Seaside Resorts

The Ruskinsʼ Visits to Seaside Resorts and Spas

The Ruskins frequented seaside resorts during John Ruskinʼs youth, which coincided with a period of expansion for coastal settlements that could provide amenities for visitors seeking health and recreation through sea bathing. The growth in fashionable seaside resorts began in the eighteenth century as an extension of the established season for inland spas such as Bath and Tunbridge Wells. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, seaside resorts prospered by the incursion of the professional and well‐to‐do merchant classes, like the Ruskins, into what had been primarily the pleasures and benefits of the elite. As Londoners, the Ruskins patronized the resorts within easy reach along the southeast coast, such as Sandgate and Hastings (see Walton, The English Seaside Resort, 6–9, 20, 48).
The Ruskins also took advantage of the inland mineral‐spring spas, especially Tunbridge Wells. Ruskinʼs cousin, William Richardson (1811–75), was a physician at Tunbridge Wells from 1853 until his retirement in 1868. In 1841, Ruskin was sent to take the water cure at Leamington Spa, which, according to Walton, was exceptional as a late bloomer among Britainʼs inland spas when the public was being drawn increasingly to the seaside (The English Seaside Resort, 7).
Health and Sea Bathing
In June 1819, Margaret Ruskin “rejoiced” that her husband, John James, was considering sea bathing, but she advised caution. He should “try cautiously the sea”, “tak[ing] but one plunge come out instantly rub yourself perfectly dry and if you should feel no cold nor headake try it again at the interval of the day”. If this experiment made him “sensible of benefit”, Margaret urged, then John James should “stay [at] the seaside as long as business will permit” in order to strengthen his health (Margaret to John James Ruskin, 23 June 1819, Ruskin Family Letters, 95). Margaretʼs advice closely mirrors a passage of text found in Domestic Medicine by the Edinburgh physician, William Buchan (1729–1805).
In the chapter of Domestic Medicine, “Cautions concerning Cold Bathing, and Drinking the Mineral Waters”, Buchan concedes that “it is now fashionable for persons of all ranks to plunge into the sea, and drink the mineral waters”. He therefore undertakes to provide “hints or cautions” since “imprudent use” of these treatments have caused “many lives . . . [to be] lost, and numbers [to have] ruin[ed] their health”. Among those who “ought to be cautious in using the cold bath” and yet “who stand peculiarly in need of the bracing qualities of cold water” are “nervous” people, including “a great number of the male, and almost all the female inhabitants of great cities”. Lest these urban denizens cause themselves harm in striving to allay their nervous disease, Buchan advises that, “[f]or them, . . . the best plan would be to accustom themselves to it [cold bathing] by the most pleasing and gentle degrees”. The recommended method, which Margaret repeats to John James, is to take “one immersion at a time” and get “rubbed dry the moment” of coming “out of the water” and then “continue to take exercise for some time after”. After this trial, immersions may be repeated only if the bather is not afflicted by “chilness, loss of appetite, listlessness, pain of the breast or bowels, a prostration of strength, or violent head‐achs” (Buchan, Domestic Medicine [1791], 633, 637, 639).
Buchan had fewer reservations about exposing youths to sea water: “To young people, and particularly to children, cold bathing is of the last importance. Their lax fibres render its tonic powers peculiarly proper. It promotes their growth, increases their strength, and prevents a variety of diseases incident to childhood” (Domestic Medicine [1791], 638).
First published in 1769 and revised continuously by Buchan through 1803, Domestic Medicine remained widely popular as a household medical reference in Britain and America for a century (Rosenberg, “Medical Text and Social Context”, 22). Starting with the eighteenth edition (1803), the last edition revised by the author, the chapter “Cautions concerning Cold Bathing, and Drinking the Mineral Waters” was replaced by a more extensive analysis of cold‐bathing and mineral waters (see Domestic Medicine [1805], xii, 576–77). In her advice to John James, Margaret Ruskin appears to have consulted an earlier edition. The commentary on sea bathing contained in the only book attributed to Buchan that the Ruskins have been directly documented as owning, The Cottage Physician, does not correspond to Margaretʼs advice to John James. This book, however, which was first published in 1825, is not by Buchan at all. The title page alleges the editorship of “W. Buchan, M.D., and the members of a private medical society”, but the manual consists of a farrago of medical advice excerpted from various publications. The commentary on sea bathing is attributed to a “Dr. Robertson” (pp. 209–14). See Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 55 (no. 369); and Rosenberg, “Medical Text and Social Context”, 42.
The Ruskins at Seaside Resorts
By the 1820s, many seaside resorts had sprung up along the southern and southeastern coast of England, as well as elsewhere in Britain. Besides the salubrity of sea bathing, which they could all claim, the resorts offered a wide range of amenities. One characteristic that evidently factored into the Ruskinsʼ choice among resorts was their respectability along with (or in spite of) their novelty. In 1819, John James made his trial of sea‐bathing at Weymouth, doubtless in part because he happened to have business in Southampton at the time (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 95). Weymouth was also eminently respectable, even prestigious, having been patronized by the court of George III.
In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the king was prescribed sea bathing to guard against a relapse of his madness. Weymouth was chosen, since it was already the site of a lodge belonging to his brother, Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1743–1805). The town was thus assured a place among the most fashionable seaside resorts, along witih Brighton, which was favored by the Prince Regent. According to an 1815 guidebook to spas and resorts, whereas Weymouth was once “small and meanly built”, it had become “within the last twenty or thirty years”—that is, since the advent of royal residence—a city of “rapid enlargements, and many elegant buildings, . . a very respectable place”. The guidebook notes that royal patronage persisted with the residence of Charlotte, the popular Princess of Wales (1796–1817), who spent a summer at Gloucester Lodge and had promised to return. (Instead, by the time of John Jamesʼs visit to Weymouth, Charlotte was mourned by the nation.) According to historical statistical measures of elite status among seaside resorts, Weymouth did continue to rank high and grow fast in the first third of the century (Feltham, Guide to All the Watering and Sea‐Bathing Places, 490–91; Walton, The English Seaside Resort, 12, 77–78).
Weymouthʼs royal associations would have appealed to John James, just as his mother, Catherine Tweddale Ruskin (1763–1817), was reconciled to living for a time in the comparatively “shabby” seacoast town of Dysart by the prospect of “a number of Gentlemans seats close beside it, and a variety of beautifull walks—besides the sea which to me is a most delightful Object” (Catherine Ruskin to John James Ruskin, 25 October 1808, in Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 26). John James would have been reassured by Weymouthʼs marketing of respectability, as suggested by the guidebookʼs invoking of Princess Charlotte—a code meant, perhaps, to disassociate Weymouth from the moral stigma that clung to Brighton owing to its connection with Charlotteʼs prodigal father, George IV. Nonetheless, Weymouthʼs fashionableness may have seemed a cut above the Ruskinsʼ status; and in any case, the southern coastal resorts may have required too lengthy a journey for a short summer holiday. It is telling that, for their first visit to a resort as a family, the Ruskins chose Sandgate, a comparatively small, modest, and even unnoticed place. As late as the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, Sandgate ranked only one hundreth in population among the nationʼs resorts (Walton, The English Seaside Resort, 65).
The holiday in Sandgate must have occurred in summer 1821, since Margaret reflected on the excursion in January 1822. She looked back on it fondly, framing the visit in terms of homeliness: “I hope . . . we shall be permitted to enjoy our home and english comforts [in the coming months] and if we are to travel it may only be on such journey as our Sandgate one”. Even John at age three considered Sandgate as the standard for what was “fine and . . . beautiful”, comparing its pleasures favorably to the stone rolling and stick gathering to be had on Duppas Hill in Croydon (Margaret to John James Ruskin, 30 January 1822, Ruskin Family Letters, 107, 108). At about the time of their visit, Sandgate, according to the Guide to All the Watering and Sea‐Bathing Places, was “a very pretty village”, which had “suddenly and deservedly started into notice as a watering place”. It could boast “neither a ball nor assembly room” like nearby Dover, Folkestone, or Hythe, but for the Ruskins the point probably was that “the lovers of dancing” would gravitate to those resorts, leaving the family to quiet walks on the cliffs, commanding a prospect of the French coast; to exploring an Elizabethan castle, its fortress “lately . . . converted into a martello tower”, a reminder of the contest with Napoleonic France; and to taking advantage of a “good circulating library” and “lodgings . . . on reasonable terms” (p. 423).
For what became the Ruskinsʼ most favored seaside resort, however, they evidently sought quiet and respectability combined with somewhat grander pretensions.
Hastings
With a severe glance directed presumably at Brighton, the local author of an 1804 guidebook to Hastings declared that “[o]ne circumstance must, above all others, render Hastings dear to those who have a regard to morality—Vice has not yet erected her standard here;—the numerous tribe of professional gamblers, unhappy profligates, and fashionable swindlers find employment and rapine elsewhere. Innocent recreational delight, card assemblies, billiards, riding, walking, reading, fishing, and other modes of pastime banish care from the mind, whilst the salubrity of the atmosphere impels disease from the body. The society of Hastings are gay without profligacy, and enjoy life without mingling in its debaucheries” (, 1–2).
Quoting this pronouncement a decade later in 1815, the Guide to All the Watering and Sea‐Bathing Places deemed the statement fitting, but presents Hastings as equivocally poised between decline from its prosperous past as a trading, fishing, and shipbuilding center and its ambition for its rebirth as a tourist resort. While acknowledging the townʼs strong suit in its impressive history and romantic landscape, this guidebook description harps on losses: “The present is a new town; the old one having been swallowed up by an inundation”, and the coast continues to erode; Hastings “had formerly a good harbour”, which has lain in ruin since Elizabethan times; “trade . . . is inconsiderable, compared to what it once enjoyed”, though the boat builders continue to maintain a “high reputation”; and with “only one inn, properly so called”, “accommodations and attendance are frequently subjects of complaint”. Yet Hastings “every year . . . seems to obtain fresh accessions of visitors”, and development is underway: “the promenade lately obtained . . . is a great improvement” (Feltham, Guide to All the Watering and Sea‐Bathing Places, 317, 318, 319, 320–21, 316). Whatever merit may have been warranted by these judgments, the assessment at least attests to an ancient coastal town striving to transform its economy from traditional but declining maritime occupations to modern tourism servicing the rising middle class.
This entrepreneurial activity may have been what intrigued the Ruskins—particularly John James—when they visited Hastings, probably for the first time in 1826. The 1820s was a peak decade for Hastings as a resort (Walton, The English Seaside Resort, 58). Taking advantage of the rising tide of fashion for seeking health and pleasure at the seaside, the town was turning to account its decayed advantages as a port and fishery, able to offer the kind a beachfront well adapted for bathing—a wide coastal frontage with a gentle declivity for easy access to the sea. The town could also parlay resources appealing to a broader range of tourist engagement. The area was rich with historical asssociations, and its landscape was both picturesque and interesting to naturalists. Such variety and flexibility of touristic appeal, Walton argues, gave seaside resorts an edge over the older inland spas, which had little besides their mineral springs to recommend them. Also, unlike the traditional spas with their rigid social codes, the seaside resorts welcomed children (see The English Seaside Resort, 106–7, 16–17, 42–43, 217). As characterized in the letterpress for Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England (1814–26), “Hastings, as a public watering‐place . . . may boast the charm of uniting social and elegant pleasure with rural tranquillity” (W. B. Cooke and G. Cooke, Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England, n.p.).
To package the emerging resort industry of Hastings with its picturesque and historical resources, artistic and antiquarian enterprises featured the town in publications of the 1820s. The most ambitious work focused on Hastings particularly was an 1824 illustrated history, The History and Antiquities of the Town and Port of Hastings, written and illustrated by W. G. Moss (dates unknown). As “draughtsman to His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge”, Moss created the topographical, architectural, and antiquarian drawings, on which the engravings were based. The work was published by subscription, listing numerous royal subscribers, headed by George IV. The attention thus garnered for Hastings may have helped the town to build a case for an elite clientele. Thus, notwithstanding the declaration by the Hastings Guide that the town set itself apart from resorts that harbored morally disreputable pleasures, Mossʼs stately work indicates how a bid for patronage by the late‐Georgian aristocracy could be accommodated along with appeal to the evanglical middle class. As Walton remarks, the visiting public at the resorts was formed from a “complex pattern of demand”, woven from “differing visiting publics, aristocratic and commercial . . . centered on the metropolis”, and reflecting a “wide range of social attributes, attitudes and expectations, which could be subsumed under each [social] label”, including “many shades of religious commitment” (The English Seaside Resort, 14). A spectrum of desirably polite but moral society could be cultivated with the aid of an intelligent and appealing print and visual culture.
Mossʼs work perhaps more accurately reflects the appeal of a watering place like Hastings to as a middle‐class family in the 1820s, as compared with a grander illustrated publication such as the Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England, which reached its conclusion in 1826. The latter was a scheme by the engravers William Bernard Cooke (1778–1855) and his brother George Cooke (1781–1834) to employ several artists, chiefly J. M. W. Turner, in producing watercolor drawings of coastal scenes to be engraved and published in parts. In 1811, when the Cookes first floated the idea with Turner, the scheme was novel, since most English topographical works were devoted to the countryʼs interior. The ambitious project was delayed by quarrels and professional setbacks, however, and when it reached its final collected form in 1826, many expectations had been thwarted, including a spin‐off project to be entitled “Views at Hastings and Its Vicinity” (Shanes, Turnerʼs Rivers, Harbours, and Coasts, 6, 9 and 5–12 passim). The letterpress, also a disappointment, was originally prepared by William Combe (1742–1823), best known for The Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of the Picturesque (1812), illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson for the publisher Rudolph Ackermann. For the collected 1826 volumes, Combeʼs text was revised by Barbara Hofland (1770–1844), the childrenʼs writer, whose spouse was a landscape artist. Updating the letterpress, Hofland highlighted several of the seacoast locations as having achieved popularity for bathing and seaside recreation—Margate, Ramsgate, Hastings, Brighton, Weymouth, Lyme, Teignmouth, Comb‐Martin, Lynemouth, and Minehead—but the emphasis was at variance with the engravings, few of which foregrounded such activities. Turnerʼs scenes in particular, on which the success of the publication depended, exclude signs of modern tourism. There are two exceptions: in the drawing for Brighton, Brighthelmston (engraved G. Cooke), Turner admits the “New Chain Pier, or Suspension Bridge”, crammed with a fashionable crowd, into the scene, although viewed from a non‐participantʼs perspective in the open sea; and in Plymouth Dock (engraved W. B. Cooke), he places promenaders in the foreground who are so frisky with “spirit and character” that the narrator is moved to comment on “Mr. Turnerʼs power, when he chuses to exert it, in delineating animate as well as inanimate nature”. Otherwise, the foregrounds of Turnerʼs coastal scenes are occupied solely by fishermen, washerwomen, smugglers, solidiers, and the like (W. B. Cooke and G. Cooke, Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England, n.p.).
W. G. Mossʼs compositions are workmanlike at best, but The History and Antiquities of the Town and Port of Hastings reflects his enthusiasm for Hastingsʼ transformation into a seaside resort, for which he uses the phrase “improving the town”—a key term in the period, improvement, used to characterize large‐scale city planning and imposition of a uniform style, such as John Nashʼs designs for Regentʼs Park in London, which could pervasively alter the character of a city (The History and Antiquities of the Town and Port of Hastings, 146; and see Summerson, Georgian London, 198; and The Colosseum, Hornorʼs London Panorama, and the London Diorama in Regentʼs Park). In his preface, Moss describes himself as an invalid who came to Hastings for convalescence, and discovered a historical and picturesque treasure “heretofore . . . unnoticed and untouched” save by guidebooks. Claiming to scorn guidebooks, but making an exception for the Hastings Guide “published a few years since”, probably referring to an edition illustrated by his own designs (here engraved as outline drawings, which would later be elaborated for the The History and Antiquities of the Town and Port of Hastings), Moss in fact compiles a version of a guidebook, with three lengthy chapters of military and ecclesiastical history followed by a fourth chapter that opens in the manner of a picturesque tour and goes on to highlight the improvements that have brought an “influx” of “visitants and strangers” who have “contributed to . . . [the townʼs] rising consequence” (Moss, The History and Antiquities of the Town and Port of Hastings, xi–xii, 123).
In Mossʼs picturesque landscape plates—several of them engraved by Robert Wallis (1794–1878) and by Edward Goodall (1795–1870), both of whom were simultaneously distinguishing themselves in superior contributions to the Cookesʼ Southern Coast of England, by engraving Turnerʼs Ramsgate and Folkstone (Wallis), and Rye, Boscastle, and Mount Edgecomb (Goodall) (see Hunnisett, Steel‐engraved Book Illustration in England, 95, 101)—the artist foregrounds figures engaged in leisure pursuits, the likes of which are only suggested by figures dotting the far distant beach or martello tower in Turnerʼs drawings of Ramsgate and Folkstone. In Mossʼs drawings, families stroll and ladies take in the view with guidebook and parasol, gazing at Hastings from above, in Minnis Rock (frontispiece), and from the beach, in Pier Rocks (p. 127 opp.); couples gaze out to sea Marine Parade, seated or walking on “one of the finest promenades on the coast”, with bathing‐machines stand waiting on the beach (p. 148 and opp.); and passengers gather around the stagecoach waiting outside town hall (p. 129 opp.). To demonstrate the “improvements in building” bringing about “the rise of Hastings within the last few years”, a plate features the new “handsome range of modern houses” in Pelham Place, and a complementary plate, Pelham Place and Crescent, even mocks up the development “as intended to be completed” by the architect, Joseph Kay (1775–1847) (p. 145 and opp. 146 and opp.)—a vision that was happily outmatched by the completed building—while a contrasting plate of East Bourn Street gives a “specimen of Hastings, prior to its present improvements” (p. 155 and opp.) See the visit to Hastings narrated in “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol I” along with associated contextual glosses for specific places and activities.