Jonathan Stafford: Everyday Leisure by the Sea: Democratising the Sublime

Vortrag im Rahmen des Workshops Everyday Quesions. Gender, Economic, and Cultural Practices in Maritime Early Modern and Modern Everyday Life (17th-20th Centuries), Fondazione Banco di Napoli, 5.–6.12.2024

Much has been written about the history of the seaside as a tourist destination: its early emergence as a place of romantic escape, where the sea’s enjoyment as a wild spectacle of nature contributed to the formation of the iconography of the sublime; and its later democratisation, as working-class crowds found respite from the world of labour in the mild dissipation provided by fairground rides. However, little has been done to connect these two distinct eras. Indeed, their respective aesthetic codes – their construction of maritime scenography, both textually and visually – manifest a palpable disconnect, with the sea’s wildness increasingly depicted as tamed and domesticated by technical and discursive means. Utilising paintings, photographs, posters, postcards, and textual sources, this paper explores the cultural and visual history of coastal tourism on the North East coast of England in the early Twentieth Century, foregrounding the terrifying spectacle of nature – epitomised in the shipwreck – as a means to unpick the considerable continuities in these very different experiences of seaside leisure. The frisson of voyeuristic terror provided by the image of shipwreck, I will argue, was a latent presence in the sensation of danger simulated by the fairground. As leisure became democratised, however, the popular entertainment forms which became ubiquitous in British coastal resorts were persistently haunted by an excess which was doubled: both the sea and the holiday-maker as a mass were perceived as threatening forces of nature which needed to be controlled.

Der Kulturhistoriker Jonathan Stafford ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im Projekt Archipelagische Imperative. Schiffbruch und Lebensrettung in europäischen Gesellschaften seit 1800.