There ‘Where Earth Lies Exhausted’: The Spaces of Swinburne’s ‘By The North Sea’
Keywords:
Victorian poetry, Algernon Swinburne, littoral landscape, Suffolk coast, assemblage theory, tourism, seaside.Abstract
This study is set in the context of recent studies of the culture of littoral landscapes, and specifically nineteenth-century literary engagements with the coast of England. It examines the representation of the coastal landscape of Dunwich, Suffolk embedded in Algernon Swinburne’s 1880 poem By The North Sea; in doing so, it focuses on the means by which that representation is distanced from the modernity of the popular tourist destination which the site had become by the late nineteenth century. The study is framed as an exercise in the application of assemblage theory, and constructs three principal assemblages as a means of analysing the distancing effect mentioned above: the historic landscape of the Dunwich area, with its physical and cultural components; the tourist landscape of the Dunwich area, with its infrastructure, practices and culture; and the literary landscape represented in ‘By The North Sea’, with the extensive modification and interpretation of the topography mediated by a wide range of poetic genres, texts and cultural references. An outline model of the selective literary appropriation of such landscapes is derived from the case study.References
Abrams, M. (1984) The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism. London: Norton.
Alexander, N. and Cooper, D. (2017) Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-war Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Anderson, B., Kearnes, M., McFarlane, C. and Swanton, D. (2012) ‘On Assemblages and Geography.’ Dialogues in Human Geography, 2(2), pp. 171-189.
Anderson, J. (2015) ‘Towards an Assemblage Approach to Literary Geography.’ Literary Geographies, 1(2), pp. 120-137.
Barrell, J. (1972) The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bates, D. and Liddiard, R. (2013) East Anglia and Its North Sea World in the Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell.
Bewick, T. (1847) A History of British Birds, Vol.2 [online] [Accessed 3 March 2023] https://archive.org/details/b29333131_0002/page/222/mode/2up
Borsay, P. (2013) ‘A Room With a View: Visualising the Seaside, c. 1750–1914.’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 23, pp. 175-201.
Briassoulis, H. (2017) ‘Tourism Destinations as Multiplicities: The View from Assemblage Thinking’ International Journal of Tourism Research, 19, pp. 304-317.
Bryden, I. (2020). ‘Tennyson and the Return of King Arthur.’ In Parker, J. and Wagner, C. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Collins, I. (2005) Making Waves: Artists in Southwold. Norwich: Black Dog Books.
Collins, I. (2012) ‘An Impression of Suffolk.’ Apollo 176, pp. 48-53.
Collins, W. (1862) No Name. [Online] [Accessed 2nd June 2023] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1438/pg1438-images.html
Defoe, D. (1722) A Tour Through the Eastern Counties of England. [Online] [Accessed 2nd June 2023] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/983/983-h/983-h.htm
DeLanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum.
DeLanda, M. (2016) Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
eHive (2022) ‘Dunwich Museum.’ [Online] [Accessed 30 August 2022] https://ehive.com/collections/3767/dunwich-museum
Ellis, S. (1912) ‘Dunwich in Literature.’ The English Illustrated Magazine, Oct., pp. 29-37.
Evangelista, S. (2009) British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fippinger, A. (2009) ‘Intimations and Imitations of Immortality: Swinburne's “By the North Sea” and a “Poeta Loquitur”.’ Victorian Poetry, 47(4), pp. 675-690.
Fisher-Høyrem, S. (2022) Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian England. Cham: Springer.
Fowler, C. (2013) The Emergent Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fraser, A. (2014) Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Gardner, T. (1754) An Historical Account of Dunwich, Anciently a City, Now a Borough. London: W. Owen.
Gosse, E. and Wise, T. (1919) The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Vol. 2. London: Heinemann.
Hake, T. and Compton-Rickett, A. (1916) The Life and Letters of Theodore Watts-Dunton, Volume 2. London: T. C. & E. C. Jack.
Hake, T. and Compton-Rickett, A. (1918) The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, With Some Personal Recollections. London: John Murray.
Harman, G. (2018) Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Pelican Books.
Horatschek, A., Rosenberg, Y. and Schäbler, D. (2014) Navigating Cultural Spaces: Maritime Places. Leiden: Brill.
Ingleby, M and Kerr, M. (2018) Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
James, H. (1905) English Hours. Boston: J. R. Osgood and Co.
Jarvis, S. (2013) ‘Swinburne: The Insuperable Sea.’ In Bevis, M. (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jervis, B. (2016) ‘Assemblage Theory and Town Foundation in Medieval England’ Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 26(3), pp. 381-395.
Johnson, T. (2017) ‘The Tree and the Rod: Jurisdiction in Late Medieval England.’ Past and Present, 237, pp. 13-51.
Keirstead, C. (2019) ‘Sea Dreams and Realities: Tennyson, Travel, and the Shifting Currents of Littoral Space in Victorian Culture.’ Victorian Poetry, 57(1), pp. 73-99.
Kluwick, U. and Richter, V. (2015) The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures: Reading Littoral Space. London: Routledge.
Labbe, J. (1999) ‘Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head.’ In Wu, D. (ed) A Companion to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lambert, D. Martins, L. and Ogborn, M. (2006) ‘Currents, Visions and Voyages: Historical Geographies of the Sea.’ Journal of Historical Geography, 32, pp. 479-493.
Lang, C. (1960) The Swinburne Letters Vol. 4. Oxford:Oxford University Press.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levin, Y. (2013) Swinburne's Apollo: Myth, Faith, and Victorian Spirituality. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
Lyell, C. (1830) Principles of Geology, Vol. 1. London: John Murray.
Lyons, S. (2013) ‘”Life as the End of Life”: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Secular Aesthetics.’ [online] [Accessed 16th February 2023] https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/33745/Lyons_Sarah%20final.pdf?sequence=1
McGann, J. (1972) Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McSweeney, K. (1973) ‘Swinburne's “By the North Sea”.’ The Yearbook of English Studies, 3, pp. 222-231.
Munn, G. (2006) Southwold: An Earthly Paradise. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club.
Oulton, C. (2022a) Down From London: Seaside Reading in the Railway Age. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Oulton, C. (2022b) ‘"Why were you silent when I spoke tonight?" Coming to Terms in Tennyson's “Sea Dreams” and Swinburne's A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems’. Victorians, 141, pp. 37-50.
Parker, J. and Wagner, C. (2020) The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parker, R. (1978) Men of Dunwich: The Story of a Vanished Town. London: Harper Collins.
Pye, K. and Blott, S. (2006) ‘Coastal Processes and Morphological Change in the Dunwich-Sizewell Area, Suffolk, UK.’ Journal of Coastal Research, 22(3), pp. 453-473.
Porter, R. (1976) ‘Charles Lyell and the Principles of the History of Geology.’ The British Journal for the History of Science, 9(2), pp. 91-103.
Ribeyrol, C. (2013a) ‘Swinburne: A Nineteenth-century Hellene?’ In Maxwell, C. and Evangelista, S. (eds) Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Ribeyrol, C. (2013b) ‘“It’s bawdier in Greek”: A.C. Swinburne’s Subversions of the Hellenic Code.’ Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 78.
Riede, D. (1978) Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Roberts, B. (2019) Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Rouse, M. (1982) Coastal Resorts of East Anglia: The Early Days. Sudbury: Terence Dalton.
Schulz, M. (1981) ‘The Circuit Walk of the Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden and the Pilgrim's Circuitous Progress.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15(1), pp. 1-25.
Scott, R. (2002) Artists at Walberswick: East Anglian Interludes 1880-2000. Bristol: Art Dictionaries.
Sear, D., Bacon, S., Murdock, A., Doneghan, G., Baggaley, P., Serra, C. and LeBas, T. (2011) ‘Cartographic, Geophysical and Diver Surveys of the Medieval Town Site at Dunwich, Suffolk, England.’ The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 40(1), pp. 113-132.
Sharp, W. (1904) Literary Geography. London: Pall Mall Publications.
Shaw, K. (2018) ‘Space, Assemblage and the Non-Human in Speculative Fiction’ [online] [Accessed 1st June 2023] https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/ 23648/2/Shaw_Kristen_2018August_PhD.pdf
Suffolk Coast and Heaths (2012) ‘Touching the Tide: Landscape Character Assessment.’ [online] [Accessed 4th March 2023] https://www.suffolkcoastandheaths.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2012-Touching-the-Tide-Landscape-Character-Assessment.pdf
Swinburne, A. (1880) Studies in Song. London: Chatto and Windus.
Thomas, E. (1917) A Literary Pilgrim in England. London: Methuen.
Thompson, C. (2007). The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thurgill, J. (2019) ‘Literary Geography and The Spatial Hinge.’ Literary Geographies, 7(2), pp. 152-156.
Tomko, M. (2004) ‘Varieties of Geological Experience: Religion, Body, and Spirit in Tennyson's “In Memoriam” and Lyell's “Principles of Geology”.’ Victorian Poetry, 42(2), pp. 113-134.
van Dyke, C. (2013) ‘Plastic eternities and the mosaic of landscape.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31, pp. 400-415.
Ward, C. (1883) Thorough Guide to the Eastern Counties. London: Dulau.
Watts-Dunton, C. (1922) The Home Life of Swinburne. London: A.M. Philpot.
Westover, P. (2012) Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750-1860. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Woods, M. (2015) ‘Territorialisation and the assemblage of rural place: Examples from Canada and New Zealand.’ In Dessein, J., Battaglini, E. and Horlings, L. (eds) Cultural Sustainability and Regional Development: Theories and practices of territorialisation. London: Taylor and Francis Group, pp. 29-42.
Wright, W. (1901) Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes, Vol. 2. London: Macmillan.
Zimmerman, V. (2008) Excavating Victorians. New York: SUNY Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
