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Down from London Seaside Reading in the Railway
Age
Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton
Liverpool: University Press, 2022 Hardback. xi + 272 pp. ISBN 978-1800854011.
£95
Reviewed by Jacqueline Banerjee The Victorian Web
Carolyn W. de
la L. Oulton's Down from London has a particularly beguiling cover, featuring
a watercolour entitled Bleak House, Broadstairs (1889) by the nineteenth-century
American artist, Childe Hassam. It depicts a young woman in a light summer
dress strolling along the promenade, looking to neither right nor left, but lost
in her book instead. Looming above her, on
its headland, is Fort House, popularly referred to as Bleak House since the
1860s, because Dickens and his family had several times spent part of their summers
there. In most respects, this picture is spot on. It was the golden age of the
seaside resort, when literary tourism became fashionable, and when a whole new interest
in "holiday reading" developed. The intersection of these trends is
Oulton's subject here, and she organises a huge amount of diverse material in two
main ways — by looking at the seaside itself and the kinds of books being read there,
and then by examining specific resorts in the south-east of England, such as Brighton,
Folkestone and Margate, where the seaside culture flourished. Broadstairs itself comes to the fore in the last
chapter, devoted to "Writing the Dickens Country". People set out
for the seaside with a variety of books, sometimes picked up at railway station
stalls, or sometimes brought from home. Despite the additional burden it entailed, choosing
most of them before the trip was recommended. An article in the Birmingham
Daily Post advises, "the best plan is to put the books into a wooden
library-box (like one of Mudie's), which holds twelve to twenty volumes, is
easily opened and carried, and which goes under the seat of a railway
carriage" [qtd. p. 20]. How the
most voracious readers would have benefited from today's light-weight eBook
devices! Still, there were ways of getting round the problem of luggage, and not
just by calling a porter. On arrival, summer visitors could patronise one of the
local libraries, an ideal recourse on a rainy day, or help the local economy by
purchasing guidebooks and periodicals that were lighter in every sense than the
kind of hefty tomes that might constitute their regular fare. As for libraries,
Parson's Library in Folkestone not only had "the finest selection of books
of all descriptions", but "a delightful lounge, where subscribers may
rest, meanwhile perusing at will the large selection of newspaper and
magazines" [qtd. p. 144]. This
was a subscription library, but Folkestone's Free Library, established in 1879,
allowed borrowing as well as reference from 1881, and was criticised for
offering (horror!) more "modern works of fiction" [qtd. p. 149].
Specifically for the tourist market, guidebooks proliferated, while Summer
Thoughts for Happy Holidays, the summer number of a penny journal, was promoted
as being "Cram full of funny pictures and side-splitting jokes..... The
book for the beach par excellence" [qtd. p. 19]. Bought at the
resort, acquisitions like these were eminently portable, and could perhaps jettisoned
before departure. Such details offer useful insights into life in the late
Victorian seaside resorts. Given its
variety, Oulton, like the Victorian columnists and feature-writers who offered recommendations,
finds "holiday reading" hard to categorise: "it was always prone
to splinter in confusing ways between educational popular science, illustrated
humour, and light or sensational fiction" [75]. One advantage of Oulton's
attempts to cover this field is that she often deals with non-canonical, even
ephemeral work, thus opening up new ground. Discussing the sea itself in her first main
chapter, for example, she looks, among others, at fast-paced books about
smuggling. Rather than contenting herself with Daphne Du Maurier's celebrated Jamaica
Inn (1935), she pays equal attention to the tales of Russell Thorndike, a
now largely forgotten Kentish author. Thorndike's first Doctor Syn book
came out in 1915, and led to a series of prequels in which the roguish hero,
the vicar of the fishing village of Dymchurch-under-the-Wall, uses his
expertise in smuggling to help his parishioners. His favourite sea-shanty,
introduced in the second chapter of the original book, gives you a flavour of
the series: "Oh, here's to the feet that have walked the plank; /Yo
ho!" It is exhilarating to meet such
new characters, and Oulton opens up many fresh avenues for research. Happily, Dr Syn himself is quite well
represented online in the Internet Archive, where Thorndike's work is variously
marked as Pulp Fiction, Miscellaneous, Adventure, and Popular Magazine! Oulton
says that she has looked at "approximately 130 novels and stories set at
least partly on the UK coast" [221], so there is a real feast of such non-canonical
fare. The resorts were
rather easier to categorise than the reading that went on in (or indeed about) them.
Each seaside town had its own character, although their reputations tended to
change with the times. Folkestone had
rather a superior status, and was keen to keep it that way, by appealing to the
"more genteel" kind of visitor [10].
Brighton, sometimes known as London-by-the-Sea, was a mixed bag like the
capital itself: by the Victorian age it had
become "fashionable but also fast, a health resort with accepted
credentials that also had an unusually high rate of poverty and disease emanating
from its backstreet tenements" [108]. One marker of gentrification, Oulton
suggests, was the arrival of a pier: Brighton's Chain Pier was opened as early
as 1823, and is
immortalised in one of John Constable's paintings. So many of the
holiday-makers here were drawn from the upper classes that a journalist in the
Graphic commented wryly in 1889 that "the visitors are more attractive
than the place itself" [qtd. p. 114].
Resorts on the Isle of Thanet lost out accordingly: by the
mid-nineteenth century, Ramsgate and neighbouring Margate were left largely to
the lower classes. Margate in particular
became (in William Hughes's words in A Week's Tramp in Dickens Land, first
published in 1891) "a popular Cockney watering-place" [qtd. p. 213].
So much for the idea, voiced by an MP in
Folkestone on the relocation of the free library there, that such spaces could
promote "the greater union of class with class" [qtd. p. 148]. The most that can be said in that respect is
that, now that the railways had made the south coast so easily accessible, "remaining
exclusive" was becoming more of a challenge [222]. After following
Oulton rather breathlessly through an accumulation of detail, and across some very
permeable boundaries, it is quite a relief to land on familiar Dickensian
territory in the last main chapter. Here
we find that the title of Childe Hassam's painting is the only misleading
aspect of it: Dickens did not write any
part of Bleak House in the Broadstairs mansion. Rather, it was
where the later chapters of David Copperfield were composed. Nevertheless,
the idea that it inspired Bleak House persisted into the twentieth century. The challenges as well as vagaries of promoting
literary tourism are also illustrated by the belated identification of a certain
sea-front cottage in Broadstairs as the inspiration for Betsey Trotwood's home
in the same novel. Yes, it answers well to the description in David Copperfield,
and is now set up as a museum, with Betsey's front parlour cleverly recreated
here. But this was only after a long period of confusion, because Dickens himself
had relocated it to Dover in the novel. As Oulton says,
"The history of seaside reading is a complex one" [221] and she has had
some difficulty in packing her large amounts of information into discrete chapters.
Not that it matters. Given the nature of
her material, there was bound to be some overlap, and there is much here for social
historians and literary enthusiasts of all kinds to enjoy dipping into, unpacking
and following up. Unfortunately, the
steep price may limit the readership. The
publisher would do well to make a more reasonably priced paperback edition
available — hopefully, with the same appropriate illustrations and, of course, cover
design!
☞ Illustrated version on The Victorian Web : https://victorianweb.org/authors/reviews/oulton.html
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