The Lure of the Sea

Alain Corbin's wonderful book explores the dramatic change in Western attitude towards the sea and seaside pleasures that occurred between 1750 and 1840. Interest in travel; the arrival of landscape painting, geology and natural theology; fashions in medicine and the advent of the bathing-machine; the emergence of Romanticism and the Sublime - these are only some of the elements that helped transform perceptions. By the time Jane Austen wrote Sanditon - perhaps the first 'seaside' novel - in 1817, the sea and shore had come to be viewed as something intensely and sensuously pleasurable, with beach holidays all the rage in new resorts from Brighton and Scarborough to Dieppe.