A ROOM WITH A VIEW: VISUALISING THE SEASIDE,c. 1750–1914

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe expansion in consumption that marked the British economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was based not only on a growth in material goods, but also of experientially and culturally rich products such as leisure and tourism. Underpinning the latter of these, and of key importance in the rise of the seaside resort, was the process of visualisation. The ‘tourist gaze’ became a commodity in its own right, geared around environmental and social subjects, and facilitated by a transformation in the content and reproductive potential of visual culture and an engineering of resorts to deliver views.