The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

Reading Littoral Space

Ursula Kluwick, Virginia Richter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317040538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

From early colonial encounters to the ecological disasters of the twenty-first century, the performativity of contact has been a crucial element in the political significance of the beach. Conceptualising the beach as a creative trope and as a socio-cultural site, as well as an aesthetically productive topography, this collection examines its multiplicity of meanings and functions as a natural environment engendering both desire and fear in the human imagination from the Victorian period to the present. The contributors examine literature, film, and art, in addition to moments of encounter and environmental crisis, to highlight the beach as a social space inspiring particular codes of behaviour and specific discourses, as a geographical frontier between land and water, as an historical site of contact and conflict, and as a vacationscape promising regeneration and withdrawal from everyday life. The diversity of the beach is reflected in the geographical range, with essays on locales and texts from Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, South Africa, the United States, Polynesia, and New Zealand. Focusing on the changed function of the beach as a result of processes of industrialisation and the rise of a modern leisure and health culture, this interdisciplinary volume theorises the beach as a demarcater of the precarious boundary between land and the sea, as well as between nature and culture.

Chapter 1
Visions of the Beach in Victorian Britain

Christiana Payne

The beach played an important role in nineteenth-century British art. In the early part of the century, Turner and Constable made repeated studies of waves crashing on beaches, in Margate and Brighton respectively. The resulting exhibition pictures showed contrasting facets of the beach: Constable focused on seaside visitors seeking health and fresh air, Turner on the darker subject-matter of shipwrecks, death and destruction. Other artists depicted the fishermen and women at work, studied rock formations or celebrated the exploits of heroic lifeboatmen. All these subjects were part of the larger category of seascapes and coastal scenes, which acquired particular resonance in British culture because of their associations with the navy, and hence with the national character and its assumed propensities for bravery, scientific enquiry, even democracy. This essay will examine four key paintings from the mid-Victorian years which exemplify these associations: William Powell Frith’s Ramsgate Sands (1852–1854, Figure 1.1), William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay (c.1858–1860, Figure 1.2), John Brett’s A Morning amongst the Granite Boulders (1872–1873, Figure 1.3) and Winslow Homer’s Four Fishwives (1881, Figure 1.4).

All these paintings focus on beaches, that is, flattish areas of sand or pebbles adjacent to the sea. In the nineteenth century the word ‘beach’ began to take on its modern connotation as a site for holiday-making and leisure. In tourist resorts such as Ramsgate and Pegwell Bay in Kent, the beach was a social space where people prepared to bathe, read novels and newspapers, flirted, rode donkeys, watched entertainers, collected natural history specimens or simply sat out in the open air. In fishing villages, however, the flat beach had a more utilitarian function as the place where boats were pulled up onto the sand, where their catch was unloaded and sometimes where the fish were sold to merchants and the general public. In these locations, such as Cullercoats on the north-east coast near Newcastle, the beach was a different kind of social space, one in which the relationships within a close-knit community were cemented and tested. Here, and on unfrequented rocky beaches in more remote locations such as Cornwall, images of the beach might remind viewers not of holidays but of the symbolism of the seacoast as a metaphor for the fragility of human life and the hope of immortality.

The beach was a significant topos in English literature, and there was a close relationship between visual and verbal imaginings of it in this period. Artists were well aware of the poetic symbolism which saw the beach as the boundary between life and death, as expressed by Wordsworth in ‘Intimations of Immortality’:

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. (lines 166–72)

In equally well known lines, Byron had described the ocean as ‘boundless, endless, and sublime, / The image of Eternity, the throne / Of the Invisible’ (Canto Four, stanza 183, lines 5–7). Later in the century, Tennyson used the same idea, that of the sea representing the eternal life from which the human soul came, and to which it would return, in ‘Crossing the Bar’:

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which draws from out the boundless deep

Turns again home. (lines 1–8)

For Christian believers, the sea was a reminder of the promise of immortality. But in an age of religious doubt, it could equally well offer a bleak vision of a world without faith, in which the waves went on beating remorselessly against the coast, death was final, and the individual was of little account. Tennyson’s ‘Break, break, break’ suggests this chilling prospect:

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me. (lines 13–16)

And the melancholy of the seashore is explicitly linked with the loss of faith in Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’:

Listen! You hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

…

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

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. (lines 9–28)¹

Artists were avid readers of poetry, often using lines from poems to accompany the titles of their paintings in the catalogues of Royal Academy exhibitions, and the sea habitually evoked a meditative and poetic response, both from the artists themselves and from contemporary viewers of their paintings.

The artistic interest in the sea and coast, and hence the beach, in nineteenth-century Britain was intensified by the growing popularity of the seaside holiday. Across the Western world, visiting a coastal resort to bathe in the sea and enjoy the fresh air gradually changed from being the preserve of the wealthy and of invalids, to become a pleasurable experience for the middle class and eventually for most of the population (see, for example, Corbin or Walton, passim). The mingling of men and women from different classes on the beach gave rise to social embarrassment and sexual excitement, providing a rich field for satirical humour in both visual and verbal media. Sea-bathing was a particular focus of interest: in many places, men insisted on their right to bathe naked, while women wore long shifts which were perhaps even more thrilling than nudity as they clung revealingly to wet bodies. Despite the bathing machines, and the segregation of men’s and women’s bathing areas, it was evidently quite possible to get more than a glimpse of bare flesh on the Victorian beach. The ‘respectable’ visitors constantly complained about breaches of decorum, as men and even women used binoculars and telescopes to get a better look (see Payne, Where 97–102).

The beach was also a place of potentially embarrassing social encounters. It was an unregulated space open to all, and this was the cause of some disquiet in the strictly hierarchical society of mid-Victorian Britain. Impecunious bachelors went to the beach to find heiresses, and a gentleman might find himself bathing in the sea next to his tailor (see Becker 47–8; and Payne, Where 96). Charles Dickens was one of the first to exploit the comic potential of seaside social climbing in his short story ‘The Tuggses at Ramsgate’ (1836). Mr Tuggs is a grocer who comes into money, so the family decides to give up their business and go to Ramsgate, where they try to pass themselves off as upper-class. They are set up by confidence tricksters who flatter them by remarking on the similarities in their appearance to that of various titled personages – and eventually manage to swindle them out of a considerable part of their new-found fortune. The Tuggses find crowds of people on the beach, and Dickens describes it as a place of constant activity, where human foibles are revealed:

The sun was shining brightly; the sea, dancing to its own music, rolled merrily in; crowds of people promenaded to and fro; young ladies tittered; old ladies talked; nursemaids displayed their charms to the greatest possible advantage, and their little charges ran up and down, and to and fro, and in and out, under the feet, and between the legs, of the assembled concourse, in the most playful and exhilarating manner. There were old gentlemen, trying to make out objects through long telescopes; and young ones, making objects of themselves in open shirtcollars; … and nothing was to be heard but talking, laughing, welcoming, and merriment. … The ladies were employed in needlework, or watch guard making, or knitting, or reading novels; the gentlemen were reading newspapers and magazines; the children were digging holes in the sand with wooden spades, and collecting water therein. (333–5)

The Tuggses are initially embarrassed as they watch the bathers in the sea, but this does not stop them from using their telescopes (336–7).

The pretensions, vanity and hypocrisy of seaside visitors were satirised in the graphic arts by Dickens’s friend John Leech, whose cartoons in Punch mined a rich vein of comic imagery throughout the 1850s and early 1860s, familiarizing the public with stock characters: the hideous bathing woman, the long-suffering paterfamilias, the beautiful young lady who inadvertently reveals her charms in the wind, the ugly older woman who likes to think that the young men are looking at her, the overdressed ‘swell’ whose one aim is to flirt. Leech’s cartoons gave visual form to some of the characters and incidents noted by Dickens. He also made fun of seaside fashions, such as the bonnets which came so far over women’s faces (to protect them from sunburn) that they looked like the hoods of bathing machines. Both Dickens and Leech took holidays at the seaside, where they had plenty of opportunity to observe amusing behaviour. In 1849, they rented houses not far from each other on the Isle of Wight, and one can imagine them sitting on the beach together and pointing out particular types to one another (see Houfe, 83).

Leech was also a friend – and seaside holiday companion – of the artist William Powell Frith, whose painting Ramsgate Sands, Life at the Seaside (Figure 1.1), was one of the sensations of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1854. It was based on Frith’s own summer holiday in Ramsgate in 1851, where he said ‘the variety of character on Ramsgate Sands attracted me – all sorts and conditions of men and women were there’ (Frith 243).² To eyes accustomed to the modern beach, the painting is extraordinary. The figures crowd together, rather than seeking out their own spaces; they wear an enormous amount of clothing, the faces of the women shaded from the sun by large bonnets and umbrellas; and many of them stand or sit stiffly, as if they are attending a formal social event rather than relaxing in the open air. The crowd dominates the picture space, and their surroundings are those of town rather than country, with the natural elements confined to a narrow strip of sea in the foreground and a rock face in the right background. The viewpoint is contrived and not entirely logical. As observers, we feel very close to the figures, as if we are standing in the shallow waves; but at the same time, we can see over their heads, which gives a panoramic effect usually associated with map-making and with a sense of knowledge and control. The holiday-makers are presented to our gaze like specimens in one of the aquaria that were the popular craze of the time (Payne, Where 117–9).³

Fig. 1.1‘Ramsgate Sands (Life at the Seaside)’, 1852–1854, William Powell Frith (1819–1909). Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014/ Bridgeman Images.

This painting was probably the most influential visual image of the beach produced in nineteenth-century England. It was reproduced as an engraving, and the original painting was bought by Queen Victoria and hung in her seaside home, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Ironically, she herself had retreated to the Isle of Wight to escape the crowds on the beach in Brighton. In 1845, she had found them ‘very indiscreet and troublesome’ (Gilbert 107). Possession of Frith’s painting enabled her to study her ‘people’ in detail without any risk of being jostled or pestered by them – or worse. After the ‘year of revolutions’ in 1848 had toppled monarchs across Europe, Queen Victoria was well aware of the importance of popular support in maintaining the constitution, and also of the dangers of the mob. Frith’s painting focuses on families and children and shows people from different social classes coexisting happily, two further characteristics that would have appealed to Queen Victoria. The figures are shown sandwiched between symbols of Britain’s military and naval strength – the crescents named after Nelson and Wellington in the background and the sea in the foreground. The obelisk commemorates George IV’s departure from Ramsgate on his visit to Scotland in 1821. In 1851, in his dedication to his first book of poems as Poet Laureate, Tennyson had praised Queen Victoria’s wise rule, which kept her throne unshaken, unlike those of so many of her European counterparts, because it was ‘Broad-based upon her people’s will, / And compassed by the inviolate sea’ (Tennyson, ‘To the Queen’ lines 35–6). Frith’s painting can be seen as an illustration of that declaration. Ramsgate is a port that looks across to France, and the thin strip of sea functions as a defensive barrier, a symbol of the Channel that had saved Britain from invasion during the Napoleonic Wars.

The critical response to the painting indicates some of the ways in which contemporary reviewers would have interpreted it. They looked closely at the figures and wove stories around them, surmising that the widow on the right was proposing to ‘the young man with an apologetic moustache’ seated behind the chair, or that the four sisters to right of the centre were worrying their father for the list of marriages in the newspaper (Art Journal 161–3). In front of this group there is an itinerant enter...