Down from London: Seaside Reading in the Railway Age

From the discomfort of the crowded hoy boat to the questionable intimacy of the railway carriage, Victorian escape to Modernist isolation, journeys to the sea are never just a journey, and arrival is not the end point of the story. From comic ephemera to romance classics, postcards and visitors’ books, the history of the resorts is closely connected to the stories told about them to and by visitors. But if the cultural history of the resorts is shaped by the metaphorical purposes to which they are put, then by definition it is embedded in histories of reading.