Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century

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 *
On the natural environment, Matthew Ingleby and　Matthew P. M. Kerr’s　Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, is an engaging and heterogenous collection of essays that offers surprising synergies. In the Victorian period, Britons fell in love with their own seaside. Ranging widely from art history, to poetry, to geology, to the histories of colonialism and commerce, these essays explore how Britons engaged with the littoral -- Pamela K. Gilbert * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 volume 59, issue 4 *
Taken together, these essays provide an ambitious overview of how the coast was variously approached, repurposed, and revisited across the long nineteenth century. The interdisciplinary focus is vital to the interplay of visual and literary aesthetics with developing technologies, and this distinctive feature allows the volume to cover more ground than a monograph could realistically hope to do. Approaching the sea from the relative positions of juxtaposition, the surface, and even the submarine stands to remind us that, in researching nineteenth-century accounts of the coast, we should be constantly alive to the perspectives that these accounts spotlight, subsume, or choose to ignore. -- Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton, Canterbury Christ Church University * Victorian Studies, 2019 *