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.
