Andrew's Wiki
British Seaside

Summmary

The definitive work of the top scholar on the topic. He wrote both The British Seaside and The English Seaside Resort and works specifically on Blackpool, a working class northern resort. It’s a great history, and it does deal with literature, but only as another form of historical evidence. Themes: liminality, carnival, class, sexuality, gender.

Themes

• Regional and class differences among the resorts
• Local government
• Marketing
• Changes: invention of internal combustion engine, move away from rail transport, etc
• As “Single industry towns” whose fortunes go up and down with the seaside itself
• Lately have responded creatively to the pull for Brits to vacation in the Mediterranean b/c of cheap travel
• Clash of the classes where people are invited to remake themselves yet ridiculed if they’re found out acting “above” their stations

Quote

• “consensually liminal nature of hte seaside as ‘place on the margin’, where land and sea meet, the pleasure principle is given freer reign, the certainties of authority are diluted, and the usual constraints of behavior are suspended, however provisionally, to give a broader acceptability to, or at least tolerance of, variety of sexual partners and practices, or unscheduled bodily exposure, or drink-fuelled raucousness, ribaldry or indelicacy, or the consumption of greasy food with the fingers in the public street. The seaside puts the ‘civilising process’ temporarily into reverse (although the participants understand that they are defying its conventions) and conjures up the spirit of carnival, in the sense of upturning the social order and celebrating the rude, the excessive, the anarchic, the hidden and the gross, in ways which generate tension and put respectability on the defensive, generating culture wars….” 4
• 4 “liberating people from the leaden constraints of day-to-day identity, which is a recurrent theme in popular literature, and at least as old in principle as environments like eighteenth-century Bath, where in the absence of deeper knowledge of people’s antecedents in a temporary community of strangers, appearance, manners, and plausibility might be anything.” So people pretend social mobility, which was both sympathized with and mocked
• Of course there are still some constraints and sense of propriety, it’s just wider.
• 5 seaside resort as “worlds in microcosm and opportunities for social comment” like Austen’s Sanditon, Arnold Bennett’s The Card, including the layer of roughness and crime like in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (gangs, petty crime b/c of the poverty in these towns)
• For example where richer people and actresses and businessmen could play at being bohemians, like the turn of the century “plotland settlements” with “self-built houses in rustic settings…right on the shoreline, where property rights were uncertain,” one of which H G Wells noted was “a queer village of careless sensuality” 55 and which were “an alternative version of the seaside holiday accessible to people who neither wanted nor needed the existing urban resort culture” (I think that’s cool and goes against the simple you-are-supporting-capitalism arguments) too bad they were outlawed 1947
  • (although by the late twenties planned communities for commuters and the retired were built, bungalows, respectable and rationally distributed)