Shallows and Deeps

Abstract

This chapter recovers the nineteenth-century milieu for the more focused author studies that follow. It gives a discursive historical account of two marine locations characterized by their uncertain boundaries in the period: the shore-line and the deep sea. This twinned emphasis allows an exploration of the developing capacity to probe further and deeper, limning some specific contours of the marine welter. The chapter draws on mutually influential genres of sea-writing, with key works including Jane Austen’s unfinished novel about sea-bathing; the scientific treatises of Philip Henry Gosse and Charles Wyville Thomson; the popular journalism of Charles Camden (a pseudonym for Richard Rowe); Charles Kingsley’s fiction and creative non-fiction; Thomas De Quincey’s ruminations on drowning; and Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘“Wireless”’. The discussion introduces a recurring motif: the interrelationship of the sea’s literal and symbolic meanings in the nineteenth-century cultural imaginary.