jean Painlevé. For Painlevé, the sea horse is a creative rebellion against terrestrial strictures and the division of labour in human reproduction and childrearing, with the father gestating and giving birth to the fertilised eggs.30 In the film L’Hippocampe, Painlevé offers the first film documentation of this event, where the father, surrounded by the newly expelled babies, swims in murky water reminiscent of Michelet’s sea. Its life, however, upends Michelet’s gender binarism: the father harbours and protects egg and sperm, in contrast to Michelet’s fecund, feminine sea resembling mother’s milk. In a contemporary prose piece, Painlevé made this complication explicit, describing reproduction, where ‘the female places about two hundred eggs in a pouch beneath the male’s stomach, which he fertilises. . . . The male undergoes a real and apparently extremely painful delivery five weeks after the wedding.’ The prose piece concludes by giving the sea horses’ bizarrerie an affirmative reading as opening a world beyond gender norms, proffering this animal ‘to those who wish for a companion who would forgo the usual selfishness in order to share their pains as well as their joys’, and calling it a ‘symbol of tenacity [which] joins the most virile effort with the most maternal care’.31 The novelist Victor Hugo received a copy of Michelet’s La Mer when it was published in 1861, and noted its resonance with his imagination of the sea.32 These contacts include the fecundity of the life found in the underwater recesses of a deep ocean reef, as well as both writers’ fascination with the strange life found there. Like Kingsley, Michelet was attracted by its alluring metamorphoses as well as its bizarrerie. In the words of Lionel Gossman, ‘Michelet was irresistibly drawn to nature’s transvestite “fantasmagories,” and “créations fantastiques.”’33 In Travailleurs de la mer, in contrast, Hugo emphasises the horror of the informe. The plunge beneath the surface in this novel is brief compared to most of the novel in the tradition of sea adventure fiction, representing exploits at the water’s surface. Its undersea glimpses of terrifyingly aberrant forms and reproduction are memorable.

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We enter this environment through a coral labyrinth: ‘C’est une sorte de vaste madrépore sous-marin’ (It is a kind of vast submarine coral labyrinth).34 Coral is associated with beauty for many popularisers of naturalism – thus, Kingsley’s comments on it as ‘bizarrerie’ accompany lush descriptions citing Gosse on its beauty. For Hugo, in contrast, as the word labyrinth intimates, this setting harbours danger and monsters. He describes a reef where ‘les espèces monstrueuses . . . pullulent’ (species that are monstrous . . . propagate). (The Enlightenment notion of a monster is a creature that crosses categories; Hugo’s coinage of a monstrous species is hence paradoxical – an antithèse is the French rhetorical term – but in a terrifying way in contrast to the fantastical cross-species creations of Kingsley.) Similar to The WaterBabies, Hugo uses parataxis to evoke the confusion of species in the environment. However, the rhetorical effect is opposed. In contrast to Kingsley’s lists, which pull away from retrospective narration to the forward-moving adventure of language, lists here convey a chaotic and consuming breakdown of order. ‘On s’entre-dévore’ (They devour each other), Hugo writes, perhaps punning on the homonym of antre, a lair or den: ‘De vagues linéaments de gueules, d’antennes, de tentacules, de nageoires, d’ailerons, de mâchoires ouvertes, d’écailles, de griffes, de pinces, y flottent, y tremblent, y grossissent, s’y décomposent et s’y effacent dans la transparence sinistre’ (Vague lineaments of mouths, antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, claws, pincers, float, tremble, grow, decompose and fade in sinister transparency). When supernatural elements are invoked in this workshop of creation and destruction, it echoes yet reverses Kingsley’s tone. For Hugo, these unfinished sketches, ‘ébauches de la vie’ (rough drafts of life), are demonic, rather than associated with fairy magic. On the reef, forms, ‘presque fantômes, tout à fait démons, vaquent aux farouches occupations de l’ombre’ (part ghost, all demon, occupy themselves with the wild work of the shadows). Writing of Proust’s analogy between jellyfish and flowers, where Proust cites Michelet’s La Mer, Syme associates the marine informe with another anthropological concept for disturbing boundary transgression relevant for Hugo’s representation of marine bizarrerie. This concept is the notion of the abject, defined by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.35

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As we have seen with Kingsley, creatures that dwell on the edge of boundaries can also be engaging and delightful. Michelet, too, takes the occasion of corals to present marine animals exceeding our categories as particularly fascinating. Drawing on Darwin’s descriptions of corals, like Kingsley, Michelet writes: ‘Il est des êtres incertains, les corallines, par exemple, que les trois règnes se disputent. Elles tiennent de l’animal, elles tiennent du minéral; finalement elles viennent d’être adjugées aux végétaux’ (‘There are doubtful creatures, the Corallines, for instance, that are claimed by all the three kingdoms. They tend towards the animal, they tend towards the mineral, and, finally, are assigned to the vegetable’). For Michelet, the reason for such uncertainty is not frightening – perhaps, he speculates, it is to remind us, ‘si fiers et placés si haut, de la fraternité ternaire, du droit que l’humble minéral a de monter et s’animer, et de l’aspiration profonde qui est au sein de la Nature’ (‘so high placed and so haughty, of the right of even the humble mineral to rise into animation, and of the deep and eternal aspiration that lies buried, but busy, in the bosom of Nature’).36 For Hugo, in contrast, this undersea indeterminacy, while fecund, is nightmarish, and deadly for humans. It haunts the imagination, and it threatens his hero when he encounters all the disturbing qualities of undersea category transgression distilled to a single creature. At the centre of the undersea labyrinth is an octopus, like a ruler of the reef. The octopus is the epitome of the informe and the abject, with the power to devour, which leads Hugo to impute to the octopus a sinister intelligence as well. Among different aspects of its existence epitomising the informe, Hugo identifies its means of locomotion: ‘La pieuvre nage; elle marche aussi. Elle est un peu poisson, ce qui ne l’empêche pas d’être un peu reptile’ (The octopus swims; it walks too. It is part fish, which does not prevent it from being part reptile). Its peculiar empty yet vital materiality, where inside and outside are confounded, is abject: ‘Elle n’a pas d’os, elle n’a pas de sang, elle n’a pas de chair. Elle est flasque. Il n’y a rien dedans. C’est une peau. On peut retourner ses huit tentacules du dedans au dehors comme des doigts de gants’ (It has no bones, no blood, no flesh. It is flaccid. It has nothing inside. It is a skin. Its eight tentacles could be turned inside out like the fingers of gloves). Most horribly for Hugo, its orifice of ingestion and excretion are the same: ‘Elle a un seul orifice, au centre de son rayonnement. Cet hiatus unique, est-ce l’anus? est-ce la bouche? C’est les deux’ (It has a single orifice, in the centre of its radiation. This singular hole, is it the anus? is it the mouth? It’s both).37 Hugo skirts reproduction, but the question is implied once vital

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functions and orifices have been mentioned, adding to the octopus’s evil genius. On Hugo’s reef, as in Kingsley’s depiction of a journey from the stream to the sea, the underwater environment is a reservoir of life forms crossing categories and defying normative development. The stark contrast between Hugo’s abject, menacing underwater evil and Kingsley’s exuberant carnival shows the generative richness of marine bizarrerie, which will remain vital to surrealism and beyond. Dating to antiquity and rejuvenated by the take-off of marine biology as well as enhanced access to the depths, this motif, with its myriad iterations, illustrates how science can be fantasy’s muse. Even as new knowledge of the underwater environment demystifies monsters and myths, it expands the realm of the imagination.

Notes 1. On the science and technology involved in this access, see Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 2. The review, from the London Literary Gazette (15 July 1854), was republished in Philip Henry Gosse, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, 2nd edn (London: John Van Voorst, 1856), 653. 3. Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (‘Full fathom five thy father lies’) is perhaps the most famous example of the underwater graveyard. As late as 1797, Romantic poet Friedrich Schiller depicted the depths as hell inhabited by fearful natural creatures, in his ballad ‘The Diver’: There crowded, in union fearful and black, In a horrible mass entwined, The rock-fish, the ray with the thorny back, And the hammer-fish’s misshapen kind, And the shark, the hyena dread of the sea, With his angry teeth. Friedrich Schiller, ‘The Diver’, anonymous translation of 1902, 19thCentury German Stories, Virginia Commonwealth University, (last accessed 7 January 2018). 4. Charles Kingsley, Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1859), 37. 5. Brian Alderson, introduction to Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xiii. All references to Kingsley’s novel are to this edition, and are given in parentheses in the text.

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6. This change would, of course, not be the only possibility to imagine how people might inhabit the sea – it also would have been possible to impose terrestrial constraints on marine spaces. 7. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Brooks More (Boston: Cornhill Publishing, 1922), (last accessed 7 January 2018). 8. The Romantic scholar Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch notes that Plato compared ‘the unregenerate soul to the body of the sea-god Glaucus, broken and deformed by the pounding waves and encrusted with rock and shell’. The comparison, he continues, recurs in Proclus’s commentary on Plato’s Alcibiades. To cite Bernhardt-Kabisch: ‘The soul, Proclus says, in descending into generation and bodily existence, became encumbered with, and obscured by, all sorts of mundane “garments,” as Glaucus becomes covered with weeds, rocks, and shells.’ See ‘The Stone and the Shell: Wordsworth, Cataclysm, and the Myth of Glaucus’, Studies in Romanticism 23 (1984): 484. 9. The eighteenth-century rococo has a marine facet valuing whimsical and bizarre metamorphoses and forms, as Killian Quigley noted in ‘Robert Boyle, Picturesque Invisibility, and the Oceanic Sublime’, talk at ‘The Underwater Realm’, Stanford University, 18 May 2015. 10. Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (New York: Continuum, 2009), 8. 11. Kingsley, Glaucus, 134–5. 12. Ibid. n.p. 13. Gosse, The Aquarium, 221. 14. In the words of Gillian Beer, ‘metamorphosis turns out to be a concept as crucial to physiology, geology, or botany, as to myth. (Linnaeus published the Metamorphosis Plantarum in 1755 and Goethe’s Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu Erklären was published in 1790.)’ Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 104. 15. The Origin of Species, 1876, vol. 16 of The Works of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 402. 16. Ian Duncan, ‘George Eliot’s Science Fiction’, Representations 125 (2014): 15. 17. The impact of Kingsley’s zany sea changes on land-oriented narratives may be as rapid as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865). Kingsley described the mother otter peeping upright out of the water as ‘grinning like a Cheshire cat’. Alderson comments in a note: ‘Dodgson’s celebrated use of the Cheshire cat . . . may stem from his reading of WB, since the evanescent beast was not present in his first draft of the story written . . . in 1862–3.’ See Kingsley, Water-Babies, 59, 213. 18. Alderson, introduction, xv.

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19. Dorothy Coleman, ‘Rabelais and The Water Babies’, Modern Language Review 66 (1971): 516. 20. Ibid. 518. 21. The quotations from The Water-Babies in this paragraph are on pages 47 to 49 of the text. 22. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 104–5. 23. Ibid. 106. 24. Alison Syme, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 96. 25. Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St Antony; or, A Revelation of the Soul, anonymous translation (Chicago: Simon P. Magee, 1904), 108. In fact, hermaphroditism, biologically a feature of many marine creatures, was known in antiquity. Syme cites an eighteenth-century translation of Oppian, a Greek poet, who also wrote about fish, on eels, and suggests the thrill of such hermaphroditism for the moderns: ‘Strange the Formation of the Eely Race / That know no Sex, yet love the close Embrace.’ Ibid. 93. 26. Georges Bataille, ‘Formless’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31. 27. Flaubert, Temptation, 169–70. 28. Gillian Beer, ‘Kingsley: “pebbles on the shore”’, The Listener, 17 April 1975, 506. The Beer quotation in the following sentence is from this article as well (507). 29. Jules Michelet, La Mer [The sea], 2nd edn (Paris: Hachette, 1861), 111. The English text comes from M. J. Michelet, The Sea (La Mer), anonymous translation (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1861), 116. All further English translations are from this version and will be cited in the notes as Michelet, The Sea (Rudd and Carleton trans.). 30. As Steven Erickson has observed, ‘The Sea Horse (1934) shows a male seahorse giving birth, while other shorts depict hermaphroditic animals and asexual methods of reproduction; although subtly and gently expressed, there’s a queer sensibility at work.’ See ‘Animal Attraction’, Artforum, 20 April 2009, (last accessed 8 January 2018). 31. Jean Painlevé, ‘The Seahorse’, in Andy Masaki Bellows, Marina McDougall and Brigitte Berg (eds), Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), xiii. 32. According to Bernard Leuilliot, when Hugo received the book, he wrote, perhaps with some anxiety: ‘Nous nous côtoyons et je le constate avec gloire; cet automne, j’ai presque écrit un volume sur la mer, et voici que votre livre m’arrive.

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[. . .] il y a naturellement et nécessairement des points où mon étude touche votre travail (les fleuves de la mer, les faiseurs de monde). Je suis tout heureux de ces rencontres.’ Le ‘volume sur la mer’ se réduit à un paragraphe de la ‘Philosophie’ de Hugo (§ V, B, 472–82: ‘Regardez. Ceci est la mer . . .’), où l’on peut voir comme un avant-texte des Travailleurs. (‘I glory to see that we have rubbed shoulders; I almost wrote a book about the sea this autumn, and here your book arrives. . . . naturally and necessarily there are places where my study touches yours (the sea’s rivers, the makers of the world). I’m quite happy with these points of contact.’ The ‘book about the sea’ was reduced to a paragraph of Hugo’s ‘Philosophy’ (§ V, B, 472–82: ‘Look. This is the sea . . .’), which can be regarded as an avant-texte to Travailleurs.)

33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

‘Science/Fiction (Les Travailleurs de la mer)’, Groupe Hugo, Université Paris Diderot, 15 May 1993, (last accessed 8 January 2018). Translation is mine. Lionel Gossman, ‘Michelet and Natural History: The Alibi of Nature’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145 (2001): 313. Gossman continues: ‘He delights in the infinite mutability of forms and substances, and as he describes these his own prose seems to become weightless, to take on that quality of “lightness” that Italo Calvino considers one of the essential virtues of literature.’ Michelet and Kingsley are both drawing from science of the time, including the writings of Darwin. All quotations in this paragraph come from Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer [The toilers of the sea], ed. Yves Gohin (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Folio Classique, 1980), 244. Translations are mine. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. Michelet, La Mer, 139; Michelet, The Sea (Rudd and Carleton trans.), 140–1. Hugo, Travailleurs, 438.

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Chapter 10

On the Beach Valentine Cunningham

On the beach. The beach: location of holiday joy, of seaside pleasures, of time off in the sun at the coast – opened up for democratic leisure and pleasure by the Victorians, who invented the popular coastal holiday resort. It’s where people liked to be. ‘Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside,’ sang the music hall star Mark Sheridan on his recording of 1909, making a popular hit of John A. Glover-Kind’s 1907 expression of seaside desire: Everyone delights to spend their summer’s holiday Down beside the side of the silvery sea I’m no exception to the rule In fact, if I’d my way I’d reside by the side of the silvery sea. But when you’re just the common or garden Smith or Jones or Brown At bus’ness up in town You’ve got to settle down. You save up all the money you can till summer comes around Then away you go To a spot you know Where the cockle shells are found. Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside I do like to be beside the sea! I do like to stroll upon the Prom, Prom, Prom! Where the brass bands play: ‘Tiddely-om-pom-pom!’ So just let me be beside the seaside I’ll be beside myself with glee.

Glee on the beach. But being on the beach was also a metaphor for the miserably penniless, the forcefully unemployed, the jobless.

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This version of the beach was as a site of nautical misery, locale of forcefully retired, out-of-work, redundant sailors: the beached ones. OED beached, adj., sense 3: ‘Fig. Laid aside, discarded; unemployed (cf BEACH n. 3b)’: beach, n., sense 3b: ‘Naut. The shore, any part of the coastline off which a ship is at anchor; hence on the beach, ashore; retired. . . . By extension on the beach is used to mean “beachcombing, unemployed”; also (occas.) penniless, “broke”.’ The first OED illustration of which is from Jack London’s novel about the poor, The People of the Abyss (1903): ‘England is always crowded with sailormen on the beach.’1 Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic 1957 novel about civilisation, the human even, at an abject ruined end, is aptly titled On the Beach. The title-page of Shute’s novel had lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men (1925), including: In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.2

On the beach at Margate, Eliot felt beached as a person and as a poet. He struggled with The Waste Land in a deserted autumnal shelter beside the sea, where he was not quite getting over some sort of nervous breakdown. ‘“On Margate Sands”’, says an anguished voice in Part III of The Waste Land, ‘“I can connect / Nothing with nothing.”’3 The beach, the coastal margin, the edge of the land, could evidently be dementing as well as delightful. These edge-lands were utterly oxymoronic, their meanings uneasily contradictory. As a text, so to say, they offered contradictory meanings; they were decidedly aporetic. Decidedly undecidable. The sea-waterside pages of nature’s script, of the ‘book’ of nature as Victorians were fond of putting it, made most challengingly difficult reading matter. And so, reading the shore – being at the shore; on the shore – was commonly a matter of very mixed feelings. The consternations of little Paul Dombey, for instance, that deeply puzzled attender to the noise of the neighbouring waves. ‘The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?’ Little Dombey’s question was frequently on writers’ lips, and commonly inspired by anxiety in the face of enigmatic noise: the felt provocations of ‘What the Waves Were Always Saying’ (as the title of Dombey’s chapter 16 has it). ‘The deep / Moans round with many voices,’ says Tennyson’s old man Ulysses, in the poem ‘Ulysses’ (published 1842), afraid of being stuck where he is, afraid of being on the beach, and trying to hear the promise of further life and action in those many voices. He eggs himself on in anticipation of further

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heroic doings out on ‘the sounding furrows’.4 And it sounds a lot like wishful thinking, a downbeat whistling in the dark. In a primary meaning beach meant shingle (OED beach, n., sense 1: ‘the loose water-worn pebbles of the sea-shore; shingle’) and the shingle spoke; it had its voices: the ‘Shingle Voices’ that Philip Henry Gosse celebrated in his 1865 book A Year at the Shore. Gosse heard them as God’s awesome voice, the utterance of the Divine Creator’s power but also his wisdom. To be rhapsodised over in a devotee’s orgy of poetic celebration. On the ‘long shingle-beach’ at Ilfracombe, the waves drive in; and each in turn curls over its green head, and rushes up the sloping beach in a long-drawn sheet of the purest, whitest foam. The drifted snow is not more purely, spotlessly white than is that sheet of foaming water. How it seethes and sparkles! how it boils and bubbles! how it rings and hisses! The wind sings shrilly out of the driving cloud . . . its tones . . . drowned in the ceaseless rushing of the mighty waves upon the beach and the rattle of recoiling pebbles. Along the curvature of the shore the shrill hoarse voice runs, becoming softer and mellower as it recedes.5

What the shingle declares, for Gosse, is God’s economy, His beautiful creative management of the natural, as well as of the spiritual. It’s the voice of the Bible, and especially of the Book of Genesis, defence of whose veracity had driven Gosse into exile from the evolution-dominated scientific community he’d flourished in, settling for good at his beloved western coast, there to keep on tracing and publishing the wonders of the creativity of the God of Genesis.6 ‘And God made . . . and God saw that it was good’, again and again, in Genesis Chapter 1. The ‘Shingle Voices’ are God’s audible, readable text, words of God, affirming God’s biblical Word. Here, at the beach, is spiritual comfort, in a faith-affirming seaside rhetoricity, cheering epistemic encounters which pronounce religious comfort in the tide’s potent to-ing and fro-ing. The softening and mellowing of the incoming tide’s ‘shrill hoarse voice’ is apparently being taken as a kind of allegory of the way, in Gosse’s Plymouth Brethren theology, the divine anger against the fallen sinner is assuaged, ‘recedes’ no less, through the salvific death of Christ – that ‘receding’. What, by great contrast, Matthew Arnold hears the shingle speak, as he looks out of his hotel window at Dover in his poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), is a terribly saddening, unconsoling message: Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand,

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Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.7

A note of sadness, a music (a cadence) sounding ‘the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery’, which is ‘eternal’ because Sophocles heard it ‘long ago’ on the Aegean (allegedly, given that the Aegean is not a tidal sea, which Arnold has apparently forgotten), but more pointedly because it announces the fate of the ‘Sea of Faith’, of faith in the eternal claims of Christianity (ll. 15–18, 21). That Sea was once a full tide around the world; now the tide is receding, a recession announced by the Dover shingle’s voice: But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. (ll. 24–8)

No affirmation here of faith in God’s good and lovely created world, but quite the opposite – an epistemology of the retreat of God and Christian faith into negativity and absence. The consoling seaside signs of God’s presence, according to Gosse, the Shingle Voices, are heard and read as grating signs of his absence according to Arnold. God, Christianity, the one-time believer Matthew Arnold, even perhaps poetry itself, all on the beach. Arnold does, of course, try hard not to be utterly downcast at Dover. His Dover poem opens with the fair light of the moon; the vast cliffs are glimmering in the moonlight; the night-air is sweet; and he’s with his new wife, his love (he’s on his honeymoon, hence perhaps all the moon insistencies), looking into a future that’s all before them, he hopes, ‘like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new’. But this is only a seeming, because the world Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. (ll. 33–7)

Those confused alarms of armies clashing ignorantly by night come from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, where the Athenian soldiery were in deep trouble in a night-time battle. In a

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military stasis, a condition of alarm; confusion; ignorance; all darkling, in the dark. Military aporia.8 Gosse and Arnold, opposed readers of the shingle, are at odds because the shingle is so variously readable. Its voice is so selfcontradictory. Shingle, the essence of beach, comprises an utterly aporetic semiotic – all at once a fullness, as for Gosse, announcing loudly the presence of God, but also, as for Arnold, an emptiness, announcing equally loudly God’s absence. Such stymying aporia, and the mixed feelings it provokes, is, of course, the old trouble with beach texts, texts on and of the beach, as witness the effect of the single footprint imprinted ‘on the shore’ in Robinson Crusoe (1719). Robinson Crusoe: marooned sailor, stranded on his island – stranded: stuck on the strand (OED strand, n., sense 1.1.a: ‘The land bordering a sea . . . that part of shore which lies between the tide-marks; sometimes used vaguely for coast, shore’; strand, v., sense 1.1: ‘Trans. To drive or force aground on a shore, esp. on the sea-shore; also rarely of a river, to leave aground (by the ebbing of the tide)’; stranded, adj., sense 1a: ‘That has been driven ashore’) – was plunged ab initio into the terribly polarised emotionality of the beach: I walk’d about on the Shore, lifting up my Hands, and my whole Being, as I may say, wrapt up in the contemplation of my Deliverance, making a Thousand Gestures and Motions which I cannot describe, reflecting upon all my Comerades that were drown’d, and that there should not be one Soul sav’d but my self. . . . After I had solac’d my Mind with the comfortable Part of my Condition, I began to look round me to see what kind of Place I was in, and what was next to be done, and I soon found my Comforts abate, and that in a word I had a dreadful Deliverance: For I was wet, had no Clothes . . . nor any thing either to eat or drink . . . no Weapon either to hunt and kill any Creature for my Sustenance, or to defend my self . . . nothing about me but a Knife, a Tobacco-pipe, and a little Tobacco in a box . . . all my Provision, and this threw me into terrible Agonies of Mind, that for a while I run about like a Mad-man.9

And now the unsettlingly uncertain readability of the beach was present all over again. The footprint is indubitably there – Crusoe measures it with his own bare foot – and he feels it as having some awesome significance. It has a terrifying presence of some kind, but of what, exactly? A one-legged monster out of some travel-book’s luridly gothic imagining? Savages? The Devil? And it’s this very indeterminacy which provokes years of terror, scaring Crusoe into fortifying his abode like mad. It’s the beached interpreter’s terror enforced by a sense of the

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awful physical fragility, and so indeterminacy, of any imprint in the sand, the text of the beach, which, as Crusoe observes, ‘the first Surge of the Sea upon a high Wind would have defac’d entirely’.10 I would guess Crusoe’s footprint as a representative troubling text of the beach is never far from Michel Serres’s mind as he engages with the mysterious single foot in La Belle Noiseuse, the painting in Balzac’s 1845 story ‘Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu’ (The unknown masterpiece): ‘If La Belle Noiseuse is nautical, if the noise is sea noise, the foot printed there cannot there remain. It fluctuates, it does not remain, or if it remains, it does so by fluctuating. It is one, it isn’t one, unstable.’11 Sea noise, fluctuation, instability: shingle meanings. And ironically, perhaps, in the light of Gosse’s positive Genesis defendings at the seaside, Serres potently takes the watery fluctuations of Balzac’s painted foot as genetic for the waywardness of all narrative, all fictions, and does so, of course, in his own Book of Genesis, Genèse (1982; Genesis, 1995). They’re precariously in contest, and contested, then, these extremely mixed messages and feelings of the coast. Certainly, there are no certitudes at Dover. So, no change there, from the location’s old dubieties (think Dover’s mixed role in King Lear, where alleviation for Britain’s plight arrives in the shape of Cordelia’s French Army, but blind Gloucester attempts suicide). Nor much difference from how things would strike Dover’s visitors in the future. Modern Dover: the naturally edgy place for Auden and his chums, marginal gay men all, in which to enjoy then-illegal sex. A sexual pleasure resort for sexually edged-out ones, an enclosure of delight, full of sexually available soldiers as Auden’s 1937 poem ‘Dover’ has it, in ‘the made privacy of the bay’; but as that poem also puts it, the place where you kill time on an edge threatened by enemy aeroplanes from out there, making ‘England of minor importance’. The border at which travellers get out and away, but also where they return, often, beaten and tearful. This Dover is where only ‘some of these people are happy’.12 It was in a sexual encounter in a seaside resort that Auden suffered the terrible physical wound he writes about in his ‘Letter to a Wound’ in The Orators (1932), his anal fissure, which catastrophically ruined his sex life. Historically, Dover Arnold, and his Dover poem, are complexly in-between, on edge; stranded, we might say, between the suicidal despairs of Shakespeare’s Gloucester and the debatable pleasures of Auden and his chums.13 Momentously for English literature and in particular for the English novel, George Eliot was much more of Philip Henry Gosse’s inclination than Matthew Arnold’s. On 8 May 1856, the then Marian Evans and her partner George Henry Lewes set off for the seaside, for Ilfracombe

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in North Devon (they would be in Ilfracombe until 26 June, when they travelled over to Tenby in South Wales). It was for a holiday, but of the new, and already popular, mid-Victorian sort: exploring the beaches, their rock pools and so on, for the little creatures, zoophytes, anemones, molluscs, annelids, to take back home to London to keep in their own ‘marine vivarium’ or ‘aquatic vivarium’ – what had come to be called an ‘aquarium’. Both of them keen would-be natural historians, they were armed with hammers and chisels for loosening anemones from rock pools, as well as with large jars they’d bought specially in London for keeping the creatures in (terribly cumbersome railway baggage, these, and they proved the wrong kind). They also had a heavy metal microscope for examining the tiny beings they would collect. And their lodgings rapidly filled up with dishes and pans and jars (a friendly cleric helped them get the right sort). Their days were spent outside hunting creatures on the shore-line – ‘bagging’ them, as George Henry Lewes put it: this was Small Game hunting – and their evenings in inspecting the seaside trove through their microscope, with Lewes writing up their natural-historical explorations and captures for Blackwood’s Magazine. These pieces were collected in his book Sea-side Studies at Ilfracombe, Tenby, the Scilly Isles, and Jersey (1858). In the evenings at Ilfracombe the pair also read Philip Henry Gosse’s A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (1853). In fact, they had travelled with Gosse in their hand. They had headed for Ilfracombe because Gosse had enthused over the shore-line treasures there. Tenby was also one of Gosse’s good places; his Tenby: A Sea-side Holiday (1854) was said to have defined Tenby as ‘“the prince of places for a naturalist”’.14 In Ilfracombe they’d looked out a lodging house recommended by Gosse in his Devonshire Coast, turning it down because it was too ‘shabby’ and badly furnished. Their whole interest in making this trip had been inspired by Gosse. As with hordes of other visitors to the coast, all those Gosse readers armed with their jars and chisels. The intention of Evans and Lewes and masses of other inlanders to fill an aquarium back home had been fuelled by Gosse’s best-seller The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (1854). Aquarium was, the OED tells us, Gosse’s coinage and was first used in that title of his. (According also to the OED, the word vivarium died away after 1653, to be revived by Gosse in his 1849 book The Ocean.) From Gosse, Evans and Lewes had learned the kit, the tools, the methods of collecting; where to find the zoophytes and how to preserve them. All England was said to have been Gosse-ified, and so were Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes.15

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The attractiveness, the attractions, of Philip Henry Gosse’s seaside books, what made them so appealing, making him a cult figure, a kind of Pied Piper of Natural History, is obvious. Book after book came out, lavishly illustrated, packed with Gosse’s wonderful realistic drawings of enlarged creatures, many in colour, all accompanied by loving descriptions, exciting and enticing detail about anemones and the rest of the sea-shore’s minute inhabitants. Prose poem after prose poem registering the beauty, the ‘glory’, the ‘wonder’, the ‘exquisite beauty’ (he keeps saying it, untiringly) of nature’s miniature seaside. The wonders of the shore, wondrously pictured and described by Gosse – as advertised by the Devonshire clergyman and writer Charles Kingsley in his Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore (1855), shouting up the pleasures and knowledge to be gained in ordinary persons’ natural history, advising how to fill and maintain a ‘jar’ of specimens, but all on the back of Gosse’s work. Kingsley repeats at great length Gosse’s accounts, in A Naturalist’s Rambles and The Aquarium, of sea creatures, and how to make ‘artificial sea-water’ to keep them in, and construct a ‘naturalist’s dredge’ for gathering them, and so forth. It was a shameless fanzine rip-off of Gosse’s books, but creditably promoting their ‘brilliant power of word-painting, combined with deep and earnest religious feeling, which makes them as morally valuable as they are intellectually interesting’, and mightily helping on the national cult of natural historian Gosse.16 The wonders of the shore indeed: presented and represented in and through the aweing Gosse-ified poeticity so admiringly celebrated in Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda (1988), that rewrite of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, featuring the character Oscar’s father, Dr Hemmings, whose Hennacombe Rambles are full, and unexpectedly to people who’ve dismissed him as a pious dry stick, of ‘trembling and tender appreciation of . . . the tiniest sea-creatures’ – a poetry of ‘maidenhair and a ribbon of spawn’.17 An amazement and shock to the novel’s worldly Wardley-Fish. At the seaside, as advertised by Gosse and his chorus Charles Kingsley, were such plentiful sources of pleasure – aesthetic, intellectual, religious delightings – for you too if you’d only head for the sea-shore and follow Gosse’s pattern, his instructions. (Polemical – always the preacher-man – Gosse ran classes in London and then at the seaside for paying customers, the citizenry eager for naturalhistorical trips to the coast.) And to crown it all, here at the seaside, at the coastal edge, was an easy, practical way of experiencing divine design, order, economy – the wonderful works of the Creator, the God of Genesis, under fire on every side by the new evolutionary sciences which denied Genesis and seemed to be edging God out

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of the natural world. In his Sea-side Pleasures (1853), Gosse characteristically extols the assorted pleasurable insights you could get at Ilfracombe from carefully detaching the zoophyte Lepralia from its rock-pool base, taking it away in a glass container filled with salt-water and examining it carefully, with its ‘beautiful polypes protruded and expanded’, through your microscope: If you want to get an insight into the structure and functions of any of these minute animals, especially such as are so transparent that all the offices of life are discernible in active operation; or if you want to be charmed with the perception of beauty, or delighted with new and singular adaptations of means to ends; or if you desire to see vitality under some of its most unusual and yet most interesting phases; or if you would have emotions of adoring wonder excited, and the tribute of praise elicited to that Holy Being who made all things for his own glory – then take such a zoophyte as this, fresh from his clear tide-pool.18

It’s a typically enticing invitation to touch and own and perceive: an enthused and enthusing epistemology of the natural, the truly scientific, of course, but combined with practically religious realisations (that word adaptations from the evolutionary rhetoric that so perturbed Gosse, adapted here to Gosse’s Christianised purposes, is no accident). The lovely small things, the creatures of the God of small things, are freely available to you if you bother to go and find out, have the ears to hear and the eyes – the microscopeassisted eyes – to see. Potent natural-historical truths and delights are thus open to the amateur natural historian, the ordinary person. Here was a democracy of the subject (the potency of the smallest, apparently most insignificant creature) for the democratic observing subject. Everyman, and Everywoman, could with minimal effort come to know at first hand the loveliness, the beauty, the poeticity of the edge, of the nearly edged-out. As declared, exposed, aestheticised, with utterly telling aptness, we might think, by this marginalised man of so many edges: a keen member of the tiny sect of Christians known as the Plymouth Brethren, ending up as the leading elder of a Brethren assembly in South Devon; renowned metropolitan scientist whose famous researches were all based in the coastlines of the far-west of Britain; a core Victorian scientist self-extruded from the scientific centre over the new evolutionary theories, an intellectual exile publicly affirmed by his Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (1857), that zany attempt to reconcile geology and Genesis (though he went on being consulted about sea-shore

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matters by Darwin); a Second Adventist waiting in vain for the second advent of Christ, too. Keen marginalisings horribly capped by Gosse’s emotional marooning upon the death of his beloved wife Emily, the Christian poet and tract-writer, whose agonised drawnout ‘last days on earth’, that margin, he dwelt on in the extremely pained A Memorial of the Last Days on Earth of Emily Gosse (1857). (She died of breast cancer on 10 February of that year, after enduring excruciating surgery without anaesthetic.) A man on the beach, in so many ways.19 His was a proliferating set of marginal conditions and effects which brought him uncannily close, mutatis mutandis, socially, intellectually and spiritually, to Marian Evans – unmetropolitan Midlands intellectual; edged out from her orthodox evangelical Christianity through her encounters with German Christian liberalism and humanism, whose main works, D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, she translated (1845 and 1854), but still deeply religiously minded; on the margins of intellectual, political and social respectability – mixed up with the radical world of John Chapman and the Westminster Review, which she effectively edited, and living openly in an out-of-wedlock partnership with Lewes; feeling her way to doing novels about socially, provincially, ordinary culture and people, the grand world’s marginalised ones, a democratic fiction about ordinariness. And, arrestingly, it was on this Gosse-ified natural-historical holiday that she hit on the model for her fiction to be: she would be a novelist as natural historian. It was an ambition, a perception, taking shape as she pursued from day to day the Gosse-ified natural historian’s way. In the evenings at Ilfracombe, among the jars and pans of collected creatures, she worked on the essay that became a sort of programme note for her fiction to come, ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (finished 5 June, and posted from Ilfracombe to Chapman for the Westminster Review to be published in July 1856, just days after her return to London).20 The essay was a laudatory review of the sociological analyses of Wilhelm von Riehl, the German new-sociologist, realised and presented as being an exemplary species of natural-historical investigation. Revelatory for Germany, it was a socio-analytical take that England needed: If any man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, especially of the small shopkeepers, artisans

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and peasantry . . . and if, after all this study, he would give us the result of his observations in a book well-nourished with specific facts, his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer.21

And Marian Evans would be that man: George Eliot, the Novelist as Natural Historian; on the Gosse scientific model, an all-Gosse-ified fiction – observing human specimens, collecting them, examining them as it were microscopically; reporting, documenting (and aestheticising); granting the people analysed a knowable life; preserving them in the novel as vivarium/aquarium. A fictional practice of human life-giving and preservation. Towards the end of her long ‘Natural History of German Life’ essay, Evans writes of how social policy must be based not ‘simply on abstract social science, but on the Natural History of social bodies’. Natural history was becoming for her the best model of a truth-telling practice, for writing – novels as well as other social studies – as a scientifically useful and revelatory instrument. You must, she writes, apply the right model ‘to establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that your particular society of zoophytes, molluscs, and echinoderms may feel themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skins’.22 Your private vivarium – your novel as vivarium. The novelist on the George Eliot model will not be like Lydgate in her Middlemarch (1872), the ambitious physiologist anxious to get to the bottom of personality in a society but whose failure is not unconnected with his having no time for natural history. And certainly not like the highand-mighty Mrs Transome in Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), who hardly notices the Dissenting minister Rufus Lyon when she enters a room, ‘not from studied haughtiness, but from sheer mental inability to consider him – as a person ignorant of natural history is unable to consider a fresh-water polype otherwise than as a sort of animated weed, certainly not fit for table’.23 And as Marian lies in bed ‘one morning’ at Tenby, urged on by George Henry Lewes’s pressings to put down the fictions she has talked about earlier at Berlin, she thinks out her first published story, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’.24 On 6 November 1856, it was sent to John Blackwood, who published it anonymously in his Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857, and then appeared, with two others, as Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), by ‘George Eliot’. The devoted ‘man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth’, the studious ‘natural-historical’ observer of the Riehl essay, was on her way. The interest, and the push, of George Henry Lewes in his 1858 Sea-side Studies at Ilfracombe are not at all surprising. He’s

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pleasingly, almost uxoriously, sharing his partner Marian Evans’s amateur natural-historical life at Ilfracombe and Tenby; writing out, and illustrating, with some satisfaction, his own microscopic discoveries in his Tenby articles, and so cashing in on the Gosse market, living in the glow, like Kingsley, of this national natural-historical hero by endorsing at some length Gosse’s work, his books, his help and advice, as well as stressing in Gosse-ified tones and terms how the microscope endorses reverence as well as knowledge. A key Lewes note is how infinity is manifested in the small creatures under the microscope. There was all of meaning in these small vessels. There was, for George Eliot, the eloquence of a pebble – as relished in her review of Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect (in the Westminster Review of January 1851): the fullness of positive meanings Gosse found in the shingle, or sea-shells, in his A Year at the Shore. And hereabouts one can’t help thinking of that Gosse-like sea-shell in Tennyson’s Maud (1855), encountered on a Brittany beach (by, it so happens, a self-exiled killer), ‘With delicate spire and whorl / How exquisitely minute / A miracle of design’ (or for the matter of the fetchingly lovely small thing, of the host of beautiful little girls Charles Tennyson Turner accumulated in his poems about the seaside).25 But, of course, for all the triumphalism, the ontological and aesthetic pay-off of the naturalhistorical hunt (that fictional Small Game hunting) and its writing, a pay-off George Eliot’s fiction manifests in abundance, certain doubts – the inevitable doubts hovering over all shore-line pursuits and meanings – will not go away. The life of a vivarium, an aquarium, is only a part-life, an artificial, unnatural existence. And the novel as vivarium is of course fiction: an art that is, as George Eliot nicely put it, the closest thing to life, but still not life. And the whole Gosse-ified natural-historical business, its rhetoric, its aesthetic, its divinity, is haunted by the extreme stripping of English and Welsh coasts of their marine life: loving devastation by amateurs such as Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes; commercialised devastation by professionals collecting for the large trade in sea creatures that soon built up. A lamentable emptying and loss for which Philip Henry Gosse took responsibility, a complete wiping out of anemones and antheas and such. Aggrieved, Gosse reported that in two years from 1854 to 1856 there had occurred a complete denuding of Tenby’s once-rich seaside ‘garden’, so that now, he declared in a Good Words article in 1861, you ‘come home with an empty jar and an aching heart’.26 One might even call it a sort of Arnoldian distress.

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Notes 1. See Jack London, The People of the Abyss (New York: Macmillan, 1903), 126. 2. T. S. Eliot, epigraph to Nevil Shute, On the Beach (London: Heinemann, 1957). 3. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Annotated Waste Land, with T. S. Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 66, ll. 300–3. 4. See Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chapters 8 and 18; Alfred Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’, in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 138–45. 5. Philip Henry Gosse, A Year at the Shore: With Thirty-Six Illustrations by the Author . . . (London: Alexander Strahan, 1865), 1–2. 6. The Gosse story is told with staunch sympathy and understanding by Ann Thwaite in her Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), and of course in the less sympathetic and occasionally rather too slanted Father and Son (1907), by Gosse’s man-of-letters son Edmund. 7. Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1965), pp. 239–43, ll. 9–14. Further references to this poem will appear by line number in the body of the text. 8. See my discussion of Arnold ‘on the beach’, and Victorian watery texts, but especially Arnold’s, in Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 216–19, 367–9. 9. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 40. 10. Ibid. 131. 11. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 50. 12. W. H. Auden, ‘Dover’, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 222–3. 13. For Auden’s Dover, see its role in the ‘Seedy Margins’ chapter of my British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 373–6. 14. Philip Henry Gosse, Tenby: A Sea-side Holiday (London: John Van Voorst, 1856), 2. 15. See Marian Evans, ‘Recollections of Ilfracombe 1856’, and Marian Evans to Charles Bray, 6 June 1856, in Letters of George Eliot, ed. Gordon S. Haight (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 2:240, 252; Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 197–207.

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16. Charles Kingsley, Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1855), 160. 17. Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 195. 18. Philip Henry Gosse, Sea-side Pleasures (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1853), 29–31. 19. The three-fold advertisement in the September 1856 Tenby Observer wonderfully encapsulates Gosse’s character and seaside modus: Four Lectures on Biblical Adventist Prophecy by Mr P. H. Gosse FRS at the Assembly rooms, Tenby, on Lord’s Day Evenings at Six o’clock; 5 Works on Marine Natural History by Philip Henry Gosse FRS beginning with Tenby: A Sea-Side Holiday. With 24 Plates, coloured, plus Emily Gosse’s Abraham and His children, or Parental Duties Illustrated by Scriptural Examples.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

And under the heading ‘Marine Natural History’: ‘Mr P. H. Gosse FRS begs to announce that he has opened a Class of Ladies and Gentlemen, for the out-of-door study of Marine Natural History. Cambrian House, St Julian Street, September 4, 1856.’ Advertisement reproduced in Thwaite, Glimpses, 188. See Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996), 158. [George Eliot], ‘The Natural History of German Life’, review of Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft and Land und Leute, by W. H. von Riehl, Westminster Review, July 1856, 56; reprinted in George Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 112. Ibid. 131. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 161; George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, ed. Lynda Mugglestone (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 364. George Eliot, ‘How I Came to Write Fiction’, in Haight, George Eliot, 206–7. ‘Maud: A Monodrama’, in Tennyson, p. 566, ll. 54–6. See my discussion of the Victorian aesthetic of the small thing in Victorian Poetry Now, chapter 5. Philip Henry Gosse quoted in Thwaite, Glimpses, 239.

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Chapter 11

Developing Fluid: Precision, Vagueness and Gustave Le Gray’s Photographic Beachscapes Matthew P. M. Kerr

The scores of sea views were all so apparently alike that they appeared to be all done by the same photographer. Henry Peach Robinson

In Thoughts about Art (1862), the artist and essayist Philip Hamerton speculates on ‘the relation between photography and painting’. He compares ‘a wonderful little picture by Holman Hunt’, Fairlight Downs, Sunlight on the Sea – first exhibited in 1858 – with a marine photograph by Gustave Le Gray (Figures 11.1, 11.2). The focus of Hunt’s picture is the brilliant seascape running along the top of the frame. The sea reflects the sun so brightly that it is almost white in places, and the glare distorts the outlines of the steamers and sailing ships dotted along it. In his analysis of Le Gray’s photograph, Hamerton also draws attention to the effect of the sunlight on the water. He observes that ‘the blaze of light upon the sea is given with perfect fidelity’; however, in his eyes this effect has been achieved at a cost: In order to get this, and the light on the edges of the clouds, all else has been sacrificed – the shaded sides of the clouds, in nature of a dazzling grey, brighter than white paper, are positively black in the photograph, and the pale splendour of the sunlit sea – except where it flashes light – is heavy and impenetrable darkness.

‘It is’, Hamerton submits, ‘one of the peculiar misfortunes of the photograph that it is not capable of giving two truths at once.’1 While Hamerton frames his conclusion generally, the particular substance of his discussion – and of Le Gray’s marine photographs – associates the need for ‘two truths’ with seas and skies, and with the coastline.

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Figure 11.1 William Holman Hunt, Fairlight Downs, Sunlight on the Sea (c. 1858). Oil on panel, 28 x 31 cm. Public domain.

Figure 11.2 Gustave Le Gray, The Sun at Its Zenith – Ocean (1856). Albumen print from a collodion-on-glass negative, 32.4 x 41.4 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Although Hamerton could not have known at the time, he was not strictly correct in his appraisal of Le Gray’s pictures. In fact, the startling light effects of Le Gray’s marine scenes of the mid- to late 1850s were the result of a doctoring process in which two negatives – one containing the sea and shore, and the other the sky – were joined to make one image. (The technique is called combination or composition printing.2) Le Gray’s reputation had been built on such effects. However, the terms of Hamerton’s critique also suggest another way in which the ‘truth’ of Le Gray’s coastal photographs might be multiplied or divided. Where Hunt’s picture is named by Hamerton, Le Gray’s photograph is not. Details are discussed (‘Towards the sides of the photograph, the distinction between sea and sky is wholly lost in one uniform shade of dark brown, extending from top to bottom’), but the subject of the picture as a whole is not described, nor is its title given. As a result, Hamerton’s claims might apply equally well to a single photograph or to a whole genre of image – indeed, Hamerton finds that sea photographs by E. Colliau, such as La Jetée (The jetty, c. 1861), suffer the same problem ‘toward the edges’, where they become ‘dark’. It is, Hamerton concludes, ‘a common defect in sea-views’.3 The question that preoccupies not only Hamerton’s criticisms of Le Gray’s coastal views, but also contemporary discussions of coastal photography more generally, is what might be involved in photographing a subject for which particularity, solidity and detail are less self-evidently suitable as criteria of aesthetic success. Is the fine-grained particularity of the collodion negatives used by Le Gray to photograph waves as they break the best way of capturing a subject emblematic (then as now) of imprecision? Can an instantaneous photograph adequately represent the sea when, according to Ruskin, marine sublimity is dependent on monotony, in which one instant might be indistinguishable from the next? Geoffrey Batchen has argued that, beginning with its British inventor Henry Fox Talbot, photography embodied a hope that ‘transience and fixity’ might be brought into conjunction.4 In this chapter, I shall argue that Le Gray’s photographs of coasts, which offer unprecedentedly detailed views that are at the same time indistinct in both time and space, appeal to the viewer through a combination of both precision and vagueness. Le Gray’s photographs depict places where the solid particularity of shore-lines meets the more fluid forms of sea and sky, but his formal procedures also bring exactness into contact with abstraction. If, that is, Le Gray’s pictures respond in part to the specific challenges posed by a particular subject matter, they also reflect larger uncertainties about the importance of precision to photographic truth.

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Transient Effects When Le Gray’s coastal photographs were first exhibited mid-century, it was in the context of enthusiastic debates about photography’s value, a number of which crystallised around the question of how best to photograph the sea and the sky from the coast. Like the coastline itself, sea-and-sky photographs (including those of Le Gray) seemed to bring opposites into contact: transience and fixity, truth and artifice, magic and mundanity, momentariness and perpetuity, daylight and moonlight, the visible and the invisible, life and death, but most of all precision and vagueness. If the edges of sea-views are commonly indistinct, as Hamerton suggested, this is so not just because (as I shall show) sea waves and cloud formations posed particular challenges to the photographer, but also because the difficulty of distinguishing one wave from another or one cloud from another puts particular pressure on photography, a form increasingly beset in the mid-1850s by debates about the relative importance of detail and sharpness. From the start, a foundational hope for photography was that it would offer what Talbot called ‘mute testimony’.5 However, the belief that photography could or should exhibit corroborating power, as Jennifer Tucker has recently observed, at ‘the level of legal evidence’ or scientific experimentation reached its zenith around the time Le Gray displayed his sea-views.6 ‘Photographs’, Carol Armstrong proposes, ‘manifestly suggest that to photograph is to collect directly from Nature.’ And yet, what it might mean to collect what Frederic T. Cott called in 1854 nature’s ‘transient effects’ was less definite – perhaps necessarily.7 Part of what characterises photography as a medium, then, is the way it rhetorically insists upon what Roland Barthes famously called its own ‘evidential force’. More recently, critics have rightly become sceptical of the view that photographs can be objective, even if they supply (in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s knowing phrase) an ‘image of objectivity’.8 Daniel Novak’s persuasive account emphasises the ways in which photography’s rhetorical claims to truth may in fact depend upon forms of ‘abstraction and exchange, figuration and metaphor’. Novak’s argument is that nineteenth-century ‘technologies of realism’ such as the realist novel and the photograph both ‘rendered [their] subject[s] at once dismembered and disembodied’, and offered techniques for their reconstitution into viable wholes – an extension of Lindsay Smith’s earlier caution that photography ought not to be considered ‘a “record” of phenomena or events’ because, in

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place of seamless plenitude, photographs are always in various ways fragmentary, adumbrated or partial.9 Thus, in a nicely paradoxical arrangement, selection, mechanical reproduction, combination printing and other forms of fragmentation are not, in Novak’s view, anomalous to photography’s rhetoric of specificity and authenticity, but foundational to it. As he puts it, while ‘photography and realism seemed to introduce a greater challenge to formal totality, they also offered new techniques of totalisation – the means by which to turn these fragments into the picture perfect scenes of convincing and compelling fictions’.10 Discussions of photography in the mid-nineteenth century invited viewers to reflect on the ways in which artifice and the appearance of fidelity might be interdependent. Indeed, the interconnection of these two contrasting aspects of photography is often apparent in the reactions of individual commentators. ‘The grand claim of photography’, Jabez Hughes argued in 1865, ‘is, that it is true.’11 Hughes’s italics are designed to camouflage the extent to which being ‘true’ was in fact a complex proposition for photography. It is unclear whether Hughes means to refer to permanent or transient, empirical or transcendental forms of truth – and of course the rhetorical force of his statement is rooted in the fact that he declines to disentangle these possibilities. Indeed, the way in which the best photographs entwine them was at the heart of the Journal of the Photographic Society’s hopes for photography as an art form: There is no question that the irresistible tendency of modern art is towards imitation: not typical boughs, mere horns and clothes-pegs; not typical clouds, mere bolsters and feather-beds; not typical robes, mere moonshine and fuss; not typical faces, mere straight noses and dummy eyes; not typical leaves, mere green ciphers, – but twisted snake branches, radiant domes and feathered ripples, as of angels’ wings, flowing waves, and windings of silk and satin, and faces all alight with warring and volcanic passions. We want Dutch truth allied to Italian poetry, and this, more than this, Photography promises, nay, gives.12

Whether critics believed that photography made good on this promise or not, it is at least clear that photography pressed critics to question what types of truth (two or ‘more’) the pictorial arts could or should provide, and prompted them repeatedly to wonder whether these types were incompatible, or could be combined. Prior to the exhibition of Le Gray’s photographs in 1856, some attempts to photograph both the sea and the sky had been made, though no photograph had successfully captured both subjects. This

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was because, as John Herschel had demonstrated in 1834, silver salts were most sensitive to blue light. In consequence, the sky required a far shorter exposure time than open seas or fields, which resulted in one portion of the frame tending to be over or underexposed.13 John Dillwyn Llewelyn, for example, exhibited four of what he called ‘motion studies’, which included sea studies such as A Wave Breaking at Three Cliffs Bay, at the Photographic Exhibition in London in 1854, and again at the Paris International Exhibition the following year, where he was awarded a silver medal.14 He worked on first paper and then glass negatives starting in 1853, and managed to create sharp images at high speed by restricting the aperture of his camera.15 The sea in Llewelyn’s most famous image, Caswell Bay (1853), is remarkably clear, but, like other photographic seascapes prior to Le Gray, it shows no clouds (Figure 11.3). Dominique de Font-Réaulx suggests that

Figure 11.3 John Dillwyn Llewelyn, Caswell Bay – 1853 – Waves Breaking. Salted paper print from a collodion-on-glass negative, 15.5 x 16 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Louis-Cyrus Macaire and Jean-Victor Macaire-Warnod were the first to photograph waves in 1851; Navire quittant le port du Havre (Ship leaving the port of Le Havre, 1851), the photograph Font-Réaulx has in mind, shows ripples in the harbour at Le Havre as a ship steams out to sea (Figure 11.4). As with Llewelyn’s motion studies, Macaire and Macaire-Warnod’s image also does not show clouds. Instead, the sky is irregularly mottled, a flaw photographers sometimes tried to correct by painting directly on to the negative: ‘Blackness in the negative produced an all-white sky, an effect preferred by many early amateurs to the unpredictable patterns created by overexposure and solarisation.’16

Figure 11.4 Louis-Cyrus Macaire and Jean-Victor Macaire-Warnod, Navire quittant le port du Havre (Ship leaving the port of Le Havre, 1851). Daguerrotyped postcard, 15 x 11 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Later, it became possible to photograph clouds, and a new subgenre of cloud photographs became popular in the mid-1850s. The first treasurer of the Photographic Society, Alfred Rosling, for example, exhibited his ‘cloud portraits’ at the start of 1855.17 In subsequent years, the procedures for obtaining accurate cloud pictures to accompany landscapes became a common theme, and the advice offered ranged from combination printing, to custom metal shutter flaps, to a torn sheet of paper that could be ‘placed inside the camera in a groove’ and then removed part way through the exposure.18 Nonetheless, according to the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society in 1890, ‘The successful photographing of clouds is so entirely different from the ordinary run of photographic work that very few photographers succeed in producing even passing results.’19 Regardless of the technical challenges, opinion was crucially divided over the question of whether precision was a desirable quality for marine photographs to possess. For Elizabeth Eastlake, who was sceptical about the aesthetic merits of accuracy in photographs, images of ‘the sky with its shifting clouds, and the sea with its heaving waves’ were ‘last, and finest, and most interesting of all’ precisely because they defied precision.20 Prior to Eastlake’s defence of obscurity, others had argued for the artistic value of blurred outlines in photography, most notably William J. Newton who, in a paper delivered at the first meeting of the Photographic Society in February 1853, advanced the opinion that ‘a greater breadth of effect and consequently a picture more suggestive of the true character of nature’ might be realised in a picture taken slightly out of focus.21 For others, however, the aim of capturing sharp images of the sea and sky was of such significance that it could be thought of as an emblem of photography’s larger objectives. The realisation of these objectives was also formulated in terms of photographic truth: When good sized pictures (say 12 to 14 inches by 10) can be taken instantaneously on collodion, so that the motion of foliage, rising smoke, passing clouds, moving water, the wave rising, or the ripple sparkling, and the motions of figures or animals are all overcome in the lightninglike rapidity of the process, then that one will be the only true process by which landscape objects can be satisfactorily obtained.22

Le Gray’s photographs were even larger, at around 12 by 16 inches.23 In the years surrounding the 1856 exhibition, then, the debate over whether sea and sky photographs ought or ought not to be

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pictorially muzzy had not been settled. It was not clear how the ‘fugitive beauties’ of these blurry pictures should be interpreted: could indistinctness be a term of approbation, or did it mark an absence that needed filling in? In 1858, Thomas Sutton, the editor of Photographic Notes, praised two images of the sea taken on Jersey sent to the magazine by Robert Howlett. Sutton viewed them as ‘an advance in sea-scape photography’ for the way in which they exchanged ‘the blank space which has hitherto stood for the restless sea’ for ‘welldefined ripples and breakers’.24 Sutton began the decade insisting on the artistic pre-eminence of slower, less precise calotype for ‘views’ which, he said in 1854, constituted the ‘true poetry of photography’.25 But by 1857 he had changed his mind, arguing instead for the clarity of wet collodion. ‘For skies and distance, moving water, &c.,’ he asked, ‘where is the negative process that can be compared to it?’26 Nonetheless, in spite of the quality of Howlett’s photographs, Sutton finds flaws: ‘The exposure was not sufficiently instantaneous and . . . the waves . . . had time to change their form a little; so that their outlines are a little blurred and softened. Perhaps a cap with a trigger might have remedied this evil.’ Sutton also notes a ‘want of detail in the shadows of the rocks’ which ‘look more like patches of black sticking plaster, than anything else’. This, he thinks, ‘might perhaps be remedied by taking two negatives, one for the sea, the other for the rocks’.27 Like Llewelyn’s coastal pictures, Howlett’s skies were empty, but he could perhaps have used another negative to fill this blank space, as Le Gray had done two years earlier. Filling in the blanks was, however, a riskier proposition than Sutton admits. In 1859, the year after Hamerton exhibited his photographs, the Brighton photographer Samuel Fry caused a stir with his own combination-printed coastal views, including Sea and Clouds, A Break in the Clouds (Instantaneous) and A Heavy Sea, at Brighton.28 The first reviews were positive, but incredulous: ‘The waves are not quite so successful as to sharpness as some we have seen; but the light and shade are very fine and the atmospheric distance, with the sky, water, and, we might almost say, wind, combine together to make a very effective picture.’29 If to some Fry’s combinations were fortuitous, to others the pictures seemed at once over-stuffed with detail, and excessively painterly: An instantaneous picture of ‘A Heavy Sea, at Brighton,’ by Samuel Fry, is one that is certain to attract attention, notwithstanding it is hung so high that it is impossible to examine it closely. In it we see a steamer forcing her way through waves which wash across her deck, and in the

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foreground an immense wave is rolling in like a wall. The print has a peculiar appearance, very much as if it were a copy of a painting, and if we did not feel confident that Mr. Fry is incapable of attempting to deceive, we should assume that, if it is not a copy of a painting, it is very much enlarged from the original negative. The colour also is less agreeable than it might have been.30

The reviewer of Fry’s pictures in the Photographic News in 1860 writes in the context of the debates over precision I have outlined, and remains suspended between the apprehension of Fry’s photograph as deception or as imitation. He or she is absorbed by the picture, but at the same time strives to keep it at a distance: its colours are strange; if it is an imitation, it may be imitating a further imitation (a painting). This is an instructive moment since, held in suspense, we catch a glimpse of the reviewer in the act of forming the heterogeneous elements of A Heavy Sea, at Brighton into an aesthetic whole. In this case, the reviewer’s effort to view Fry’s photograph as a photograph depends upon his or her response to the image as narrative. The subjects of the photograph (the steamer, the waves) appear to be in motion, and are described using progressive verbs (‘forcing’, ‘rolling’). In this sense the image (like the activities of its subjects) is properly unfinished. The feeling, however, that what the viewer witnesses here is a narrative in progress sits uneasily with the claim that the photograph captures a particular instant with precision, that it is ‘instantaneous’. As it turned out, Mr Fry did not attempt to deceive viewers by keeping the details of his combination printing process secret; a few months later, the Photographic News printed the transcript of a lecture he had given to the South London Photographic Society on ‘Instantaneous Photography and Composition Printing’.31 The lecture concentrates on the details of how combination photographs could be achieved, and in the process sidesteps the controversy surrounding the practice; three years later, the Photographic News still recollected, however, that the ‘legitimacy’ of Fry’s methods had been ‘the subject of considerable discussion’.32 The argument over combination photography’s legitimacy had already been initiated by Oscar Gustave Rejlander, whose combination photographs included The Two Ways of Life (1857), which was composed from thirty-two different negatives.33 Rejlander’s photographs became popular at around the same time as Le Gray’s marine views. The debate reached a climax, however, in a series of combative articles published by Henry Peach Robinson and A. H. Wall in 1860. Wall felt that what

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he called ‘the patchwork quilt school of photography’ can tend to ‘[mistake] deception for imitation’.34 Robinson made combination photographs himself, and vigorously defended the practice in the British Journal of Photography and in public lectures. Robinson’s argument picks up earlier discussions of photography’s truthfulness: it was, he claimed, possible to ‘get nearer to the truth for certain subjects with several negatives than with one’.35

Truth and Exactness In December 1856, Le Gray’s coastal photographs were shown for the first time in the fourth annual exhibition of the Photographic Society in London. The exhibition contained 1,009 photographs from a variety of photographers, including some of what would go on to be considered Le Gray’s most significant pictures. A number of these, such as Bateaux quittant le port du Havre (Boats leaving the port of Le Havre), depicted rigged ships in port. However, other photographs did not focus upon the human-centred drama of harbours or coasts. For example, Lighthouse and Jetty, Le Havre is nearly empty of figures – only a few silhouettes are visible on the jetty itself, and two more distinguishable near the waterline on the left (Figure 11.5). Instead, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the thresholds – the shore-line and horizon – that divide the picture. These are the places where Le Gray’s technical facility was most severely tested, since correctly exposing the darker jetty, the sky and the rippled surface of the sea, with the waves breaking along the shore individually and distinctly, required a virtuosic display of Le Gray’s skill with high-speed glass negatives. Indeed, the horizon marks the seam along which Le Gray’s two negatives would be joined. At the exhibition, Le Gray’s photographs caused an immediate sensation; the periodicals were nearly unanimous in their praise. The Morning Chronicle called the pictures ‘the chef-d’œuvre of photographic art’. The Journal of the Photographic Society wrote: ‘We stop with astonishment before Mr. Le Gray’s “Sea and Sky”, the most successful seizure of water and cloud yet attempted.’ According to a reviewer for the Leeds Mercury, ‘Le Gray’s glorious “Sky and Sea,” is justly considered the finest photographic picture yet produced.’36 Photographic Notes agreed that the photograph’s tag line, ‘the finest photograph yet produced’, was ‘no exaggeration’. Indeed, the reviewer hoped in addition that ‘the Sea and Sky piece of Le Gray’ would ‘do immense good by stimulating

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Figure 11.5 Gustave Le Gray, Lighthouse and Jetty, Le Havre (1857). Albumen silver print, 31 x 40.3 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

photographers to aim at a higher class of subjects than field gates, stiff trees, and stuck-up country mansions’.37 Photography is, in Eastlake’s phrase, ‘the sworn witness of everything presented to her view’, even if what she sees is nothing but ‘cheap, prompt, and correct facts’.38 But, if Le Gray’s pictures appeared to show their subject without exaggeration, they also had the potential to suggest something ‘good’ – something ‘higher’ – something, perhaps, less strictly tangible, or even less straightforwardly visible, than gates, trees or mansions. And discussions of Le Gray’s work habitually recur to the vexed possibility that appreciating his photography might require – or enable – a leap from visible fact to invisible abstraction. In this vein, a number of other journals claimed to have discovered in Le Gray’s pictures a conjunction of accuracy and photographic artistry. This combination was sometimes couched in Keatsian terms: ‘it is only necessary to be truthful to be at once poetical’ (The Athenaeum); ‘truthfulness and beauty beyond praise’ (Caledonian Mercury).39 If for Keats truth and beauty are in certain respects equivalent, for the Caledonian Mercury the conjunction seems more like a coincidence (‘truth and beauty’). If what we see

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in these reviews is a hope that something transcendently true might emerge from photography’s capacity for exactness, a degree of hesitancy about the precise nature of this conjunction is typical of what Lindsay Smith calls mid-nineteenth-century photography’s ‘interplay between the imitative and the symbolic’.40 Part of the frisson offered by photographs involves the perception that the photographer must have been in the place the photograph depicts at the instant that is depicted – what Barthes calls the photograph’s sense that ‘the thing has been there’.41 If, as Michel Frizot has said, ‘photographs conveyed the impression of being in the presence of their subjects’, they did so in part by way of the implied presence of the photographer. Photographic technology demands that some individual be there-then to make the exposure. And to some of those who appreciated them, Le Gray’s coastal photographs were appealing for these reasons: ‘Sailing ships in motion, the swell of the sea, clouds floating in the air, and the sun itself with its long rays of glory are all reproduced and fixed, instantly and simultaneously, with no sleight of hand, no tricks.’42 However, at other times (and to other viewers) Le Gray’s photographs appeared weirdly insubstantial, even timeless. The ‘crowning falsity’ of these pictures, according to Hamerton, is that the sun appears so dark that it is likely to be confused with the moon: ‘I have observed that simple people always take such photographs for moonlights, and I suspect that they are extensively sold as such. The truth is that they do approach nearer to the character of moonshine.’ (According to the Illustrated London News of February 1857, Le Gray’s Brig by Moonlight was displayed for sale ‘in every shop window’.)43 Of course, the question of whether moonlight upon water produces, as Hamerton says, a ‘diffused light outside the reflection or glitter, which is lost in these photographs’ is complicated by the knowledge that the moon or sun we see in Le Gray’s print may not be the one reflected in the sea to begin with.44 Moreover, if moon and sun have proven interchangeable in this instance, the particular picture Hamerton has in mind has itself become something less than an impression transcribed from nature, and can be included instead in the generic and commercial category moonlight: ‘A painting or picture of a moonlit scene’ (OED, sense 2a). In any case, the watery and changeable light of the moon has in these images become impossible to distinguish from the clean lines and sharp reflections of daytime. These photos, then, appeared at once to be both instantaneous and strangely suspended between times, records of a particular moment and images of perpetual twilight.

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Separately, conflicting reviews may have something to tell us about the way Le Gray’s photographs appealed (or not) to the tastes of individual reviewers; taken together, they suggest the extent to which Le Gray’s photographs prompted and drew together broader debates about the relationship between precision and aesthetic truth. The same sea-views seemed to some to set a new standard for exactitude, while others detected nothing but distortion. For example, The Standard praised Le Gray’s marine pieces for their ‘truth and exactness’ (hinting that these qualities might not be identical),45 while the Journal of the Photographic Society, in its review of the same exhibition, found them to be more confused: ‘Water our art altogether misses, turning it either to congealed mud or to mere chaos or nonentity.’46 Whether the photographic sea resembles mud or a less tangible ‘nonentity’, the sequence of proffered alternatives (‘either . . . or . . . or’) suggests an inconclusive pattern of thought to fit the picture’s indistinctness. In an 1859 review, The Athenaeum synthesised the two perspectives, maintaining, ‘the tent stakes remain in the same holes, water and cloud with all their fugitive beauties are still as unfixed and chameleon-like as ever, and promise for some time at least to be to the hooded men what quicksilver was to the alchemysts [sic].’47 Le Gray’s photographs’ capacity for simultaneous originality and typicality was also at issue in the reviews. Consider Ernest Lacan’s comments on the Paris International Exhibition of 1857. The ‘astonishing Le Gray seascapes’ were ‘clearly new’, he writes, ‘different from all others before’. In these photographs, ‘ships with no sail keep on sailing . . . a surging sea, floating clouds, and the sun itself with its glorious rays are reproduced.’48 Lacan’s response does not make it clear whether he views Le Gray’s seascapes as beautiful fabrications, exact reproductions, or transcriptions of the transcendental – images of the sun, or the noumenal ‘sun itself’ – nor whether we might discern conceptual traffic between these kinds of image. If these photographs are ‘clearly new’, we might wish to ask whether this is because they are imaginative inventions or reproductions of exceptional accuracy. In 1858, Thomas Sutton, the editor of Photographic Notes, claimed that ‘the ripple on the surface of the sea, and the waves running up the sides of rocks and breaking over them, or tumbling in heavy rollers on the beach, are sights as familiar to us as those of cabs and omnibuses to our London readers’.49 But what Lacan’s review makes clear is that he believes that Le Gray’s photographs show something that had formerly been invisible: ‘Mister Le Gray’s marines are beyond comparison; they are completely unlike anything done before.’50

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Does Lacan believe that these exceptional qualities render Le Gray’s pictures more or less mimetic? According to the Journal of the Photographic Society, in its review of the 1856 exhibition, photography’s distinctive characteristic was its special power of transforming mundane views into transcendent ones: ‘What in painting is a tiresome pedantry of observation, becomes in photography an inexhaustible delight, a study, and a piece of instruction. What we cared not for in nature, becomes a joy and wonder in the photographic picture.’51 If photography could claim to ‘annihilate itself as a medium, to become the thing itself’,52 hopes for the medium’s apotheosis into a modern form of art appeared to require a second transformation, facilitated by the photograph, of the thing into the thing as in itself it really is. In this sense, photography promised not only to depict the natural world, but also to reveal aspects of nature invisible to the naked eye. This feeling, that the photograph could make the invisible visible, informed the first impressions of many of Le Gray’s first viewers. This reaction was in part a response to Le Gray’s subject matter and style. But it was given special intensity by the fact that Le Gray’s photographs seemed to exceed the capabilities of photographic technology at the time. ‘The difficulties in the way of seizing by means of photography a scene like this are enormous,’ the Daily News wrote. ‘The effect must be produced instantaneously. Every reflection on the water of the bright sun just bursting through the clouds is magical.’53 As I have said, the fact that Le Gray’s photographs were combination prints was not widely known, and was not the source of the technical amazement that affected Le Gray’s first audiences. Rather, getting a clear image of either waves or clouds was extraordinary enough to warrant enthusiastic notice. Such accomplishments were not only amazing, but also destabilising: in the context of photographic technology’s rapid development in the hands of amateur experimenters after the lifting of Talbot’s patents in 1851,54 categories of authenticity and contrivance were themselves in flux. To many nineteenthcentury viewers, it was not at all clear that images such as Le Gray’s could exist at all. (At least one critic is still sceptical that negatives the size of Le Gray’s prints could have been produced in the 1850s when the minimum exposure time for large negatives was around thirty seconds.)55 As a consequence additional to the one described above, Le Gray’s pictures seemed to make visible something that should not have been seeable with a camera. While it is true that Le Gray’s photographs were found to be convincing and compelling as fictions, it is less clear that the sort of

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Dickensian realism of fragments described by Novak is useful as an explanatory principle, at least when considering the responses of Le Gray’s first audience. This is partly because, as I have said, this audience did not know that Le Gray’s pictures were combination prints, but also because Le Gray’s pictorial inclination was not toward clutter but rather toward sparseness, or what he called ‘sacrifice’. What Le Gray’s pictures do not seem to require of their viewers is the suturing together of their disparate details. Instead, Le Gray’s most compositionally spare photographs are his most distinctive productions: Le Gray devised what he called ‘the “law” of sacrifice’ to describe ‘the unsuitability of the [silver salt] negative for both kinds of light – blue and green’. While Hamerton had suggested that Le Gray’s photographs had had to make unnecessary sacrifices in pursuit of their effects, Le Gray made an aesthetic virtue of such sacrifices: ‘in my opinion’, he wrote, ‘the artistic beauty of a photographic print consists nearly always in the sacrifice of certain details. . . . by varying the focus, the exposure time, the artist can make the most of one part or sacrifice another to produce powerful effects of light and shadow, or he can work for extreme softness or suavity . . . depending on how he feels.’56 In the sea-views, the principle of sacrifice applies to subject matter as well as technique. Although he was known for his technically innovative work in other areas, before 1856 Le Gray had not photographed coastal scenery. Starting in 1849, he had run a studio in Paris; he took portraits (including one of Napoleon III in 1852), and some landscapes. Prior to his coastal views, Le Gray’s most important work had been documentary: a tour on behalf of the Commission for Historical Monuments in 1851, photographing buildings slated for restoration. He took over six hundred negatives using the dry wax paper process he had invented. In 1855, however, his focus began to shift. During this period, Le Gray took a series of pictures of trees in the forest of Fontainebleau. The way in which light reflects on foliage had proven to be an obstacle for other photographers, a problem Le Gray solved by placing his camera outside of the forest and shooting in. These experiments enabled him to develop the techniques he would later use to photograph the coast.57 The forest pictures also represented a significant shift in terms of subject matter, one relevant to the later beachscapes. They do not document specific individuals or places. In these photographs, contextual information like place, time of year and even time of day are difficult to determine. The photographs of the coast press this principle further. The change in visual focus alters the photograph’s

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relationship to time. While a photograph such as Le Gray’s Bateaux quittant Le Havre (1856–7), for example, documents an event (albeit a prototypical one), Lighthouse and Jetty (see Figure 11.5), taken at the same place, is doubly focused, presenting at once an instantaneous impression – Claude Monet’s Jetty at Le Havre (1868) duplicates the scene very closely – and a permanent arrangement.58 This effect is intensified as Le Gray sacrifices detail. Le Gray had trained as a painter, and these pictures are composed in a painterly fashion, designed to draw the eye along the two conspicuous and nearly parallel thresholds of tideline and horizon. If this picture captures a particular moment, it is also an emblem of permanence within flux. The same might be said of the majority of Le Gray’s seascapes, however, since, if they reproduce particular seascapes, they also reproduce each other. While the ‘celebrated sea and cloud view’ was particularly impressive to London audiences, the terms with which this admiration was expressed indicate the kind of double vision that is characteristic of Le Gray’s photographs.59 Recall for a moment that ‘Sea and Sky’ was the image particularly admired by the journals. Or ‘Sky and Sea’, as the Leeds Mercury has it. Or ‘the sea and clouds by Le Gray’, according to the Morning Chronicle. The Caledonian Mercury refers to ‘sea-pieces and cloud scenery’ (which it calls ‘masterpieces of the art’), suggesting in the process that more than one work might be thought of as ‘Sea and Sky’. Photographic Notes is, however, fairly clear that there is but one ‘glorious Sea and Sky piece by Le Gray’. Either way, there is now no extant photograph by Le Gray called ‘Sea and Sky’ (or any of the variants suggested above), though of course there are several likely candidates. It may be that titles shifted between exhibitions, and accuracy when it comes to this sort of thing is not a strong suit of nineteenth-century periodical reviews. Extant catalogues from the period list ‘Sea and Sky’, but this does not harm the point that reviewers at the time were imprecise, nor does it aid the present-day critic in identifying the picture.60 Regardless, it is telling that, in or out of inverted commas, capitalised or not, plural or singular, the seemingly impossible way in which Le Gray’s photos ‘grasp’ at once these two subjects is what was important. More than that, the title ‘Sea and Sky’, which is in practice both a way of specifying and a generalisation – a genre, a subject, or one picture in particular: the sea and the sky, or this sea and this sky? – mimics the double-take invited by the pictures themselves, in which ‘shapes and images of the most transitory nature – such as the

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rippling sea or the vapour – are caught by the artist, and made, as it were, permanent’.61 Eugenia Parry Janis implies that Le Gray’s Mediterranean with Mount Agde is the particular photograph these reviews had in mind; it is clear, though, that particularity is only part of what viewers found fascinating about the image.62 Nevertheless, Mediterranean with Mount Agde provides an especially useful example since Le Gray’s sleight of hand is more than usually conspicuous here (Figure 11.6). Along the horizon in this image, it is clear that it has been doctored, showing where the two images of sky and sea were overlaid. Moreover, this image is one in a series of at least seven in which seas and skies have been switched and rearranged. In her article on photography, Eastlake had declared one of the primary virtues of photography to be its truth to nature: ‘Mere broad light and shade, with the correctness of general forms and absence of all convention, which are the beautiful conditions of photography.’ Le Gray’s experiments are, however, at least in part experiments in conventionality. They work at creating a novel photographic convention and were successful to the extent that, by the time of his 1859 exhibition in Paris, La Lumière

Figure 11.6 Gustave Le Gray, Mediterranean with Mount Agde (1857). Albumen silver print from two glass negatives, 31.8 x 40.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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considered his ‘beautiful marines’ to be ‘works too well known to need describing’.63 At the same time, these pictures work at suiting themselves to pre-established convention, and appealed to viewers at least in part because they appeared to blend natural and supernatural, coastal and celestial. It was still unclear in the 1850s whether photography would turn out primarily to be a scientific tool – something like a microscope – or a kind of preservative: a ‘medium more retentive than “fleeting memory”’, as the Leeds Mercury said.64 However, if Le Gray’s coastal photos promised objectivity, that putative impartiality, at other times, led critics implicitly to compare Le Gray’s productions to those of an altogether more mystical kind of medium. The Daily News argued that these photographs showed that ‘artists are getting a greater mastery over the extremely sensitive materials which the resources of chemistry have laid open to them’, and commented on their ‘magical’ quality as noted above. The Caledonian Mercury similarly found something uncanny in the apparently dispassionate objectivity of Le Gray’s photography: ‘Hold up to nature in the proper manner and at the proper time your sensitive medium; and by the magic light of Heaven she will transmit unerringly thereon whatever you have compassed with your instrument.’65 For both of these writers, what is ‘magical’ about Le Gray’s photographs is the way in which they manipulate time. These photographs make simultaneously visible the permanent and the transitory, or ‘instantaneous’. Something that has passed – that is past – is maintained visibly, impossibly in the present. The particular magic of Le Gray’s photography, which technically and metaphorically joins two photographic surfaces and two separate temporal planes, is, in a sense, that of communion with the dead. The critic for the Journal of the Photographic Society found this to be the case. I quote at length: We stop with astonishment before Mr. Le Gray’s ‘Sea and Sky’, the most successful seizure of water and cloud yet attempted. The effect is the simplest conceivable. There is a plain, unbroken prairie of open sea, lined and rippled with myriad smiling trails of minute undulations, dark and sombrous and profoundly calm, over the dead below – smooth as a tombstone. Overhead is a roll and swell of semi-transparent dusky clouds, heaving and breaking and going they know not whither. From the midst of this ‘pother’ of dimness falls a gush of liquid light, flush and full on the sea, where it leaves a glow of glory. The delight and surprise of this descent of the god is a new pleasure. It is as when Jacob’s ladder of angels was but just withdrawn, and the radiance above and below, where it rested on earth and sky, had not yet melted out.66

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The critic’s language both emphasises and diminishes difference, just as the photograph is supposed to. While the photograph is, shortly, ‘the simplest conceivable’, it also appears eloquent – a ‘smooth’ surface that is simultaneously stippled and puckered, ‘lined and rippled’ like a bounded coastline that might be infinitely long if it could be stretched taut. In keeping with this aesthetic, the sounds of words are fluidly extended (‘liquid light, flush and full on the sea, where it leaves a glow of glory’), eschewing precision (and possibly sense) in favour of a principle of lyrical interconnection. The critic’s description of the sky could equally be applied to the waves beneath – ‘a roll and swell . . . heaving and breaking’. That they suit both hemispheres of the print is appropriate given this passage’s overarching conceit. The dead here seem simultaneously to be confined safely beneath the surface of the sea and just to have finished following their glories head first into heaven. While, this critic claims, ‘the old art was a black art’ and ‘Photography revels in light’, he cannot help admitting that Le Gray’s ‘art’ is poised duskily in a ‘“pother” of dimness’ between the two afterlives. In 1862, Henry Mayhew wrote: ‘Mere literal truth is a poor thing after all. Why, Gustave le Gray’s wonderful photograph of the Sunlight on the Sea, that is hanging before our eyes as we write, is as true as “Mangnall’s Questions;” and yet what a picturesque barbarism, and even falsity it is!’67 I have been suggesting, however, that for many of Le Gray’s viewers, it was not (or not only) literal truth his photographs offered. A few years earlier, the National Review voiced an opinion outwardly similar to Mayhew’s: ‘M. Le Gray may startle by the instantaneous production of a sea piece, crisped with laughing waves fringed with the froth and foam of breakers, and overhung with skies of magical reality. But these pictures only startle – the artist feels all their want of true soft harmony, in fact their want of truth.’68 That Le Gray’s photographs do not supply a form of ‘soft harmony’ is a claim at least partly offset by the reviewer’s own synaesthetic sounding-out of their effect (the soft focus of ‘fringed with . . . froth and foam’). Similarly, in its efforts to deny Le Gray anything except ‘magical reality’, this review hints at the way in which his photographs repeatedly, and in a number of ways, appeared to bring together apparent incommensurables. Paired with the sort of truth Mayhew has in mind, founded on particularity, many viewers claimed to perceive a second sort of truth in Le Gray’s photographs, connected not to what these photographs showed, but to the sense that they made something that had been invisible visible. This was not only a matter of technique (though it was in part). Rather, Le Gray’s combinations of sea, sea-shore and sky encouraged correspondingly granular visual

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tactics, which gave weight at once to precision and vagueness without preferring one to the other. Indeed, the particular merit of Le Gray’s pictures may be that they invite us to consider the interdependence of such apparent opposites. Where other photographers debated the merits of sharpness, Le Gray’s photographs ask whether precision can arise from a photographer’s willingness to sacrifice detail.69 Poised between standards of accuracy that depend alternately on fluidity and solidity, Le Gray’s photographs are coastal, then, not only because they depict both sides of a threshold, but because they require us to see in two ways at once.

Notes

1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Epigraph: H. P. Robinson, Picture Making by Photography (London: Piper and Carter, 1884), 3. Robinson devotes a chapter to photographs taken ‘On Sea and Shore’. Philip Hamerton, Thoughts about Art (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1862), 209–10. While the technique was well known at the time, it was not clear until much later that Le Gray practised it. See Eugenia Parry Janis, The Photography of Gustave Le Gray (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1987); Nils Ramstedt, ‘An Album of Seascapes by Gustave Le Gray’, History of Photography 4 (1980): 121–37. Hamerton, Thoughts about Art, 208. ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in The Stones of Venice, vol. 10 of The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), 210; Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 91. Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844), n.p., quoted in Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 19. Tucker, Nature Exposed, 19. See also Grace Seiberling and Carolyn Bloore, Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 110–11. Carol M. Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 32; Frederic T. Cott, ‘Miscellaneous: Collodion vs. Paper’, Journal of the Photographic Society 2 (21 November 1854): 74, quoted in Seiberling and Bloore, Amateurs, Photography, 28. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 89; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, in ‘Seeing Science’, special issue, Representations 40 (Autumn 1992): 81–128.

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9. Daniel Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 51, 4; Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4. 10. Novak, Realism, Photography, 68. 11. ‘About Light and about Lighting the Sitter; with Some Reflection about the Room in which He Is Lighted’, Photographic Journal, 15 July 1865, 106, quoted in Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 54. 12. ‘The Photographic Exhibition’, Journal of the Photographic Society, 21 January 1857, 192. 13. Weston J. Naef, ‘Gustave Le Gray, Carleton E. Watkins and the Esthetic of Perception’, in Margret Stuffman and Martin Sonnabend (eds), Pioneers of Landscape Photography: Photographs from the Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1993), 75. 14. See Christopher Titterington, ‘John Dillwyn Llewelyn: Instantaneity and Transience’, in Mike Weaver (ed.), British Photography in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 68. Victoria and Albert attended the London opening, and subsequently requested copies of Llewelyn’s pictures. Christiana Payne recounts this story and discusses Le Gray in Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2007), 52–5. 15. Seiberling and Bloore, Amateurs, Photography, 23. 16. Ibid. 28. 17. See Tucker, Nature Exposed, 28, 132; Seiberling and Bloore, Amateurs, Photography, 145. 18. ‘Skies in Photographic Landscapes’, Photographic News, 13 March 1863, 121; W. H. Warner, ‘To Secure Clouds in Landscapes’, Photographic News, 9 January 1863, 18. 19. Birt Acres, ‘Some Hints on Photographing Clouds’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, July 1890, 161, quoted in Tucker, Nature Exposed, 145. 20. Elizabeth Eastlake, ‘Photography’, Quarterly Review 101, no. 202 (1857): 460. 21. William J. Newton, ‘Upon Photography, in an Artistic View, and in Its Relations to the Arts’, Journal of the Photographic Society, 3 March 1853, 6. Eastlake discussed Newton approvingly in her essay. 22. ‘The Albumen Process’, letter to the editor, Journal of the Photographic Society, 21 September 1854, 40–1, quoted in Seiberling and Bloore, Amateurs, Photography, 29. 23. See Ramstedt, ‘Album of Seascapes’, 125. 24. [Thomas Sutton], ‘On Taking Instantaneous Pictures’, Photographic Notes, 1 January 1858, 12. The magazine first prints a letter from Howlett on lenses.

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25. Thomas Sutton, ‘Miscellaneous: Paper v. Collodion’, letter to the editor, Journal of the Photographic Society 2 (21 October 1854): 53–4. 26. [Thomas Sutton], leader in Photographic Notes, 1 October 1857, 355. 27. Sutton, ‘On Taking Instantaneous Pictures’, 12. 28. See ‘Photographic Exhibitions in Britain, 1839–1865: Records from Victorian Exhibition Catalogues’, De Montfort University, 2002, (last accessed 8 January 2018). 29. ‘The Moon in the Stereoscope. Photographed by Samuel Fry, Brighton’, Photographic News, 11 November 1859, 112. 30. ‘The Photographic Exhibition’, Photographic News, 27 January 1860, 243. 31. ‘Instantaneous Photography and Composition Printing’, Photographic News, 23 November 1860, 350–1. 32. ‘Skies in Photographic Landscapes’, 121. 33. See Anne M. Lyden, A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014), 38. 34. A. H. Wall, ‘“Composition” versus “Patchwork”’, British Journal of Photography, 15 June 1860, 176, quoted in Smith, Victorian Photography, 104. Smith discusses the debate between Wall and Robinson at length (103–6). See also Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians, 54–6. 35. Henry Peach Robinson, ‘Composition not Patchwork’, British Journal of Photography, 2 July 1860, 190. 36. ‘Soiree of the Photographic Society’, Morning Chronicle, 18 December 1856, 5; ‘The Photographic Exhibition’, Journal of the Photographic Society, 21 February 1857, 214; ‘Local News’, Supplement to the Leeds Mercury, 2 May 1857, 9. 37. ‘Exhibition of the Photographic Society’, Photographic Notes, 15 April 1857, 141. 38. Eastlake, ‘Photography’, 465. 39. ‘The Photographic Society’, The Athenaeum, 10 January 1857, 54; ‘Exhibition of the Photographic Society of Scotland (Second Notice)’, Caledonian Mercury, 25 December 1857, n.p. 40. Smith, Victorian Photography, 103. 41. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76. See also Smith, Victorian Photography, 108. 42. Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Cologne: Könemann, 1998), 98; Ernest Lacan, ‘Exposition de la société française . . .’ [Exhibition of the French Society], Revue photographique, 5 February 1857, 213, quoted and trans. in Dominique de Font-Réaulx, ‘Parallel Lines: Gustave Courbet’s “Paysages de Mer” and Gustave Le Gray’s Seascapes, 1856–70’, paper presented at ‘Looking at the Landscapes: Courbet and Modernism’, J. Paul Getty Museum, 18 March 2006, 5, (last accessed 9 January 2018). 43. Hamerton, Thoughts about Art, 210; ‘Crystal Palace Photographic Gallery’, Illustrated London News, 7 February 1857, 121. Compare

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44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64.

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also complaints voiced in the National Review: ‘The public express the same consciousness of their false contrasts by asking if they are indeed moonlight views, or if the heavy clouds are really thunder-clouds.’ See ‘The Present State of Photography’, National Review, April 1859, 391. Hamerton, Thoughts about Art, 210. ‘The Photographic Society’, The Standard, 3 January 1857, 1. ‘The Photographic Exhibition’, Journal of the Photographic Society, 21 January 1857, 193. See also Seiberling and Bloore, Amateurs, Photography, 41. ‘Fine Arts: Photographic Society’, The Athenaeum, 15 January 1859, 86, quoted in Seiberling and Bloore, Amateurs, Photography, 41. Lacan, ‘Exposition’, quoted and trans. in Font-Réaulx, ‘Parallel Lines’, 5. Sutton, ‘On Taking Instantaneous Pictures’, 12. Lacan, ‘Exposition’, quoted and trans. in Font-Réaulx, ‘Parallel Lines’, 5. ‘The Photographic Exhibition’, Journal of the Photographic Society, 21 January 1857, 192. Smith, Victorian Photography, 104. ‘Photographic Society – Private View of Exhibition’, Daily News, 3 January 1857, n.p. See Roger Taylor and Larry John Schaaf, Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007), 44–55. None of Le Gray’s negatives are extant. See Ramstedt, ‘Album of Seascapes’, 131. Naef, ‘Gustave Le Gray’, 76–7. See p. 000 above. See Sylvie Aubenas, Gustave Le Gray (London: Phaidon, 2003), 4–8. The first photograph mentioned here can be viewed online: Gustave Le Gray, Group of Ships Departing Le Havre, 1856–7, Lee Gallery, MA, (last accessed 9 January 2018). ‘The Photographic Exhibition’, Illustrated London News, 24 January 1857, 61. Some catalogues for early exhibitions, including the one compiled by C. M. Ingleby for the Birmingham exhibition (1857), list ‘Sea and Sky’. It remains unclear, however, which Le Gray sea-and-sky photograph is meant in any given instance. See ‘Photographic Exhibitions in Britain’. ‘Photographic Society’, The Standard, 1. Janis, Photography of Le Gray, 75. Eastlake, ‘Photography’, 460; Marc Gaudin, ‘1857–1858, résumé des progrès les plus importants . . .’ [1857–1858, summary of the most important progress], La Lumière, 2 January 1858, 1, quoted and trans. in Janis, Photography of Le Gray, 82. ‘Local News’, Leeds Mercury, 30 April 1857, 3.

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65. ‘Fine Arts’, Daily News, 3 January 1857, 6; ‘Exhibition (Second Notice)’, Caledonian Mercury, n.p. 66. ‘The Photographic Exhibition’, Journal of the Photographic Society, 21 February 1857, 214. This is the second part of the article of the same title begun on 21 January. 67. Henry Mayhew, Young Benjamin Franklin; or, The Right Road through Life: A Boy’s Book on a Boy’s Own Subject (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1862), xiii. 68. ‘The Present State of Photography’, National Review, April 1859, 391. 69. For a discussion of ‘the “sharp” school’ of photography, see Tucker, Nature Exposed, 33.

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Chapter 12

Beyond the View: Reframing the Early Commercial Seaside Photograph Karen Shepherdson

In 2013, Magnum photographer Martin Parr asserted that seaside, or ‘beach’, photography had its roots in the British photographic tradition: In the United Kingdom, one is never more than seventy-five miles away from the coast. With this much shoreline, it’s not surprising that there is a strong British tradition of photography by the seaside. American photographers may have given birth to Street photography; but in the UK, we have the beach. Perhaps the natural outcome is Beach Photography.1

The history of British photography certainly sees repeated fascination with the shore-line, coastal communities, and the capturing of seaside cultures by both photographic artists and commercial photographic practitioners. For the latter’s seaside photographs, adherence to certain loose aesthetic norms and conventions springs to mind: happy, intergenerational faces; depiction of carefree moments of leisure at the shore-line; joyful, healthy and idealised children; and adult playfulness throwing off the working day to be replaced by acts of buffoonery, larks and partially clothed jolly japes. Such conventions are indeed the norm from the early 1900s until commercial seaside photography largely collapsed by the mid-1970s. However, further back in time, in the second half of the 1800s, we see photographic seaside portraits that markedly contrast with the contemporary twentieth- or twenty-first-century viewer’s expectations. The first fifty years (1850–1900) of this type of commercial photographic practice saw significant and rather rapid modification of customer demand, experience and product – the photograph. In comparison with contemporary image-making, early photographic

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seaside portraiture shows clear differentiation in aesthetic, typically signified through absence: the seaside as explicit location is missing (even the bathing costume), and most notably there is an absence of smile. The photographic smile, in the contemporary photographic era, has become virtually ubiquitous and mandatory, signifying in Audrey Linkman’s view ‘the fun-loving, warm-hearted, popular and charming’.2 As an exemplar, the seaside resort of Ramsgate in Kent can be used to raise several related questions: how did the early Victorian photographic client seek to be visually represented? At what point did beach photographic portraiture evolve into smiling snaps, and what part was played by the seaside photographer? The Victorian seaside photographer was an itinerant, held in low regard and generally considered to be the antithesis of a craftsman. Evidence for this can be seen in the frequently applied monikers of smudger or bodger – terms which of course provide explicit, comic description: smudging and bodging refer to the making of images.3 Moreover, these photographers were regarded as ‘pests’, ‘sandflies’, as ‘unwashed’ and ‘odorous’.4 Their activity has repeatedly been conflated with low forms of seaside entertainment and showmanship, made explicit as early as 1874 when the Photographic News stated: ‘These itinerants bear something like the same relation to the skilled photographer that the organ grinder has to the musician.’5 Bodging was also accompanied in popular imagination by pestering. In the 1901 edition of Black’s Guide to Canterbury and the Watering Places of East Kent, the description of Ramsgate as a popular seaside resort is accompanied by a sketch of a well-dressed young woman being harassed by the down-at-heel itinerant photographer (Figure 12.1). The publication’s index of illustrations explicitly places the scene of the sketch at the seaside, titling it ‘Ramsgate, a Beach Photographer’. Here the photographer as public nuisance is shown pushing himself and his trade forward, stating that the act ‘won’t tike yer ’arf a minute, lidy’.6 Thus generally perceived as more vulgar salesman than photographer, these itinerants were regarded at best with indifference and frequently with contempt. As Colin Harding argues, the early beach photographer was ‘widely perceived as operating on the margins of professional competence, respectability and even legality’.7 Such margins of legality were quite frequently transgressed. In 1882, in an attempt by local police to curb this trade at the resort of Ramsgate, a beach photographer was arrested and charged with nuisance behaviour. Found guilty, he was fined half a crown, with ten shillings’ costs. In court, the arresting police officer estimated

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Figure 12.1 Phil May, ‘Ramsgate, a Beach Photographer’, Black’s Guide to East Kent (1901), 93–4.

that apart from the offending itinerant, some forty to fifty further photographers were working on the sands that day.8 Clearly, then, by the early 1880s, the beach photographer was not only a recognisable itinerant, but also ubiquitous. As Harding emphasises in his own exposition of this period, when we look at Victorian seaside photographic images, we will often also see the presence of not one, but several other itinerant commercial seaside photographers working in fierce and often noisy competition.9 The Victorian period is known for the growth in popularity of the seaside, the train service and steamer vessels from London allowing

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affordable day trips to the coast, thus facilitating the arrival of huge numbers of visitors, providing a wealth of potential clients for these image-makers. Travel guides, as we have seen, were safe in caricaturing photographers as pests. Local courts were far from backward in recognising itinerant behaviour as being damaging to a town’s reputation. As a consequence of mass daily migration to the coast, particularly through the railway, the trade of seaside photography reached almost epidemic proportions. Beach scenes from Ramsgate towards the latter part of the nineteenth century illustrate the resort’s popularity. The train station with its impressively large curved roof can be seen bringing day-trippers in their droves right down to the shore and right into the waiting itinerant photographer’s net (Figure 12.2). This first image, whilst overtly demonstrating the popularity of the resort, is so dense with people as to make analysis problematic. However, another image, taken earlier in the day, depicts Ramsgate’s Main Sands with greater clarity (Figure 12.3). The beach is south-east facing so the shadows tell us this is early morning, with people beginning to arrive

Figure 12.2 Ramsgate’s Main Sands. Author’s own collection.

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Figure 12.3 Ramsgate’s Main Sands. Author’s own collection.

and set up for the day, and this inevitably includes the seaside photographers. They are clearly visible locating themselves right on the beach itself with their wheeled handcarts situated conveniently at the end of each of the stone slipways. The closest handcart when magnified reveals the trader’s name as J. Price. And Price, along with numerous other itinerant photographers, would spend the day producing ‘while you wait’ seaside portraits, either as ambrotypes (a glass plate positive) or as tintypes (a direct positive image on enamelled iron – correctly referred to as a ferrotype).10 The tintype portrait by Price shown here is of a family gathering of four adults and infant, posed in typical nineteenth-century fashion in front of the sea wall (Figure 12.4a and 12.4b). This tintype in its mount of a thin pressed brass matte and wooden box frame is in keeping with the period, and whilst the maker’s stamp ‘J. PRICE, Photographers, SANDS. RAMSGATE’ locates it to the seaside, the specificity of the beach as place is absent from the image itself. This image would have been produced and framed within J. Price’s wheeled dark box, which not only held all the paraphernalia required to produce the image, but also acted as darkroom. On the side of each dark box would be displays of previous portraits; thus these simple wooden handcarts functioned as hybridised studios,

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Figure 12.4a and 12.4b Family grouping tintype taken by J. Price (c. 1875), showing front and rear views of image. Author’s own collection.

dark boxes and galleries on wheels. A typical family tintype portrait circa 1890 notably includes the seaside photographer’s handcart functioning as a backdrop, with a gallery of earlier portraits clearly displayed in the upper portion of the photograph (Figure 12.5). More than one hundred years later, many of these modest seaside portraits remain in circulation. Local collectors’ fairs and online auction sites provide numerous opportunities to purchase ambrotypes and tintypes, more often than not at affordable prices which echo the original era of their production. Distinct from current practice, the Victorian photographer did not archive images at the time of production. The originals, whether an ambrotype or a tintype, were far more akin to the Polaroid of the mid-twentieth century: a one-off image with no negative record to be held by the photographer, since storage would be at a premium. The ideal was to minimise associated paraphernalia, to streamline the process into a fast, popular, affordable and mobile production system. The production process and experience of the Victorian client being photographed by the itinerant seaside photographer is recorded in November 1880’s Photographic News. The reporter notes: The fee is one shilling, and we tell our friend to make all the haste he can. We time him. Of course it is a collodion positive he sets about

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Figure 12.5 Family grouping tintype, with no photographer’s name (c. 1890). Author’s own collection. making. The plate is quickly polished, and out into the bath; then we are led towards the sea-wall to be fixed up and focused. . . . There was lots of light . . . and an exposure of two seconds sufficed. . . . In another instant he has withdrawn the slide and buried himself in the dark tent . . . time three minutes, twenty seconds, the plate is developed and washed, and we are treated with a passing glance at the result. A match is struck, and a spirit lamp lighted, over which the tiny picture is deftly moved to dry. The glass soon gets hot, and then some of ‘Bates’ black varnish is rapidly applied at the back by means of a camel’s hair brush. Finally, the picture is fitted into a gilt frame. Time – five minutes, forty seconds.11

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A number of interesting points can be drawn from this account. The portrait is an ambrotype – we know this as the reporter refers to ‘the glass’. Yet by the time of this report in 1880, the tintype as an American import had become the material of choice for most seaside photographers. Whilst in many ways inferior, having a narrower tonal range and a reduced luminosity when compared to the ambrotype, the tintype was cheaper, lighter and obviously far more durable than glass. In addition it was a more sensitive medium, providing faster developing time. Clearly aesthetics were not the driving force; pragmatics such as cost, speed and material resilience took precedence, thus the superior ambrotype was largely (but clearly not wholly) superseded by the tintype. We frequently characterise our contemporary culture as a time of instant access and pleasure, but as early as 1850 we see this in action through commercial seaside photographs where, as Michael Carlebach argues, the ‘customers came to see them as the first truly instantaneous picture, taken and finished while they waited’.12 This instant gratification was of course a vital feature of the seaside photographer’s trade. If the majority of seaside visitors in this period were day-trippers, then time was tight and photographers needed to provide instantaneous images in order to secure a sale. In addition to noting the impressive speed of production, the anonymous writer for the Photographic News also refers to ‘being led towards the sea-wall’. We don’t have the advantage of seeing the ambrotype mentioned by this author, but the example of J. Price replicates well enough how the seaside portraits of the Victorian period frequently abstract any sense of place from the image (see Figure 12.4). Thus the brute sea wall becomes a repeated feature of itinerant seaside photographs, with the actual beach given little if any visual space. Whilst commercial seaside photography might be a record of a family’s day trip to the coast, a portrait of its members is far more important than any context of place and space. The work produced by these itinerant practitioners has been dismissed as inartistic and disposable – cheap seaside ephemera offering a while-you-wait likeness in an instantaneous image. Such a view of their practice and persona should perhaps be reframed. In agreement with Carlebach, it is difficult to regard these itinerant operators as the makers of art, working at pace and producing affordable images not only of the working class but also for the working class. Linkman also argues that the ‘public patronised the studio for “artistic” likeness and the itinerant for amusement’.13 Nevertheless, any bifurcation of studio photographer as legitimate and itinerant seaside photographer

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as rogue appears simplistically compartmentalised. Seaside photographers are too easily discounted, with a failure fully to acknowledge the innovative experience both of making images en plein air and of having one’s image made within the public sphere. Though the motivation of the operators might have been principally focused on income generation rather than creative practice, there remains substantial evidence that many itinerant photographers, despite working at pace, were nevertheless producing images that stand close scrutiny and evaluation today. To reconsider the photograph produced by J. Price of Ramsgate: we have a tintype measuring 2.75 by 3.5 inches (see Figure 12.4). In America, this size was popularly known as a bon ton, a term not adopted in the United Kingdom, but in scale this typified many British seaside tintypes.14 Whilst we know the photographer and even where his dark cart was located on Ramsgate Main Sands, nevertheless the portrait’s subjects remain unknown. Subtle interchanges of glances are taking place between members of this anonymous grouping. The standing woman looks with an enigmatic smile directly and confidently at Price, holding her bonnet in her left hand (this is a laterally reversed image), and she runs counter to fashion, having come to the beach with her impractical skirt-train still attached, which is gathered up and placed over her left arm. The older man, wearing a top hat, seemingly the antithesis of beachwear, looks across to her. Centrally seated, the woman holding the infant again looks to camera, but her smile is wholly absent, the baby echoing this seriousness, holding the paraphernalia of the seaside – the spade – whilst her tiny bucket is placed directly on the sands. The presence of this child is delightful. Her solemn look to camera is humorously countered by her naked lower body, where the button of her navel and the curling of her toes can be clearly seen. Such revelation is extremely unusual for the era, and despite the family’s conservative dress, she seems to offer a nod to the future, where the child will begin to be liberated from the Victorian traditions of layering. Geoffrey Batchen’s claim that the ‘tintype had no masters and generated no masterpieces’ is difficult to oppose, but though Price might not have been a ‘master’, he was certainly competent in producing images in the field and under pressure of time.15 This is a well-composed and exposed full-length group portrait, with an excellent tonal range. On magnification, the detail in this portrait proves even more impressive. The tintype typically makes whites particularly difficult to achieve, but here in the image of the standing woman, the whites verge on true. This suggests that Price knew

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how to manipulate the exposure and development to achieve a successful outcome. There is a degree of softness in the focus, most noticeable on the baby’s face – the most difficult sitter to negotiate a two-second stillness. In addition, the contrast is high – unsurprisingly for a tintype – which results in some loss of detail in both men’s suits and also the skirt of the seated woman. But beyond the blacks, striking detail remains. Most notably, the pleating in the baby’s sun bonnet, the layering of lace on the standing women’s own hat, and the flesh tones of all the sitters are exceptional. Thus whilst typifying all seaside photographers of the Victorian period as itinerant sandflies might prove convenient, the visual evidence supports a more nuanced actuality. Whilst many were taking full advantage of a mass migration to the seaside to make quick money for little service, others, such as Price, were highly competent and confident in their image-making trade. In a more sociological context, couples and families represented by these images, whilst at the seaside for amusement, a day out, are nevertheless gathered together in social groups. Such events, from our own lives and our own gatherings, whilst fun and enjoyable, can also be meaningful and memorable. To have that documented, perhaps for the very first time, in a likeness of yourself, your lover, your child, your family photographed together, can significantly become transformed into the genuinely meaningful. Rather than cheap seaside ephemera, a revised consideration might be offered, whereby these portraits become important affordable keepsakes, often in evidence within family collections. Whilst many of the documented sources underpin Linkman’s ‘amusement’ hypothesis, the images themselves frequently support a visual counter view. Furthermore, where the smile might be absent or restrained, tenderness certainly is not, through touching intergenerational gatherings photographically documenting these families perhaps for the first time (Figure 12.6; see also Figure 12.5). This might indeed be a novel experience, and an enjoyable one, but as surviving material objects these modest photographs counter the connotation of mere seaside ephemera or cheap shore-line amusement. The cost of production and purchase was relatively low (in 1880 often between sixpence and a shilling), but except at the very cheapest end of the market, where tintypes would be slipped or glued into light card sleeves, these seaside photographs were as shown here, presented neatly through the use of thin, flexible brass matte (often elaborately stamped) and then encased in simple yet attractive painted wooden box frames.

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Figure 12.6 Mother with children on the steps of a bathing machine tintype, with no photographer’s name (c. 1870). Author’s own collection.

If supposedly taken for amusement, then paradoxically the photographs’ sitters seldom look amused. These early beach portraits show the subjects, dressed in their best clothes, looking stiff and literally buttoned up.16 The portraits, despite the location of production, are formal, largely appearing to ape the aesthetics and conventions of legitimate Victorian formal studio photographic portraiture, which in turn had mimicked portrait painting, where the smile was largely circumnavigated in favour of a more ‘serious and dignified’ presentation.17 A repeated assertion has been that such serious expression by the sitter was rooted in the technological (in)capabilities of the camera. As Carlebach notes: ‘Exposure times in the heyday of the tintype . . . were much longer than today, sometimes lasting as long as half

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a minute. . . . No wonder sitters sometimes looked a little grim.’18 Certainly shutter speeds of the nineteenth century were more pedestrian than those of later cameras, but on a bright seaside day an exposure time of no more than two seconds would be required – slow, perhaps, by contemporary standards but wholly within the bounds of capturing a natural smile. The convention of pose and facial presentation is arguably far more aligned to the rhetoric of portraiture and the aim of avoiding the connotation of a sitter’s grin transcending into a grotesque gurn. As Linkman rightly notes, ‘smiles and varied expressions were within the technical capability’ of the photography and the smile’s absence was ‘a matter of conscious choice, influenced more by precedent and propriety than by any limitation of the technical process of the day’.19 These simple Victorian seaside portraits are examples of an increasingly democratised medium which facilitated sitters in presenting themselves not as they necessarily were, but how they wanted to be seen. The Victorian sitter provides a dignified representation and as a norm this pose was as established as the contemporary sitter’s mandatory smile for the camera is today. Clearly norms are plastic and these nineteenth-century itinerant seaside images are an important material demonstration of representational shifts in portraiture – hints of smiles, initially often with children, appear, and before too long not only does the grin photographically arrive, but also play, mischief and seaside frolics. When one studies large Victorian beach scenes, it becomes rapidly and visually evident that behaviour itself isn’t constrained by the formal; informal behaviour is also in evidence, at times writ large, but not initially intended for documenting on affordable commissioned seaside portraits. Such private behaviour enacted within the public sphere of the beach suggests that the Victorian seaside provided a site for the carnivalesque, where certain norms could be suspended, with transgressions occurring particularly through touch, within the public sphere.20 Naturally, one needs to be careful not to overgeneralise, but visual accounts of this period, including popular graphic sketches, such as those of Ramsgate published in the Illustrated London News of August 1894, demonstrate how within the bustle of the seaside day trip lovers could recline together on the sand (Figure 12.7). Taking this further are Paul Martin’s surreptitious photographs of 1892 to 1896 where, with his camera disguised as a brown paper parcel, he was able repeatedly and covertly to photograph intimacies on Yarmouth Sands. Paul Martin’s unwitting couples are shown in full recline, enjoying passionate and physical embraces, with one even showing a man astride a woman.

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Figure 12.7 W. W. Russell, ‘Ramsgate Sands’, Illustrated London News, 4 August 1894, 149.

While Martin’s subjects were covertly photographed in the late nineteenth century, portrait sitters at the sands predominantly sought a far more restrained representation. Nevertheless, as early as the mid-1860s posture becomes more nuanced with a hint of the leisurely, signifying that it was now not just permissible to relax in such a manner, it was also acceptable – indeed, sought – to be documented in such states. Linkman points out that the public sphere of the seaside is where the loosening of formal facial conventions first appears, whereby ‘sitters on the beach came to exhibit a greater freedom of expression and pose. Smiles, grins and laughter made their début among the more familiar restrained expressions’, paving the way for ‘enthrallment with a new convention – the grin which splits our face from ear to ear and proves that we are no spoilsport, life is fun and we must be seen to enjoy it’.21 Such movements in conventions of demotic portraiture are not conveniently linear; there is no neat moment of shift between the dignified and the indecorous. Rather, from the 1860s we can see multiple variations of the seaside photograph, ranging from the classic group portrait exemplified in this chapter, to those reflecting in various degrees the joyful liberation felt by spending a day at the coast. In addition to the smile, the documenting of playfulness becomes encouraged by many itinerant beach photographers, a seaside novelty

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or gimmick knowingly differentiating the freedom of seaside activities from staid studio portraits. Motivated by what Batchen has described as ‘the demands of entrepreneurial capitalism for new objects to sell in a competitive marketplace’, the itinerant beach photographer increasingly deployed enticing props and comical backdrops, with customers proving more than amenable in seeking a record of leisure and evidence of a good time, a happy time signified through playfulness and the smile.22 But even with their emergence, what still remained absent was the bathing costume. Where nineteenth-century examples do exist of sitters wearing bathers, paradoxically they have not been taken at the seaside, but rather at high street portrait studios, frequently situated close to the beach. English tintypist Harry Smith emigrated to Atlantic City in 1876, and there he specialised in the ‘bathing’ studio portrait. One of Smith’s clients gives an account of a studio visit: A couple of bathers in blue jerseys and short drawers come out as I go in, for Harry Smith announces he makes a specialty of bathers. He has two attitudes for them; one shading the eyes and looking off right, in the stage-seaman fashion; the other sitting in a section of a boat, a life-belt round the neck, an oar in the hand. For me, a walking gentleman, he brings forward a ricketty [sic] piece of balustrade, an imitation indiarubber plant, and a background of a lighthouse and sea-gull. . . . he offers me a large collodion-stained fist to shake, and turns briskly to two lank lady bathers who are arranging their long thin locks coquettishly before the studio glass.23

Clients, on visiting such studios, whether in the United Kingdom or the United States, could dress in matching bathing costumes supplied by the photographer along with seaside props such as buckets, spades and boats, complete with a trompe l’oeil seascape backdrop to set the scene for the quasi-seaside photograph (Figure 12.8). It is not until the 1920s that visitors to the seaside would routinely be photographed dressed for the environment and photographed within the visible coastal environment. It is not without coincidence that sitters’ confidence had grown both in being shown at leisure and in the photographer representing them in such states. From increasing regulation of beach trade in the 1880s, local coastal authorities began to recognise that through control and regulations concession revenue could be generated and the reputation of their seaside as a resort free from unlicensed tradesmen could be restored. After the Great War a turning point for the itinerant seaside photograph and

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Figure 12.8 Typical tintype studio portrait, possibly American (c. 1880). No photographer’s name. Author’s own collection.

photographer takes place. The British Journal of Photography as early as 1923 reports the transformation and regulation of this practice: ‘Your picture while you wait’ will soon be a lost phrase at the seaside, where the antiquated ‘studios on wheels’ are quickly vanishing from sight. Most up-to-date resorts are this year leasing exclusive beach photography rights to the modern ‘reflex’ man, who has no use for mobile darkrooms. . . . The ‘reflex’ man . . . doesn’t pose his customers, but wades into the water, snapshotting the bathers in perfectly natural attitudes.24

The itinerant beach photographer as the first mass-producer of plein-air portraits was thus displaced and replaced by a photographer who was regulated, thereby bringing as well the connotation of

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respectability and competence. With the newly gained confidence of the client, naturalistic environmental portraits rapidly began to circulate. Yet, as argued earlier, this isn’t to characterise by default the Victorian seaside photographic era as one of bodging or smudging. When scrutinised through the remains of their trade – the seaside ambrotype and tintype – such simplification resolves into a more nuanced reading. The negative image of itinerant seaside photography on its demise becomes transformed into a nostalgic longing, where H. G. Stoke reminds his reader: Think of the black-hooded camera on its wide-spread tripod; the mysterious box on wheels that served both as showcase and laboratory (do you remember the queer vinegary smell of the tintypes as they were submitted for your approval and admiration, fresh from the alchemist’s den, and with the gold frame still being folded into position?) . . . compare some of his masterpieces with those snaps you brought back last year. He didn’t do such a bad job, did he?25

Notes 1. Martin Parr, Life’s a Beach (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2013), iv. The Magnum Photographic Agency is a prestigious international photographic cooperative, first founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David ‘Chim’ Seymour and George Rodger. In 2014, Parr was elected Magnum President. 2. Audrey Linkman, The Victorians: Photographic Portraits (London: Tauris Parke Books, 1993), 7. 3. See Colin Harding, ‘The Smudger’s Art: The Popular Perception and Representation of Itinerant Photographers in the 19th Century’, in Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (eds), Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Images in the 19th Century (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000), 143–53. 4. A number of nineteenth-century accounts of beach photography draw upon such derogatory remarks, including ‘Among the Photographic Artists’ in the Photographic News for 30 May 1884, and ‘The Beach Photographer’ in Photography on 27 June 1889. 5. R. W. Aldridge, ‘The Status of Photography’, Photographic News, 28 August 1874, 416. 6. E. D. Jordan (ed.), Black’s Guide to Canterbury and the Watering Places of East Kent (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1901), 94. 7. Colin Harding, ‘Sunny Snaps: Commercial Photography at the Water’s Edge’, in Tricia Cusack (ed.), Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 229–30.

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8. See Linkman, The Victorians, 171. 9. Harding, ‘Sunny Snaps’, 232. 10. Both the ambrotype and tintype seaside images in the era under discussion were produced using collodion wet plates. The collodion process, invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851, is time critical and the plate, be that glass or ferro, remains light sensitive only whilst wet. The term ambrotype positive is something of a misnomer, as it is in fact a negative image which, when processed with a dark or black backing, appears positive. The tintype (again incorrectly named given that it is enamelled iron) is a direct positive image but, as with the ambrotype, laterally reverses the image. Thus these portraits are mirror images of the actuality. 11. Quoted in Harding, ‘Sunny Snaps’, 232. 12. Michael L. Carlebach, Working Stiffs: Occupational Portraits in the Age of Tintypes (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2002), 42. 13. Ibid. 23; Linkman, The Victorians, 148. 14. For a useful table of standard tintype formats, see Floyd Rinhart, Marion Rinhart and Robert W. Wagner, The American Tintype (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 223–4. 15. Geoffrey Batchen, ‘The Art of Business’, in Steven Kasher (ed.), America and the Tintype (New York: International Center of Photography, 2008), 19. 16. Carlebach’s title makes explicit reference to the sitters’ ‘stiffness’; see Working Stiffs, 5. 17. Linkman, The Victorians, 43. 18. Carlebach, Working Stiffs, 5. 19. Linkman, The Victorians, 43. 20. Salient writing and debate over the nineteenth-century seaside as a site ripe for the carnivalesque includes Tony Bennett, ‘Hegemony, Ideology, Pleasure: Blackpool’, in Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woolacott (eds), Popular Culture and Social Relations (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), 135–54, and, in response, Darren Webb, ‘Bakhtin at the Seaside: Utopia, Modernity and the Carnivalesque’, Theory, Culture and Society 22 (2005): 121–38. 21. Linkman, The Victorians, 174, 183. 22. Batchen, ‘Art of Business’, 20. 23. ‘An American Watering-Place’, Cornhill Magazine, November 1894, 481–2. 24. ‘Beach Photographer: New Style’, British Journal of Photography, 30 March 1923, 199. 25. H. G. Stoke, The Very First History of the English Seaside (London: Sylvan Press, 1947), 112–13.

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Chapter 13

Symons at the Seaside Nick Freeman

Born in Pembrokeshire and growing up in Cornwall and Devon, Arthur Symons (1865–1945) had an imaginatively productive, often complex relationship with the sea. As someone who identified himself primarily as a Celt, he had little interest in the history or mythology of English nautical heroism, and was unconcerned with the sea as a means of national defence: the intensifying naval rivalries of early twentieth-century Europe left him unmoved. The sea was instead an aesthetic spectacle, ‘alone of natural things’, he said, in ‘obey[ing] Aristotle’s law in art, that for perfect pleasure there must be continual slight variety’.1 The experienced sailor Joseph Conrad suggested that ‘the sea is always the same’, but Symons disagreed with his friend.2 ‘I suppose many waves are identical out of the infinite number of waves which break on any point of shore,’ he conceded. ‘But some happy accident of wind or tide or sunlight seems always to bring in its own variation.’3 The sea was something to watch, delight in and occasionally be fearful of, as can be seen in his depiction of the pilchard fishermen of St Ives in his story ‘Seaward Lackland’ in Spiritual Adventures (1905), or the lonely woman of ‘The Fisher’s Widow’, a bleak vignette from his first collection of poetry, Days and Nights (1889). However, apolitical, uninterested in economic, military or logistical questions, and determinedly solipsistic in privileging his Paterian ‘sensations and impressions’ above all else, Symons paid little heed to the practicalities of coastal life and rarely considered them in any detail. Like his alter ego Daniel Roserra in another ‘spiritual adventure’, ‘An Autumn City’, ‘He chose a city, a village, or a sea-shore for its charm, its appeal to him personally; nothing else mattered.’4 This chapter examines some of Symons’s encounters with the Atlantic, the Channel and the Mediterranean, with particular reference to his determination to aestheticise the natural world, a

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central characteristic of the decadent literature with which he was strongly associated during the 1890s and early 1900s. When he is not simply regarded as a fly caught in the amber of 1890s decadence, Symons is typically categorised as a proto-modernist outstripped by more radical writers, or as the man who, through The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), introduced T. S. Eliot to the French avant-garde. He was also, however, an enthusiastic European traveller, who supplemented his earnings as a poet, critic and theatre reviewer with a steady stream of accounts of visits to Continental cities. Critical emphasis on his experiments in urban representation has in a sense distracted readers from the ways in which his travel journalism brought him into contact with the natural as well as the artificial. Essays such as his preface to the second edition of Silhouettes (1896) make this emphasis unsurprising: Symons did, after all, claim that he preferred to smell ‘new-mown hay’ in a scent-bottle rather than in a hayfield, and insisted that ‘there is no necessary difference in artistic value between a good poem about a flower in the hedge and a good poem about the scent in a sachet’. ‘I prefer town to country,’ he went on, but it is important to remember that he did not dismiss the natural world, as some of his contemporaries may have done. ‘Probably I enjoy the hayfield as much as you do,’ he said, ‘but I enjoy quite other scents and sensations as well.’5 Such comments have encouraged the view of Symons as a writer who habitually distinguished between nature and art, rather than as one who also elided them or else applied artistic techniques and allusions to landscapes, in the process transforming them into stylised versions of themselves. The sea would be a favourite subject for these practices. Utilising an ever-expanding railway network, Symons ventured as far afield as Seville, Moscow, Sofia and Constantinople, collecting his musings on urban aesthetics in books such as Cities (1903) and Cities of Italy (1907). Robert Louis Stevenson may have believed that ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’, but Symons held precisely the opposite view.6 His travel essays rarely give any sense of how he got to his destinations, and though he must have crossed the Channel dozens of times, he mentions it only occasionally. Instead, he quoted his sometime associate Count Eric Stenbock’s aphorism ‘to travel is to die continually’, remarking how it was ‘a line I have often found myself repeating . . . as I lay in a plunging berth as the foam chased the snowflakes off the deck’.7 Sailing from Hamburg to Le Havre in the summer of 1891, his first voyage on an Atlantic liner, he experienced a dreadful bout of seasickness, something recounted by his friend Frank Willard, the literary tramp ‘Josiah Flynt’, in his autobiography, but which Symons himself passes over even in

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his unpublished memoirs.8 Five years later, in July 1896, a trip to Galway with W. B. Yeats occasioned no account of crossing the Irish Sea, and when their boat was becalmed for several hours when sailing to the Aran Islands, Symons was more interested in reading and studying maps than in the placid ocean. Even when stormy conditions prevented them from reaching the isle of Inisheer, Symons devoted but a single paragraph of a twenty-five-page account to what must have been a fairly frightening two-and-a-half-hour voyage.9 What he preferred to do was to describe the sea from the coast, preferably from a cliff where he could stand well back. ‘I never ventured near the edge of a cliff,’ he wrote in an unpublished reminiscence, ‘as I had the nervous fear that I might fall into the sea’.10 Leisurely contemplation appealed far more than physical peril. ‘We loitered on the cliffs for some time, looking over them,’ he wrote of the trip to the Aran Islands, ‘looking into the magic mirror that glittered there like a crystal’ and ‘hesitating on the veiled threshold of visions’.11 Recalling a visit to Lamorna Cove near Penzance, the ‘most desolate place’ he had ‘ever seen in Cornwall’, Symons was seized by ‘the terror of the abyss’ as he stared down into the water and ‘imagined drowned creatures, swirled down to the bottom of the sea’. 12 The visit typified his concentration on his own perceptions, for although he had spent many hours wandering along the Thames Embankment, his account of Lamorna shows no interest at all in the huge quarry that provided so many of the stones for it. Gazing across the water, Symons welcomed sightings of ships, for they ‘humanised’ the ‘sea’s beauty’, though their appeal disappeared once steam replaced sail. One could not accuse Symons of embracing the callous pastoral picturesque of Dickens’s Harold Skimpole, the man who believes that the sight of black slaves in a field of white cotton is aesthetically delightful, but he rarely shows sustained interest in the lives of the fishermen whose boats ‘look like great white birds . . . with wings lifted’.13 They make for engaging moments of reminiscence in his autobiographical writings, and provide the local colour integral to the evocation of the Cornish Methodist community of ‘Seaward Lackland’, but once Symons shook off the early influence of Browning, and began to privilege his own perceptions rather than attempting to dramatise those of others, the Cornish coast became depopulated, existing as a series of vantage points from which he could watch the sea’s chromatic and rhythmic modulations. He seems never to have the slightest desire to sail on it, much less swim – in this regard, Symons was no Swinburne.

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It was precisely the desolate remoteness of Cornwall that Symons enjoyed, and he stressed it repeatedly in his sketches of the county, often occasioned by visits to his friend, Havelock Ellis, who lived near St Ives. Kennack Bay was, he felt, the place where more than anywhere else he longed ‘to build a cottage, where I could come and live when I wanted to be alone’; he regarded it as ‘a place for work and dreams’ akin to Yeats’s Innisfree.14 Rather than the ‘fretfulness, pretence, and vulgar crowding of so much of the English sea-coast’, Cornwall was rich in cliffs where one could ‘lie down and be alone, and smell salt and honey, and watch the flight of the sea-gulls, and listen to the sea, and be very idly happy’.15 The ‘poisonous trail of the railway’ was not yet ‘all over’ Cornwall when he wrote these words in August 1904, but while Symons disparaged (or ignored) tourists and holidaymakers, he seemed oblivious to the fact that he was using the coast just as so many of them did. Breathing clean air away from the bustle and the smoke, taking things easy, enjoying what later metropolitan journalists patronisingly term ‘a slower pace of life’ or ‘recharging one’s batteries’; Symons might be regarded as exemplifying all he professed to despise, were it not for the fact that he regarded these trips as homecomings in which, like Antaeus, he might lie upon the earth and be restored. The sea was essential to this process of regeneration. Without it, exposure to the Cornish landscape was analogous to eating ‘good food without drinking’. ‘There is a thirst of the eyes,’ he concluded, ‘which must wait unsatisfied until the eyes drink the sea.’16 For Symons, Cornwall was a realm entirely unconnected with his busy life as an honorary Londoner or unofficial Anglo-French cultural ambassador, and the North Atlantic coast affected him far more powerfully than any familial associations the county may have offered. The stories of Spiritual Adventures were written at a time when he was frequently visiting the Lizard Peninsula, and allusions to it crop up throughout the book. The explicitly autobiographical ‘A Prelude to Life’ tells how Symons spent his early years playing ‘on the terrace facing the sea’, an idyllic period that ended when he had to go to school: ‘There was no longer any sea; I had to live in a street.’17 The pianist Christian Trevalga takes his surname from a village south of Tintagel, and his earliest memory is of ‘the sharp, creaking voice of the seagulls as they swept past him at the edge of the cliff’.18 The tormented protagonist of ‘The Journal of Henry Luxulyan’ is another character to take his name from a Cornish village (albeit an inland one), while Seaward Lackland, fisherman and Methodist lay-preacher, grows up

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in St Ives and, his father rightly predicts, will ‘not go farther than Land’s End by land, or Mount’s Bay by sea’.19 All these stories treat Cornwall not as a ‘land of lost content’ like Housman’s Shropshire but as a place of youth and innocence. It is telling that ‘A Prelude to Life’ should note that Symons could not read until he was nine years old. Education brought with it knowledge and liberation, allowing him to fashion himself as a man of the world and, for a time at least, a wouldbe libertine, but it also erected a barrier between himself, other people, and the natural world. The idyllic Cornwall of Symons’s sketches is clearly highly selective, its portrayal governed by his tastes and interests rather than a commitment to journalistic or sociological objectivity. An essay of 1896 concluded with a denunciation of ‘that tyranny of the real which is the worst tyranny of modern life’, and his depictions of Cornish life continually displace the actual with openly subjective responses to it.20 Tin mines and farms pass unnoticed, and his fisher-folk lack the closely observed external details of Stanhope Forbes’s paintings. A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (1885) has a realism absent from ‘The Fisher’s Widow’, written the following year; one cannot imagine Symons living in Newlyn and belonging to its community rather than remaining on its margins as commentator and observer. Even if one defends him by pointing out his commitment to psychological rather than physical portraiture, it is notable that the Methodists of ‘Seaward Lackland’ exist largely to mirror and replay Symons’s own spiritual questions and anxieties concerning his loss of faith, and are less convincing than the troubled artists and intellectuals who are the basis of the book’s other stories.21 Symons’s encounters with the Channel and the Mediterranean were very different. The boat train provided an efficient link between London, Newhaven, Dieppe and Paris, and Symons was a frequent passenger. Writing from Dieppe, he saw the Channel as ‘that blue streak’ across which was England, or, more particularly, London, the centre of his intellectual, artistic and sexual life.22 Perhaps mindful of that ‘fretfulness, pretence and vulgar crowding’, he had little to say about Newhaven, though he did offer a few thoughts on Bognor and nearby Selsey in his story ‘The Death of Peter Waydelin’ (1905). Waydelin is a curious composite of Symons, Beardsley and Whistler, probably Symons’s favourite painter, and, like Beardsley in particular, he has no great interest in nature. The narrator describes the Sussex coast as ‘exquisite’, but Waydelin largely ignores it (along with a fine sunset) and sits ‘angrily’ throwing stones into the sea and philosophising about aesthetics. ‘At Bognor’, Symons writes,

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‘nature deals with its material so much in the manner of art’ that no artist could be immune to ‘the colour-sense of those arrangements of sand, water and sky which were perpetually changing before [us]’.23 The ‘arrangement’ of the natural world immediately signals Whistler’s influence – the painter had produced The Beach at Selsey Bill in 1865, the year Symons was born – and implies a realm governed by solipsistic perception rather than quotidian realities. There is no suggestion of there being anyone else on the beach despite it being a very popular destination for London’s day-trippers, and not so much as a whelk-stall to intrude upon the two men’s conversation. In view of Waydelin’s creative stance, it is unsurprising that any description of the landscape is quickly supplanted by the artist’s lengthy disquisition on how to perceive it. Though the sea and the sunset offer ‘a magnificent silent refutation’ of some of his ideas, the story nevertheless privileges the aesthetic and intellectual above any other considerations.24 Describing a Channel crossing would have been, for Symons, akin to a commuter describing a journey on the underground. The sea was an unfortunate, if occasionally beautiful, obstacle that separated perfidious, philistine Albion from an altogether more significant artistic culture, and Dieppe was a port from which one looked inland rather than out to sea. In the first edition of The Savoy, the radical artistic magazine he had launched in January 1896 to supplant the increasingly anaemic Yellow Book, Symons recalled the previous summer’s trip to Dieppe when, having gone for a long weekend, he ended up staying for two months. The Dieppe depicted in the essay is a sanctuary for English bohemian artists in the wake of the Wilde trials, and it is one in which the town shrinks to cafes, hotels and the casino, a place where Beardsley spends all day gambling on the horseracing machines and studiously avoiding looking out at the sea. It is a venue for social and artistic discussion, for flirtation, and for planning the aesthetic counter-offensive The Savoy was designed to lead. Although Symons did relax – and was glad to escape from the ugly mood that followed Wilde’s sentence – his pleasure-seeking and cerebral endeavours were quite different from anything he might have done in Cornwall.25 Symons sat for hours at the casino, studying the complex etiquette prevailing on the beach and watching the women pass by in ‘a flow of soft dresses, mostly in sharp, clear colours, vivid yellows and blues and whites, the most wonderful blues more dazzling than the sea’.26 In the aftermath of the end of his intense affair with Lydia, the mysterious dancer with whom he had been involved since late 1893, women and sex were much on his mind, and his

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Baudelairean dismissal of bathers cannot disguise the fascination they held for him. ‘A sentimental sensualist should avoid the French seaside,’ he wrote. ‘He will be pained at seeing how ridiculous a beautiful woman may look when she is clothed in wet and dragging garments. The lines of the body are lost or deformed.’27 The passage prompted an illustration by Beardsley featuring the actress and courtesan Cléo de Mérode, mentioned in passing in Symons’s essay, who had scandalised Dieppe ‘by bathing in a fantastical costume and adorned with heavy gold chains’.28 The artist’s lack of interest in the natural surroundings is palpable, notably in his minimalist treatment of the sea and the token flight of gulls with which it is decorated. Occasionally, Symons ventured to the ‘unfashionable part of the town’ where the boats arrived from Newhaven, in order to enjoy the more boisterous amusements of the town’s fishing community, or ventured along the coast to Varengeville, which could claim scenery that is quasi-Cornish: ‘deep, enchanting country lanes’, ‘little sunken ways through the woods’, ‘strange, stiff little pine-woods on the heights’. ‘At Dieppe, the sea is liberal,’ he wrote, ‘and affords you a long sweep from the cliffs on the left to the pier on the right.’29 In general, though, he tended to ignore the Channel, perhaps because the cliffs were not high enough to give him the sublimely vertiginous panoramas that he found on the Cornish coast, perhaps because the sea itself lacked the turbulence and variety he savoured when watching the Atlantic from Boscastle or Tintagel. As a travel writer, Symons was always caught between evoking a place so that those who had never visited it could do so imaginatively, assuring those who did know it that he too was an aficionado of sound judgement, and glorying in his response to it, so that his impressions of a place risked overwhelming the place itself – in a 1918 review, the TLS called this ‘the aesthetic fallacy’, an arrogant belief in the importance of one’s own perceptions rather than anything of enduring significance.30 An earlier critic in The Athenaeum was also unimpressed. ‘Mr Symons lives luxuriously on his sensations,’ he remarked. ‘He treats life as the fuel of mood, not caring so much what things are to each other as for what they are to him.’31 The Dieppe essay exemplified all these concerns as Symons attempted to be a leisured man of the world and an arbiter of taste – an unimpressed Punch parodied it as ‘Margate 1895’ by ‘Simple Symons’, a man who ‘went to Margate this year by the excursion train with the intention of remaining only for the eight hours of vulgarity without fun that we trippers are promised, and . . . remained from Saturday to Monday!’32 However, Dieppe obviously meant rather more to Symons than his blasé commentary

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suggested. He had been visiting the town since 1890, and on his initial visit, the first time he had looked across to England from abroad, he had penned a sequence of six short poems, ‘At Dieppe’, between 18 and 20 June. These determine to aestheticise and depopulate the town by looking out at the sea, a sea which is not disfigured by any steamers from Newhaven or indeed the ‘Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, / Butting through the Channel in the mad March days’ which so delighted John Masefield in ‘Cargoes’ (1910).33 The first, ‘After Sunset’, dated 19 June, is short enough to quote in its entirety: The sea lies quieted beneath The after-sunset flush That leaves upon the heaped grey clouds The grape’s faint purple blush. Pale, from a little space in heaven Of delicate ivory, The sickle-moon and one gold star Look down upon the sea.34

The sea is placid, a Whistlerian ‘arrangement’ rather than a symbol or a prompt for speculation about theology and the human condition – Dieppe beach is a very long way from the agonising doubts of Arnold’s Dover. ‘After Sunset’ is a slight production in itself, but it signals that Symons was not interested in detailed description, historical associations or, at this point in his career, complex selfanalysis: the seascape is not an objective correlative or a cue for reminiscence or regret. Instead, the poem conducts an experiment whereby a painting by Whistler (as much as an actual seascape) is depicted in the starkly minimalist style of mid-period Paul Verlaine, the poet whose ‘Art poétique’ (1884) urged his followers to ‘Prends l’éloquence et tords lui son cou!’ (‘Wring the neck of eloquence!’). Whistler’s chromatic palette had become ever more restricted as his career progressed, and Verlaine’s poem urged a similar attenuation in counselling the writing of ‘la chanson grise’ in which colour would be forbidden and ‘la Nuance’ would reign supreme. Symons’s use of three colours in the space of eight lines suggested he had yet to fully apply Verlaine’s methods, or that midsummer was less likely to produce the grey mists necessary for those poems in which ‘l’Indécis au Précis se joint’ (‘Indecision joins Precision’).35 Other poems in the group showed Symons moving closer towards Verlaine’s approved colour scheme in ‘the grey / Unending waste of sea and night’ in the second poem, ‘On the Beach’, but rhetorical posturing intervened:

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‘Is not this, where the sea-line ends, / The shore-line of infinity?’36 ‘Under the Cliffs’ meanwhile filtered Verlaine through Wilde’s version of French impressionism. ‘This pallid afternoon, / With feet that tread as whitely as the moon’ mixed Verlaine’s ‘La Lune blanche’ (1870) with the closing lines of ‘The Harlot’s House’ (1885).37 These early poems showed Symons failing to trust his own observations, and instead seeking to legitimise them through a process of allusion and cultural refraction. Citing the approved influences or authorities of art does not, in itself, make a poet a practitioner of it. When Symons returned to the subject of Dieppe in September 1893, it was clear that he had made significant advances in three ‘colour studies’. The first of these explicitly painterly poems, ‘At Dieppe’, was dedicated to the artist Walter Sickert. It went further than the early pieces and undoubtedly benefited from being written during autumn despite the anguish occasioned by seasonal change: The grey-green stretch of sandy grass, Indefinitely desolate; A sea of lead, a sky of slate; Already autumn in the air, alas! One stark monotony of stone, The long hotel, acutely white, Against the after-sunset light Withers grey-green, and takes the grass’s tone. Listless and endless it outlies, And means, to you and me, no more Than any pebble on the shore, Or this indifferent moment as it dies.38

Sickert knew Dieppe far better than did Symons. He had commenced annual summer visits in 1879 when he turned twenty, and would live there between 1898 and 1902, producing so many images of the town that a mutual friend of his and Symons’s, the portraitist Jacques-Émile Blanche, nicknamed him the Dieppe Canaletto. In keeping with Sickert’s style, the poem is evocative yet imprecise in matters of detail and setting, with its stony beach looking out at a ‘sea of lead, a sky of slate’. Symons resists the temptation to imbue the land and seascape with directly symbolic meaning, instead using them as an emotional index by which he can assess his own condition (and, by implication, that of the similarly jaded Sickert). Its

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listlessness carries with it a suggestion of the pathetic fallacy – a less moody observer might simply describe the water as still – as Symons subordinates beach and tide to his own emotional emptiness. There is no explicit causal relationship between the two, for the sea is not responsible for the unexplained depleted vigour or indifference the speaker recounts. Instead, the poem reveals the growing egocentricity of Symons’s methods, and his increasing tendency in verse, as well as in his travel essays, to use his environment as a means of talking about himself. The precise use of muted colour offers a more evolved appropriation of Whistler and Verlaine, but lurking within ‘At Dieppe’ is a marked hint of how Symons would develop over the subsequent decade and a half before the breakdown that all but finished his career in the autumn of 1908. This fascination with his own impressions, and his tendency to prioritise them above their actual inspiration, helped motivate T. S. Eliot’s criticism of Symons, ‘The Perfect Critic’, in The Sacred Wood (1921). Symons knew Latin and Greek, but he was not a classicist and did not feel the yearning for the Isles of Greece that so consumed George Gissing in By the Ionian Sea (1901) or the ‘fever of Hellenism’ that seizes Mr Lucas in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Road from Colonus’ (1904). He never saw the Aegean, and what he says of the Mediterranean is brusque and uncomplimentary. In ‘An Autumn City’, Daniel Roserra, the leisured traveller who, Symons admitted, was a self-portrait, takes his new bride, Livia, to Arles in SouthEastern France: as one might expect, their sea voyage from England to Marseilles is not recounted. The trip is a disaster, with incessant rain causing tension and resentment. Livia is stricken with cold, and cannot understand why her husband so loves wandering through the town’s cemeteries in such inclement weather for ‘she had none of that sympathetic submissiveness to things which meant for him so much of the charm of life’ and is unable to share his ‘luxuriating sensations’.39 At the end of the story, Roserra takes pity on her, and takes her back to Marseilles. She is overcome with delight, but he can only recognise the confirmation of their incompatibility. The town is an ‘exuberant paradise of snobs and tourists’, the heat is ferocious, and the whole place teems with disgusting vulgarity. Worse still, Livia can ‘get pleasure out of the empty sunlight and obvious sea’.40 This light might have inspired Cézanne, but it is too equatorial, too bright, to appeal to the connoisseur of Whistlerian nuance. And no one who has stood at Land’s End or Tintagel Castle could ever be stirred by the flat, bright blue, unchanging waters of the Mediterranean. In ‘The Triumph of Time’ (1866), Swinburne,

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a fellow devotee of the Boscastle cliffs, called the Mediterranean ‘a tideless dolorous midland sea’. Roserra and Symons would surely endorse this view. As Livia glows delightedly beneath her parasol amid imagery now familiar from a thousand holiday brochures and websites, Roserra seethes and sweats, knowing his happiness is over for ever. Symons never wholly recovered from his nervous collapse, and though he regained something of his health, his ability to travel was severely curtailed. He was unable to visit Italy, and did not see Paris again until the early 1920s, when his sometime benefactor, John Quinn, funded a couple of brief returns to his old haunts. Until then, he went no further than the Isle of Wight, and it was here that his continuing neurosis met the coastal landscape in an extraordinary essay, ‘Sea-Magic’, which must have bewildered those who purchased the first issue of The Sackbut in November 1920 when it was initially published. The magazine was primarily concerned with music, and had recently superseded the increasingly staid Organist and Choirmaster. Its editor was Philip Heseltine, better known as the composer ‘Peter Warlock’, a man whose fascination with all things Celtic, magical and bohemian probably made him sympathetic to Symons’s work.41 Much as Warlock admired Delius, ‘Sea-Magic’ was no Sea Drift. It was instead a startling example of how, since his breakdown, Symons had become increasingly obsessed by snakes, sin and Satan. Karl Beckson has shown how Symons was unable to reconcile a Methodist upbringing with his sexual desires and their appetites. Even the work he produced during his brief heyday is, for a postFreudian audience, strikingly suggestive of sexual turmoil – as in ‘A Prelude to Life’, where he admits to nightmares in which he walked barefoot ‘across a floor curdling with snakes’ and which contained ‘a disturbing element of sex’. ‘I was’, he wrote, ‘ashamed of my desires, of my sensations, though I made no serious effort to escape them’, and sought only ‘a conscious, subtle, elaborate sensuality, which I knew not how to procure’.42 After his illness, Symons’s obsessions became ever more visible and, regrettably, crudely expressed, with his misguided essays on and translations of the ‘satanic’ Baudelaire doing his reputation permanent damage. They also show a tendency to see the natural world as manifesting his own inner torment, and it was this which came to the fore in ‘Sea-Magic’. Having been so dully tranquil in his poetry of the 1890s, the Channel was now ‘amazingly unreal’, a woman dressed in an absinthe-green gown who was ‘pettish and cruel and fretful

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and capricious and caressing’, ‘violently heaving like an enormous serpent convulsed with anger’. In a moment of feverish reflection, he confessed that it was ‘more than horrible to imagine oneself on a ship with underneath one a huge mass of surging reptiles in continuous nervous movement’.43 This image might be better suited to Symons’s own consciousness than the sea off Shanklin, but in a sense it is not inconsistent with his earlier approach. The seascape is still depopulated and aestheticised, evoked through artistic allusion (D. G. Rossetti, Gautier, Berlioz), and personalised through idiosyncratic imagery. Nothing matters beyond the poet’s own reactions to it. That it is now conjured up through more spectacular and consciously imaginative imagery than it had been in poems free of figuration, such as the Dieppe colour study, is less important than the relationship between the natural environment and its observer. In this, Symons was consistent to the end, always foregrounding his own impressions and sensations, and largely oblivious to those of others – just as Wordsworth often writes of being alone when he was actually with his sister, Dorothy, so Symons tends to discount the presence of his wife, Rhoda. Ultimately, his coast is less a coast than the stimulus for egocentric observation, even if the resulting essays and poems are, on occasion, beautiful, even moving.

Notes 1. Arthur Symons, ‘The Cornish Coast’, in Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands (London: W. Collins, 1918), 284. First published as ‘Cornish Sketches III: The Cornish Coast’, Saturday Review, 27 August 1904, 265–6. 2. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 1995), 18. 3. Symons, ‘Cornish Sketches II: The Cornish Sea: Boscastle’, Saturday Review, 14 September 1901, 330–1, reprinted in Cities and Sea-Coasts, 279. 4. Symons, ‘An Autumn City’, in Spiritual Adventures (London: Constable, 1905), 178. 5. ‘Preface: Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli’, in Poems, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Arthur Symons (London: Martin Secker, 1924), 96–7. First published in Silhouettes, 2nd edn (London: Leonard Smithers, 1896). 6. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘El Dorado’, in ‘Virginibus Puerisque’ and Later Essays (London: Collins, 1928), 154. 7. Symons, ‘Berlin’s Discomforts’, in Wanderings (London: J. M. Dent, 1931), 136.

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8. Josiah Flynt, My Life, in The Memoirs of Arthur Symons: Art and Life in the 1890s, ed. Karl Beckson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), 165. 9. Symons, ‘The Isles of Aran’, in Cities and Sea-Coasts, 302–27. First published in The Savoy, December 1896, 73–86. 10. Symons, ‘The Genesis of Spiritual Adventures’, Arthur Symons Papers, Princeton University, CO182, Box 9, File 7, p. 9. 11. Symons, ‘Isles of Aran’, 313. 12. Symons, ‘Aspects of Cornwall’, in Wanderings, 260. Dated here as 1913; first appeared in Freeman, 18 October 1922, 131–2. 13. Ibid. 262. The image of ships as giant birds is used again in the vision of ‘a fantastic ship, with red and white sails’ that opens Symons’s ‘The South Coast’, first published in The Graphic on 7 June 1919. See ‘The South Coast’, in Wanderings, 281. In chapter 18 of Bleak House (1853), Skimpole proclaims that the slaves on American plantations lead ‘“an unpleasant experience on the whole; but they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence. I am very sensible of it, if it be, and I shouldn’t wonder if it were!”’ See Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 273. 14. Symons, ‘The Cornish Coast’, 284. 15. Ibid. 284–5. 16. Symons, ‘At the Land’s End’, in Cities and Sea-Coasts, 272. Dated here as ‘Summer 1905’; first published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January 1909, 219–25. 17. Symons, ‘A Prelude to Life’, in Spiritual Adventures, 6–7. 18. Symons, ‘Christian Trevalga’, in Spiritual Adventures, 86. 19. Symons, ‘Seaward Lackland’, in Spiritual Adventures, 202. 20. Symons, ‘At the Alhambra: Impressions and Sensations’, The Savoy, September 1896, 83. 21. Symons’s father was a Methodist minister, whose frequent changes of parish were one reason why Symons grew up in the south-west. Where ‘Seaward Lackland’ is concerned, it is only fair to say that Thomas Hardy, the dedicatee of Spiritual Adventures, thought it the finest story in the book, ‘an almost perfect bit of narrative art’ that he much preferred to the more Jamesian, open-ended method of ‘An Autumn City’. Hardy to Symons, 20 October 1905, in The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 3:183. 22. Symons, ‘Dieppe: 1895’, in Cities and Sea-Coasts, 228. First published in The Savoy, January 1896, 84–95. 23. Symons, ‘The Death of Peter Waydelin’, in Spiritual Adventures, 147. 24. Ibid. 148. 25. For a brief account of the Dieppe trip and its contexts, see my 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 164–7.

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26. Symons, ‘Dieppe: 1895’, 228–9. 27. Ibid. 230. 28. Stephen Calloway, Aubrey Beardsley (London: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 1998), 142. 29. Symons, ‘Dieppe: 1895’, 246, 228. None of these details are visible in Beardsley’s drawing. 30. ‘The Aesthetic Fallacy’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 October 1918, 465. 31. Unsigned review of Cities and Sea-Coasts, by Symons, The Athenaeum, 14 November 1903, 641. 32. ‘An Idyll of the Sea-Side’, Punch, 1 February 1896. The author of the squib was Wilde’s friend, Ada ‘Sphinx’ Leverson. 33. See John Masefield, ‘Cargoes’, in Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 282. 34. Symons, ‘At Dieppe I: After Sunset’, in Poems, 98. First published in Silhouettes (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1892). 35. Paul Verlaine, ‘Art poétique’, in Jadis et nauguère: Poésies [Yesteryear and yesterday: poems] (Paris: Léon Vanier, 1884), 23–4. 36. Symons, ‘At Dieppe II: On the Beach’, in Poems, 99. 37. Symons, ‘At Dieppe V: Under the Cliffs’, in Poems, 102. 38. Symons, ‘Colour Studies I: At Dieppe’, in Poems, 197. Dated 16 September 1893; first published in London Nights (London: Leonard C. Smithers, 1895). 39. Symons, ‘An Autumn City’, 192–3, 183. 40. Ibid. 197, 181. 41. Symons would surely have been amused by the fact that Heseltine had been born in the Savoy in 1894, since the hotel had supplied the name of his radical arts magazine the following year. 42. Symons, ‘Prelude to Life’, 35–6. 43. Symons, ‘Sea-Magic’, in Wanderings, 288, 291. First published in The Sackbut, November 1920, 313–16.

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Epilogue: Unravelling Philip Hoare

As we sailed down the River Itchen towards the sea on that grey, drizzly June afternoon, unaccountably cool and wet after a prolonged episode of intense heat, we passed boats moored in midstream, patched and appropriated from their former uses to create ad hoc homes, afloat, neither part of the land nor yet of the open water. They constituted an aquatic Mad Max community, lived in, presumably, by people who had rejected the shackles of cars and mortgages. On one side of the riverbank were new residences rising from the former site of Vosper Thorneycroft, a prosperous ship-building yard, its huge sheds, big enough to house a small church, long since pulled down and turned into a brownfield site ripe for profitable redevelopment. On the other teetered voluminous piles of rubbish, twisted metal of every description rising in trash dunes that seemed about to overwhelm our little wooden yacht as we passed by, should anyone take out that key piece of Jenga scrap. Ahead, Southampton Water widened to the open sea, suddenly and abruptly oceanic in its outlook, dwarfing everything, even the behemoth car carriers which were being loaded, like floating multistorey car parks, with their vehicles, ready to roll out the other side in their appointed marketplace. It seemed this coast was for sale, from the land and the labour and the rubbish to the giant petro-chemical refinery of Fawley, the largest in Europe in 1951, when it was constructed over the eastern edge of the New Forest – mimicking the ancient trees with its gantries and silos and spires burning like monuments to the unknown soldiers of the new age of the Anthropocene. Great oil tankers were suckled dry of their bituminous cargo, formed from the fossil remains of those trees, and the refined products pumped intravenously through a network of pipelines, inland

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and around the country; or would, in time, be transformed into the raw material for the plastics that filled other cargo ships, and add to the litter washed up on the lonely, suburban beach where I swim, every day.

*

*

*

On 27 May 1922, Guglielmo Marconi sailed from Southampton on his ‘electron ship’, Elettra – a custom-fitted yacht-cum-laboratory which he had bought in the port three years earlier, at the cost of £21,000.1 Marconi was setting out on a research cruise, ostensibly to test short-wave transmissions. But the inventor’s mission was wreathed in secrecy and intrigue. Two years before, in January 1920, the Daily Mail had published an interview with Marconi, in which he seemed to speculate on unidentified radio signals. It was noted that these signals had been detected before the war. It seems no coincidence that Marconi’s miraculous telegraph system, a key moment in modern technological history, was also linked with other, more esoteric notions of communication. As the prominent physicist Sir Oliver Lodge’s contemporary interest in radio had segued into spiritualism – Lodge had lost his son Raymond in the First World War, and he claimed to have messages from Raymond in the spirit world, where there were houses, trees and flowers but no disease, and soldiers who had died now smoked cigars and drank whiskey – Marconi, too, had come to believe in spiritualism, as if its metaphysics might provide an alternative to the apocalyptic war that had threatened the essential integrity of Island Britain, and even its familiar spirits. It was a conflict in which the shores of the archipelago had been breached from above by whale-like Zeppelins, and from below by equally whale-like U-boats, a threat which drastically raised the going rate for a talismanic caul, the dried amniotic membrane of a child ‘born behind the veil’ and therefore a protection against drowning. Meanwhile, whales themselves were taken for submarines. In captions to what are probably the first aerial photographs of cetaceans ever taken, the Illustrated London News reported: ‘A “Neutral” of the seas often mistaken for a U-boat’; ‘An air photograph of a large whale spotted from a British air-ship.’ ‘In half-lights’, it continued, under an image of a slender, vast fin whale caught just under the surface, ‘these huge monsters bore a strong resemblance to a submerged U-boat, and, as the rule in war was, “When in doubt, bomb,” a good many of them were killed by our aircraft.’2

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It was as if the fragile coast’s edginess and held-outness allowed for such a futurist domination of the natural world. It is telling to note, too, that the seaplane – which would segue into the Spitfire two decades later – was developed in Southampton by Noel Pemberton Billing, a pioneering aviator, proto-fascist and inventor (of, among other things, a compass camera and a self-lighting cigarette), at his riverside works at Woolston in 1913, registering the telegraphic address ‘Supermarine, Southampton’, as if to impose his will to power on the semi-industrial shore.3 Like Marconi, Billing’s ambitions were a mirror of those of his contemporary: the glamorous tweed-clad and bow-tied airman Claude Grahame-White – another proponent of ‘the Aeroplane Age’, as sponsored by the Daily Mail with their ‘Wake Up England’ campaign – who was born on the outskirts of Southampton at Bursledon Towers, now the site of a Tesco superstore. In 1921, at a private party given by Florence Tyzack Parbury, a socialite, performer and air pilot who had flown with GrahameWhite in 1910, Marconi had spoken of the close association between aviation and wireless telephony, and also discussed interplanetary wireless communication, as if casting the future.4 ‘“Mention has been made of the possibility of wireless rays passing out through the terrestrial air into space . . . and of the sending of messages to Mars,”’ he told the assembled guests. ‘“Perhaps some day we shall be able to fly in those spaces outside the earth’s envelope.”’5 An undated newspaper clipping notes a ‘Wireless Concert’ given by Parbury at the Kensington studio. (Presumably the same ‘Jacobean studio’ at Yeoman’s Row, Knightsbridge, where she had entertained wounded soldiers during the war, claiming later, ‘I know of three cases where sight, hearing and speech were restored while an entertainment was in progress, to men who had lost three senses through shell shock.’6) Guests put on telephone headpieces and listened to music being played by a gramophone and an orchestra at the Hague. The dense fog enveloping London did not seem to make any difference to the clarity with which the sounds travelled. The 100 ft aerial overheard caught a lilting waltz, a duet, a song from ‘Chu Chin Chow,’ and other selections, while in the intervals came the Morse voices of steamers in the North Sea and the Channel.7

These entrepreneur-inventor-pioneers preceded their history. They were avatars of a future when the relevance of national borders would

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extend beyond the shore and into international waters, emblems of a globalism to come. ‘Have I done the world good’, Marconi asked himself, ‘or have I added a menace?’8 Marconi’s movements, from Europe to America – a distance his invention had already reduced to the length of a radio wave, as it were – were narrated by his own technology in the New York Times, telegraphed over waters in which, eight years earlier, the technological miracle of Titanic, sailing from Southampton, had been sunk by an iceberg, followed by terrible human-inflicted, militarised losses of the war itself. (The radio operators on Titanic were employed by Marconi’s company, and Marconi was personally congratulated for having saved survivors from the tragedy by means of his technology.) Now the sea and the shore were new arenas, for strange new notions. ‘Marconi Still at Sea on Mysterious Sounds; Says Queer Indications on Wireless Occurred in London and New York Simultaneously’, dateline London, 27 January 1920: ‘Interruptions of the Marconi wireless instruments by undecipherable signals, which were noted before the war and have been publicly referred to since, are discussed by Marconi in an interview published in The Daily Mail today.’9 And just as Marconi had linked continent to continent in a new static empire, so another Italian venture, the Milanese company G. B. Pirelli, which specialised in the manufacture and laying of submarine telephone lines, established their giant factory on Southampton’s reclaimed land in 1913, and became implicit in the process by which the town’s shore-line was incrementally stolen from itself in the pursuit of economic and industrial progress.10 (It is telling, perhaps, that Southampton foreshore has been claimed as the site where Canute demonstrated his inability to turn back the tide.) I have a personal connection to that monolithic site; it financed my upbringing. My father would work there all his life, arriving from depressed Bradford in 1938, stepping out into the bright maritime light of Southampton on to a railway platform – constructed of concrete in which cockle-shells are still embedded – which then looked directly on to the sea. Each day, at the same time, he would leave home and clock in, returning each evening at the same time.11 In those huge brick sheds, over-lit with watery light from glazed roofs, my father worked through the Second World War onwards (during which German fighter planes attacked factory workers as they crossed the yard to their canteen). There he tested those vast serpentine cables which tethered Britain as a client state to the United States.

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Marconi’s transatlantic voyage had been tempestuous. Elettra (after whom he would name his daughter) had to put into port at the Azores (where the mysteriously abandoned American brigantine Mary Celeste had been found drifting in 1872) and again take refuge in Bermuda, the original isle of strange noises that inspired the Earl of Southampton’s lover, William Shakespeare, to write The Tempest. On arrival in New York Marconi was interrogated, even before he made landfall, by his own technology, as the Associated Press wired ashore his responses to their question: had he found life on Mars? What Marconi did not divulge to the media was his far stranger belief that, in the ethereal, fluid post-war world of loss and grief, his receivers might pick up, not the sound of aliens, but that of longdrowned sailors. Marconi’s interest in the occult appeared to burgeon in tandem with his active fascism – he joined Mussolini’s party the following year, 1923, and the Italian leader would be best man at Marconi’s wedding. A decade later, Virginia Woolf, who had a surprising interest in science fiction, imagining a telephone that could see and a machine that could connect us to the past, wrote an essay in which she sent her Imagination across the Atlantic in spirit – like Prospero’s Ariel, or the ravens which sat on Odin’s shoulders and flew around the world each day to bring its news back to their omnipotent master. It was an out-of-body experience through which she would visit ‘America, which I Have Never Seen’ and which she never would. ‘Sit still on a rock on the coast of Cornwall’, her spirit-familiar tells her, ‘and I will fly to America and tell you what America is like.’ Passing fishing boats and steamers, soaring over Queen Mary and several airplanes – one of which might well be flown by Florence Parbury – Imagination reports back, ‘“The sea looks much like any other sea; there is now a shoal of porpoises cutting cart wheels beneath me.”’12 Finally she makes landfall, like an exhausted swallow or monarch butterfly, and is swallowed up by the canyons of New York. To me, all these imaginative and technological linkings of one coast merge with another, through history and myth, reflecting and echolocating the beginnings and endings of what or where the shore might or might not mean or be. The coastline of Britain unravels in my head, turning itself inside out, reversing its liminality to become something extensive rather than limiting; receiving rather than ending. Its topography moves in meaning, too, as fluid as the sea that defines it. Its settlements veer from the utilitarian – the port – to the recreational – the resort.

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These are human definitions; impositions of meaning. In the Ordnance Survey of the country, carried out from this nodal point, the shores of the Thames are included in that measurement – as if the capital itself were both port and resort, inverted by that suckedin coast. Like London, Southampton sits at the head of an estuary, but it is coursed on either side by the two rivers that make my dawn swims in its waters such a chilly experience. This gives the port-resort its geographical and human duality. A place known and defined for its leaving and arriving. A place which has shared its history, at once industrial and commercial and recuperative and recreational: from the burgeoning and declining and restoring fortunes of its port, to a similar trajectory in its appeal as a watering place, a spa town and a site for entertainment. A last resort, perhaps, for some of its visitors.

*

*

*

In the 1720s, Daniel Defoe spoke of Southampton as ‘a truly Antient Town, for ’tis in a manner dying with Age; the decay of the Trade is the real decay of the Town; and all the Business of Moment . . . a little of the Wine Trade, and much Smuggling’.13 Yet by virtue of its rare double tides, it constantly regenerated itself. Now the port deals with the majority of our sea-borne trade with the east, and, daily, new cars are gathered in dock-side multi-storeys to be driven the short distance on to car carriers and out the other end ten thousand miles away. There is a binary quality, too, to this place, a sense of exchange, another kind of physicality which is anthropomorphic: the deep cut of Southampton Water as an invagination in the underbelly of the island. These shores bear witness to giving and taking, to immigration and emigration of people, of trade, of ideas, of disease, of poets, of art. When John Keats arrived here in 1817, hoping to escape London for the solace of the sea, he found only the expanse of mud of Southampton Water at its double low tide, as if the place had performed an Ariel-like trick on him. ‘The Southampton water when I saw it just now was no better than a low Water Water, which did no more than answer my expectations,’ Keats told his brothers. His nerves were raw, so he took out The Tempest. ‘“Here’s my Comfort,”’ he said.14 That afternoon he left on the rising tide, with Shakespeare’s play in his pocket, sailing to the Isle of Wight, another magical island of strange noises, to compose his ‘Sonnet. On the Sea’, filled with ‘eternal whisperings around / Desolate shores’.15

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A century later, the writer Laurie Lee, then a young man setting out in search of his fortune, experienced a similar sense of disillusion. ‘I finally arrived at Southampton where I had been told I would see the sea,’ he wrote in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, in 1934. ‘Instead, I saw a few rusty cranes and a compressed-looking liner wedged tightly beside some houses: also some sad allotments fringing a muddy river which they said was Southampton Water.’16 Modern-day visitors to the city may experience the same hope and disappointment – the paradoxical invisibility of the shores which define the place, yet which cannot be reached. Such a disjuncture speaks to the greater paradox of the British archipelago. We are told, as citizens, that wherever we are we are never further than seventyfive miles from the sea-shore, just as we are, supposedly, never more than a few feet away from a rat. Our shore is an imperial imposition, too. The Romans called the Mediterranean mare nostrum, appropriating its shores as the beginning, rather than the end, of their empire. But the sea beyond seemed to belong to no one: mare liberum. It was the British who defined a new possession of the shore, by extending power as far as a cannon could reach – a three-mile zone around the archipelago. It took until the mid-twentieth century for the empire of the United States to institute a new extension of claim, two hundred miles out. In the European referendum of 2016, a new political-physical liminality was proposed. Its result, and the decision to cast off from the Continent (the contained land), presumed that the sea which surrounds us, here on the British archipelago, our island state, sets us apart, defined, unlike the amorphous continental mass beside us. We were turned incontinent as a result, rather than creating a new bulwark. Surrounded by a cordon sanitaire, to keep the rest of the world at bay. But the sea also connects us, by those shores. The longshore drift of culture and history opens us to the world. It unites us with people who cross it, promised by their smugglers that they will leave their problems behind and step into our cities of gold, borne there by the water. That week in June, as I sailed with friends from Falmouth in Cornwall, where England runs out, a single-engine plane flew overhead, trailing a banner exhorting us to leave. As if we might all sail away from the troubled world – that fractious Europe and its problematic borders. As if Britain itself might sail back into some perfect past, set free of the ties that bind us. For much of modern history,

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we thought we held dominion. We were an imperial power, forever extending our reach. Now we seek to recall it, in an extended act of managed retreat, abandoning our responsibilities. Just-rising seas are forcing councils around our coasts to yield in their bureaucratic, managed retreat. But then I thought of Herman Melville, as I often do when on the ocean’s skin, or in it. As misanthropic as his anti-hero Ishmael may be, he declares to the readers of Moby-Dick (1851), and the rest of us, ‘God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!’17 Similarly, in his earlier, semi-autobiographical Redburn (1849), written from the wharves of New York, Southampton’s glamorous alter ego, he had addressed the influx of refugees from the Irish famine, asking whether ‘multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores’, and replying, ‘if they can get here, they had God’s right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world.’18 In our interconnected age, there are no boundaries. Gender, race, species: the old classifications and hierarchies must disappear, if we’re to survive. The sea is a queer place, an unknown, the great out there. Lawless, for all that we have sought to impose law upon it. It is the great leveller, the conduit of culture and life. It is the ultimate connection, not a division, not a defence. It opens us up to the new, rather than closing us down to the old, forever renewed and rebooted with every tyrannical tide. I look with wonder at the little fold-out map in my Ward Lock’s Red Guide: Bournemouth, New Forest, Southampton (noting the hierarchy of the names), published in 1963, when I was five years old. Even then, when large parts of the town were still bombsites. The empty apron of reclaimed land beyond the railway line stands as a space to be filled by the future: by the ‘Heliport’ optimistically added to the docklands; and by the sense of what this artificial coastline had promised to a new city attempting to rise from its own ruins. Eroding and replacing itself, the coast expresses an end and a beginning; loss as well as hope. ‘Is this Utopian?’ Oscar Wilde asked in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891). ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.’19 More than ever, we’re all in this together. Any shore proposes the future as much as it outlines the past.

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Notes 1. For images of Marconi’s yacht, see the website of the Comitato Guglielmo Marconi International, (last accessed 10 January 2018). 2. ‘The War in the Air: Whales Mistaken for Submarines’, Illustrated London News, 5 April 1919, 477. The photographs were selected from the Royal Air Force exhibition at the Graphic Galleries in London in 1919. In a turnaround of such cetacean bombardment, testimony recorded for Southampton’s Oral History Unit offers an observation from a former worker at Harland shipyard during the First World War: We done some huge jobs during the war. Harland did stems and sterns that were blown to pieces. A big whale boat, the biggest in the world, a whale, whaling mother ship right it were had a bomb down through her funnel and blew her engine room and that. We repaired her. They had a job to get her in No 6 dry dock, she was so big.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

Southampton Oral History Unit, Southampton Archives Office, SC/OH, M0031, b.1903. Particular thanks to Padmini Broomfield for assistance with this source. Billing founded the Society of Vigilantes dedicated to prevent ‘enemy aliens’ (often German Jews) from having equal access to air raid shelters. In 1918, he was sued for libel by the ‘Salome Dancer’, Maud Allan, for suggesting that she was the leader of ‘The Cult of Clitoris’ and a lesbian figurehead for high-ranking British men and women addicted to ‘Wildean practices’. In 1920, Parbury was filmed as a passenger in a biplane scattering flowers over New York. See ‘Arrivals on SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria – Outtakes’, Moving Image Research Collections, University of South Carolina University Libraries, 28 April 1920, (last accessed 10 January 2018). ‘An Aerial Limousine: First Woman to Fly Her Own Pleasure Plane’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 14 November 1921, 10. Montreal Gazette, 25 August 1919. See ‘Florence Tyzack Bigland’, Geni.com, (last accessed 10 January 2018). Guglielmo Marconi quoted in Marc Raboy, Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 631.

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9. ‘Marconi Still at Sea on Mysterious Sounds; Says Queer Indications on Wireless Occurred in London and New York Simultaneously’, New York Times, 27 January 1920, 7. 10. One Sotonian, born in 1903, recalled: Before Pirelli’s cable factory was there on the Western Esplanade, the sea came right up to the roadside and there was a low wall. . . . Later on . . . we saw the building of the new docks in Southampton. Now this was a colossal project. Basically it was built by driving a great sea wall across the bend in the river opposite the central station and then pumping out the water from inside and the mud was dredged to make a deep channel for the ships. . . . There were quite a few fatalities I believe during the building.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

Southampton Oral History Unit, Southampton Archives Office, SC/OH, M0028, recorded 5 September 1983. Another oral history contributor working in Pirelli’s during the First World War would take his terrier to work with him at 6 a.m.; the dog would be waiting for him at 9 a.m. when he came out for breakfast, and at 5 p.m. ‘he’d be waiting . . . to go home with me’. Southampton Oral History Unit, Southampton Archives Office, SC/OH, M0032, b.1903. Virginia Woolf, ‘America, which I Have Never Seen’, Hearst’s International Magazine, April 1938, reprinted in the Dublin Review 5 (Winter 2001–2), (last accessed 10 January 2018). [Daniel Defoe], A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journeys . . . (London: G. Strahan et al., 1724), 1:80. Ironically, Defoe’s own gravestone stood for sixty years at 56 Portswood Road, Southampton, having been taken away by the stonemason, Samuel Horner, when he replaced it with an obelisk over the writer’s grave at Bunhill Fields in the City of London. See ‘Defoe, Daniel: Tombstone’, Sotonopedia: The A–Z of Southampton’s History, Southampton Central Library, (last accessed 10 January 2018). John Keats to George and Tom Keats, 15 April 1817, in Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott, rev. edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 13, 12. ‘Sonnet. On the Sea’, in Keats’s Poetry and Prose, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 79. Laurie Lee, ‘London Road’, in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 15.

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17. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Tom Quirk (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 299. 18. Redburn: His First Voyage, vol. 4 of The Writings of Herman Melville, Northwestern-Newberry edn, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 292. Melville sailed to England in the autumn of 1849 to sell Redburn to a London publisher. His ship was the Southampton. 19. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891; repr. London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1912), 43.

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Index

Acts of Union 1707, 2 Acts of Union 1800, 153 Addison, Joseph, 31 Alde, River, 3 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 176, 183n17 Allan, Maud, 264n3 Allen, Matthew, 135, 136, 137 Ambroise, 7–8, 9 ambrotype, 229, 230, 232, 240, 241 American Revolutionary War, British coastal blockade of America, 2 Anderson, Benedict, 150 Anglicanism, 152, 154 Anglo-Saxon peoples, 149–50, 155, 162, 164 Anning, Mary, 1 Anstruther, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103 Anthropocene, 256 aquarium, 169–70, 192, 196, 197 Aquarium, The (Gosse), 14, 152, 169, 172, 192, 193 Arblay, Alexandre d’, 29, 39 Arcades Project, The (Benjamin), 142 Aristotle, 242 Arnold, Matthew, 188–9, 190, 191, 197, 249 ‘Dover Beach’, 21, 188–9, 191 As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Lee), 262 Assommoir, L’ (Zola), 15 Athenaeum, The, 211, 213, 248 Atlantic City, 238 Atlantic Ocean, 19, 20, 26n50, 82, 175, 242, 243, 245, 248, 260; see also telegraph: Atlantic telegraph cable Atlantic World, 150–1 Black Atlantic, 150 Auden, W. H., 191 ‘Dover’, 191 ‘Letter to a Wound’, 191

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Austen, Jane Mansfield Park, 29 Persuasion, 43 Pride and Prejudice, 40 Sanditon, 31 Bakari, Fumo, Sultan of Witu, 128–9, 130 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 79, 175 Balnea, The (Carey), 37, 38 Balzac, Honoré de, 137 ‘Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, Le’ (The unknown masterpiece), 191 Bank Holidays Act 1871, 2 Barghash, Sultan of Zanzibar, 125 Barker, Robert, 6–7, 8 Barnum, P. T., 11, 13 Barr, Colin, 154 Barrett, Charlotte, 46 Bataille, Georges, 177–8 Bateaux quittant le port du Havre (Boats leaving the port of Le Havre; Le Gray), 210 bathing, 54, 59; see also swimming Baudelaire, Charles, 143, 248, 252 Bayly, C. A., 160 Beardsley, Aubrey, 246, 247 Beaufort Scale, 59 Beaumont, George, 7th Baronet, 56 Beckson, Karl, 252 Benjamin, Walter, 136, 142, 143 Arcades Project, The, 142 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 101 Berlioz, Hector, 253 Bernhardt, Sarah, 15 Billing, Noel Pemberton, 258, 264n3 birds, sea, 111, 244, 254n13 Birkbeck, George, 75 Blackpool, 2 Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Scotland (1873), 104

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268

Coastal Cultures

Blackwood’s Magazine, 144, 192, 196 Blake, William, 52 Blanche, Jacques-Émile, 250 blue humanities, 4 bodger, 220, 226 Bonaparte, Napoleon see Napoleon Borough, The (Crabbe), 21 Boucicault, Dion, School for Scheming, 137 Bournemouth, 81–4, 263 Boyne (HMS), 7 Braddick, Michael, 150 Bradford, 259 Brantlinger, Patrick, 141, 143, 144 Brantôme, Pierre de, 101 Break in the Clouds (Instantaneous), A (Fry), 208 Brewster, David, 72, 75 Brewster, Margaret Maria, 72–3, 74 Brig by Moonlight (Le Gray), 212 Bright, Charles Tilston, 157, 161 Brighthelmstone see Brighton Brighton, 6, 29–50, 54, 59–64 bookshops, 35–6 Brighthelmstone as older name, 29, 39, 40, 46 Chain Pier, 6, 47 circulating libraries, 36 development and expansion, 30, 37–9, 46–7 double appearance, 31, 38, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46–7 health benefits, 30, 32, 33, 36, 45–6 Marine Parade, 47 railway, 30 Royal Pavilion, 6, 30, 37, 38, 45 shopping, 36 social scene, 35, 36, 45 Steine, 30, 35–7 Brighton Beach, with Colliers (Constable), 59–60 British Journal of Photography, 210, 239 British Museum, 117, 118, 119, 126–7, 129, 131 Broglie, Victor de, 3rd Duke of Broglie, 73 Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights, 101 brougham (carriage), 77 Brougham, Henry Peter, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, 17, 69–77 Brougham Hall, 72 broughams (trousers), 77 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 154

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Buchanan, James, 149 Burke, Edmund, 31, 32, 40, 46; see also sublime Burney, Charles, 40 Burney, Charlotte (later Francis, later Broome), 40, 45, 46 Burney, Frances (later d’Arblay), 17, 29–50 Brighton visits, 34, 35–6, 45–6 Camilla, 47n1 Cecilia, 30, 35, 36 coastal imagination, 31, 34, 35 Evelina, 29, 35, 36 exile in France, 39–40 health problems, 45–6 Ilfracombe visit, 34 sea-view in her writings, 29–30, 31, 34–5, 40–1, 42–5, 46–7 swimming, 32–3, 48n18 Teignmouth visit, 13 Wanderer, The, 17, 29, 30, 31, 33, 39–45, 46, 47 Burney, Susanna (‘Susan’), 33, 34 Butt, Clara, 21 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron, 3 Cabot, John, 151 Caledonian Mercury, 211–12, 216, 218 Camilla (Burney), 47n1 Cannes, 17, 69–74, 77 Canute, 259 capitalism, 2, 4, 5, 18–19, 20, 98–115, 143, 144, 238 Carew, J. E., 154 Carey, George Saville, Balnea, The, 37, 38 Carey, Peter, Oscar and Lucinda, 193 Carlisle, 9th Earl of (George Howard), 158 Caroline, Queen (Caroline of Brunswick), 75 Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 176, 183n17 Caswell Bay (Llewelyn), 205 Catholicism, 151–4, 157, 159–62 Cave, Basil, 117, 118, 126 Cave, Mary, 117, 118, 126, 134n21 Cecilia (Burney), 30, 35, 36 Celts, 150, 152, 162, 164 Celtic fringe, 150 Chain Pier, Brighton, The (Constable), 54, 62–3

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Index Channel, The see English Channel Charlotte, Queen (Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz), 6 Château Eléonore, 71 ‘Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, Le’ (The unknown masterpiece; Balzac), 191 Christianity, 53, 60; see also Anglicanism; Catholicism; Dissenters; Presbyterianism Clare, John, 135 climate, 82, 84, 85, 101, 102, 103, 105, 108, 111, 113 Cnut see Canute Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The’, 172, 175 Colliau, E., Jetée, La (The jetty), 202 Commission for Historical Monuments, 215 Confidence-Man, The (Melville), 137 Conrad, Joseph, 242 Lord Jim, 21 Constable, John, 30, 51–68 Brighton Beach, with Colliers, 59–60 Chain Pier, Brighton, The, 54, 62–3 English Landscape Scenery, 55–6, 65–6 Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames, 17, 54, 64–5 Harwich: The Low Lighthouse and Beacon Hill, 57–8 Hove Beach, 52–3 Sea near Brighton, The, 60, 61 Sea-beach, Brighton, 65 Stormy Sea, Brighton, 60–1, 62 Weymouth Bay, 55–6 Weymouth Bay from the Downs above Osmington Mills, 57 Yarmouth Jetty, 57–8 Constable, Maria, 59, 65 contact zone, 120 coral, 121, 170, 173, 174, 180, 181 Cornwall, 242, 244, 245–6, 248 Cott, Frederic T., 203 Coutts (East India Company ship), 53, 54 Crabbe, George, Borough, The, 21 Creevey, Thomas, 74 Crimean War, 155 Cruikshank, George, 11, 12 Daily Mail, 257, 259 Daily News, 214, 218 Daniell, William, Voyage round Great Britain, 3

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269

Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species, 173–4 Dead Souls (Gogol), 137 Defoe, Daniel, 261, 265n13 Robinson Crusoe, 190–1 Delius, Frederick, 252 Denmark, 7 Derrida, Jacques, 141 Devon, 151, 242 diaspora, 150, 155, 162 Dickens, Charles, 7, 244 Dombey and Son, 21, 187 Little Dorrit, 137 Dieppe, 39 Disraeli, Benjamin, 14 Dissenters, 151, 154 diving, 102, 105, 111–12, 113, 115n30 Dolaro, Selina, 15, 16 Dombey and Son (Dickens), 21, 187 Dorset, 151, 152 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 137 doubleness, 31, 38, 43, 45, 46–7; see also Brighton Dover, 17, 188, 191 ‘Dover’ (Auden), 191 ‘Dover Beach’ (Arnold), 21, 188–9, 191 Dublin, 154, 159, 161, 164 Dudley, Robert, 155–6, 160 Earl of Abergavenny (1796 East India Company ship), 56 Eastlake, Elizabeth, 207, 211, 217 Edinburgh, 98 Edinburgh High School, 74, 76 Edinburgh Review, 74–5, 76 Edinburgh University, 72, 74, 101, 107 ‘Education of an Engineer, The’ (Stevenson), 98, 101–5, 107 Eglinton, 13th Earl of (Archibald Montgomerie), 161 Eidophusikon see Loutherbourg, Philippe-Jacques de Elba, 18 Elettra (yacht), 257 Elgar, Edward, Sea Pictures, 21 Eliot, George, 191–2, 195, 196, 197 Felix Holt, the Radical, 196 Middlemarch, 137, 196 ‘Natural History of German Life, The’, 195–6 ‘Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, The’, 196 Scenes of Clerical Life, 196

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270

Coastal Cultures

Eliot, George (cont.) translation of The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach, 195 translation of The Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss, 195 Eliot, T. S., 187, 243, 251 Hollow Men, The, 187 Waste Land, The, 187 Ellis, Havelock, 245 English Channel, 2, 54, 242, 246, 248, 249, 252–3 Channel Tunnel, 3 English Landscape Scenery (Constable), 55–6, 65–6 Enoch Arden and Other Poems (Tennyson), 136, 144 Essence of Christianity, The (Feuerbach), 195 Evans, Marian see Eliot, George Evelina (Burney), 29, 35, 36 Fairlight Downs, Sunlight on the Sea (Hunt), 200–2 Falmouth, 262 famine, 152 Father and Son (Gosse), 193 Fawley, 256 ‘Feejee Mermaid’ see Barnum, P. T. Felix Holt, the Radical (Eliot), 196 Fenians, 152, 162–4 ferrotype, 229 Feuerbach, Ludwig, Essence of Christianity, The, 195; see also Eliot, George Field, Cyrus, 157 Fiennes, Celia, 31, 35 Fingal’s Cave, Staffa (Turner), 21 First World War, 257, 259 fish, performing, 11, 13–14 Fisher, John, 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 63, 66 fishing, 99, 103–5, 151–2, 153, 161 Fitzgerald, Edward, 135 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 69 Fitzgerald, Peter see Kerry, 19th Knight of Flaubert, Gustave, 19 Tentation de Saint Antoine, La (The temptation of St Antony), 177–8 Fleming, Anthony, 153 Flynt, Josiah, 243 Fontainebleau, 215 Forbes, Stanhope, 246 Forster, E. M., 251 France, 7, 19, 53, 55, 64

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fraud, 136, 137, 140 Fremantle, Edmund, 118, 119, 128–31 Fremantle, Sydney, 131 French Revolution, 39, 40, 41 Freud, Sigmund, 136, 138 Friedrich, Caspar David, Monk by the Sea, The, 51–2 Frith, William Powell, Ramsgate Sands, 21 Fry, Samuel, 208–9 Break in the Clouds (Instantaneous), A, 208 Heavy Sea at Brighton, A, 208–9 Sea and Clouds, 208 Game of Speculation, The (Lewes), 137 Gautier, Théophile, 253 George IV, 36, 37, 39, 63, 70 Gibbon, Edward, 36 Gibraltar, 17 Gilbert and Sullivan, 16 HMS ‘Pinafore’, 15 Gilpin, William, 38 Gisborne, Frederic Newton, 157 Gissing, George, 251 Gladstone, William Ewart, 77 Glasgow, 2 Glaucus (Kingsley), 170, 171, 172, 175, 177, 193 Glaucus myth (Ovid), 171 Gogol, Nikolai Dead Souls, 137 Government Inspector, The, 137 Goncharov, Ivan, Oblomov, 137 Gosse, Edmund, 152 Father and Son, 193 Gosse, Emily, 195 Gosse, Philip Henry, 19, 152, 169, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 197 Aquarium, The, 14, 152, 169, 172, 192, 193 Gosse-ified, 192, 193, 195, 197 Memorial of the Last Days on Earth of Emily Gosse, A, 195 Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, A, 192 Ocean, The, 192 Omphalos, 194 Sea-side Pleasures, 194 Tenby: A Sea-side Holiday, 192 Year at the Shore, A, 152, 188, 197 Government Inspector, The (Gogol), 137 Grahame-White, Claude, 258 Graphic Galleries (London), 264n2

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Index

271

Great American Museum see Barnum, P. T. Great Eastern (SS), 155, 163 Great Yarmouth, 54, 57–8 Greenwich Park, 9 Grey, Charles, 2nd Earl Grey, 76

Hugo, Victor, Travailleurs de la mer, Les (The toilers of the sea), 21, 171, 179–81 Hull, 2 Hunt, William Holman, Fairlight Downs, Sunlight on the Sea, 200–2

Hadleigh, 54, 64–5 Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames (Constable), 17, 54, 64–5 Hamerton, Philip, 200–2, 203, 208, 212, 215 Hard Cash (Reade), 137 Hardy, Thomas, 254n21 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 21 Harvey, Moses, 152 Harwich, 54, 57–8 Harwich: The Low Lighthouse and Beacon Hill (Constable), 57–8 Hatton, Joseph, 152 Haydon, Benjamin, 39 health, 7, 30, 33, 36, 40, 46, 51, 54, 58, 60, 61, 62–3, 80–5, 89, 93, 136 Heavy Sea at Brighton, A (Fry), 208–9 Henry VII, 151 Herschel, John, 205 Heseltine, Philip see Warlock, Peter High Beech (village), 135 Hippocampe, L’ (The sea horse; film; Painlevé), 171, 179 ‘Hippocampe, L’’ (The sea horse; essay; Painlevé), 179 HMS ‘Pinafore’ (Gilbert and Sullivan), 15 Hogan, John, 154 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 142 holiday, seaside, 1, 2, 5, 16, 17, 22, 54, 69, 79, 81, 92, 186, 192, 195, 245 Holland see Netherlands Holland, Henry, 37, 38 Hollow Men, The (Eliot), 187 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, ‘Wreck of the Deutschland, The’, 21 horses, sea, 179, 184n30 House of Commons, 75 House of Lords, 76 Housman, A. E., 246 Hove Beach (Constable), 52–3 Howard, George see Carlisle, 9th Earl of Howlett, Robert, 208 Hudson, George, 137 Hughes, Jabez, 204

Île Sainte-Marguerite, 71, 72 Illustrated London News, The, 131, 158, 212, 236, 237, 257 Immortality Ode (Wordsworth) see ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (Wordsworth) Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC), 123, 128, 130 In Memoriam (Tennyson), 140 India, 155, 160, 162 Indian Mutiny, 160, 162 Infant School Society, 75 invalids, 33, 51, 60–1, 63, 81, 84–5, 89, 90, 103 invasion, 51, 53 Ireland, 149–64 Irish Sea, 244 Irving, Edward, 138 Isle of Erraid, 105, 108 Isle of Wight, 140, 261 Itchen, River, 256

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‘Jacko’ (performing fish) see fish, performing Jamaica, 162 Jefferson, Thomas, 3 jellyfish, 173, 174, 180 Jenny (performing seal) see fish, performing Jetée, La (The jetty; Colliau), 202 Jetty at Le Havre (Monet), 216 John Bull (newspaper), 53 Kant, Immanuel, 141 Keats, John, 261 Kerry, 149–50, 155–4 Kerry, 19th Knight of (Peter Fitzgerald), 159, 160, 163 Kidnapped (Stevenson), 98, 108 King Lear (Shakespeare), 191 Kingsley, Charles, 19, 21, 170, 181, 193, 196 Glaucus, 170, 171, 172, 175, 177, 193 Water-Babies, The, 170–1, 172–6, 177, 178, 180 Kipling, Rudyard, 155

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272

Coastal Cultures

Kirk, John, 122 Kleist, Heinrich von, 52 Knightsbridge, 258 Knowles, James, 3 Lacan, Ernest, 213, 214 Lamu (Kenya), 117, 123, 125 Le Gray, Gustave, 20, 200–24 Bateaux quittant le port du Havre (Boats leaving the port of Le Havre), 210, 216 Brig by Moonlight, 212 Lighthouse and Jetty, Le Havre, 210–11, 216 Mediterranean with Mount Agde, 217–18 Sun at Its Zenith – Ocean, The, 201 Le Havre, 206, 210, 211, 216, 223, 243 Le Marchant, John Gaspard, 153 Lear, Edward, 69, 71 Lee, Laurie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, 262 Leeds Mercury, 210, 216, 218 Leicester Square, 6, 7, 8, 9 Leslie, Charles Robert, 56 ‘Letter to a Wound’ (Auden), 191 Leverson, Ada (‘Sphinx’), 255n32 Lewes, G. H., 21, 191–2, 196, 197 Game of Speculation, The, 137 Sea-side Studies, 5, 192, 196–7 Liberal Party (Newfoundland), 153–4 Life of Jesus, The (Strauss), 195 Lighthouse and Jetty, Le Havre (Le Gray), 210–11, 216 liminality, 79, 92 Little, Philip F., 153 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 137 Liverpool, 2 Llewelyn, John Dillwyn, 205, 206, 208 Caswell Bay, 205 Wave Breaking at Three Cliffs Bay, A, 205 Lloyd, David, 150 Lodge, Oliver, 257 Lodge, Raymond, 257 London, 6–7, 9, 11–16, 21, 30, 35, 42, 54, 55, 73, 75, 87, 157, 162, 164, 192, 193, 205, 210, 216, 227–8, 246, 258–9, 261 London, Jack, People of the Abyss, The, 187 London Mechanics’ Institution, 75 Lord Jim (Conrad), 21 Louis Philippe I, 70, 73

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Loutherbourg, Philippe-Jacques de, 9, 11 ‘Lover’s Tale, The’ (Tennyson), 139 Lucas, David, 55 Lumière, La (periodical), 217 Lydia (mistress of Arthur Symons), 247 Lyell, John, Principles of Geology, 19, 140 Lyles, Anne, 51 Lyme Regis, 1 Macaire, Louis-Cyrus, and Jean-Victor Macaire-Warnod, 206 Navire quittant le port du Havre (Ship leaving the port of Le Havre), 206 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 105 Mackay, R. W., Progress of the Intellect, The, 197 Macmillan’s Magazine, 136 Mad Max, 256 Mansfield Park (Austen), 29 Marconi, Guglielmo, 20, 257–60 Margate, 2, 21 marine biology, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 177 marine worms, 172, 173, 174 Martello towers, 3 Martin, Paul, 236 Masefield, John, 249 Maud (Tennyson), 197 Mayhew, Henry, 219 Mediterranean, 9, 17, 69, 73, 102, 104, 217, 242, 246, 251–2, 262 Mediterranean with Mount Agde (Le Gray), 217–18 Melville, Herman, 263, 266 Confidence-Man, The, 137 Moby-Dick, 21, 263 Redburn, 263, 266 Memorial of the Last Days on Earth of Emily Gosse, A (Gosse), 195 Mentone (France), 81, 102 Mer, La (The sea; Michelet), 178–9, 180–1 Mérimée, Prosper, 71 mermaids, 11, 12, 13, 170 costume, 21 Mérode, Cléo de, 248 ‘Merry Men, The’ (Stevenson), 98–9, 105–13 Michelet, Jules, 178 Mer, La (The sea), 178–9, 180–1 Middlemarch (Eliot), 137, 196 migration, 151–2, 161–2 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 9

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Index Moby-Dick (Melville), 21, 263 Monet, Claude, Jetty at Le Havre, 216 Monk by the Sea, The (Friedrich), 51–2 Montgomerie, Archibald see Eglinton, 13th Earl of Moore, Thomas, 166n29 More, Hannah, 40, 46 Moriarty, David, 159 Morning Chronicle, 210, 216 Mullock, John T., 153, 159 Munster, 152–3, 160, 163–4 Mussolini, Benito, 260 Napoleon, 9, 17–18, 54, 65, 72 Napoleon III, 73, 215 Napoleonic Wars, 3, 9, 53, 65 Nash, John, 37, 38 National Review, 219 nationalism, 150, 153, 162–3 natural history, 86, 152, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197 ‘Natural History of German Life, The’ (Eliot), 195–6 Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, A (Gosse), 192 Navire quittant le port du Havre (Ship leaving the port of Le Havre; Macaire and Macaire-Warnod), 206 Netherlands, 7 New Arabian Nights, The (Stevenson), 110 New Brunswick, 157 New Forest, 256, 263 New Statistical Account of Scotland, 102–3 new thalassology, 4 New York, 164, 259, 263 New York Times, 259 Newfoundland, 149–55, 157–61 Newton, William, 207 Niagara Falls, 9 Night Thoughts (Young), 52 Nixon, John, View of Brighton, 37 Oblomov (Goncharov), 137 Ocean, The (Gosse), 192 oceanography, 169 O’Connell, Daniel, 153, 166n29 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (Wordsworth), 52–3, 176 ‘Oh! I Do Like to Be beside the Seaside’, 186 Omphalos (Gosse), 194

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273

On the Beach (Shute), 187 ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’ (Stevenson), 98, 99–101 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 173–4 O’Neill, Peter, 150 Oral History Unit (Southampton), 264n2, 265n10, 265n11 Ordnance Survey, 3, 261 Oscar and Lucinda (Carey), 193 O’Shaughnessy, William, 160 Ovid, Glaucus myth, 171 Oxford Street, 13 Painlevé, Jean, 171, 179 Hippocampe, L’ (The sea horse; film), 171, 179 ‘Hippocampe, L’’ (The sea horse; essay), 179 Paley, William, 60 Palmer, Samuel, 52 panoramas, 6–7, 8 Paradise Lost (Milton), 9 Parbury, Florence Tyzack, 258 Paris, 9, 61, 64, 70, 74, 77, 215, 246, 252 Paris International Exhibition 1855, 205 Paris International Exhibition 1857, 213 Paris Salon, 64 People of the Abyss, The (London), 187 Persuasion (Austen), 43 Philip II of Spain, 106 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, A (Burke) see sublime Photographic News, 209, 226, 230, 232 Photographic Notes, 208, 210, 213, 216 Photographic Society (London), 207 1854 exhibition, 205 1856 exhibition, 204, 207, 210–11, 214 Journal of the Photographic Society, 204, 210, 213, 214, 218 photography, 20, 225–42 of clouds, 200, 203, 204, 205–7, 214 collodion, 201, 202, 205, 208, 241n10 combination printing, 202, 204, 207, 208, 209–10, 214, 215, 219 glass negatives, 205, 210, 217 itinerant, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240 as magical, 214, 218, 219 of moonlight, 212, 223n43 paper negatives, 205

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274

Coastal Cultures

photography (cont.) portrait, 225, 226, 229, 230, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240 portraiture, 226, 235, 236, 237 see also ambrotype; bodger; ferrotype; Polaroid; smudger; tintype Piccadilly, 13 Pirelli, G. B. (company), 259 Pitt, William, 3 Pius IX, 154 Plymouth, 2 Plymouth Brethren, 188, 194 Poe, Edgar Allan, 101 Polaroid, 230 police, 82–93 Pont-Aven, 1 Poole, 81–3, 86, 88 Poore, George Vivian, 75–6 Portfolio, The (periodical), 98 Portland, Isle of, 57 Portsmouth, 2 Presbyterianism, 157 Price, J., 229, 230, 232, 233, 234 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 40 Prince Edward Island, 153, 157 Prince Regent see George IV Principles of Geology (Lyell), 19, 140 Progress of the Intellect, The (Mackay), 197 Proust, Marcel, 177, 180 Prowse, D. W., 152 Punch, 70, 77, 248 pyroglyph, 135 Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 207 Quinn, John, 252 Rabelais, François, 175 Raleigh, Walter, 22 Ramsgate, 226, 227, 228, 229, 233, 236, 237 Ramsgate Sands (Frith), 21 Rancière, Jacques, 140 Reade, Charles, Hard Cash, 137 Redburn (Melville), 263, 266 Redon, Odilon, 177 Rejlander, Oscar Gustave, Two Ways of Life, The, 209 Relhan, Anthony, Short History of Brighthelmston, A, 36 Repton, Humphry, 38 Retournay, M. Horace, 70 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich von, 195, 196

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‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The’ (Coleridge), 172, 175 Robinson, Henry Peach, 200, 209–10 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 190–1 Rogers, Alexander, 123–6, 131, 134n21 Rogers, Samuel, 76 Rosling, Alfred, 207 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 253 Rowlandson, Thomas, 63 Royal Air Force, 264n2 Royal Navy, 54, 65, 117, 129–30 Royal Naval Exhibition 1891, 129–31 Royal Society, 173 Ruisdael, Jacob van, Wheat Fields, 56 Ruskin, John, 202 Russell, Richard, 30, 32 Russell, William Howard, 155–6, 160 Russia, 137 Sackbut, The (periodical), 252 ‘Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, The’ (Eliot), 196 St Brendan, 160 St Helena, 9, 10 St Ives, 1 St John’s, 152–4, 159 St Margaret Islands see Île SainteMarguerite Salvation Army, 18, 81–93 Samoa, 99 Sanditon (Austen), 31 Savoy, The (periodical), 247 Scarborough, 2 Scenes of Clerical Life (Eliot), 196 School for Scheming (Boucicault), 137 Scotland, 18, 156–7 Scott, Walter, 29, 104, 107 Waverley, 29 Scribner’s Magazine, 98 sea and health, 7, 30, 33, 36, 40, 46, 51, 54, 58, 60, 61, 62–3, 80–5, 89, 93, 136 as metaphor for birth, death and immortality, 51, 52–3, 56, 60, 65 representation in literature, 31–2, 34–5 sea birds, 111, 244, 254n13 sea horses, 179, 184n30 sea-view, 29, 34, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43–5, 47: female literary tradition, 34, 35; see also Burney, Frances seaside holidays, 1, 2, 5, 16, 17, 22, 54, 69, 79, 81, 92, 186, 192, 195, 245

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Index Sea and Clouds (Fry), 208 Sea-beach, Brighton (Constable), 65 ‘Sea Dreams’ (Tennyson), 18, 135–46 Sea near Brighton, The (Constable), 60, 61 Sea Pictures (Elgar), 21 Sea-side Pleasures (Gosse), 194 Sea-side Studies (Lewes), 5, 192, 196–7 Sea Symphony (Vaughan Williams), 21 Seaford, 3 Second World War, 259 Serres, Michel, 191 Shakespeare, William, 260 King Lear, 191 Macbeth, 105 Tempest, The, 20, 111, 171–2, 182n3, 260, 261 Winter’s Tale, The, 110 Sheerness (town), 54, 65 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 101 shingle, 188, 189, 197 shipwrecks, 7, 11, 24n30, 51, 54, 56, 105–13, 136, 170 Short History of Brighthelmston, A (Relhan), 36 Shute, Nevil, On the Beach, 187 Sickert, Walter, 250 Simmel, Georg, 137, 138 Sinclair, John, 124 Smith, Charlotte, 32, 34, 40, 42, 43, 46 Smith, Harry, 238 smudger, 20, 226 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 75 Society of Vigilantes, 264n3 Soul of Man under Socialism (Wilde), 263 South London Photographic Society, 209 Southampton, 2, 20, 256–66 Harland shipyard, 264n2 Oral History Unit, 264n2, 265n10, 265n11 Southampton Water (estuary), 256, 261, 262 Vosper Thorneycroft shipyard, 256 Western Esplanade, 265n10 Woolston (suburb), 258 Southey, Robert, 53 Spanish Armada, 106–7, 110, 129 Spitfire (aircraft), 258 Spithead, 6 Standard, The, 213 Stenbock, Eric, Count, 243

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275

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 18, 81–2, 98–115, 243 ‘Education of an Engineer, The’, 98, 101–5, 107 Kidnapped, 98, 108 ‘Merry Men, The’, 98–9, 105–13 New Arabian Nights, The, 110 ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’, 98, 99–101 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 107 Treasure Island, 98, 100, 106, 109, 111, 112–13 Wrecker, The, 111, 114n11 Stonehenge, 44–5 Stormy Sea, Brighton (Constable), 60–1, 62 Strand Theatre (London), 10 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson), 107 Strauss, David Friedrich, Life of Jesus, The, 195; see also Eliot, George sublime, 31–2, 33, 35, 38, 43, 44–5 Sun at Its Zenith – Ocean, The (Le Gray), 201 Sutton, Thomas, 208, 213 swimming, 14–15, 32–3, 48n18, 244, 257 Swinburne, Algernon, 244, 251–2 Tristram of Lyonesse, 21 Symons, Arthur, 20, 242–55 Symons, Rhoda, 253 Talbot, Henry Fox, 202, 203, 214 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 74 Tay, River, 11, 13 telegraph, 149–64 Atlantic telegraph cable, 19, 149–50, 154–64 temperance, 79–97 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 20, 111, 171–2, 182n3, 260, 261 Tenby: A Sea-side Holiday (Gosse), 192 Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron Tennyson, 17, 18, 135–46, 187–8, 197 Enoch Arden and Other Poems, 136, 144 In Memoriam, 140 ‘Lover’s Tale, The’, 139 Maud, 197 ‘Sea Dreams’, 18, 135–46 ‘Ulysses’, 187–8 Tentation de Saint Antoine, La (The temptation of St Antony; Flaubert), 177–8

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Coastal Cultures

Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy), 21 Thames Estuary, 65 Thrale, Hester, 34, 35 Times, The (London), 71 Times Literary Supplement, 248 tintype, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 240 Titanic (RMS), 259 Torquay, 18, 79–93 tourism, 1, 31, 54, 57, 79, 93, 98, 103–4, 106, 245 Tourists’ Guide to Sutherland and Caithness, 103–4 Travailleurs de la mer, Les (The toilers of the sea; Hugo), 21, 171, 179–81 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 98, 100, 106, 109, 111, 112–13 Tristram of Lyonesse (Swinburne), 21 Trollope, Anthony, Way We Live Now, The, 137 Turner, Charles Tennyson, 197 Turner, J. M. W., 5, 21, 30, 52 Fingal’s Cave, Staffa, 21 Two Ways of Life, The (Rejlander), 209 Ulster Scots, 157 ‘Ulysses’ (Tennyson), 187–8 United Irishmen (society), 152 University of London (later University College London), 75 Valentia Island, 149–50, 155–64 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, Sea Symphony, 21 Verlaine, Paul, 249–50, 251 Victoria, Queen, 129, 149, 154 Victory (HMS), 53 View of Brighton (Nixon), 37 vivarium, 192, 196, 197 Voyage round Great Britain (Daniell), 3 Wade, William, 35 Wall, A. H., 209–10 Wanderer, The (Burney), 17, 29, 30, 31, 33, 39–45, 46, 47 Warlock, Peter, 252 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 187 Water-Babies, The, 170–1, 172–6, 177, 178, 180 Waterford, 151, 154, 161 Wave Breaking at Three Cliffs Bay, A (Llewelyn), 205

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Waverley (Scott), 29 Way, Lewis, 69 Way We Live Now, The (Trollope), 137 Wellesley, Arthur see Wellington, 1st Duke of Wellington, 1st Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 70, 75, 77 Westminster Review, 195, 197 Weymouth, 55–7 Weymouth Bay (Constable), 55–6 Weymouth Bay from the Downs above Osmington Mills (Constable), 57 whales, 257, 263, 264n2 Wheat Fields (van Ruisdael), 56 Whistler, James McNeill, 246, 247, 249, 251 Whitman, Walt, 155 Wick, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104–5, 108 Wilcox, Timothy, 62 Wilde, Oscar, 247, 250 Soul of Man under Socialism, 263 Willard, Frank see Flynt, Josiah Wilson, Harriette, 75 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 110 Wiseman, Nicholas, 161 Witu, 118, 119, 123, 128–31 Woolf, Virginia, 20, 260 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 253 Wordsworth, John, 52 Wordsworth, William, 52–3, 56, 60, 101, 114n11, 253 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, 52–3, 176 ‘Wreck of the Deutschland, The’ (Hopkins), 21 Wrecker, The (Stevenson), 111, 114n11 Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 101 Yarmouth Jetty (Constable), 57–8 Year at the Shore, A (Gosse), 152, 188, 197 Yeats, W. B., 244, 245 Yellow Book, The, 247 York Herald, 73 Young, Edward, Night Thoughts, 52 Zanzibar, 17, 18, 117, 118, 121, 123–8 Žižek, Slavoj, 141 Zola, Émile, 137 Assommoir, L’, 15

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