'From Martello towers and mermaids to telegraph cables, Swahili chairs and the "invention" of Cannes, these fine, thought-provoking essays demonstrate just how largely the coast loomed in British nineteenth-century culture. Artists, writers, scientists, religious thinkers, politicians and the public were all drawn by the sea, which in turn shaped Britain's relationship with the world. A very able crew of distinguished scholars and rising stars navigates the uncharted waters and major cultural currents of Victorian age.'Fiona Stafford, University of Oxford

The first book to examine the cultural importance of the coastline in the nineteenth-century British imagination

The long nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic, varied flourishing in uses for and understandings of the coast, which could seem at once a space of clarity or of misty distance, a terminus or a place of embarkation - a place of solitude and exhilaration, of uselessness and instrumentality. Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century takes as its subject this diverse set of meanings, using them to interrogate questions of space, place and cultural production.

Outlining a broad range of coastal imaginings and engagements with the seaside, the book highlights the multivalent or even contradictory dimensions of these spaces. The collection offers essays from major figures in the cutting-edge field of maritime studies and includes interdisciplinary discussions of coastal spaces relevant to literary criticism, art history, museum studies and cultural geography.

Matthew Ingleby is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Queen Mary, University of London.
Matthew P. M. Kerr is Lecturer in British Literature, 1837-1939, at the University of Southampton.


Cover image: Violet and Blue: The Little Bathers, Pérosquérie, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1888. Oil on wood panel; 12.4 × 21.7 cm (4 7/8 × 8 9/16 in.) Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.178. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Acknowledgments; 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; 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; Epilogue: Unravelling, Philip Hoare; Notes.