For a broad view of
shore life we need to go, not to specialised volumes produced by
professional scientists on different groups of animals, but to the writings of the shore
naturalists who became increasingly active during the last century. The most
important of these was Philip Henry Gosse, 1810-1888. To the-present generation he
is best known as the austere parent of Father and Son but to the Mid-Victorians his
name was a household word as the author of a unique series of books on shore life,
A Naturalist's Ramble on the Devonshire Coast, The Aquarium and Tenby, with a
host of others from accounts of early experiences in Canada and Jamaica to a
history of the creation in which this devout Plymouth Brother attempted to rally
opinion against the doctrines of The Origin of Species.
Gosse was a fine observer,
a faithful and exact recorder and gifted with high artistic
powers ; his paintings of shore life have rarely been equalled. He combined his
popular work, on which he depended for his livelihood, with scientific studies which
secured his election to the Royal Society. He lacked only imagination and its
attendant humour. Indirectly he affected English literature first through Sir Edmund
Gosse's study of their contrasted characters, second by his friendship with Charles
Kingsley in whom he awoke the interest which found literary expression in Glaucus :
or, The Wonders of the Shore, illustrated by G. B. Sowerby, and in the more enduring
Water Babies.
Another literary figure
who turned aside to write on the beauties of the shore was
George Henry Lewes, husband in all save name of George Eliot, whose Seaside
Studies was widely read. The Seaside Book of W. H. Harvey, Professor of Botany at
Dublin, was another popular work although the author has more enduring claims to
fame through his book on British seaweeds.
