Stumbling on Dover Beach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59391/inscriptions.v5i2.162Keywords:
landscapes, gardens, beaches, Arcadia, history, creative criticism, geometry of the imaginationAbstract
This is the third in a series of essays, linked thoughts about change over time. In the space of very few years in world historical terms, English beaches and wave-like rolling hills were transformed. For centuries people turned cottages away from strong winds. Then came the impulse to face the sea, to breathe the air in and cast like anglers for awe, possibly to catch the sublime. This is an extraordinary change of mind. On Dover Beach Arnold escaped social constraints, but he feels unease about change. Ignorant armies had gathered themselves up, pulled themselves together, moved to the city, wanting to leave behind the dirt and cold and grind, the middens of peasant life. They found... new versions of the same. Some then lived to see life in the trenches of World War One. They had lawns and gardening and, eventually, all-conquering patio furniture.
References
Cornwell, Bernard. Sharpe’s Havoc. New York, Perennial, 2004.
Cornwell, Bernard. Sharpe’s Trafalgar. New York, Perennial, 2003.
Herzog,Werner, director. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, 2019. 89 mins.
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Lenek Lena and Gideon Bosker. The Beach; The History of Paradise on Earth. New York: Viking, 1998.
Lipton, Eunice. Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire. New York: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Nuttall, A.D.. A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020.
Weber, Eugene. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976.
Williams, John Alexander. Turning to Nature in Germany: hiking, nudism, and conservation, 1900-1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 David Ritchie

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who submit manuscripts and publish with Inscriptions retain copyright to their original work and agree to the following terms:
- Inscriptions is granted the right to first publish the work under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless otherwise agreed in writing prior to publication;
- Inscriptions and its publisher Tankebanen forlag is granted the right to produce and reproduce the work in any form, printed or electronically, for free distribution and for sale;
- Authors are permitted to post their work online and to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of their work as long as its initial publication in Inscriptions is acknowledged.