Literature, Identity and the English Channel: Narrow Seas Expanded

Literature, Identity and the English Channel Narrow Seas Expanded

Dominic Rainsford

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Literature, Identity and the English Channel

10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Narrow Seas Expanded Dominic Rainsford

10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Literature, Identity and the English Channel

© Dominic Rainsford 2002

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0-333-77389-6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rainsford, Dominic, 1965Literature, identity, and the English Channel: narrow seas expanded / Dominic Rainsford. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-333-77389-6 1. English literature—History and criticism. 2. France—Relations-Great Britain. 3. English Channel—In literature. 4. National characteristics, British, in literature. 5. National characteristics, French, in literature. 6. Literature, Comparative—English and French. 7. Literature, Comparative—French and English. 8. French literature-History and criticism. 9. Great Britain—Relations—France. I. Title.

PR129.F8R34 2002 820.9'3216336—dc21 2001059011 10 11

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10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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1 Romantic Promontories

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2 All at Sea

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3 Les Fleurs du mal de mer

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4 Modernity in Transit

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Conclusion: In Between

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The English Channel / Lu Manche: A Cultural Chronology, 1778-2001

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Notes

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Index

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v 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Contents

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Robert W. Jones, formerly of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, now of the University of Leeds, was crucially encouraging during the early stages of this project, and Amy Scott-Douglass, of California State University, Fullerton, terrifically helpful and supportive towards the end of it. Others who contributed significantly along the way include Peter Barry, Malcolm Andrews, the late Anny Sadrin, and, among my colleagues at the University of Aarhus, Karl-Heinz Westarp, Peter Mortensen, Prem Poddar and Dale Carter. I am grateful for the assistance of the staff of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the State and University Library, Aarhus. I would also like to thank my brother Nicolas, for his excellent cover photograph. A version of part of Chapter 2 previously appeared in Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds, edited by Anny Sadrin (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's - now Palgrave, 1999).

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

This is a book about the literary and cultural meanings, force and significance of the English Channel, from the time of the French Revolution to the beginning of the Third Millennium CE. I use the words 'the English Channel7 because I am writing in English, and that is the name that has been standard in this language, since the eighteenth century, for this particular water-filled incision in the surface of the globe.1 From now on, I shall usually refer simply to 'the Channel' - a term that is meant to be neutral in its geopolitical implications. My aim, in fact, is to pay as much attention to la Manche as to its English-language equivalent. The emphasis on the specific area, whatever one may choose to call it, is to be taken very literally. Certain metaphorical suggestions that can be detected in the Channel's various names will be mentioned in the chapters that follow, and certain arguments will be put forward that relate to broad issues in French, English, British, European and even global culture, but the literary texts and other materials upon which I shall concentrate almost all make direct reference to the Channel itself, defined as the actual body of water that flows from Land's End and Finistere to the Strait of Dover, together with the shores and ports of either side. The relations between literature and geography have attracted a good deal of interest since at least the late nineteenth century. Most academicallyapproved but popular literary authors whose works include many references to real places have had books written about them that retrace their footsteps, reducing their distinctive ways of seeing, very often, to the objective and the everyday. The novelist or poet, in these cases, may become a sort of tour guide - sometimes a genuinely useful cataloguer of beauty spots and inns. Authors discussed in this book who have often been treated in such a way include the likes of Dickens and Wordsworth (who perhaps asked for it, with his Guide to the Lakes), Chateaubriand and Verlaine. There is nothing new, moreover, in trying to catalogue the real places that have featured significantly in the lives of the whole canon of a nation's authors. See, for example, the encyclopaedic Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Great Britain and Ireland; Margaret Drabble's gently patriotic coffee-table tome, A Writer's Britain-, the

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Literature, Identity and the English Channel

Guide litteraire de la France; or Editions Gallimard's recent, conveniently slimline La France des ecrivains.2 It will be a pleasant side effect of this book if a few of its readers feel moved to visit any of the places that it mentions, on either side of the Channel (or indeed to make a crossing, by any of the means available, as an experience in itself), and I would certainly wish to support a constructive association of the aesthetic pleasures and intellectual benefits of reading literature and scrutinising the material world: books are physical objects, and landscapes, and even seascapes, can, after a fashion, be read. But the main aims of this book are somewhat different. In one of the most original and yet symptomatic books about literature published in the last few years, Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel, the author characterises his guiding principle as 'a very simple idea: that geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history "happens", but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shades it in depth'.3 My claim, similarly, will be that the Channel plays a notably active role in a wide range of literary texts and other cultural products; that it is not just a geographical feature that is mentioned within them, or beside which they happen to have been created, but a charged locality with a powerful history, and with a set of intrinsic and accidental properties that affect its visitors physically and mentally, interacting with the narratives that are imposed upon it, and with the individual or collective identities that are constructed in its proximity. 'Such a literary geography', as Moretti goes on to observe, can refer to two very different things. It may indicate the study of space in literature; or else, of literature in space. In the first case, the dominant is a fictional one: Balzac's version of Paris, [...] Austen's redrawing of Britain. In the second case, it is real historical space: provincial libraries of Victorian Britain, or the European diffusion of Don Quixote [...]. The two spaces may occasionally (and interestingly) overlap, but they are essentially different [...]. The project of this book will entail such an overlapping at many points. I shall be dealing with literature in space both by discussing the actual crossChannel movements of a wide range of French and British authors (as well as their periods of residence at ports and watering-places on either shore), and by drawing attention to the mappable transmission of ideas and 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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influences from France to England and vice versa. But space in literature will receive even more attention, insofar as I shall be talking about the significances that the Channel assumes through various literary texts and other cultural products. The Channel acquires a certain significance in the earlynineteenth-century writings of Charlotte Smith, for example, that it never had before. The range of meanings of the Channel grows further when it is visited subsequently, from the other side, by Victor Hugo. Swinburne then comes and develops his particular sense of the Channel through writing that draws both on his own experience of the tangible geography and on his reading of the Channel as already mediated by Hugo. Julian Barnes, very recently, has presented new visions of the Channel, and of the act of crossing it, that depend, again, both on his own experience and on a very knowing relation to previous cultural history. In the course of all of this, the Channel as a space in literature has grown and diversified; its identity has become progressively more elaborate and multiform, even as human identities are configured in relation to it. It is through culture, in other words, that the Narrow Seas become expanded.4 As much could be said of any real place that has been represented in any detail, repeatedly, throughout history. Worthwhile books could assuredly be written about the cultural vicissitudes of Dartmoor, Mont Blanc, the Bois de Boulogne and the River Ouse. But there is something very special about the Channel that these other geographical entities lack: it forms the boundary between two areas of inhabited terrain that have for centuries belonged to two different nations, speaking two different major languages; two extremely influential nations, moreover, with a turbulent history as enemies, rivals, and (currently, and, let us hope, from now on) partners and friends. The nature of the boundary that the Channel imposes between Britain and France is a very special one. Notionally, it is just a line. When you are travelling from England to France, or vice versa, and are simply intent on getting to your destination, the Channel is, in a sense, nothing. It has no content. It is simply a division that you need to get across; a border like any other. You are in England, and then you are in France. But the physical nature of the Channel militates against this. Crossing on the surface is still quite likely to make an impact on travellers viscerally - interfering with the smooth operation of their bodies in a way that now has very few parallels among routine journeys in the developed Western world. Even the Channel Tunnel is physically perturbing for some. And then there is the time that it takes. Even if the journey is calm it interferes with the traveller's routine (for 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Introduction

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

all but the very well equipped and prepared) by severing connections and confining movement - by imposing a period, be it thirty minutes or eight hours, of abeyance and desoeuvrement. The Channel can be a nothing, therefore, that becomes a something; an absence that makes itself felt. Into this space many travellers have poured a great deal of creative thought. Much of the thought that has taken place in and around the Channel has been political. Moving across the surface, the traveller is able to see one landmass recede and the other approach. There is an interval for absorbing the thought that one nation has been left behind and that another that is very different in many respects is about to be entered. The humanistically educated traveller, these days, is accustomed to thinking about national identities theoretically: as a way of organising the world that is not God-given but contingent, unstable, disputed, and even discredited by the decline of Imperialism and the advent of globalisation and transnationalism. The Channel-crosser may be strongly aware of working within certain ideas of both France and England, irrespective of which of these (if either) he or she comes from, that have been written into existence, rather than occurring naturally. Thanks, in particular, to influential commentators such as Benedict Anderson and Homi K. Bhabha, we have become accustomed to thinking of national identities as a function of culture, as much as of the facts of geography and race.5 This applies just as much to Western Europe as anywhere else. According to the critic and political philosopher Bernard Crick, 'imaginative literature is both the main source of most people's understandings of "Europe" and a potent factor from way, way back in the construction of the concept'.6 Thus, the word 'identity' in the title of this book relates to the fact that Britain and France have existed, and continue to do so, as cultural entities in the minds of their own populations, each others', and those of the rest of the world: entities that may be constructed and exchanged not least through literature. But one of my aims, as I have already stated, is to highlight the significance of a particular place: a terrestrial phenomenon that exists outside literature, outside human activities of any kind. What will be at issue, therefore, will be a dialogue between the concrete and the imaginary, and between culture and the given configuration of the territory across which culture takes place. Hundreds of different places have played significant roles in the formation of various French and English identities, sub-identities (Breton or Brightonian, for example) or super-identities (such as British or Western 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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European). The same can be said of thousands of artefacts and historical events. But French identities, at least since the Hundred Years War, happen to have been defined with special regularity in opposition to English ones (and vice versa), and the Channel is the most literal, unignorable site of that opposition.7 This is why, as we shall see, the Channel has featured so prominently in the literatures of both England and France. The roles played by the Channel in French and British identities are by no means the same, nor are they mirror images or straightforward complements to one another. It would be an oversimplification, of course, even to talk of an English or a French idea of the Channel - it is born again, to some extent, in each writer and observer, in each text. But there are some typical and considerable differences between many French approaches and many English ones, and these are already suggested by the problem of the Channel's name. According to Aubrey de Selincourt, in his book The Channel Shore, written in the 1950s for a series on the regions of Britain, [n]o country can own the sea beyond the three-mile limit of her territorial waters; yet few Englishmen [...] do not in their private imagination claim the Channel for their own. The name alone - the English Channel - is proof of it. A dividing sea must have two shores; but no Frenchman so far as I know has ever wished to give it so possessive a name on his country's behalf; the French, hardly behind the British and Americans as a sea-faring race, are content to call it the Sleeve, merely from its shape [...]. It is not their Channel: it is ours.8 De Selincourt goes on to argue that there are solid geographical reasons behind this inequality of implied possession: France's most important ports 'lie on their Atlantic and Mediterranean seaboard', while Britain's, 'apart from Liverpool and London and, in the old days, Bristol' (rather major exceptions), are on the Channel. The main purpose of this statement may be to justify the fact that The Channel Shore deals exclusively with the Channel's English shore. In this respect it resembles almost all of the other quite numerous English books that have taken the Channel as their principal subject. The English possession of the Channel, which de Selincourt presents as inevitably the case, is in fact created and sustained by descriptive acts such as his own: he is seeking, consciously or not, to make the English Channel still more English. There are specific historical reasons why he might have wished to do so (which will be examined in due course); he has a

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Introduction

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Literature, Identity and the English Channel

[I]n a strange country all the little details, the colour of the houses, the width of the streets, the cut of clothes, are sufficiently different for them all to pass the threshold of conscious perception. This is one of the main attractions of travelling for its own sake, a pastime that sometimes seems so irrational. It is no illusion that you can see more abroad than at home. The phenomenon is usually reproduced on a reflective level in published travel notes. These are always full of varied and excited impressions for the first day or two - then, as the mind reconstructs its filters to a new pattern, they becomes less interesting to read, because the author has to force himself to look for new material and falls back as often as not on commonplaces. The reaction was particularly strong in travellers to France during the [eighteen-Jeighties and nineties [...]. [T]he geographical position of France favours it. Whereas land frontiers blur changes of atmosphere, a sea journey such as the Channel crossing emphasizes the breakdown of perceptive patterns because the new impressions are thrust suddenly upon the traveller.10 These observations could certainly be extended to many other periods of Anglo-French exchange besides the 1880s and 90s: in fact, to all periods from the beginning of regular, recreational travel until the present (although something might be said - and will be - about the recent effect of the Tunnel). And they can be applied to crossings from France to England as well as to those in the other direction. Indeed, they can be applied to some 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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point, albeit a slightly strained one, about the relative aptness for transport and trade of the two Channel coasts; and it is quite true that the Channel seems to be a less prominent cultural icon for the French than for the English. There seems to be no French equivalent (and why should there be?) of titles such as Wall of Empire: The Channels 2000 Years of History or The Englis Channel: A Celebration of the Channels Role in England's History.9 But that do not mean that la Manche is nothing but an empty sleeve, and the ensuing chapters will show that the Channel achieves a distinctive character and importance in many French texts. The French scholar Christophe Campos, writing in the 1960s, in English, about English perceptions of France, displays a particularly keen sense of some of the ways in which the Channel makes itself felt in the literature of both nations:

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extent (I write as an Englishman who lives in Denmark) to movements between all sorts of places. It is likely, therefore, that closer observation of what happens to people, culturally, when they cross the Channel will throw up broader implications. Sure enough, this book is not meant to be just about France and England and crossing between the two. It does have to be about that very specific set of circumstances and experiences in the first instance, because I want to look at the cultural effects of a particular geography. But that one particular geography may then be compared with others. Indeed, some of the crises of identity that I shall describe might believably have occurred to the same people, or people like them, in another place. They are to do with the experience Campos describes of a generalized change of state, and a revelation of the arbitrariness of growing up with any particular culture - but these are things that the Channel happens to be particularly apt to make accessible for many of the people who happen to dwell in its vicinity. In summary, the cultural significances that I shall attribute to the Channel are quite various, but can be divided into three main categories. There is the set of meanings and values attached to the Channel in British or, more usually, English culture; there is the significantly different set in French culture; and there is a further set that is neither simply English nor French. This last set includes kinds of significance that may go beyond the English and the French by relating to a concept of Europe; or that are easily comparable to the human effects of other specific geographies in quite different parts of the world. It also includes tendencies that suggest that the Channel has a certain cultural life of its own: that lying between the cultures of France and England there is sometimes a third thing that is not quite to be accounted for as a blend or collage of the other two. All of these various significances have changed a good deal over the last two hundred years, but elements of continuity remain. The story of the Channel's cultural significance could have been taken back a lot further: through the Grand Tours of the eighteenth century, for example, and the English visits of Montesquieu and Voltaire; through the wide European cultural disseminations of the Renaissance (with a note on the Spanish Armada); through the complex Anglo-Norman-French world that ensued from the Battle of Hastings; at least as far back as Julius Caesar's incursions across Mare Britannicum. It would have been difficult, however, to make meaningful connections between much of this material. There is too little continuity between many of these periods and events. The French

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Introduction

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

Revolution, on the other hand, marks a turning point in European history, and especially in the relations between England and France, the consequences of which are still being processed, even now, as Europe looks for new constitutional foundations. Similarly, shocks from the late-eighteenthcentury eruption of Romanticism are still echoing in the cultures of postmodernism. So much for the chronological starting point of this book; it is my hope that it will also seem to have been published at an appropriate time. Right now, the cultural meanings of the Channel are probably changing at as fast a rate as ever before. The whole configuration of Europe may be changing dramatically, and what is happening in and around the Channel is dependent upon this. For the English, in particular, the Channel is a site of special tension - in a way that has a consequent significance, through Britain, for Europe as a whole. For many English people (or rather, British), the Channel is what connects them with the rest of a 'Europe' that includes them; but for many British people (or rather, English), it is still what divides them from a 'Europe' that does not. It happens that I am writing this on the day on which a Leader of the Opposition who recently warned that Britain was becoming 'a foreign land', and who sought to base an election campaign on 'keeping the Pound' and restricting the admission of cross-Channel asylum-seekers, has resigned, following defeat by a Euro-positive Prime Minister who gives interviews to Le Monde in French. But the debate is certainly not over. Britain's Conservative Party are considering, even now, whether to moderate their Euroscepticism in the face of electoral disfavour, or to stake their future on what would amount to an assertion of the-Channel-as-barrier-or-mote even more emphatic than William Hague's. So I hope that this book may help to provide an expanded cultural context, for some readers, within which to think about the relations between Britain and France (and, more generally, the Continent) at a time when such thinking is very much on the agenda. I hope, too, that it will be possible to make connections between some of the material discussed here and current questions that beset Europe as a whole: not just Britain and France, but the European Union and beyond. Precisely what do or might constitute the borders and the margins of Europe, especially to the East, is a very fraught and urgent topic at the moment. It might help us in developing a less hierarchical us-and-them model of a future Europe if we were to pay more attention to the complexity and ambiguity of intermediate zones, such as the Channel, that occur even between states in the prosperous West.

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The range of texts that I shall discuss is rather broad: from novels by leading figures in the French and English literary canons to obscure travel narratives and poems of negligible aesthetic distinction by forgotten versifiers. The criteria according to which these texts have been selected obviously vary. In some cases I have taken what might be seen as a typical 'cultural studies' approach, choosing to mention a text because it implies something interesting about the social environment that produced it, regardless of its artistic or intellectual merit. In most cases, however, the texts that I discuss at any length are major works of literature with a value far beyond anything that they may happen to say about a particular social predicament or historical moment, or even about the Channel. But the general merits of these texts and their usefulness in pursuing the wider interests of the book tend to go together. The history of the Channel's identities is complex and sometimes momentous, and only skilful and thoughtful authors have been able to make substantial interventions in that history. My survey in the following chapters does not set out to record every literary treatment of the Channel in English or French since the 1780s (which would make for a very long book, and a lot of repetition), but I have tried to identify and discuss most of the really sustained and revealing engagements with the Channel from this period, and those that are most representative of particular moments in cultural history. A benefit of this approach, and of the whole project, is that it allows me to discuss in close connection with one another a range of French and English texts that are rarely compared: a certain sort of Channel-bridging that is also a celebration of the gap. Comparative criticism emphasises difference at least as much as sameness - and study of the Channel reveals the dissimilarity of the cultures on either side, as well as their many common features. So as not to gloss over these differences I have chosen to quote the original texts as well as providing a translation whenever my arguments depend upon close readings in French. All of the translations are my own unless I indicate otherwise in the notes. In the case of poetry, when the original and a translation appear side by side, I have generally been rather free in my approach to the latter, in the hope of offering something more appealing than a mere word-by-word paraphrase. However, my interpretative statements always apply to the original rather than the translation.

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Introduction

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In the late eighteenth century, at the rise of the great complex of cultural tendencies that is usually referred to as Romanticism, in which Britain and Continental Europe were equally prominent, crossing the Channel became variously urgent and dangerous. The Channel was a space for warfare, a route to freedom or exile, and a symbol of political division. In 1778, as a development of the American Revolution, France, as so often in the past, went to war with Britain. This state of affairs persisted until the end of the American conflict and the Treaty of Versailles in 1783. AngloFrench relations were strengthened for a while by a Commercial Treaty in 1786, but then came the French Revolution, and in 1793, having executed their own King, the French declared war on George III. Conflict continued, through the rise of Napoleon, until the Peace of Amiens in 1802 brought another short-lived respite. The two nations were at war again the following year, and continued thus through numerous celebrated bloodbaths (from Trafalgar to the Peninsular campaigns) until Waterloo, in 1815, saw the final defeat of Napoleon, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, and an absence of war between Britain and France that has lasted, in defiance of probability and despite frequent differences of opinion and conflicts of interest, until the twenty-first century.1 It is extraordinary how much cross-Channel cultural exchange went on at the same time as all the killing. As Jacques Gury says, In the eighteenth century wars [...] did not interrupt intellectual and cultural relations. Books, ideas, letters and even people continued to circulate. When peace came, even before a treaty had been signed, the English nobility would resume their trips to France, seeking out their friends [...] and, after a fashion, picking up their former conversations.2 This insouciant behaviour was by no means restricted to the nobility. In 1782, after the British surrender to the Americans and their French

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Romantic Promontories

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supporters at Yorktown, but before the declaration of Peace, the English Philip Astley, a former member of the 15th Dragoons and therefore particularly unlikely to endear himself, one might have thought, to the enemy of a few weeks past, was in Paris setting up a version of his London Amphitheatre, the first modern circus.3 And it is with another kind of reckless showmanship, three years later, that this account of the literary and cultural life of the English Channel will begin. REVOLUTIONARY AERONAUTICS In January 1785 the French balloonist Jean-Pierre-Francois Blanchard, accompanied by an American whom he had met in London, Dr John Jeffries, set out to be the first to cross the Channel by air, starting from Kent. There was a sense of urgency to the mission, not because of any large-scale political difficulties that might be looming, but rather because Blanchard wished to pre-empt another French balloonist, more celebrated at that time, JeanFrancois Pilatre de Rozier. In doing this, Blanchard anticipated that he would offend the French government, for whom Pilatre was a national treasure. In fact, his attitude to the expedition seems to have been distinctly independent (he is said to be have been the first professional balloonist)4 and anti-nationalist. As he wrote to a friend, Le gouvernement de France est bien desole qu'il y ait un Blanchard assez effronte pour etre l'antagoniste du celebre et du fameux Pilatre [...]. Rien n'est capable de m'epouvanter. Tous les canons du chateau de Douvres seraient pointes pour tirer sur moi a mon depart et je serais sur d'un pareil sort en arrivant en France, que je partirai toujours [...] et je serais sur de descendre en mer, que je partirais encore [...].5 The French government is none too pleased that a mere Blanchard should be so presumptuous as to rival the famous and celebrated Pilatre [...]. I am afraid of nothing. Even if all the canons of Dover Castle were aimed to fire on me at my departure, and even if I might expect the same when I arrived in France [...] and I were sure that I should fall into the sea, I would still set off [...]. A few years later the batteries of Dover and the French Channel ports would

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Romantic Promontories

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

happily have fired on one another, had they been in range, so there is a sad irony in Blanchard's endorsement of the individualistic spirit of adventure in the face of state power. But this is an irony that relates to a lasting peculiarity of the Channel: that it can be constructed, at times, as neither French nor English; not necessarily neutral or a no-man's land; but rather a territory in which identities, sovereignties and reputations are forever up for grabs; where individuals, alliances and nations have to prove themselves. The specific test to which Blanchard and Jeffries submitted turned out to be a hard one. The weather turned hostile, and for a while it looked as though the balloon would end up in the water. As they lost height, Jeffries apparently offered to throw himself into the sea to save the mission. But this did not prove to be necessary. They discarded almost everything else, including most of their clothes (but not the world's first packet of air-mail), and just made it over the cliffs, a little south of Calais, descending uncomfortably between two trees, 'from branch to branch'.6 Even these last moments might have been worse, apparently, had it not been for Jeffries's ability to find new material to discard when it seemed that none remained: [...] I felt the necessity of casting away something, to alter our course; happily (it almost instantly occurred to me, that probably we might be able to supply it from within ourselves), from the recollection that we had drank much at breakfast [...]. I instantly proposed my idea to M. Blanchard, and the event fully justified my expectation [...] which circumstance, however trivial or ludicrous it may seem, I have reason to believe, was of real utility to us, in our then situation [...]7 At Calais there was extraordinary local enthusiasm for the pair's accomplishment: The following day, [...] the local and municipal guards, the brigadier, the aldermen and merchants, and all the officers from both regiments of the garrison presented themselves at the aeronauts' lodgings at ten O'clock [...]. That evening, a banquet was held in a richly decorated hall, and the ladies of Calais assembled to salute the aeronauts, one of them reciting a poem. The mayor offered Blanchard a golden box, engraved with a balloon, containing a document conferring upon him the title of Citizen of Calais. The aerostat, exhibited in the church, was claimed by the town,

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The construction of a monument in Calais was proposed, but this was rejected in favour of a stone column in the Bois de Guines, where the balloon had actually landed, and this was duly erected in January 1786, with Blanchard and Jeffries in attendance. Blanchard's apprehensions about the reception of his trip in the metropolis seem to have been partly justified. 'Paris protests against the approval shown at Rouen,' wrote one sympathetic commentator, 'and when M. Blanchard achieves prodigies in England, when he crosses from Dover to Calais despite a foaming sea, [...] they belittle his glory and say that it was all a matter of luck.'9 Nevertheless, the trip was well received at Versailles, where Louis XVI awarded him a further pension of 1200 livres and a 'gratification' of 12 000.10 With France well on the way to revolutionary meltdown, it is perhaps hardly surprising that such a prominent cultural event should have been disputed along regional and factional lines. On the international plane, in a reversal of Blanchard's vision of cannons fired from either coast, the verse caption to a contemporary print celebrated the crossing as the anticipation of a peaceful cross-Channel entente: Deux peuples divises par l'Empire des Mers, Ne font qu'un aujourd'hui en franchissant les airs Presage fortune de l'union sincere Qui va regner entr'eux pour le bien de la terre.11 Two peoples divided by the Empire of the seas, Become one today, surmounting the breeze; Hopeful presage of friendship unfurled, Reigning between them for the good of the world. These lines would make slightly better sense if John Jeffries had been English rather than a Bostonian and Harvard graduate who happened to reside in London, but their author seems to have overlooked this inconvenience in the strong desire to find a symbol for the friendship of past enemies - one that we might compare to the clasping of American and Russian hands in the International Space Station, or (staying with the geography but losing some of the tension) of British and French ones in 1990 when two tunnels beneath

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which presented Blanchard with 3000 livres there and then, and a further 600 per annum.8

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

the Channel finally became one. In fact, Jeffries himself emphasised the Anglo-French significance of the crossing, noting that the balloon had come to earth 'near the spot celebrated for the famous interview between Henry the Eighth, King of England, and Francis the First, King of France'.12 This would have been a happy coincidence for many readers, not least in France, where many educated people had thought very well of the English - to the point of Anglomanie, to use a term coined in the 1750s - throughout much of the eighteenth century, and where the nobility, in particular, were constantly hopeful that good relations would be restored. This was the view of the Due de Croy, writing in 1783, shortly after the Treaty of Versailles: Nous paraissons, d'ailleurs, fort bien avec l'Angleterre [...]. Les deux nations echangeaient leurs ridicules et s'aimaient a la folie. II n'y avait plus ni haine ni rivalite et tout annon<jait que nous serions longtemps bien avec l'Angleterre.13 We seemed to be getting on very well with England [...]. The two nations indulged in mutual ridicule and adored one another madly. There was no more hatred or rivalry, and everything suggested that we should be on good terms with England for a long time. This optimistic prospect would have been nicely symbolised, indeed, by an Englishman and a Frenchman risking their lives together in a suspended basket and a spirit of combined scientific innovation and sporting gallantry. A more elaborate poetical celebration of the crossing, by Marie-EmileGuillaume Duchosal, appeared in 1786. This politically self-contradictory work contrasts the achievement of Blanchard and Jeffries with what Duchosal apparently sees as a creeping degeneracy in French cultural life. Thus, he accuses the actors of the Comedie Frangaise of dishonouring themselves in performing Beaumarchais's moderately anti-aristocratic Le Mariage de Figaro (1784),14 and goes on to characterise the balloonists in language that echoes the austere classical dramas of Corneille and Racine. It is the tent of Blanchard that is described in the following excerpt, not that of Achilles, and the warrior who bursts into it is the good Dr Jeffries: II penetre soudain la tente ou ce Heros Venoit de s'arracher au neant de repos. 'Jeune homme, lui dit-il, votre gloire m'est chere; 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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'Laissez-moi, comme vous, illustrer l'Angleterre 'Je brave les destins: quelque soit leur arret 'S'il ne faut que mourir, Jeffries est tout pret.' Le Pilote des airs, touche de ce courage Consent de partager la gloire du passage.15 He suddenly entered the tent of our hero, Who had lately returned from the void of repose. 'Young sir/ he declared, 'your glory I prize 'Let me, just like you, make England arise! T defy the fates, whatever they plan; 'Be it only to die, make Jeffries your man!' Touched by his courage, the Pilot of the air, Liberal with glory, consented to share. Like the author of the verse caption to the commemorative print, Duchosal seems eager to involve England in the project, and even to see it as an English triumph. Again, this is despite the fact that neither aeronaut was English. But this may have less to do with Anglophilia than with Duchosal's dismay at contemporary France. Blanchard's own attitudes to his country seem to have remained complex. He found it desirable to leave France during the Revolution - perhaps because of his recent acceptance of Royal patronage - but was nevertheless arrested in Austria on the charge of spreading Revolutionary doctrines. The charge did not stick, and January 1793 found him making a balloon ascent in Philadelphia and receiving a personally signed passport from George Washington, after which he remained in the United States for five and a half years, finally returning to France in time for Napoleon's accession to power in 1799. In general, it seems that Blanchard, as a professional, was happy to accept support from all quarters, and unlikely to identify himself too closely with any one administration or regime in particular. But this in itself might be said to show a revolutionary, and Romantic, combination of individualism with universal fraternity. Thus Duchosal, writing in 1786 and holding more explicitly revolutionary views (despite his distaste for Beaumarchais), found no difficulty in linking his Classically heroic image of Blanchard to a popular egalitarianism, as in his accoimt of the celebrations that followed the crossing:

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Romantic Promontories

Literature, Identity and the English Channel Dans Calais aussi-tot on entend mille voix Qui des deux Architas celebrent les exploits. Le plaisir confond tout: l'indomptable vulgaire Du prejuge des rangs a rompu la barriere. On contemple, on admire & l'on ne connoit plus Des Chefs & du Senat les titres superflus.16 In Calais straightaway we hear a thousand voices That celebrate the deeds of the two Archytases. Pleasure mixes all: the indomitable mass Has broken the barrier of the prejudice of class. We look, we admire, and we utterly forget The superfluous titles of the governing set.

Duchosal expresses sentiments, here, that were rife in France in the late 1780s, and that culminated, of course, in the Revolution. He does not develop his political position in any more concrete way in the poem, nor does he explain quite what the connection is between popular power and Blanchard's crossing. But somehow he manages to see the act of sailing in a balloon from the English shore to the French one as a defiance of state hierarchies and a display of solidarity with the common people (le vulgaire). As Simon Schama observes, the early French aeronautical experiments in general had a populist and provocative character, from Montgolfier onwards. Their 'public was enormous, elated and unconstrained, and spoke not with the accents of polite society but with the emotional vocabulary of Rousseau's sublimity. [...] The crowds of spectators who ran the gamut of unconfined emotions while watching them behaved exactly as crowds were not supposed to in the old regime.'17 The act of ballooning across from the shores of one old regime to those of another merely compounded these destabilising and potentially incendiary effects. ON THE BRINK A few years later, with Britain and France at war, an exploit of the kind just described would not have been possible. In fact, cross-Channel ballooning was viewed with apprehension, as a possible means of invasion.18 More generally, the personal mobility that Blanchard had revelled in so spectacularly,

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floating from one nation to another (and then on to yet more: not just the United States, but also Poland, Bohemia, the Netherlands...), was greatly endangered or curtailed. In contrast to the perspective of a Blanchard, a more typical sense of the Channel for many inwardly adventurous individuals of the Romantic period was as a barrier. This was especially so for women. A case in point is the early Romantic poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, in whose works the Channel and its English shores take on a momentous personal and political significance. Smith, who spoke very good French, did cross the Channel herself at least twice, spending several months in Normandy during the winter of 1784-85, but her reason for doing so was to take charge of a feckless, spendthrift and unfaithful husband who had gone to the Continent to escape his creditors. Her efforts to reform him were unsuccessful; she separated from him in 1787 and had to face the necessity of finding her own ways to clear old debts and support her very many children. Literature was the solution that presented itself, and Smith went on to write influential novels and a pioneering but distinctly melancholy corpus of poetry. Given her continuing straitened circumstances and husbandless state, Smith had little chance to achieve lasting security. After her separation she continued to live a restless life until her death in 1806, changing her place of residence frequently, but she returned repeatedly to her native Sussex, staying close to the Channel shore, in towns such as Chichester and Brighton. Even when she lived outside Sussex, she selected Channel ports: Exmouth and Weymouth. And her verse, although wide-ranging in its moral and political themes, maintains a distinct geographical flavour.19 Smith often describes herself or her characters confronting the shore, and the Channel, in a state of great sadness and inner turbulence. But she also imposes turbulence on the landscape, generating forms of topographical revolution that, in their way, are as dynamic as the exploits of Blanchard. Smith's most important text in this respect is her poem 'Beachy Head', published in 1807. A tribute to a beautiful but also tragic promontory on the Channel coast, this poem is the occasion for a host of enquiries into subjects as seemingly diverse as private despair and historical geology. These themes come together, in fact, in the opening lines: On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime! That o'er the channel rear'd, half way at sea The mariner at early morning hails,

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Romantic Promontories

Literature, Identity and the English Channel I would recline; while Fancy should go forth, And represent the strange and awful hour Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent Stretch'd forth his arm, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores, and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle.20

Smith was a serious student of natural philosophy. Her tendency to mix poetry with speculative science probably shows the influence of Erasmus Darwin,21 and it is possible that she was also aware of some specific early work in historical geology. The facts of the matter are not so important, however, since Smith's opening vision is much more than a dispassionate sketch of Beachy Head's formation. Not only does she envisage the separation of Great Britain from the Continent as an act of divine will, immediately completed; not only does she construct an alliterative bombardment ('rock' ... 'rear'd' ... 'rent' ... 'rush' ... 'rifted') to make the process seem as abrasive as she can manage; but, through her speaker, she even wishes to be there at this hour of genesis and judgement, lying on the cliff top, on the very threshold of the action, even as England and France are ripped asunder. Smith had already presented a number of equally alarming coastal scenarios in her Elegiac Sonnets, published in gradually expanding editions from 1784 onwards. In one of the best known of these, the expansively titled 'On being cautioned against walking on an headland overlooking the sea, because it was frequented by a lunatic' (first published in 1797), Smith is unspecific about the headland in question, but it sounds very much like Beachy Head: Is there a solitary wretch who hies To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow, And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes Its distance from the waves that chide below; Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf, With hoarse, half-utter'd lamentation, lies Murmuring responses to the dashing surf? In moody sadness, on the giddy brink, I see him more with envy than with fear; 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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This is a prodigiously ironic poem. The speaker has been cautioned against going to the headland because there is a lunatic there. The problem is more that, on approaching the headland, she becomes a lunatic herself. The second sentence of the poem seems to begin with a misplaced modifier: surely it should be the lunatic who is 'on the ... brink? But, no, the syntax implies that it is the speaker who here, as later in 'Beachy Head', is drawn to the edge. Similarly, it is the lunatic - perhaps, to avoid further ambiguity, we should say 'he' - who supposedly assesses the length of the drop from the cliff-top to death below, but, by the end of the sonnet, he has been constructed as a type of innocent, 'uncursed with reason', and it is the speaker who knows the 'depth ... of his woe', and, presumably, the height of the cliff. It is a poem about failing to commit suicide. He fails because he is in a wild state beyond the capacity to recognise his own wretchedness and the means of ending it; she fails, not because she is not wretched, but merely through the influence of 'nice felicities'. It is impossible to know quite what Smith meant by this last phrase, but it sounds dismissive and diminutive, is tainted within the poem by association with envy and shrinking and the curse of reason, and generally exudes weakness in the face of the poem's natural sublime. 'Is there a solitary wretch ...?' No, there are two of them, or one with a double personality. So, in opening her poem about Beachy Head with the idea of lying upon it at the extremely dangerous moment of its formation, Smith was revisiting unstable but familiar ground. In fact, she returns again and again to a violent or morbid coast in her writings, like a lunatic forever hesitating to throw herself off. In doing this she takes part in defining the wider dark significance of Beachy Head, which continues, even now, to be Britain's favourite site for suicide, claiming (or being presented with) approximately one life per month.23 The novelist Louis de Bernieres, author of the best-selling Captain Corelli's Mandolin, has recently written about Beachy Head's tragic significance in Harper's Magazine. His article shows a strange mixture of insight and insensitivity. He tells the stories of several individual cases sympathetically enough, and describes himself terrifyingly hypnotized by the location, seen

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He has no nice felicities that shrink From giant horrors; wildly wandering here, He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know The depth or the duration of his woe.22

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

through its awful history: a 'beautiful place [that] openly invites you to die'. But when he tells us that someone went over the cliff, deliberately, on a motorcycle, he grieves facetiously for the machine: T like motorcycles. What a waste.' The problem with this piece is that de Bernieres is clearly not unhappy enough to appreciate his subject. If you cannot imagine yourself doing it - making your way, perhaps from a considerable distance, to spend your last six seconds falling 550 feet from an especially handsome coastal promontory which happens to be popular for this purpose - the whole scenario seems rather ludicrous, and the people who do it are inaccessible ciphers. De Bernieres (perhaps on behalf of his assumed audience, in Harper's) displays a mainstream and symbolically inland sensibility, and in this respect is very different from Charlotte Smith. She adopts a persona that is convincingly entangled with those of the troubled characters whom she describes, while he, a writer whose work advertises cosmopolitan familiarity with the inland ways of several nations, looks out into the watery but not unpopulated expanse of the Channel, senses that it is somehow a challenge to everyday life, but, to express this, has to resort to fantastical vagueness: 'Most days there is a haze on the sea, and this gives rise to the curious sensation of standing at the very edge of the world, as though one has arrived in the middle of an Arthurian legend or is being reminded of some inscrutable mystic truth.'24 As another modern visitor to the Channel coast remarks, 'People on land think of the sea as a void, an emptiness, haunted by mythological hazards. The sea marks the end of things. It is where life stops and the unknown begins.'25 But this is Jonathan Raban, the intrepid yachtsman, and his remarks are a criticism of the blinkered comprehension of the landbound. In fact, de Bernieres is quite open about his inability to make sense of Beachy Head, and he makes an effort to retrieve meaning from others who know the place better. But they are hesitant to generalise about the psychology of suicide beyond a certain point. Michael Davey, for example, the Coroner at Eastbourne, 'believes that the one solid reason for jumping is that it is irrevocable, unlike an overdose. You cannot change your mind, once committed, and therefore it is clear that this method of suicide is for those who genuinely long for the final peace.'26 This sounds correct, but could still apply to many other methods, and locations, for suicide. Beachy Head offers a range of other benefits at the moment of death: a grandeur that might make the oppressed feel momentarily triumphant, an imagined companionship with others who have died at that place, and - perhaps most of all - an

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intoxicating amplification of the twin movements of escape and rejection that all suicides might be felt to contain: in this case, escape into the largely uncorrupted naturalness of the very edge of England and the sea, and rejection of a whole life-history that has taken place (in the vast majority of cases) upon that particular landmass. By pushing off from this white cliff, with its resplendent connotations of fortress Albion, the sufferer must feel, at least in some cases, that he or she is leaving England as well as life. Charlotte Smith, certainly, would have tended to see individual tragedies in a wider cultural and political perspective. Smith, a sufferer in many ways herself, is fascinated by human beings' readiness to cause damage, and gifted with the capacity to identify with the urges that drive them when they do so. This applies to the urge to destroy the self in suicide, but also to the abuse of inanimate nature, and to conflicts between nations and individuals. Looking out to sea, in 'Beachy Head', Smith imagines, or recalls seeing, not an 'inscrutable mystic truth', but something much more concrete: a merchant ship, heading for the Orient. There it will reach the latitudes where the Earth hides within her glowing breast The beamy adamant, and the round pearl Enchased in rugged covering; which the slave, With perilous and breathless toil, tears off From the rough sea-rock, deep beneath the waves. These are the toys of Nature; and her sport Of little estimate in Reason's eye: And they who reason, with abhorrence see Man, for such gaudes and baubles, violate The sacred freedom of his fellow man Erroneous estimate!27 This is one of several places in 'Beachy Head', and in her cliff-top writings in general, where Smith has almost certainly been influenced by King hear? Towards the close of that play, Edgar, masquerading as the mad beggar Poor Tom, is drawn with the other surviving dramatis personae to the vicinity of Dover, and pretends, for the benefit of his blind and would-be suicidal father to be looking out over the edge of Dover Cliff. Peering down to the Channel in his imagination, he is on the 'giddy brink' that Smith mentions in her sonnet about the lunatic, but he, like Smith's speaker, hovers between lunacy and reason, and can still appreciate 'How fearful / And dizzy 'tis to cast

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Romantic Promontories

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

one's eyes so low!' Transferring his own imagined peril, onto others, he sees a worker, the samphire gatherer, 'dreadful trade!'29 Samphire is a more intrinsically useful edible, than pearls, but in both cases Nature is rifled in exposes and glorifies human folly.

and his father's, dangling below: substance, being a way that both

TIMON AND CASSANDRA The connection between Shakespeare's imaginative world, at the end of King Lear, and Smith's in 'Beachy Head' is not merely coincidental. Smith is tapping into Shakespeare like so many Romantic authors,30 but tapping more specifically into an idea of the coast as an area of extremes, the limit of society and threshold of the unknown, where human nature is frighteningly exposed and concentrated. Shakespeare's most extensive formulation of this theme occurs in Timon of Athens. The hero of that play, who has fallen on hard times through too much generosity, and has been appallingly disappointed by his fair-weather friends, declares himself 'sick of this false world', and prepares to die. He does die, in due course, on the seashore, outside Athens, apparently in exact fulfilment of a previously stated design: Then, Timon, presently prepare thy grave; Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat Thy grave-stone daily: make thine epitaph, That death in me at others' lives may laugh.31 In other words, Timon plans to construct a final resting place for himself upon the beach, and, as far as we can tell, to bury himself within it (perhaps in some way using wood from a tree which he had earlier, mysteriously, declared an intention to cut down).32 He expects no help from other humans by this stage in the narrative, and wishes only mockery upon them, but he seems to envisage comfort from nature. The beating by light foam' sounds like a gentle and consoling visitation. How exactly he proposes to die is unclear from the text; nobody within the play shows much curiosity about it. Shakespeare may have been relying on a grand tragic notion of a person being morally worn out by life and brokenhearted - so that Timon could just lay himself down to die. There are other old sufferers in the tragedies who appear to sense their imminent deaths,

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even though we are not told of anything specific that is physically wrong with them: the Earl of Kent at the end of Lear, for example. So, perhaps Timon feels that he has had enough of life, devotes his last energies to constructing a grave - with gravestone and epitaph - and then just lies down within it, to let the sea, the sand, and death wash over him, a procedure which is neither quite suicide nor quite a mere succumbing to age or illness. What Timon does is certainly very strange, however we interpret it, but the principled soldier Alcibiades, in the play's final speech, seems to understand: Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs, Scorn'dst our brains' flow and those our droplets which From niggard nature fall, yetrichconceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye On thy low grave, on faults forgiven.33 Here again we find the idea of the sea shore as a place of consolation. Timon has discovered the niggardliness of 'nature' in the sense of human nature, the general moral poverty of people, during his own material poverty. Now, however, he arranges to be covered by the natural wealth of 'rich' insentient Nature, finding a final release from pettiness in the 'vast' body of the sea. Driven, like Gloucester, to the end of his tether, he moves to the edge of land-based humanity, and consigns himself to an element that, through the contrast with tears, makes people seem insignificant. And yet, of course, Alcibiades anthropomorphizes the sea, making Neptune lament as a person would, and so partly recuperates Timon as a being who is still within the economy of human feelings, someone for whom Alcibiades, at least, continues to feel, and who perhaps died still hoping for reconciliation, on some mysterious post-mortuary level, with others of his species. '[T]he sea-sound,' as A. D. Nuttall notes, 'is uniquely Shakespearean, perhaps a kind of grace or benediction after all.'34 Timon goes to die (or kills himself) beside the sea so as to make a point perhaps like some modern suicides at Beachy Head. This point may be that humanity has been a disappointment, but that certain allusions to human value, such as the attribution of special significance to certain places, and the association of freedom with the sea, still mean something. Timon is still bothered to make a gesture. This corresponds to a wider cultural significance of the sea shore as a zone where human values are not necessarily rejected 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Romantic Promontories

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

but rather put to the test. The results of the test can be very positive. It is possible to read Timon partly in this way, especially if we see him through the eyes of Alcibiades. Gloucester, certainly, seems to be morally regenerated by his sham last journey to the coast in Lear. Charlotte Smith, drawing 'Beachy Head' to a close, tells the story of another old man who seems at first to share all of Timon's disappointment, but for whom, much more than for Timon, relocation to an inhospitable coastal dwelling brings a reaffirmation of the human, through a more acute experience of pity for the weakness and vulnerability of others. At first, this experience develops through the non-human features of the scene; in fact, it is specifically fostered by the coastal topography: Just beneath the rock Where Beachy overpeers the channel wave, Within a cavern mined by wintry tides Dwelt one, who long disgusted with the world And all its ways, appear'd to suffer life Rather than live; the soul-reviving gale, Fanning the bean-field, or the thymy heath, Had not for many summers breathed on him; And nothing mark'd to him the season's change, Save that more gently rose the placid sea, And that the birds which winter on the coast Gave place to other migrants; save that the fog, Hovering no more above the beetling cliffs Betray'd not then the little careless sheep On the brink grazing, while their headlong fall Near the lone Hermit's flint-surrounded home, Claim'd unavailing pity; for his heart Was feelingly alive to all that breath'd; And outraged as he was, in sanguine youth, By human crimes, he still acutely felt For human misery.35 Again, Smith seems to have been influenced in details by Shakespeare ('the beetling cliffs', for example), but more generally she repeats something similar to the idea in Timon of a misanthrope touched and softened by the sea. Smith's hermit, a historical 'Parson Danby' according to her own 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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footnote, goes on to make humanitarian sorties from his cave, rescuing the shipwrecked, before eventually being from 'earthly bondage freed' by the Channel's very real forces of attrition, in a landslide brought on by a storm.36 The coast kills Smith's hermit, but it seems also to have saved his soul. Smith was perfectly aware that shore-dwellers were capable of behaving in ways that were the moral opposite of this: in 1795 she had witnessed and written about a disastrous multiple shipwreck at Chesil Beach on the Dorset coast, where both the dead and some of the desperate survivors were robbed by local villagers.37 This must have been particularly outrageous to Smith, given her sense of the feeling, sympathetic influence of the shore, and it must have been even worse that history compelled her to view the Channel as a theatre of war. In her sonnet 'The Sea View', for example, she presents another scene of cliff-top trauma, but the distress is not self-engendered in the mind of a suicidal lunatic, but rather is visited upon the pastoral serenity of an 'upland Shepherd', who looks out to sea and suddenly perceives an almost Blakean vision of 'dark plague-spots by the Demons shed, / Charged deep with death', 'war-freighted ships' flashing 'destructive fire', leaving 'mangled dead / And dying victims [to] pollute the flood'.38 There is still a suicidal element in this, but the self-destroyers are collective: mankind in general, considered as a war-making species, and, more specifically, the navies of Britain and France, and the administrations directing them, in the 1790s. Putting this realistic observation of military conflict in the period together with Smith's more personal expressions of frustration and despair in other poems that were published at the same time (such as 'On being cautioned...'), it is possible to see her exploring the image of the cliff-top observer as a nexus for suffering of all kinds: whether it be brought about by individual domestic circumstances (as in her own private life) or by the rivalry of nations. The coastal setting, in other words, expresses a whole set of interconnected ideas: the individual marginality that might be felt by a person who, owing to misfortune, holds a vulnerable position in society; the conduct of that society in going to the edge of civilised behaviour, and over it, into war; and the position of helpless vantage occupied by the former relative to the latter, in which Smith and her speakers and personae can be seen as having an unavailing, Cassandra-like prophetic vocation. 'Beachy Head' is Charlotte Smith's greatest achievement in verse, but her sense of the damage caused by politics and her capacity for sympathetic identification interact most fruitfully with her precise geographical and historical circumstances in an earlier work, her long poem of 1793, The 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Emigrants. This is a poem about French cross-Channel refugees, and seems to have been written to serve a specific social purpose: to increase the mutual understanding of the English and the French, and promote, as she says in the poem's dedication to William Cowper, 'the extirpation of that reciprocal hatred so unworthy of great and enlightened nations'.39 Book I of the poem is set in November 1792, on the cliffs, as usual - east of 'Brighthelmstone' (as Brighton used to be called), hence close to Beachy Head. Smith alludes to the new buildings in fashionable Brighton (already patronised by the future Prince Regent), but only to note that they are inadequate barriers to 'the spectre Care', of no use to oppressed souls like her speakers, or the various French people, mostly clergy, whom she describes clustered grimly on a less frivolous stretch of coast.40 Remembering, no doubt, her own enforced crossChannel venture of 1784-85, she notes that she too has felt how sad It is to look across the dim cold sea, That melancholy rolls its refluent tides Between us and the dear regretted land We call our own - 4 1

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The 'dim cold sea' is a pithy and disillusioned characterisation of the Channel, which fits the generally unimpassioned and rationalist approach of the poem and Smith's attempt to assess the moral balance of her historical moment fairly. She notes some of the faults of the ancien regime but finds penitence and progress in its refugees, hinting at parallel failings in Britain. She characterises the French Revolution as having been, at first, 'the noblest cause that ever warm'd / The heart of Patriot Virtue', but adds a note indicating that she is aware that patriotism is no longer an undisputed virtue.42 The best way for Britons to impress upon these foreigners the merit of the country to which they have fled would be to display 'Reason's gen'rous potency', eschewing acts of war, which has 'by our brave Compatriots thinned the world'.43 Book II of the poem is set on 'an Afternoon in April, 1793', and a little further inland, 'on an Eminence on one of those Downs, which afford to the Sout View of the Sea'. Perhaps Smith chose this location to suggest a slightly greater detachment from the busy frontier of Anglo-French relations. Certainly she begins the book by setting everybody's problems in perspective, taking an overview in which her 'own wayward destiny' slots into place 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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alongside 'the unhappy lot / Of the lorn Exiles';44 and, as she stands back from the Channel, and its sufferers become equated with one another, so she is able to sympathise across classes and stations as well as nationalities: with Marie Antoinette, for example (still alive at this point), and beyond to a vision in which rich and poor are faced with similar sadnesses, and with the unpromising search for happiness. The Channel, viewed from these geographically and intellectually distant points of vantage, serves some function in keeping actual violence at bay - 'For, by the rude sea guarded, we are safe'45 - but the 'rude sea', like the 'dim cold sea', is no inspirational prospect. It is a reminder of division which will only be overcome when, in the concluding vision of the poem, the world is free from 'the hell-born fiends / Of Pride, Oppression, Avarice, and Revenge', and the exiles can return to 'their desolated land' to establish 'Reason, Liberty, and Peace!'46 This last line, the last of the poem, seems to be Smith's version of liberte, egalite, fraternite. Thus, she endorses the Revolution while hoping for the rehabilitation of its refugees, and upholds English as the functioning vehicle for the idea of freedom, while acknowledging French as its inspiration. All in all, a generous exercise in Channel-bridging, the like of which stood little chance in the following years of international conflict.47 It is salutary, by way of contrast, to note that other English poets of Smith's time were quick to make use of the Channel in a more partisan way. Robert Bloomfield, for example, a considerably less skilful writer, appears to have shared Smith's antipathy for warfare, but instead of exploring the Channel as a field of possible exchange and identification between the English and their Continental enemies, he just takes the easy option of celebrating it as a barrier that will keep the French at bay, a 'rude sea' without a stain, a simple but thankfully impassable division between a flourishing, decent, virtuous England, and the wicked outer world. This is Bloomfield's 'Address to the British Channel': Roll, roll thy white waves, and envelop'd in foam Pour thy tides round the echoing shore, Thou guard of Old England; my country, my home; And my soul shall rejoice in the roar. Though high-fronted valour may scowl at the foe, And with eyes of defiance advance;

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'Tis good to exult in the strength of the land; That the flower of her youth are in arms; That her lightning is pointed, her jav'lin in hand, And aroused the rough spirit that warms: But never may that day of horror be known, When these hills, and these valleys shall feel The rush of the phalanx by phalanx o'erthrown, And the bound of the thundering wheel. The dread chance of battle, its blood, and its roar, Who can wish in his senses to prove? To plant the foul fiend on Britannia's own shore, All sacred to peace and to love? Hail, glory of Albion! yefleets,and ye hosts, I breathe not the tones of dismay; In valour unquestion'd still cover your coasts, But may Heav'n keep the slaughter away!48 This is not an especially bigoted or jingoistic poem: Bloomfield does not construct 'Old England' or 'Britannia' or 'Albion' as inherently superior to any other nation. Britain has a good army, apparently, but, more than that, Britain is a lucky nation: kept free from the ill-defined horrors of the outer world, the depredations of the 'foul fiend' (whether this be taken to be Napoleon, the Devil, or simply a personification of war), by the fact of having a particular geography.49 In fact, in its simple way, Bloomfield's poem plays quite a serious game with the bestowal of credit for Britain's security: the Channel is the 'guard', itself a military entity; 'high-fronted valour' is perhaps the impression given by upstanding troops and a wellshipped navy, but is also an anthropomorphised vision of the cliffs; and, in the last stanza, is it the Channel that is addressed (as the title of the poem implies) or human forces, 'ye fleets, and ye hosts'? and who is it, consequently, that 'still cover[s the] coasts'? Bloomfield has nothing to say about the politics of the Channel, but he does raise a question about the balance of

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'Tis thou hast repell'd desolation and woe, And the conquering legions of France.

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INSULARITIES There is a type of enlightened universalism lurking behind Bloomfield's poem, which, if history had developed a little differently, might have allowed him to sympathise with the French as much as with the British. This connects Bloomfield with the double nature of Charlotte Smith's monitory cliff-top utterances, in which a person may speak of being warned against a lunatic, for example, while adopting the manner of one herself, or in which she may warn of militaristic dangers on the horizon, but reminds her readers that the prevalence of war is partly their own fault. There are important connections to be made, too, with the contemporaneous reflections of William Wordsworth, who paid a respectful visit to Smith at Brighton on the way to his own second trip to France, in 1791. It was during this trip that Wordsworth met Annette Vallon, who was subsequently to bear his child Caroline. Wordsworth was to be separated from both mother and child by politics (if not by inclination), but he took the advantage of the Treaty of Amiens, in 1802, to spend a further month at Calais, getting to know his daughter and improving his understanding with her mother, before returning to England to marry Mary Hutchinson. So Wordsworth was like Smith in experiencing the Channel as the physical correlative of a fractured family life. And, again like Smith, this lends an intimacy to his accounts of the Channel's role in larger, political divisions. It may also have helped him, like her, to see political reality from more than one side. In the sonnet 'England! the time is come...', which was written in 1802, possibly at Calais, Wordsworth notes that England is on the right side in its conflicts with France - 'Far, far more abject is thine Enemy' - but he ends with the strong implication that this is only by default, and with an image that ominously anticipates Smith's 'war-freighted ships': the wise pray for thee, though the freight Of thy offences be a heavy weight: Oh grief! that Earth's best hopes rest all with Thee!50

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strengths and weaknesses that underlies those politics: is Britain a nation whose moral stature can be symbolised by the Channel, or is Britain simply a model of what any nation might be, if it had the natural advantage of its own Channel to keep it uncorrupted?

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

'Freight' is a finely chosen word, in both instances, pointing as it does to the links between Anglo-French rivalry and maritime trade. The business of international commerce, embodied also in Smith's merchant ship in 'Beachy Head', bound down-Channel for the Orient, the 'ship of commerce richly freighted', not quite a 'plague-spot' like the men-of-war but still a 'dubious spot' on the horizon,51 becomes the burden of sin that Britain has to expiate in inglorious conflict with another power more fallen than herself. But whereas Smith, from her high vantage points above the Channel, appears chiefly conscious of Britain's solidity and of the nation's power to go on disseminating violence, Wordsworth is able, at times, to put himself in a quite different subject position, looking back across the Channel, seeing England itself as a mere 'spot', and himself as a worried temporary exile, eager to get back - as in another of his sonnets of 1802, 'Composed by the Sea-Side, Near Calais': Fair Star of Evening, Splendor of the West, Star of my Country! on the horizon's brink Thou hangest, stooping, as might seem, to sink On England's bosom; yet well pleas'd to rest, Meanwhile, and be to her a glorious crest Conspicuous to the Nations. Thou, I think, Should'st be my Country's emblem; and should'st wink, Bright Star! with laughter on her banners, drest In thy fresh beauty. There! that dusky spot Beneath thee, it is England; there it lies. Blessings be on you both! one hope, one lot, One life, one glory! I, with many a fear For my dear Country, many heartfelt sighs, Among Men who do not love her linger here.52 This England seems unfreighted with sin. But this is a vision of stellar purity that is enabled by remoteness, and that deals with what ought to be, as much as with what is. Wordsworth made two significant changes to this poem for his 1836 Poetical Works and for all subsequent editions in his lifetime: he changed the tenth line to 'Beneath thee, that is England; there she lies' (my italics).53 The neuter pronouns of the original version bespeak an alienation from the home country that is denied by the softer, later text: but this should come as no surprise given the general shift to conservatism in Wordsworth's 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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outlook as he grew older, and given his inevitably fading recollection of quite what it was that he had felt as he looked over from the Calais shore at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Dorothy Wordsworth, who had travelled to Calais with her brother, appears to have experienced the same vista at the same time, and, in taking words and images from William, or (just as probably) giving them to him, she makes the euphoric nature of the original shared experience all the more apparent: '[W]e had delightful walks after the heat of the day was passed away - seeing far off in the west the coast of England like a cloud crested with Dover Castle, which was but like the summit of the cloud - the evening star and the glory of the sky.' Both Wordsworths seem to have had an agreeable enough time at Calais, but it is specifically when they look out to sea, and beyond the sea to England, that their imaginative life lights up. 'The town of Calais seemed deserted of the light of heaven,' Dorothy continues, 'but there was always light and life and joy upon the sea.'54 Nevertheless, it is clear from poems such as 'England! the time is come...', that William Wordsworth, at least, outside England looking back, knew his country's faults as well as Charlotte Smith, inside looking out. It is just that the twenty-three miles from Calais to the English coast make it easier to hope and dream. And traversing that distance, to become an emigrant or exile, changes everything. In this respect, it is very striking that Wordsworth, when he came to write a sonnet describing his return from Calais to England in 1802, chose to concentrate on a fellow passenger who would almost certainly have had no reason to look across to England with affection, nostalgia, pride or even much hope, and who, on arrival there would have been at almost as much of a disadvantage as she had been in France. This is a poem that Wordsworth altered dramatically over the years, to the point that it is necessary to consider two versions. This is how the poem appears in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807): We had a fellow-Passenger who came From Calais with us, gaudy in array, A Negro Woman like a Lady gay, Yet silent as a woman fearing blame; Dejected, meek, yea pitiably tame, She sate, from notice turning not away, But on our proffer'd kindness still did lay A weight of languid speech, or at the same 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Romantic Promontories

Literature, Identity and the English Channel Was silent, motionless in eyes and face. She was a Negro Woman driv'n from France, Rejected like all others of that race, Not one of whom may now find footing there; This the poor Out-cast did to us declare, Nor murmur'd at the unfeeling Ordinance.

And here is the text that appears in The Poems of William Wordsworth (1845): We had a female Passenger who came From Calais with us, spotless in array, A white-robed Negro, like a Lady gay, Yet downcast as a woman fearing blame; Meek, destitute, as seemed, of hope or aim She sate, from notice turning not away, But on all proffered intercourse did lay A weight of languid speech, or to the same No sign of answer made by word or face: Yet still her eyes retained their tropic fire, That, burning independent of the mind, Joined with the lustre of her rich attire To mock the Outcast - 0 ye Heavens, be kind! And feel, thou Earth, for this afflicted Race!55 At the risk of weakening my point about the revisions to 'Composed by the Sea-Side' - a risk from which I will defend myself by saying that Wordsworth's mind was a complex entity and did not develop along an entirely regular trajectory - 1 would say that it is the later version of this poem that is the more radical and provocative. What is clear, at least, is that this poem records an experience that affected Wordsworth deeply, and which he continued to analyse intensively (these changes are no mere tinkering) for decades. It is also apparent, I believe, that he never knew quite what to make of this material. Wordsworth conceived this poem, or at least received the real-life data for it, at the moment of travelling away from a position of isolation and homesickness '[a]mong Men who [did] not love' his nation. His expectation, on the basis of 'Composed by the Sea-Side', may well have been that, having reached the 'dusky spot' on the horizon, he would find that all was

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brightness, glory and security once more. He looked forward to the Channel crossing, that is, as a narrative of happy homecoming and an end to loneliness. There is a feeling of incomprehension and discomfort in the sonnet about the black refugee, however, that testifies not merely to a specific inability to make sense of one unfamiliar human other, but also to a potentially fatal disruption of the whole happy narrative. The result of the black woman's participation in Wordsworth's return journey is to open up the Channel to a global perspective. From England, or 'my dear Country', and the single Evening Star in the sea-side poem, we have moved to Earth and the Heavens in the later version of the poem describing the crossing. A certain reading of the distance from Calais to Dover that made a kind of sense to a homesick Englishman at a particular moment in history is set back by an intimation that this is just one little waterway in a big and troubled world, and that for some it is just another obstacle within a generally hostile environment, rather than the short transition from vulnerability to security, disquiet to peace, the foreign to the familiar. It is something like this gloomy intimation that lays the 'weight' on Wordsworth's would-be universalist and humanitarian overtures - a tiny return payment of affliction from black to white. The speaker's position in this sonnet is chastened and disempowered. The underpinnings of his sense of the world and its prospects are challenged, and he is left unable to communicate. The deep isolation of the woman whom he attempts to address shuts him out, and isolates him too. And yet a kind of isolation is fundamental to much of the ideology of Romanticism, and, for that matter, to many constructions of the British character. It was common for visitors to Britain from the Continent in this period to be struck by the self-reliance of its inhabitants, and to attribute this to a very literal isolation, and to the concomitant influence of the sea. A case in point is the anonymous author of Souvenirs d'un voyage en Angleterre (1791): Je veux bien croire qu'il n'est point de pays ou la liberte ne puisse etablir son auguste empire; mais vous me permettrez de penser qu'elle regnera toujours plus facilement au milieu des orages de la mer, ou a l'abri de quelques rochers escarpes, que dans de vastes & paisibles plaines. L'insulaire protege par l'element qui l'environne, tant qu'il a cette puissance pour amie, n'en a point d'autre a redouter, & tout l'invite a se la rendre favorable; car les soins qu'il est oblige de prendre habituellement pour assurer la subsistance, ou pour accroitre sa richesse, deviennent en 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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meme-temps pour lui les moyens les plus puissans de force & de defense; sa marine est tout-a-la-fois son industrie & son armee. II est chez lui quand il veut l'etre, il n'est chez les autres qu'autant qu'il en a besoin. J'en conclus qu'un Peuple insulaire est appele par la force meme des circonstances au commerce, a la liberte, a l'egoisme; a cet egoisme de moins qui l'isole en quelque maniere des autres Nations, & lui permet de n'entretenir avec elles que les seuls rapports qui peuvent convenir a ses gouts, a ces interets, a son ambition.56 I would like to believe that there is no country in which liberty cannot establish her august empire, but you must allow me to say that she always holds sway most easily in the midst of maritime storms, or in the shelter of a few steep rocks, rather than in open, peaceful plains. The island-dweller, protected by the element that surrounds him, having that force as his companion, has nothing to fear from any other, and everything invites him to make the most of his location. For the efforts that he is daily obliged to make for his own subsistence or to increase his wealth become the most powerful means at once of self-assertion and of defence; his boats are both his industry and his army. He is at home when he wishes to be so, and not with others except when the need arises. I conclude, therefore, that an insular people is led by the very force of circumstances towards commerce, liberty and egoism: at least, to that sort of egoism that isolates them in a way from other nations, and allows them to avoid any other contact than such as fits with their taste, interests and ambition. In part, this is a more sophisticated statement of an idea that seems to lie behind Bloomfield's 'Address to the British Channel', namely the idea that special geographical circumstances interact with human nature to produce forms of virtue that, once acquired, allow the local indigenes to feel good about themselves. This is almost a form of 'moral luck', in the phrase used by Bernard Williams and other philosophers: meaning that here we have a case of admirable behaviour on the part of people whose circumstances make admirable behaviour inevitable, or at least less of an effort than it might be for others.57 Again, this is not a partisan celebration of the Channel (after all, this is not an Englishman writing), but a universalist reflection on the links between people and geography. At the same time, this writer's emphasis is more on the single individual than the collective: we are being told about 'an insular people' ('un Peuple insulaire'), but the arguments that build up to a

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description of their character are all couched in terms of the individual 'island-dweller' (Tinsulaire'). To be a member of an island people, for this author, is to be alone as much as one wishes. Insofar as this applies to Britain, it makes the British people into a collective personification of the Romantic ideal of lonely but sublime confrontation between one mind and nature. This is a positively marked loneliness to be contrasted with the mundane and joyless kind apparently experienced by Wordsworth's black co-passenger. Her isolation is figured by her self-absorption and unresponsiveness in transit, upon a boat full of people, while the idealised loneliness expresses itself much more readily in terms of the spectator, firmly grounded on land that he knows, who looks out into an expansive void (the Channel, for example) which symbolizes his willed independence from human contact.58 OVER THE SEA, BEYOND THE TOMB 'Romanticism is the irruption of the weather forecast [la meteo] into literature', writes Jean d'Ormesson in his recent 'autre histoire' of French literature. Every poem is a bulletin. Bad weather holds sway. The North Wind blows with vigour. It is a literature of the open air after a literature of the salon. It leads us from the forests of America to the banks of the Nile and from the lakes of Savoy to all the explorations of the Orient.59 It also finds a privileged foothold, for similar reasons, closer to home: for the shores of the English Channel, too, can provide a fresh blast of otherness. In fact, the Romantic author of whom D'Ormesson is primarily thinking, and whom he admires above all, is Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, who was born by the Channel coast in Brittany. Chateaubriand's father was a slave-trader, and thus one of the many Europeans instrumental in the destructive displacement that confronts Wordsworth in the person of his black refugee. More generally, he was one of many dwellers on both sides of the Channel coast, over the centuries, who have profited from the sea's comparative freedom from moral and legal surveillance by engaging in activities that were either completely illegal or embarrassing to civilised society: from slavery to wrecking and smuggling. There is a burden of crime in Channel culture, in fact, that surfaces

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repeatedly: above all, perhaps, in the work of Chateaubriand's greatest successor in French Romanticism, Victor Hugo. But the crime is often of a dramatically independent and necessarily skilful nature, and hence partakes of the kind of egotistical and amoral sublime that we have seen attributed to the insular life. Hugo was to seek insularity, following in Chateaubriand's footsteps, on the Channel Islands, but Chateaubriand himself was almost born into insularity by virtue of being a Breton. Even today, as John Ardagh writes, Brittany is France's Celtic fringe, a wild mysterious poetic land where the desolate central moorlands slope down to fertile plains, and Atlantic rollers break on rocky headlands. In many villages, the curious stone calvaries and ossuaries, with ornate carvings, bear witness to a special religious past, linked to the terrors of death at sea.60 There is the Breton language to be taken into account, too, which still has about half a million speakers, and had many more in the nineteenth century. Brittany, in other words, is the region that has come closest in the last two or three centuries, on either side of the Channel, to having a distinct cultural and political identity that is not French or English: other contenders such as Normandy and Cornwall lag behind in this respect.61 This has been a matter of pride to many Bretons, of course, but has inspired a kind of wonder tinged with condescension and even disgust in others, for whom separateness and difference has connoted backwardness. Thus Thomas Adolphus TroUope (the brother of Anthony): 'To the student of man and his history the Breton peasantry present an object of observation as interesting and suggestive as the fossilized remains of extinct races of organized beings can to the physiologist.'62 Chateaubriand never learnt the Breton language, and showed no interest in Breton nationalism. In fact, throughout most of his life he stayed well away from the Channel coast. This may indeed be because he feared becoming 'fossilized', if not 'extinct'. The Channel continued to influence him, all the same, and he shared with Smith, Wordsworth and many other Romantic authors, as well as with many unliterary refugees, the experience of crossing the Channel to temporary exile. In his huge autobiography, the Memoires d'Outre-tombe ('Memoirs from Beyond the Grave'), Chateaubriand describes his birth at Saint-Malo, within earshot of the Channel waves:

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La chambre ou ma mere accoucha domine une partie deserte des murs de la ville, et a travers les fenetres de cette chambre on aper^oit une mer qui s'etend a perte de vue, en se brisant sur des ecueils. [...] J'etais presque mort quand je vins au jour. Le mugissement des vagues, soulevees par une bourrasque annongant l'equinoxe d'automne, empechait d'entendre mes cris; on m'a souvent conte ces details; leur tristesse ne s'est jamais effacee de ma memoire. II n'y a pas de jour ou, revant a ce que j'ai ete, je ne revoie en pensee le rocher sur lequel je suis ne, la chambre ou ma mere m'infligea la vie, la tempete dont le bruit ber$a mon premier sommeil [...]. Le Ciel sembla reunir ces diverses circonstances pour placer dans mon berceau une image de mes destinees.63 The room in which my mother was to give birth overlooks a deserted section of the city walls. Beyond the windows lies the sea, extending as far as the eye can discern, breaking over reefs. [...] I was almost dead when I emerged. The howling of the waves, stirred up by a squall that announced the autumnal equinox, made it impossible to hear my cries: these facts have been repeated to me often; their sadness has never left my memory. Not a day goes by, as I contemplate what my life has been, but I mentally revisit the rock on which I was born, the room in which my mother inflicted life upon me, the tempest whose sound rocked me in my first slumbers [...]. The Heavens seemed to have assembled these diverse circumstances to implant in my cradle an image of my destiny. Apparently, Chateaubriand is not exaggerating the meteorological circumstances of his arrival. The autumn of 1768 was indeed marked by a severe storm of almost a month's duration, all along the Channel coast, and it reached its peak on the night before his birth.64 Chateaubriand took active steps, from his earliest days, to ensure that his destiny would indeed be tempestuous, seeking out moral and intellectual turbulence, but also battling with Nature's elements. One of the first pleasures of his boyhood, apparently, etait de lutter contre les orages, de me jouer avec les vagues qui se retiraient devant moi, ou couraient apres moi sur la rive. Un autre divertissement etait de construire, avec l'arene de la plage, des monuments que mes camarades appelaient des fours. Depuis cette epoque, j'ai souvent cru

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was to struggle against storms, to sport with the waves as they withdrew before me, or raced up behind me on the shore. Another recreation was constructing monuments from the arena of the beach: these my friends referred to as 'kilns'. Since that time, I have often seen castles that I had supposedly built for eternity fall into ruin more quickly than those palaces of sand. This association of the sea with human transience and vanity is an allpervasive one for Chateaubriand. 'The sea would not just be a treasure retained from his childhood, in its own terms,' as his recent biographer JeanPaul Clement remarks, 'but the background for almost all the scenes of his life. One can even detect its presence in the rhythms of his language.'66 Accordingly, Chateaubriand ends one of the five major divisions of the Memoires, the 'Premiere Epoque' of Part Three, with thoughts about his own evanescence, and with recollections of 'ces vieux Arabes de rivage, que j'ai rencontres en Afrique' ('those old Arabs of the shore, whom I encountered in Africa'): 'berces du murmure de la vague, ils entr'oublient leur existence et chantent a voix basse une chanson de la mer; ils vont mourir' ('rocked by the murmur of the waves, they half forget their existence, singing softly a song of the sea; they are going to die').67 This shows that Chateaubriand's depiction of humanity beginning and ending with the sea is by no means limited to his own relationship with the waters of the Channel, but that is certainly where its origins lay, and that relationship continues to play an exemplary role within his writing. A typical instance of Chateaubriand's evolution of the portentously general from local experience occurs when he describes his departure in 1783 for Brest, at the Western extreme of the Channel. Here he indulges himself in solitude and spectatorship: Cette mer que je devais rencontrer sur tant de rivages, baignait a Brest l'extremite de la peninsule Armoricaine: apres ce cap avance, il n'y avait plus rien qu'un ocean sans bornes et des mondes inconnus; mon imagination se jouait dans ces espaces. Souvent, assis sur quelque mat qui gisait le long du quai de Recouvrance, je regardais les mouvements de la foule; constructeurs, matelots, militaires, douaniers, formats, passaient et

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batire pour l'eternite des chateaux plus vite ecroules que mes palais de sable.65

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repassaient devant moi. Des voyageurs debarquaient et s'embarquaient, des pilotes commandaient la manoeuvre, des charpentiers equarrissaient des pieces de bois, des cordiers filaient des cables, des mousses allumaient des feux sous des chaudieres d'ou sortaient d'epaisse fumee et la saine odeur du goudron. On portait, on reportait, on roulait de la marine aux magasins, et des magasins a la marine des ballots de marchandises, des sacs de vivres, des trains d'artillerie. Ici, des charrettes s'avangaient dans l'eau a reculons pour recevoir des chargements; la, des palans enlevaient des fardeaux, tandis que des grues descendaient des pierres, et que des cure-moles creusaient des atterrissements. Des forts repetaient des signaux, des chaloupes allaient et venaient, des vaisseaux appareillaient ou rentraient dans les bassins. Mon esprit se remplissait d'idees vagues sur la societe, sur ses biens et ses maux. Je ne sais quelle tristesse me gagnait; je quittais le mat sur lequel j'etais assis; je remontais le Penfeld, qui se jette dans le port; j'arrivais a un coude ou ce port disparaissait. La, ne voyant plus rien qu'une vallee tourbeuse, mais entendant encore le murmure confus de la mer et la voix des hommes, je me couchais au bord de la petite riviere. Tantot regardant couler l'eau, tantot suivant des yeux le vol de la corneille marine, jouissant du silence autour de moi, ou pretant l'oreille aux coups de marteau du calfat, je tombais dans la plus profonde reverie. Au milieu de cette reverie, si le vent m'apportait le son du canon d'un vaisseau qui mettait a la voile, je tressaillais et des larmes mouillaient mes yeux.68 That sea that I would meet on so many shores washed against the extremity of the Armorican peninsula at Brest: beyond that projecting cape there was nothing except limitless ocean and unknown lands; my imagination rejoiced in these spaces. Often, sitting on some mast that was laid along the Quai de Recouvrance, I would watch the movements of the crowd: shipwrights, sailors, soldiers, customs men, convicts, came and went before me. Travellers embarked and disembarked, pilots stood by and supervised, carpenters trimmed blocks of wood, rope-makers played out cables, cabin boys lit fires under braziers which gave out thick smoke and the wholesome odour of tar. One batch of supplies after another was carried to the warehouses, while from those warehouses flowed bales of merchandise, sacks of provisions, military equipment. Here, carts were backed into the water to receive their loads; there, goods were lifted with pulleys, stones were lowered with cranes, and earth was shifted to make

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Romantic Promontories

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

breakwaters. Forts exchanged signals with one another, launches came and went, vessels set off from, or returned to, their docks. My soul expanded with vague ideas about society, its goods and its evils. An indescribable sadness would take possession of me; I would leave the mast on which I had been sitting; I would go back along the Penfeld, which flows into the port; I would come to a bend at which the port disappeared from view. There, seeing nothing but a peaty vale, but still hearing the confused murmur of the sea and of the voices of men, I would lie down beside the narrow stream. Sometimes watching the flow of the water, sometimes following with my eyes the flight of coastal crows, rejoicing in the silence around me, or harkening to the blows of the caulking hammer, I fell into the deepest reverie. And in the midst of that reverie, if the wind should bring me the cannon-shot of a vessel putting to sea, I would tremble and my eyes would dim with tears. This passage, with its rhythms of outflow and return, its eddies and beckoning depths, bears out Clement's point about the palpability of the sea in Chateaubriand's very language. It also seems to fill, and account for, the space of Chateaubriand's being, between birth by the sea and the return to it with death. It adverts to the Channel as a route to adventure and escape which Chateaubriand was to use to the full - but also reminds us that he is a human island; and, as in Timon, the vastness of inhuman waters are movingly contrasted with the tears of the individual who seeks to form a consoling relationship with that very inhumanity.69 Later, the Channel came close to being the actual scene of Chateaubriand's death, when he was almost shipwrecked off the Channel Islands.70 The Channel was also the actual place of transition between his prosperous origins and a period of exile in England, during the Terror, when he was for a while reduced to eating grass and paper. It is no wonder that he should have experienced a dislocation of his sense of home, in these circumstances, and a divided image of the character of France. In this respect, he resembles Wordsworth looking back at England from Calais. For Chateaubriand, there is the France seen from outside, which is all about individuals (not least, his isolated self), and there is the France from within, which is all about communality, collectivity, mass actions.71 Chateaubriand himself, dedicated from birth (he imagines) to an individualism that shuns the centre and the mass, is driven to continual voyaging, and to an emphasis, comparable to Charlotte Smith's, on the coastal margin of his home country.

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The dual inner/outer France reflects the more general interest in duality which Chateaubriand shared with many Romantic authors: elsewhere, he speaks of a 'double Angleterre' (meaning, essentially, west and east London), and, when returning to France in 1800, Dover to Calais, he travels 'a l'abri d'un nom etranger; cache doublement dans l'obscurite du Suisse Lassagne et dans la mienne, j'abordai la France avec le siecle' ('under the cover of another's name; doubly hidden, in the obscurity of the Swiss Lassagne, and in my own, I entered France with the century').72 He also implies a doubling of experience that is inherent to dividing one's time between two nations or two literatures. Discussing English Romanticism, he associates its practitioners with the soil, earth or land: Thomas Moore, Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Southey, Hunt, Knowles, lord Holland, Canning, Croker, vivent encore pour l'honneur des lettres anglais; mais il faut etre ne Anglais pour apprecier tout le merite d'un genre intime de composition qui se fait particulierement sentir aux hommes du sol.73 Thomas Moore, [Thomas] Campbell, [Samuel] Rogers, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Southey, Hunt, [Sheridan] Knowles, [Henry Richard Vassal Fox, 3rd] Lord Holland, [George] Canning, and [John Wilson] Croker live yet, to the honour of English literature; but one would need to be born English fully to appreciate the merit of their intimate school of composition, which addresses itself in particular to men of the soil. The implication, perhaps, is that the French are people of the air - or the sea. There is an insuperable gulf, in fact, between the literatures of England and of France. Chateaubriand is fully qualified to speak, one would think, only for French literature. And yet he persists in giving his outsider's view of English writers. But then, he has disassociated himself from much of his native culture as well, as befits a man born at its very perimeter, and he precipitates himself with a melancholy passion into the gulf between nations, into the moral Channel of a man forever in flux, forever evasive of society's assimilation. The enduring monuments of this evasiveness are, first, the huge but often strangely formal and uncommunicative Memoires (a work unloved in England), and, more literally, his tomb. For he chose to be buried on a Breton cliff top. The tomb stands there to this day, on Grand Be, an islet reachable at

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Romantic Promontories

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

low tide by a short walk from Saint-Malo, a conspicuous Romantic gesture of self-admiration and delight in exposure to the weather, coupled with misanthropic solitariness: again, a Timon-like rejection of humanity in favour of the non-judgemental sea. It is just Chateaubriand and no-one else, out there: a flamboyant loneliness in death that might strike a chord with the final cliff-top visions of some of those who go out into eternity or nothingness by way of Beachy Head.74 Describing the Breton coast in the Memoires, Chateaubriand significantly misquotes Pliny: Sur les cotes, se succedent phares, vigies, dolmens, constructions romaines, mines de chateaux du moyen age, clochers de la Renaissance: la mer borde le tout. Pline dit de la Bretagne: Peninsule spectatrice de I'Ocean. One after another, on these coasts, come lighthouses, look-out posts, dolmens, Roman fortifications, the ruins of Mediaeval castles, Renaissance towers: the sea borders all of them. Pliny speaks thus of Brittany: 'the Ocean's spectatorial peninsular'. Pliny's original phrase in his Natural History was 'poeninsulam spectatiorem' - a remarkable peninsular, a peninsular to be looked at.75 The idea of Brittany as a 'peninsule spectatrice', however, is a revealing accident, prophetic of the tomb, at watch over the Channel, but also evocative of Chateaubriand's status, while alive, as a kind of peninsular himself, jutting out beyond others' experience, reporting magisterially to the hinterland with news from the beyond, whether it be 'outre-tombe' or merely 'outre-Manche'. DISSOLUTION AND RESISTANCE There seems to be every prospect of Chateaubriand's tomb standing where it is for many years to come. The cliff-top on which it is placed has not decayed significantly since his burial in the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Timon, Chateaubriand will continue to lord it over the elements, looking down upon the sea - almost hovering over the Channel like Blanchard's reckless, revolutionary balloon. Romantic conceptualisations of death often involve both the wish to be prominent and the wish to be nothing: in Keats's odes, for example, dissolution is longed for, but the sufferer makes himself acutely

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vivid and memorable in this longing. Chateaubriand is at the egotistical extreme of this system. Charlotte Smith, on the other hand, seems to have known the desire for a real disappearance, a real nonentity in death - a state incompatible with Chateaubriand's self-monumentalising and perhaps, too, with actually pushing off from a cliff, like one of her disturbed protagonists. But she finds her own kind of ending in the Channel. This is her sonnet 'Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex': Press'd by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides, While the loud equinox its power combines, The sea no more its swelling surge confines, But o'er the shrinking land sublimely rides. The wild blast, rising from the Western cave, Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed; Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead, And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave! With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave; But vain to them the winds and waters rave; They hear the warring elements no more: While I am doom'd - by life's long storm opprest, To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.76 The poem comes with Smith's explanatory note: Middleton is a village on the margin of the sea, in Sussex, containing only two or three houses. There were formerly several acres of ground between its small church and the sea, which now, by its continual encroachments, approaches within a few feet of this half-ruined and humble edifice. The wall, which once surrounded the church-yard, is entirely swept away, many of the graves broken up, and the remains of bodies interred washed into the sea; whence human bones are found among the sand and shingles on the shore. As Smith might have predicted, the churchyard at Middleton has now disappeared completely, but it is still possible to visit another of Smith's sites of seaside decay and 'gloomy rest', the ruined church beneath Rufus's Castle on Portland, that bleak, ascetic, pale-stoned promontory, barely attached to

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Romantic Promontories

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

the mainland, on the Dorset coast. The church, a 'Chaotic pile of barren stone' as Smith says in her 'descriptive ode, Supposed to have been written under the ruins of Rufus's Castle', is sufficiently exposed, and was then, to ensure 'tempest-beaten graves'.77 With spectacular views of the Channel, south-west towards Portland Bill and east towards St Alban's Head, it is a location well suited to Smith's familiar technique of drawing together diverse human miseries and attaching them to a particular topography: she imagines a 'widow'd mourner' standing in the ruins, and looking out over the 'melancholy main' in the vain hope of seeing her husband's returning sail, as though the Channel were the Styx, but also extends a thought to the tough working conditions in the Portland quarries: Northward [Desolation's] eyes are cast O'er yonder bare and sterile waste, Where, born to hew and heave the block, Man, lost in ignorance and toil, Becomes associate to the soil, And his heart hardens like his native rock.78 This was a humane thought if a hopeless one, and it was notably prophetic of what happened in 1848, four decades after Smith's death, when a prison was established at Portland and convicts were set to work in the quarries under a brutal regime that disfigured the peninsula until the 1920s.79 In focusing on the ruined castle, Smith adverts to a general fact about the Channel coast: its material instability. This is a geography parts of which are changing very fast. The Hastings of 1066 has been washed away; Beachy Head is crumbling. But when Smith says, in a note to this poem, that the ruined Castle 'is almost the only part of this rock of stones worth seeing' she is not being a first-rate tour-guide.80 The rock of stones itself is worth seeing. The rock of Portland is like nothing else in England, extraordinarily bare. The dwellings upon it have a puritanical severity that disappears completely as soon as one is back on the Dorset mainland around Weymouth. It is not picturesque, but it expands the visitor's sense of what England can be, and testifies to the transformation wrought upon people by being pushed out into the sea, even on this relatively small promontory. And the shore itself, at the point of Portland Bill, has an unstable character that is liable to set off all manner of emotions beyond those of Smith's persistently melancholy spectators. Here is Aubrey de Selincourt, in the 1950s, inspecting the shore

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Like thousands of others (for Portland is no longer a foreign land, and trippers visit it in large numbers) I have stood on the flat rock at the extreme end of the Bill, only a foot or two above the level of the sea, and looked not without wonder at the small waves lapping its base in all the gentleness of summer, and the tide sliding past without ripple or murmur. In the shimmering heat and windless air it looked a place for 'summersleepy' nereids: why - 1 should have dived off that rock and swum in that innocent-looking sea as safely as if I had been in my own Puckaster Cove in the Isle of Wight. Yet it was odd to see it so, in such weather, at such a time and as a visitor from the land. It upset my relationship with the place and gave it the queer topsy-turvydom of a dream. I no longer seemed to know it.81 The imaginative sea-change that de Selincourt describes testifies to the unstable and exotic character of the shore. His 'summer-sleepy' comes from 'Ave Atque Vale', Algernon Swinburne's elegy for Charles Baudelaire, although the 'nereids' there are flower-weaving dryads. It is comforting to bear this warmer, albeit uncanny, sense of coastal mutability in mind when we examine the generally bleak products of Romantic Channel spectatorship. When I visited Portland Bill in August 2000,1 encountered a similarly welcome sense of estrangement - of the unfixed, emergent quality of the liminal. Many of the rocks were bare and bleached, forming a monumental complement to the simplicity of the sea, but others, beneath the tide-line, were covered with a layer of lurid green seaweed, with the texture of very thick velvet or the pelt of a lustrous, furry animal - while, in the rock pools, another type of seaweed, thin and bronze-coloured, was floating in lavish hoops and spirals, like sea-spaghetti. Nereids would almost have been too much: an uncalled-for overstatement of the Channel shore's intrinsic fascinations.

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and finding that it confounds his normal expectations of a place that is best known as a nautical hazard:

The opening of the Channel Tunnel has made it possible to travel between France and England with minimal discomfort and hardly any thought. Eurostar passengers are barely called upon to notice that the Channel is there. They descend into the earth on one side and emerge from it at the other, and the only water that they see comes in bottles, at an exorbitant price. It is like a prolonged ride on the Tube or the Metro, with better seats and fewer interruptions. In the past, getting across the Channel gave the traveller more to think about. But even in the early days of packet boats, according to Jacques Gury, editor of a recent anthology of writings by French visitors to Britain, that did not mean that there was more to report: Mais que peut ecrire le voyageur ayant franchi l'obstacle, surmonte l'epreuve? [...] La traversee, pour beaucoup bapteme de mer autant que franchissement d'une ligne invisible entre deux univers, est parfois agitee, mais sans veritable danger. L'arrivee a Douvres n'a rien de perilleux, ni de pittoresque. La plus habile des plumes ne peut offrir ni du sublime, ni de l'epique. Les mesaventures se limitent a des paquets de mer et des nausees. On peut trousser quelques scenes comiques, croquer quelques caricatures. Les recits, assaisonnes de maigres anecdotes, ne se renouvellent guere d'un siecle a l'autre, en depit de revolution technique et sociale, et l'originalite ne se manifeste que dans une certaine mise en scene ou la composition de quelques «marines».1 But what can the traveller say after having negotiated the obstacle, passed the test? [...] The crossing, which for many is a maritime baptism as well as the crossing of an invisible line between two universes, is sometimes turbulent, but never really dangerous. Arrival at Dover has nothing perilous about it, and nothing picturesque. Not even the most accomplished pen can turn this into anything sublime or epic. Any misadventures are just a

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matter of steamboats and sea-sickness. Perhaps one can dash off a few comic scenes, sketch a few caricatures. These accounts, seasoned with spindly anecdotes, barely alter from one century to the next, despite technical and social changes, and originality only manifests itself in a certain mise en scene or in the composition of a few 'seascapes'.

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All at Sea

This can be seen as Gury's own version of a Channel-crossing narrative. Its critical message is to a great extent belied by several of the pieces that he includes immediately afterwards in Le Voyage outre-Manche. But this does not mean that he is simply confused or impercipient. His dismissive tone is thoroughly literary, and his belittlement of the physical details of crossing the Channel fits neatly into a longstanding pattern of literary narratives in which the crossing is alternately raised and lowered in significance. The moment of crossing the Channel has been and (the Tunnel notwithstanding) continues to be a testing one for many English and French people alike; it is a moment for summoning up resources and manifesting a clear identity, whether it be one that characterises itself by vivid states of bewilderment, trauma and wonder, or, as in Gury's case, by a very dry invulnerability to the action of the sea, and a reluctance to be stirred by others' efforts to make it interesting. In fact, Gury only belittles the material features of the crossing. And it is perfectly true that only a handful of writers on the Channel have had the talent or the inclination to make these really memorable. Literature is surpassed by painting, in this respect - for example, by Turner's spectacular Calais Pier, with French Poissards (sic) Preparing for Sea: a work first exhibited in 1803, recording the painter's own rough first crossing of the previous year, when, like the Wordsworths and many others, he took advantage of the short-lived cessation of hostilities that was brought about by the Treaty of Amiens. Turner's battered and spindly pier, flicked out into a heaving malachite sea, past a cluster of jostling, low-riding, over-crowded barques, while drenched travellers are manoeuvred with huge collective effort from one frail wooden structure to another, really brings home the notionally obvious truth that an early nineteenth-century crossing was nothing like the sort of experience that we would expect today. In fact, it is hard to believe that what is depicted is routine transportation, for business or pleasure, and not smuggling, or, at the very least, a desperately incautious fishing expedition.2 But literature tends to come into its own in the expression of cultural and 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

philosophical undertones to real-life actions and scenes: the elements of an experience that depend on the articulation of specific mental associations. And when Gury refers to the 'franchissement d'une ligne invisible entre deux univers' he seems to be hinting at aspects to the journey that are far from trivial, with the Channel as a divider between two fundamentally different, self-sufficient zones - two universes. For Gury, descriptions of boats and breakers do little to enhance the fact of this division. For other writers, however, the cultural, psychological and even political significances of crossing the Channel have often seemed to be intimately linked to the physical process of doing so, even if that in itself may not be represented in their work with anything like the vividness of a Turner. What is usually at issue for these writers is not so much naturalistic representation as the pointing out of a simple, striking conceit that reveals something essential about what makes this journey unlike others. Not the least distinctive feature of the crossing is the way in which culture shock and a serious alteration in personal status may seem to develop seamlessly from mid-Channel crises of the digestive system. One individual who was able to bring some expertise to bear on this phenomenon was ReneJoseph-Hyacinthe Bertin, a doctor from the University of Montpellier who crossed from Gravelines to Dover in late 1799 or 1800 to inspect French prisoners of war at Plymouth: Me voila en pleine mer, et livre a toutes les angoisses qu'elle fait eprouver a ceux qui ne sont pas familiarises avec le roulis incommode d'un navire. Non, il n'est point l'expression qui puisse peindre l'etat affreux ou je me trouvai. La traversee fut de douze heures et tres-penible, car le vent etait change, et il s'etait eleve une tempete qui effraya les vieux marins euxmemes. Immobile et comme colle au plancher de vaisseau, je fus reduit au point de desirer la mort, et de demander qu'on me jetat a la mer. Ces douze heures ont ete les plus cruelles de ma vie; je m'en ressentis longtemps apres.3 Here I was in the middle of the sea, exposed to all the misery that she inflicts upon those who are unaccustomed to the uneasy rolling of a ship. No, I really do not have the words to describe the awful state that I was in. The crossing took twelve hours and was very dreadful, for the wind had changed, stirring up a tempest that even frightened the old mariners themselves. Unable to move, and more or less glued to the deck of the

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No doubt Bertin did experience a particularly nasty crossing, but there is a degree to which he was also contributing to a literary convention and participating in the maintenance of a myth. The notion of the professional mariners themselves taking fright at the storm, for example, is one that crops up just a little too often to be wholly realistic. To judge by the majority of literary accounts of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century crossings, the sailors who did this for a living would have got used to life-threatening seas very quickly indeed. The teenaged Mary Shelley, for example, crossing in the summer of 1814, was 'dreadfully seasick', but tried to sleep through it, and was getting close to Calais 'when suddenly a thunder squall struck the sail, and the waves rushed into the boat: even the sailors acknowledged that our situation was perilous'.4 Again, it is possible that she was unlucky enough to experience a crossing that really was out of the ordinary, but it is more likely that inexperience and a gothic sensibility led her to exaggerate. Not that the exaggeration is anything less than perfectly understandable. When a boat went down in a rough sea in the nineteenth century the rescue prospects were usually poor. Before the days of homing-beacons and helicopters, it was quite possible that a passenger on a stricken vessel would find themselves facing an almost inevitable death. And the floor of the Channel is liberally strewn with wrecks.5 However, Mary Shelley did not meet the fate that was to engulf her future husband in a warmer sea, and her account of the crossing comes to seem unsurprising in the wider context of her History of a Six Weeks' Tour, which proves to be a generally lugubrious document, as though its author's discomfort in getting to the Continent were simply a foretaste of the disagreeableness of being there. Charlotte Edgeworth, by contrast, who crossed the Channel in 1802 with a party that included her stepsister Maria (the novelist), amply bears out her reputation within the family as 'rational and unsentimental': We got across the little sea in three hours and a half but I was so amazingly sick that I neither recovered the use of myfingersunderstanding or body for three days after we landed ... I wish I had for there were several

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boat, I was reduced to the point of wishing that I were dead, and asking people to throw me into the sea. Those twelve hours were the cruellest of my life, and I felt their effects long afterwards.

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Edgeworth cuts the business of physical discomfort down to size, and with it the Channel: 'the little sea' is probably the least dramatic name for it that has ever been used, much less threatening than the old 'Narrow Seas', which was applied equally to the Channel and the slightly less narrow Irish Sea (and the Edgeworths, of course, were an Irish family). Bertin, by contrast, with his faintly Sterne- or Smollett-like capacity for revelling in illness and embarrassment, manages to give his cross-Channel trauma a touch of black humour, and this is certainly a common feature of trans-Manche narratives by men, reaching its apogee (as we shall see) in the work of Charles Dickens. But it is a feature of French narratives as much as English ones. Even Citizen Pierre-Nicolas Chantreau, on the whole a literal-minded narrator, manages to give sea-sickness a touch of hyperbolic swagger: Nous eussions fait notre voyage en trois heures, et peut-etre en moins, si les vents nous eussent secondes; mais ils furent contraires et nous en employames dix huit, pendant lesquelles je payai a Neptune le tribut que lui payent tous ceux qui ne sont pas accoutumes a la mer. Je debarquai aussi moulu qu'un homme auquel on vient de dormer la torture [...]/ We were supposed to complete the crossing in three hours, perhaps less had the winds been favourable, but they were against us, and it took eighteen, during which I paid that tribute to Neptune which is paid by all those who are unaccustomed to the sea. I disembarked as beaten up as if I had been put to the torture [...]. But the self-dramatisation and droll Classicism here sound rather strained. Chantreau is just trying to retrieve a little credibility from what was presumably a thoroughly nasty experience. If, on the other hand, the literary passenger were lucky enough to be personally immune to the effects of choppy seas, the scope for humour was almost endless. Here is the Reverend George Musgrave Musgrave (sic), Vicar of Borden in Kent, frequent Channel-crosser and leading English commentator on the French, exulting over a range of fellow passengers, in the 1840s, with all the leisured and cultivated whimsy that one could wish for in an easy-going Victorian cleric:

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excellent figures. I did draw two which I hope I may have the opportunity of sending [...].6

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One despairing maiden had laid herself down in beauty, with dishevelled hair, and general abandon, to the dismal horror of the time - the veritable impersonation of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Dido on the funeral pile. [...] Two prattling lady's-maids, who had been indefatigable on terra-firma in the embarkation of a spaniel dog and parrot, two guitar-cases, and an enormously disproportionate straw basket of ham and beef sandwiches, brandy-flask, and drinking cups, - had now measured their flounced and furbelowed lengths on the floor south-west of 'Dido'; preparing, as I inferred from certain long ivory needles in their hands, to continue the knitting of some fancy purses a la crochet, which probably would have been finished before landing in France, had they not, unluckily, been finished themselves, within half an hour of distance from Folkestone. [...] By a wheel of [a] barouche [which was lashed to the deck] one delicate gentle lady, of upwards of five-and-forty years of age, held on during the whole passage; her right hand grasping her son's; eyes closed, features rigid; feet rivetted, as it were, to the plank. It was a singular spectacle; a great experiment. It succeeded.8 There is a special kind of stasis involved in the Channel crossing. Stomachs may be agitated, but time stands still. Passengers are imprisoned. There is nowhere for them to go. And so their more resilient fellow passengers may study them at their leisure. It is a great opportunity for a man like Musgrave to stare at his countrymen and countrywomen and to try to sum them up. The Channel is a sort of affront. And it is a leveller. Masters and servants alike are subject to the same corporeal disturbances. Musgrave, accordingly, seems variously condescending and impertinent as his gaze shifts from a lower class of sufferer to a higher one, but, one way or another, he is always at a whimsical remove from the stability of English society as it exists on dry land. Musgrave has the saving grace of being fairly flippant about himself. He would not have published this 'trifle', The Parson, Pen, and Pencil, had he known of 'any accredited author of recent date' who had covered the same ground (and water).9 Indeed, although he is now an almost unknown literary figure - most of the Bodleian Library's copies of his works had lain with pages uncut for 150 years before I recently took a knife to them10 - he is a real pioneer of English writing on France (not just the Channel), not wholly unworthy as a successor to the likes of Smollett.11 He has a keen sense, moreover, of his own historical moment, and of its difference from all that

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went before. This comes across in his characteristically chortling account of the old fashion of getting ashore, once France had successfully been reached - an account which has the woozy aroma of a different kind of port from the one that he describes:

Wood and stone now do the kindly office for which, seven-and-twenty years ago [in 1820], the brawny flesh and mermaid bone of Boulogne's poissardes alone sufficed in the matter of landing at low water. Fancy a Fellow of Brazenose College, Oxford, being hoisted on the shoulders of one of these amphibious nymphs with 'a very ancient and fish-like smell, legged like a woman, and her fins like arms,' who bore him off, tenpence the ride, from the row-boat to the shore; the 'sailing-packet' not being able to get in by half a mile. On a change tout cela; but, however grotesque and inglorious as a premiere entree and debut, it caused a great deal of laughter at the time, as poor Matthews used to say.12 Musgrave's easy slippage between English and fairly correct French in the last sentence suggests that he is quite comfortable on both sides of the Channel - as it seems he really was. But language, politics and history conspired, then as now, to make the crossing much more problematical for others, and not just in the superficial ways that Musgrave ridicules. AT THE FRONTIER The front line of national identity, in a technical sense, is the Customs office, and in many Channel-crossing narratives this presents difficulties that echo those imposed by the sea itself. In the nineteenth century, the worst instances of bureaucratic obstruction and insolence appear to have been experienced by English travellers going to France. In fact, several French writers at the beginning of the century undergo a kind of disorientation, on arrival at Dover, which involves the subtle affront of being treated rather better than they expected; in particular, better than they would be at home. According to Dr Bertin, for example, Les agens de la douane anglaise me traiterent avec beaucoup plus d'honnetete que ceux de Gravelines. Quoiqu'envoye par le Gouvernement, j'avais ete traite malhonnetement par ces derniers. Mes malles avaient ete

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The officers of the English Customs treated me with much more decency than those at Gravelines. The latter treated me impertinently despite the fact that I was on a Government mission. They rifled my bags in the most indecent manner. These thoroughly uncivil proceedings were witnessed by the English officers, who assured me that I would be treated with more decency at Dover. They did not deceive me. He goes on to praise the inhabitants of Dover, in general, for not insulting him - for not even calling him 'French dog', which was something that he had been led to expect, he claims, by '[t]ous les auteurs de voyages en Angleterre'.14 Similarly, Louis Simond, a merchant from Lyon, was quite taken aback by the easy-going comportment of the local authorities when he arrived at Falmouth in 1809: Les douaniers saisissent un certain surplus de provisions, par quelqu'etrange reglement que je ne comprends pas. J'entends leur chef demander a notre capitaine ce qu'il aime le mieux, d'avoir son vin ou son rum saisi; et le capitaine semble prendre cette proposition en tres-bonne part; il vient de me dire que le douanier se montrait very friendly (fort son ami).15 The Customs officers confiscate a certain surplus of provisions, according to some strange rule which I do not understand. I heard the chief officer asking our captain which he would prefer, to have his wine or his rum confiscated; and the captain seemed to take this approach very well; he has just described the officer to me as 'very friendly'. There are particular reasons for Bertin and Simond's feelings of pleasant relief when they meet these amiable Customs officers: this is still the time of on-and-off Anglo-French warfare, and they might have been afraid of being taken for spies. But commentary on the Customs, as a first way of expressing the sense of difference that occurs on disembarkation on either shore, is a standard recourse at all times from the eighteenth century onwards. In fact,

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fouillees de la maniere la plus indecente. Les officiers anglais avaient ete temoins des recherches plus qu'inciviles que firent sur moi ces commis; ils en avaient ete indignes, et ils m'avaient assure que je serais traite a Douvres d'une maniere plus honnete. Ils ne m'avaient pas trompe.13

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there is a ritualistic quality to the succession of themes: putting to sea, the sickness, the Customs. This, in itself, is hardly surprising: these are the obvious steps in the process. But the appearance of a formula persists in many of these narratives in ways that one might not have thought so predictable. After the Customs, a very common next step is to offer an assessment of the local women. Bertin, for example, takes issue with Chateaubriand, who had remarked on the modesty of the young Anglaises. On the contrary, [e]lles ne craignent point de se trouver tete-a-tete avec les hommes, pourvu que ce ne soit pas dans le bed-room (chambre a coucher); enfin il semble qu'elles reservent la prudence, la timidite et la retenue au temps qui suit leur mariage. Ceci differe beaucoup sans doute de nos mceurs fran<jaises.16 they are not in the least afraid to find themselves alone with men, as long as it is not in the bedroom; in fact, it seems that they save prudence, timidity and reserve for the period after marriage. This is certainly quite different from the French way of doing things. Likewise, Simond no sooner wanders into Falmouth than he begins to make an almost agricultural assessment of the female population: Les femmes parees de leurs beautes naturelles, c'est-a-dire, tres-legerement couvertes, passent avec le bruit d'un pas de cheval; elles paraissent montees sur des echasses (un cercle de fer, pose horizontalement sous une semelle de bois attachee a chaque pied), et cependant leur demarche est vive et elastique. L'embonpoint semble general, ainsi que les couleurs de la sante.17 The women, arrayed in their natural beauties - that is to say, very lightly covered - go by with a noise like horses' hooves; they appear mounted on stilts (a circle of iron, placed horizontally under a wooden sole attached to each foot), and yet their gait is lively and elastic. Plumpness seems to be the general rule, along with a healthy complexion. And, contrary to what popular stereotypes might lead one to expect, this preoccupation is by no means restricted to the narratives of Frenchmen, or 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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even of men in general. Maria Edgeworth, writing to her friend Sophy Ruxton from Brussels on 15 October 1802, speaks of 'admiring on the ramparts of Calais the Poisardes with their picturesque nets ugly faces and beautiful legs', before setting off for Gravelines, where there 'was no amusement [...] except looking' - in an oddly significant dual survey of feminine pulchritude and military strength - 'at the landlords pretty daughter and the fortifications'.18 Similarly, Fanny Burney, also in Calais in 1802, 'saw innumerable pretty women, & lovely Children, almost all of them extremely fair. I had been taught to expect nothing but mahogany complexions & hideous features, instantly on crossing the Strait of Dover!'19 But this pleasant surprise, according to an accompanying Scotsman, was solely due to the fact that Calais had been in English possession for very long periods and that the unprepossessing French stock had thereby been improved. Beauty-spotting of this kind is partly an exercise in taste, an assertion of civilised discernment that is characteristic of this period as a whole.20 But the relative attractiveness of local women also seems to be looked upon by all of these travellers as a significant resource, a kind of primary commodity that must, of course, be catalogued in any introductory account of the different polity in which they have found themselves. Customs and Immigration, fortifications, female beauty, and perhaps, therefore, secondary issues such as presumed relative fertility, or the likely danger of (or opportunities for) seduction: these are the first essential facts that the diligent private-travelleras-foreign-correspondent must send back to the people at home. It sounds like the attitude of European travellers to the colonial Tropics: it is strange to think that these reporters have travelled such a short distance in order to document exotica. But it serves to emphasise how, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a Channel crossing was still a major journey, and the sense of France or England as a wholly other land, with different inhabitants and unfamiliar ways, was strong. Such feelings still exist: most French people still feel that the English are, in significant ways, unlike themselves, and most English feel the same about the French. But the nature of these differences is often felt to be well understood. In the nineteenth century they were still being explored and codified more actively. Some of these travellers had a particularly strong sense of being on a public mission when they crossed the Channel, and made their notes accordingly. Simond - like an earlier, French and sober Musgrave - writes to fill a need, because he believes that 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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All at Sea

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[i]l n'existe presqu'aucune relation de voyage en Angleterre ecrite par un Frangais; du moins l'auteur n'en connait point qui merite d'etre citee. M. Faujas de Saint-Fond n'a cherche et na decrit que des mineraux; mesdames Rolland, de Genlis et de Stael n'ont parle qu'incidemment de ce qu'elles avaient vu: c'etaient elles, et non pas l'Angleterre, qu'elles etaient curieuses de faire connaitre; le chevalier Hamilton n'a donne que la chronique scandaleuse d'une cour plus que galante; Sully ne s'est occupe que de son ambassade.21 there is hardly any account of travel in England by a French author, or at least this author does not know of one that deserves to be cited. M. Faujas de Saint-Fond only sought to describe minerals; Mesdames Rolland, de Genlis and de Stael only mentioned the things that they saw incidentally it was themselves, and not England, that they were interested in making known; the Chevalier Hamilton has given us nothing but the scandalous chronicle of a decadent Court; Sully was merely concerned with his duties as Ambassador. There is a certain fierceness in this inaccurate self-presentation as the first to offer an extended French account of England; and this emotional quality makes Simond one of the Channel-crossers of this period who most deserve to be read. Bertin, Chantreau and others had been there before him, but his ignorance of their work gives his writing an extra sense of adventure and grit, as though he really is a sort of spy, carrying French views and French values into territories that might be inimical to them. Thus, having done his routine duty in describing the Customs and women of Falmouth, he records a distant sighting, as from behind a screen or up a tree, of that uncouth beast the English aristocrat: Une chaise de poste a quatre chevaux, fort elegante, s'arrete a la porte; il en descend un jeune homme de six pieds de haut, gros et gras, avec le visage et les formes d'un enfant a la mamelle; c'est le marquis de S., le premier homme de qualite que nous ayons vu en Angleterre: il va, a ce que nous apprenons, promener son desoeuvrement et son ennui au-dela des mers; c'est avoir bien jeune la maladie du pays.22 A post-chaise with four horses, very elegant, stops at the port. From it descends a young man of six foot in stature, heavy and corpulent, with the 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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The 'maladie du pays' is not exactly the national (that is to say, British) malady, here. Simond explains in a note that he is talking about a sickness that comes from the concept of nationality - or of having a home country itself. There is a form of the malady that expresses itself as homesickness, apparently, and there is a form that consists of dissatisfaction with remaining in the land where you were born. The English suffer from both of these mutually contradictory disorders, and the English aristocrat, implicitly, suffers most, through having the money to fund fruitless journeys between one type of ennui and the other, and no work with which to distract himself.23 Simond's sighting of the 'Marquess of S.' is a good example of the Channel crossing's tendency to bring on moments of intense, edgy perception, particularly at times of unease in Anglo-French relations, despite the strong sense of the ritualistic and the dutiful that often emerges from the very same texts, with their nods at nausea, coastal officialdom and female fashions and comportment. The authors of these trans-Manche narratives do not always have a lot to say, but they present whatever they can muster as a priori worthwhile. Jacques Gury may apologise for them, many years later, but they do not apologise for themselves. A Channel crossing, at least until the second half of the nineteenth century, remains a notable event, worth the attention of any traveller who can competently wield a pen. DICKENS TAKES CONTROL The richest nineteenth-century descriptions of crossing the Channel, effortlessly subsuming all of the conventions noted above, are by Charles Dickens. And he knew what he was talking about. Going by letters and contemporary biographical accounts, it is possible to calculate that he made sixty crossings (thirty return journeys), the first in 1837 and the last in 1868,24 and there may well have been more: in particular, he may have made additional, furtive cross-Channel visits to his probable mistress, the young actress Ellen Ternan (although we cannot be absolutely sure that France is where she was)

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face and contours of an infant at the breast: it is the Marquess of S., the first man of quality that we have seen in England. He is going, we learn, to parade his ennui and lack of occupation overseas. He has succumbed early to the sickness of nationality.

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between 1862 and 1865.25 So, crossing the Channel was clearly one of the most familiar and characteristic travel experiences of Dickens's life. It does not figure very conspicuously in the novels - not even in A Tale of Two Cities - but together with the topography and culture of the ports and resorts of either shore it keeps reappearing as a fruitful theme in the quasi-autobiographical, quasi-fictional space of Dickens's copious journalism, and as a colourful point of reference in his letters. Like other writers of the period, Dickens associates the crossing with feelings of trauma and dislocation. On the most obvious level, this is again a matter of physical seasickness, based on his own experience. This may be seen in a letter to his wife Catherine in February 1847, for example, when he had just crossed the Channel north-westward, from Boulogne: T never knew anything like the sickness and misery of it. And besides that, I really was alarmed; the waves ran so very high, and the fast boat, going at that speed through the water, shipped such enormous volumes of it.'26 This was a theme to which Dickens returned repeatedly in his public writings, too. Thus, 'Our French Watering-Place', a sketch of Boulogne that Dickens published in 1854 in his journal Household Words, associates Channel-crossing definitively with seasickness in its first paragraph,27 and, in 'Travelling Abroad', written six years later for All the Year Round (the journal that succeeded Household Words), the departure from Dover of Dickens's protagonist and implicit alter ego, the Uncommercial Traveller, seems to have become a dreary and inevitable pain: Early in the morning I was on the deck of the steam-packet, and we were aiming at the bar in the usual intolerable manner, and the bar was aiming at us in the usual intolerable manner, and the bar got by far the best of it, and we got by far the worst - all in the usual intolerable manner.28 As a rule, however, Dickens was very resourceful in turning this problem to artistic profit. After all, it is clear from every one of his novels that he could do brilliant things with states of disorientation, inconvenience and slightly humiliating stress, whether it be the view from the roof of Todgers's Hotel in Martin Chuzzlewit or David Copperfield's formative episode of drunkenness, and the banality of seasickness proved to be no obstacle to imaginative embellishment.29 Consider, for example, 'The Calais Night Mail', Dickens's last major Channel study (republished, like 'Travelling Abroad', as part of The 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Malignant Calais! Low-lying alligator, evading the eyesight and discouraging hope! Dodging flat streak, now on this bow, now on that, now anywhere, now everywhere, now nowhere! In vain Cape Grinez, coming frankly forth into the sea, exhorts the failing to be stout of heart and stomach; sneaking Calais, prone behind its bar, invites emetically to despair. Even when it can no longer quite conceal itself in its muddy dock, it has an evil way of falling off, has Calais, which is more hopeless than its invisibility. The pier is all but on the bowsprit, and you think you are there roll, roar, wash! - Calais has retired miles inland, and Dover has burst out to look for it.30 But Dickens's Channel-trauma goes far beyond this sort of exuberant queasiness; it is not just a physiological problem. In fact, it is often possible to read Dickens's studies of seasickness as metaphoric of a much deeper challenge to the traveller; especially, perhaps, to the English traveller, who seems likely to find himself, during and just after a Dickensian Channelcrossing, at several kinds of disadvantage.31 Thus, writing to his friend and biographer John Forster in 1837, after his veryfirstcrossing, Dickens delivers a brief cautionary tale: the 'gentleman' who has accompanied Dickens and his party from the Hotel Rignolle, and who 'waltzed with a very smart lady (just to show us, condescendingly, how it ought to be done)', has turned out to be nothing grander than the 'Boots' (that is, the servant whose main function is to polish those articles). 'Isn't this French?' Dickens observes.32 He is alluding to French egalitarianism, perhaps - the breaking-down of social barriers - but there is also the suggestion that the French, like the 'alligator' Calais, have a tendency to take advantage of their English visitors. Ten years later, again writing to Forster, Dickens incarnates this English insecurity in what will prove to be an enduring bete noire (for him as for lesser writers), the Customs House at Boulogne - although by this time Dickens has chosen, in a significantly equivocal way, to express his denunciation of French opportunism in exuberant French. On leaving the Customs House, Forster is warned, Monsieur se trouve subitement entoure de tous les gamins, agents, commissionnaires, porteurs, et polissons, en general, de Boulogne, qui

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Uncommercial Traveller), where the French port is a living, scheming enemy, and the traveller its plaything and its dupe:

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Monsieur immediately finds himself surrounded by all the urchins, agents, commissionaires, porters and general rogues of Boulogne, who hurl themselves upon him, uttering terrifying cries. This lurching mass of the tourist industry seems a continuation by other means of the maritime turbulence of an actual Dickensian crossing. It would be easy to see all of this as trivial. Dickens, like so many others, gets seasick, and finds immigration in those pre-European Union days something of an ordeal. But there is more to it than that. In particular, it is important to relate Dickens's cross-Channel anxieties to the violent realities of European history at a time when the French Revolution was still well within living memory. In fact, Dickens makes such connections frequently himself. In a letter of 1853 to Frank Stone, for example, further serio-comic warnings about the Customs House include an explicit parallel with the Terror: [Y]ou will then be passed out at a little door, like one of the ill-starred prisoners on the bloody September night [that is, 2 September 1792, the first night of the massacre of aristocrats in the Prison of the Abbaye in Paris], into a yelling and shrieking crowd, cleaving the air with the names of the different hotels - exactly seven thousand, six hundred, and fiftyfour, in number.34 And it seems appropriate to bear this allusion in mind when, in the following year's 'Our French Watering-Place', after the seasickness has subsided, the Customs House again asserts itself: 'the steamer no sooner touches the port, than all the passengers fall into captivity: being boarded by an overpowering force of Custom-house officers, and marched into a gloomy dungeon'.35 This sounds facetious, but Dickens was well aware of how much fear and horror the Guillotine and all that went with it had inspired in Britain, less than twenty years before his own birth.36 But in order to see the full force of these associations, and to appreciate how intimately they are connected with the imaginative world of Dickens the novelist, we need to look at a complete essay, such as the best, I think, although the first, that Dickens wrote on the Channel-crossing theme. This is 'A Flight', which was published in Household Words in August 1851, and

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s'elancent sur lui, en poussant des cris epouvantables.33

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which describes a disorienting but exhilarating journey by rail and sea from London to Paris: one that is based upon Dickens's own recent experiences with the South Eastern Railway's new and unprecedentedly fast - twelvehour - service. Here, on the crossing itself, the routine nausea is explicitly linked to a shifting balance of advantage between the English and the French, where one nationality gains what the other loses in a regular economy of insecurity and self-possession: And now I find that all the French people on board begin to grow, and all the English people to shrink. The French are nearing home, and shaking off a disadvantage, whereas we are shaking it on. Zamiel is the same man, and Abd-el-Kader is the same man, but each seems to come into possession of an indescribable confidence that departs from us - from Monied Interest, for instance, and from me.37 'Zamiel' (from Weber's opera Der Freischutz) and 'Abd-el-Kader' (the principal nineteenth-century opponent of the French in Algeria) are the narrator's rather fanciful nicknames for two fellow-voyagers who appear, nevertheless, to be entirely French. Dickens wants to inflate and thematize their foreignness, so perhaps 'Pierre' and 'Henri' would not have been sufficient. As a complement to this emphatic othering, the British become 'us'. The narrator had previously distanced himself from 'Monied Interest', a crudely Francophobic City gent, but now, faced with French competition, they are both, literally and metaphorically, all at sea, and in the same boat. The financial overtones of these troubling fluctuations in personal value suggest that Dickens would have been one of the first to see the point of that supposedly fair, emollient and unifying project, the common European currency. 'Separate exchange rates increase the cost of foreign trade and investment [...] and disrupt trade and prices by unpredictable revaluations and devaluations', as Christopher Johnson says.38 And, as things stand, for Dickens, one mobile European's gain seems to be another's loss. A quite different level of sliding disadvantage besets the narrator on the last leg of his journey, on the train from the coast to Paris, when he sees soldiers and fortifications from his window, and falls into a daydream in which the title of the essay, 'A Flight', takes on new connotations of persecution and attempted escape:

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All at Sea

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I wonder where England is, and when I was there last - about two years ago, I should say. Flying in and out among these trenches and batteries, skimming the clattering drawbridges, looking down into the stagnant ditches, I become a prisoner of state, escaping. I am confined with a comrade in a fortress. [...] The time is come - a wild and stormy night. We are up the chimney, we are on the guard-house roof, we are swimming in the murky ditch, when lo! 'Qui v'la?' a bugle, the alarm, a crash! What is it? Death? No, Amiens.39 In other words, the train is coming to a station. There is the suggestion here that, even though he comes across as generally pro-French, the narrator is among the enemy. This is almost Charles Dickens as the returning Charles Darnay, in peril of his life, and one can see that A Tale of Two Cities, at the other end of the 1850s, will owe a lot to an established sense of English vulnerability on approaching French soil which had long attended Dickens's own travels. Unlike the insouciant Reverend Musgrave, Dickens seems to want at least to pretend to hold onto the stimulating tensions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic past. Throughout 'A Flight' we find images of shifted significance or inversion, as though crossing the Channel were like going through a kind of prism or Lewis Carroll looking-glass: 'the grown-up people and the children seem to change places in France', we are told. 'In general, the boys and girls are little old men and women, and the men and women lively boys and girls.'40 Having reached Paris, the traveller describes 'the light and glitter of the houses turned as it were inside out'. But the rapidity of the journey in 'A Flight' leaves everything unsettled, for the narrator, in a way that is finally as liberating as it is disturbing: When can it have been that I left home? When was it that I paid 'through to Paris' at London Bridge, and discharged myself of all responsibility, except the preservation of a voucher ruled into three divisions, of which the first was snipped off at Folkestone, the second aboard the boat, and the third taken off at my journey's end? It seems to have been ages ago.41 We have already encountered the narrator as a fugitive from military or political imprisonment; now we have him as a fugitive from 'all responsibility', and it is tempting to look forward not only to the mortal dangers of A Tale of Two Cities, but also to the illicit pleasure which may have been

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entailed, as previously noted, in Dickens's flights to France in the early 1860s. Yet another disquieting connotation of cross-Channel travel for Dickens, and another development, as I read it, of the seasickness theme, occurs in 'Travelling Abroad'. Here, having survived the 'usual intolerable' motion of the waves, the speaker seems compelled to seek its echo in a different form of nausea. 'Whenever I am at Paris,' he says, T am dragged by invisible force into the Morgue. I never want to go there, but am always pulled there.'42 As a result, he is haunted throughout his stay in Paris by the 'large dark man', a corpse recovered from the Seine who sounds like a shapeless incarnation of death in general. And this does not seem to be merely a coincidental linkage: 'The Calais Night Mail' is similarly followed, in The Uncommercial Traveller, by 'Some Recollections of Mortality', describing another episode of eager Morgue-crawling. So, the discomfort and moral disorientation of travelling to France are things that Dickens can be thought of as finding perversely congenial, as things that despite their frightening aspects are to be sought out and enjoyed: the cross-Channel turbulence, on whatever level, is intoxicating as well as sickening, a slightly masochistic kind of fun. The Dickensian crossChannel traveller is someone who is amusingly not his usual self - at a disadvantage, but also, somehow enhanced. This is particularly so in 'The Calais Night Mail', where, in the middle of the rough sea, while other passengers wilt and suffer conspicuously, the narrator experiences 'a curious compulsion to occupy myself with the Irish melodies' (a popular collection of songs by Thomas Moore), and in particular 'Rich and rare were the gems she wore'.43 This leads to a strange stream-of-consciousness passage which mingles the words of the song with the events on the boat, and concludes thus: Still, through all this, I must ask her (who was she, I wonder!) for the fiftieth time, and without ever stopping, Does she not fear to stray, So lone and lovely through this bleak way, And are Erin's sons so good or so cold, As not to be tempted by more fellow-creatures at the paddle-box or gold? Sir knight I feel not the least alarm, No son of Erin will offer me harm, For though they love fellow-creature with umbrella down again and golden store, Sir Knight they what a tremendous one [wave, presumably] love honour and virtue more: For though they love Stewards with a bull's-eye bright, they'll trouble you for your ticket, sir - rough passage to-night!44

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This seems like a type of cathartic reductio ad absurdum of Dickens's Channel anxiety, and it is followed by another sudden inversion (recalling those in 'A Flight'), which fits the speaker's turbulent state of mind, but which points, too, to a certain fairness and harmony underlying the old economy of shifting self-possession and national jurisdiction. Calais now looms ahead, and the narrator's allegiance suddenly changes. He now loves Calais. He had disparaged it vehemently, 'but I meant Dover'.45 And, indeed, in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens does suggest, in a single paragraph, that Dover is madly sea-bombarded, 'piscatory', quite unsavoury and furtive, as it buries its head, Ostrich-like, in the surrounding cliffs.46 It is as though Dickens views the two sides of the Channel as rival factions to be played off against one another, or as rival deities, each of whom must be lauded and appeased, from time to time, but whose ingrained jealousy of one another must not be provoked too far. This ongoing project of juggling and finding a balance between two nations separated by the unbalanced Channel is epitomised by the pair of essays on English and French 'watering-places' that Dickens published in Household Words and later placed side-by-side in the collection Reprinted Pieces. 'Our [English] Watering-Place', published in 1851, on the Channel resort of Broadstairs, makes it sound very quiet, provincial and a bit shabby. We are told much about the worthy local boatmen, who lounge about 'in obstinate and inflexible pantaloons that are apparently made of wood', but who are known to be unsurpassable in a nautical emergency.47 The essay is written with a slightly wry affection throughout. 'Our French Watering-Place' is a good deal more lively. For example, the narrator is moved to revive and expand upon another of the previously noted conventions of cross-Channel travel-writing, in uttering a 226-word sentence on the Boulogne 'fisherwomen' - on their prettiness, the trimness of their figures and the smartness of their clothes.48 And then, the landlord who features in the piece, M. Loyal Devasseur, based upon Dickens's actual Boulogne landlord, the benevolent M. Beaucourt-Mutuel, receives a long and lavish encomium, as befits a man who 'carries one of the gentlest hearts that beat in a nation teeming with gentle people'.49 It is as though Dickens is making a special effort to persuade his Anglophone readership, who might take the congeniality of Broadstairs for granted, that Boulogne is at least equally safe, appealing, sunny and hospitable. And this extends to French socio-political ideals as well. For instance, he describes summer fetes in coastal villages, 'where the people - really the people - dance on the green turf

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in the open air'.50 Here he anticipates by ten years the words of another English writer whose merit as a thoughtful cross-Channel commentator is much more widely recognised than his own: Matthew Arnold, who was to write in 1864 that France 'is the country in Europe where the people is most alive'.51 Perhaps, indeed, Arnold took the idea, and the italics, from Dickens. But Dickens himself, in 1854, seems to be alluding to a French solidarity (further exemplified in 'Our French Watering-Place' by the population's willingness to provide lodgings for their nation's soldiers) which will be novel and surprising to a British reader. He implies that some of the best ideals of the French Revolution have been realised. It is almost as though we are back with the English Romantics before the Terror and the rise of Napoleon; with William Hazlitt for example, who remembered his arrival, as a young man, in a 'Calais [...] peopled with novelty and delight', where he 'breathed the air of general humanity', and where 'the image of man was not cast down and chained to the foot of arbitrary thrones'.52 By contrast, when Dickens represents the British in 'Our French Watering Place', he chooses to do so through the expatriate 'bores' of the Boulogne boarding-houses: As you walk timidly in their neighbourhood, the very neckcloths and hats of your elderly compatriots cry to you from the stones of the streets, 'We are Bores - avoid us!' We have never overheard at street corners such lunatic scraps of political and social discussion as among these dear countrymen of ours.53 Moving away from the Channel itself for a moment, but staying with it metaphorically, through the theme of England and France held up as parallel entities which inform on one another in defiance of a cultural divide, it is appropriate to mention 'A Monument of French Folly', published in Household Words in 1851. This is a comparative study of the English and French meat industries, written in support of a plan to relocate Smithfield Market. Here Dickens inveighs against the gross un-French insanitariness of slaughterhouses in the heart of London: Into the imperfect sewers of this overgrown city, you shall have the immense mass of corruption, engendered by these [butchering] practices, lazily thrown out of sight, to rise in poisonous gases, into your house at night, when your sleeping children will most readily absorb them, and to

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This sadly ineffective early warning of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (and indeed of the foot and mouth disease which, as I write, has just crossed the Channel) is followed by much praise of clean, well-supervised French abattoirs. Dickens shows himself to be a direct ancestor, here, of the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, who in 1996 depicted a British lorry driven by a mad cow, with John Major in the passenger seat, launching itself off the white cliffs of Dover, into the abyss of the Channel, in a gesture of suicidal defiance towards enlightened French industrial practices.55 Sometimes, Dickens seems to go beyond drawing cross-Channel parallels, and almost to wish that he were French. In February 1855 he writes to Forster, indicating that he is disillusioned with a chaotic and out-of-touch British Government, and with its handling of the Crimean War (in which Britain and France were allies). A week later, Dickens goes to Paris, and considers 'emigrating' for the summer to the Pyrenees. In May of the same year, he writes to another correspondent, '[W]e hope to come to Paris at the end of October, and to stay six months. I am living on that hope at present, or I should die of political discontent.'56 But Dickens does not come to France, once he has escaped from the Custom's House, as a pitiful refugee. On the contrary, he makes himself at home, and appropriates his surroundings artistically. Writing to Forster, in 1853, about the Chateau des Moulineaux, the grandest of his successive lodgings at Boulogne, he says, '[t]he House is a doll's house of many rooms' - a phrase that he repeats, more or less, in letters to his illustrator Hablot K. Browne, and to Thomas Beard. Of the plan which is displayed in the hall of the Chateau, he says, 'there is guidance to every room in the house, as if it were a place on that stupendous scale that without such a clue you must infallibly lose your way, and perhaps perish of starvation between bedroom and bedroom'.57 There are clear parallels here with the eponymous mansion of Bleak House, the novel that Dickens was completing at this time. In other words, the foreignness of the Chateau is no hindrance whatsoever to its silent assimilation into the world of an England-centred narrative - despite the mildly xenophobic stereotyping which seems to emerge from that narrative sometimes in the characterisation of the murderer of Mr Tulkinghorn,

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find its languid way, at last, into the river that you drink - but, the French [and here he mimics Francophobes] are a frog-eating people who wear wooden shoes, and it's 0 the roast beef of England, my boy, the jolly old English roast beef!54

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the haughty and tense Mile Hortense. Had this character appeared in one of Dickens's essays, instead of in the more ethically unstable context of the novel, it seems likely that her treatment would have been more circumspectDickens might well have detected his own latent Francophobia and suppressed it.58 'Our French Watering-Place', which is perhaps the most balanced and diplomatic of these texts, draws to a close with gentle mockery of things French as well as things British, and with a vision of entente cordiale: But, to us, it is not the least pleasant feature of our French watering-place that a long and constant fusion of the two great nations there, has taught each to like the other, and to learn from the other, and to rise superior to the absurd prejudices that have lingered among the weak and ignorant in both countries equally. That said, the final sentence could seem a little patronising: 'Few just men, not immoderately bilious, could see them [the inhabitants of Boulogne and its environs] in their recreations without very much respecting the character that is so easily, so harmlessly, and so simply, pleased.'59 But compare this with the opening of David Copperfield's narrative, where he speaks of observant men (like himself) who 'retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and a capacity of being pleased, which are [...] an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood'.60 So the French - the humble French, anyway - seem to be Copperfieldian for Dickens: mild, harmless and simple in the best possible way, and eminently assimilable to his own system of values. All in all, the process of getting to France is lavishly traumatic for Dickens, but being there is perfectly comfortable. It seems that Dickens plays up the Channel-crossing process, but this only goes to make France, once he gets there, surprising familiar and unthreatening. Dickens seems to be an Englishman for whom France is not really very foreign - or, perhaps, for whom France is no more foreign than England. There is an anti-xenophobic, evenhanded sense of being at ease with the world at work within these texts. Crossing the Channel is a standing joke, a farcical, unnecessary obstacle. By flagrantly exaggerating its significance, Dickens simply emphasises that he considers the societies on either side to be equally accessible to his imaginative powers, and equally fit objects for his social criticism and concern.61

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Dickens was exemplary in his capacity to appreciate France for what it was: different from Britain but just as good. Exemplary but not wholly exceptional. The Reverend Musgrave, for example, ensconced at Boulogne in the Hotel d'Angleterre, approved of this residence precisely because 'there was absolutely nothing of "Angleterre" about it'.62 However, although Musgrave shared some of Dickens's general attitudes, and something of his ironic style, Dickens was also able to venture into areas completely beyond Musgrave's scope, exploring the Channel as a zone with special symbolic connotations similar to those that we have seen in the work of Romantic authors such as Smith and Chateaubriand. These connotations are predominantly dark and moralistic. In Dombey and Son, for example, it is to the beach at Brighton that the ghastly, unforgiven 'Cleopatra', Mrs Skewton, bad mother and hopeless would-be denier of her own decay, is taken in the hope of rekindling the last sparks of her constitution, only to find that the Channel greets her with cold indifference, speaking darkly to her like an unmerciful god: Such is the figure that is often wheeled down to the margin of the sea, and stationed there; but on which no wind can blow freshness, and for which the murmur of the ocean has no soothing word. She lies and listens to it by the hour; but its speech is dark to her, and a dread is on her face, and when her eyes wander over the expanse, they see but a broad stretch of desolation between earth and heaven.63 And then there is Book I, Chapter X of Our Mutual Friend: one of the harshest chapters in any Dickens novel. Here, the newly married Mr and Mrs Lammle take a walk by the shore at Shanklin, on the Isle of Wight. They have come to this spot for their honeymoon, but the mood is anything but joyful. Each has just discovered that the other is more or less penniless, having been led to expect something very different by the parvenu windbag, Veneering, and having sought the marriage solely on that basis. In what may be a dark parody of the closing pages of Paradise Lost, they recriminate one another, before settling for a new, disenchanted understanding, in which each knows the other to be a fortune-hunter, and both will work together to wreak revenge upon the Veneerings, and to achieve financial advantage by whatever means they may. Here again, the Channel is animate and condemnatory:

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The tide is low, and seems to have thrown them together high on the bare shore. A gull comes sweeping by their heads, and flouts them. There was a golden surface on the brown cliffs but now, and behold they are only damp earth. A taunting roar comes from the sea, and the far-out rollers mount upon one another, to look at the entrapped impostors, and to join in impish and exultant gambols.64 They are jetsam, this pair: stuff that the Channel has thrown back with mockery and contempt. To attribute this kind of agency to the Channel itself (as to the 'alligator' Calais) is a typically Dickensian move, but there has been a real tendency in the history of the Channel for formerly glamorous and prosperous natives of the British Isles to wind up, and come to grim ends, on its shores. Emma, Lady Hamilton died, almost penniless, at Calais in 1815; Beau Brummell at Caen in 1840; a broken Oscar Wilde took refuge in Normandy after his release from Reading Gaol.65 Some of these instances of the Channel as a place where the failed, the rejected and the out-of-date go may well have contributed to Dickens's attitude. And the sense that he dramatises of human inferiority (even moral inferiority) beside the sea is widespread in Victorian culture. A case in point is William Dyce's painting Pegwell Bay: A Recollection of October 5th, 1858, from 1860. This work, which shows a cluster of diminutive, lost-looking and unmistakably melancholy middle-class Victorians picking like scavengers on the beach, while elephantine, stratified cliffs loom behind them and Donati's comet shoots indifferently but significantly overhead, is a 'unique capturing', according to Robin Gilmour, 'of the great gulf which was opening up in the nineteenth-century's experience of time, between the family album "recollection" of a visit to the seaside and the terrifying vastness of geological time'.66 Pegwell Bay is located at the eastern extreme of the Channel. Gilmour sees the painting as a classic embodiment of quintessential Victorian themes - provoked by the unsettling discoveries of scientists like Sir Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology (1830-3) revealed that humans had only been around for a fraction of the Earth's history, and Darwin, whose Origin of Species (1859) implied that humans (Victorian or otherwise) were just one link in an indeterminate chain. Pegwell Bay commends itself to the painter, therefore, because it offers tangible evidence of threatening scientific facts. Easy access to the stratified remains of other ages is certainly one of the

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things that is special about the Channel coasts (and many others). It was at Lyme Regis, in Dorset, for example, with its countless ammonites and occasional ichthyosaurs, that many of the great discoveries of early palaeontology were made. But as well as the physical evidence, these shores provide a perfect repository of symbols for expressing the dismay that the evidence is liable to engender. You come to the edge of the land, face an element in which you cannot live, reach the low point of your personal fortunes, and are confronted with the slightness of your species. As Shakespeare had said centuries before, with supreme simplicity and little scientific understanding of geology, Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend.67 Such central wisdom about time and the sea resurfaces again and again in nineteenth-century culture, whether in grand, portentous works of art like Dyce's painting or Dickens's novels, or in amiable doggerel like these concluding stanzas from a poem by the forgotten John Kenyon about the most celebrated of the Lyme Regis fossil-collectors: E'en poets shall by Thee set store; For wonders feed the poet's wish; And is their mermaid wondrous more Than thy half-lizard and half-fish? And therefore 'tis that, all the time Yon shark's head Thou art measuring, spanning, I inly weave this uncouth rhyme In honest praise of Mary Aiming. True, Mary! we - earth-born - must go, Like these lost tribes, to earth again, While Lyme's dark-headed urchins grow, Each in his turn, to grey-haired men. Yet when, grown old, this beach they walk, Some pensive breeze their gray locks fanning,

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This is as mild a confrontation with the Channel shore as intimator of mortality as one could wish for, growing out of an English romantic pastoral tradition in which simple country folk go at ripe ages to their graves, uncomplaining and with consciences perfectly clear. There is just a trace of the uncanny in it, however: when we read 'urchins', are we meant to hesitate, a moment, before deciding that we have moved from sea-creatures to humans? are we meant to feel uncertain of the difference? So, even here, the Channel shore has a certain power to chasten the nineteenth-century British reader, not with the threat of overseas aggressors, but merely with the evidence of undomesticated nature, and the space for introspection. NEW WAVES; OLD CLIFFS William Dyce was just one of many artists, British and French alike, who contributed to making the Channel, its shores, its harbours and its shipping very common subjects in painting, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, the Channel has a hugely disproportionate prominence in the history of marine art, thanks to a wide range of factors: its natural resources of dramatically changing light, colour and conditions; its poignant atmosphere of a threshold or an edge; its status as a refuge from metropolitan life, be it in London or in Paris; and, above all, the miraculous appearance of a long series of prodigiously talented British and French landscape painters, within a short period of time. Wonderful representations of the Channel, pictures that capture the place but also advance the language and scope of art, exist by Turner, John Constable, Eugene Delacroix, Richard Parkes Bonington, Gustave Courbet, Louis-Eugene Boudin, Edouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Walter Sickert, to name only the most illustrious. In many cases, the attempt to link these works of art to the literature of the Channel is likely to be strained and unfruitful. Very few of these paintings are historical, political, or otherwise concerned, in any obvious way, with any debate other than how best to represent light and substance and motion and the taste of salt in the air. Comparatively few of them are narrative in any ordinary sense; and many of them contain no human figures. Above all,

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they are neither in English nor in French, and hence tend completely to avoid the negotiations of cultural dominion which so often motivate the literature of the Channel, while incidentally revealing how fundamentally linguistic those negotiations are. Some paintings may be more literary than others, however. James H. Rubin, in a recent study of Gustave Courbet, compares his most famous Channel painting, La Vague (The Wave), of 1870,69 with an earlier, more egregiously symbolic representation of a wave by a painter better known as a writer, Victor Hugo's brown gouache, Ma destinee (My Destiny), of 1857: 'Courbet has transformed Hugo's symbolism of the sea as the infinite and the spiritual which tosses a boat into a brute material force devoid of literary associations'.70 It is true that Hugo's inclusion of a boat, and, still more, his title, do provide special provocation to the viewer to see a kind of story behind his picture, but, for that matter, even to say that Courbet's wave is a 'wall', or to attribute 'brute' force to it, is to absorb his work, too, into literature. In fact, as with later, abstract art, the lack of narrative and detail in Courbet's painting tends to encourage the viewer to prose about it inwardly, filling the void with words. And, conversely, when we look at Hugo's textual representations of the Channel at some length, in the next chapter, it should become apparent that an idea of the sea as something like a brutish wall, albeit with a lot of motiveless, malignant tricks at its disposal, is at the centre of a large proportion of his many thousands of lines and sentences about it. Both of these paintings, in fact, could be said to be about the problem of whether the sea is amenable to literature at all; whether the sea means anything, can be discussed, has any rapport with human aims and interests.71 Some of the greatest earlier paintings of the Channel, like Constable's views from Brighton and other coastal locations in the 1820s, seem to resemble Courbet's in superficial respects: there is the same basic horizontal sea and sky prospect, with little or no sign of animate activity. But these earlier paintings seem to be driven by the desire to document the real conditions as accurately as possible, irrespective of the viewer's associations, needs or biases. Courbet's and Hugo's representations are not quite like this. Their seas have an extra, unnatural presence. Both artists show sea and clouds alike tending to solidity, without simply being badly painted - so as to imply a heaviness in the experience of perceiving these scenes. Courbet's sea, in La Vague, is a sort of stiff, frothy gelatine, tinted with creme de menthe; it has, at the same time, a fleshy character, lying across the canvas

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like a nude. Meanwhile, the sea that represents Hugo's destiny is made of scoops of steaming mud. These are obtrusive seas that defy you to deal with them, and hence break into the human, intellectual sphere of thought and literature. La Vague scandalised some early viewers; Constable's equally empty but much more innocent seascapes did not. These painterly representations have some rapport, at least, with a set of attitudes to the sea that is common in French nineteenth-century literature. The classic statement of these attitudes occurs in Jules Michelet's La Mer, a work that reflects on the nature of seas in general from a wide range of personal and collective viewpoints - by turns scientific, lyrical, therapeutic, mystical and ecological - but in which La Manche often seems the first and foremost sea. In a meditation on cliffs, for example, Michelet takes those of the Cotentin peninsular, in Normandy, as his example, and in doing so works up to a grand eulogising of the Channel: [0]bserve-t-on a la mer basse les assises superposees ou se lit l'histoire du globe, en gigantesques registres ou les siecles accumules offrent tout ouvert le livre du temps. Chaque annee en mange une page. C'est un monde en demolition, que la mer mord toujours en bas, mais que les pluies, les gelees, attaquent encore bien plus d'en haut. Le flot en dissout le calcaire, emporte, rapporte, roule incessamment le silex qu'il arrondit en galets. Ce rude travail fait de cette cote, si riche du cote de la terre, un vrai desert maritime. Peu, tres peu de plantes de mer echappent au broiement eternel du galet froisse, refroisse. Les mollusques et les coquilles en ont peur. Les poisons meme se tiennent a distance. Grand contraste d'une campagne douce et tellement humanisee et d'une mer si inhospitaliere. On ne la voit guere que d'en haut. En bas la necessite dure de marcher sur un sol croulant, roulant, de boulets, rend l'etroite plage impossible, fait de la moindre promenade une violente gymnastique. II faut rester sur les sommets ou les splendides villas, les beaux bois, les cultures magnifiques, les bles, les jardins, avancent jusqu'au bord du grand mur, et regardent a plaisir cette majestueuse rue de la Manche, pleine de barques et de vaisseaux, qui separent les deux rivages et les deux grands empires du monde.72 At low tide, you may see the accumulated layers where the history of the globe lies waiting to be read, in gigantic registers through which the centuries lay open the book of time. Each year consumes a page. It is a world 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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in demolition, at which the sea constantly eats, below, but which is attacked even more by the rains and frosts above. The tide dissolves the limestone, and carries away, brings back, and ceaselessly rolls the flint, shaping it into pebbles. - This fierce work makes this coast, which is so rich on its landward edge, a veritable desert of the sea. Few, very few, marine plants survive the eternal battery of the shingle, crushed and crushed again. The molluscs and the shells fear it. Even the fish keep their distance. There is such a contrast between the mild, humanised land and this inhospitable sea! One can hardly see it except from above. Below, the hard necessity of walking on a crumbling, rolling surface of little spheres makes the narrow beach impossibly difficult, and the least ambitious excursion a violent gymnastic exercise. It is better to stay at the top, where the splendid villas, fine woods, magnificent crops, meadows and gardens advance to the very edge of the great wall, and look out serenely on that majestic highway, the Channel, full of yachts and shipping, which separates the two shores and the two great empires of the world. The Channel, here, has an austere natural magnificence, but it is also the primary intersection in geopolitics. An intersection that is also a rift, of course: a romantic chasm that retains much of the sublimity that Charlotte Smith conjured up in her account of the moment of its formation, at the start of'Beachy Head'. The first sea that Michelet ever saw, in 1830, was actually the Mediterranean, but this does not appear to have had anything like the impact that was produced by his first view of the Channel, in the following year, at Le Havre. In Normandy, as a French critic has noted, he was exposed to 'a sea that lives and moves; a sea with tides, whose calms are few, and always full of menace'.73 In La Mer, Michelet remembers this first encounter with the Channel, and remembers, more particularly, watching his small daughter facing the waves, and asserting herself somehow against them (perhaps by throwing pebbles): J'observais ce duel au Havre, en juillet 1831. Une enfant que j'amenais la en presence de la mer sentit son jeune courage et s'indigna de ces defis. Elle rendait guerre pour guerre. Lutte inegale, a faire sourire, entre la main delicate de la fragile creature et l'epouvantable force qui en tenait si peu de compte. Mais on ne riait pas longtemps, lorsque venait la pensee du peu

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que vivait l'etre aime, de son impuissance ephemere, en presence de l'infatigable eternite qui nous reprend. - Tel fut l'un de mes premiers regards sur la mer. Telles mes reveries, assombries du trop juste augure que m'inspirait ce combat entre la mer que je revois et l'enfant que je ne vois plus.74 This was the duel that I observed at Le Havre in July 1831. A child whom I had brought there, into the presence of the sea, became indignant at its challenges. In her childish courage, she returned onslaught for onslaught. It was an unequal struggle, which made one smile, between the delicate hand of that fragile creature and the terrifying force which took so little account of it. But the laughter did not last for long, for the thought arose of the slightness of the loved one's life, of her ephemeral powerlessness, in the presence of indefatigable eternity, which will take us back again. Such was one of my first views of the sea. Such were my thoughts, darkened by all-too-prophetic intimations, as I contemplated that struggle between the sea, which I see again now, and the child, whom I see no more. Indeed, this daughter, Adele, had died in 1855, five years before Michelet wrote La Mer, and her image, as a child, in juxtaposition to the Channel, becomes the key to a general association of the sea with mortality, not dissimilar to that which we have already seen in the work of Chateaubriand. According to E. de Saint-Denis, Michelet differs from Chateaubriand, that incurable nostalgic, who confused the motion of the waves [...] with the swelling of his own tormented soul. The seaside meditations of the former are melancholy, but still virile, free from any morose delectation. The first impression felt by [Pierre] Loti when he faced the sea was a nameless sadness, a feeling of desolate solitude, of abandonment and exile. Michelet felt the fear inspired by a redoubtable being, a mysterious and irresistible power, a devouring force.75 However, distinguishing between the views of the sea held by these various authors is not a straightforward matter. There is perhaps more that unites them than separates them. All express a deep fascination with the sea combined with an apprehension of it as fateful and foreboding - a more intimate complex of involvement and repulsion, perhaps, that we find in 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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even the most celebrated sea-poetry or prose in English from the same period. Michelet does differ from Chateaubriand, however, insofar as his feelings about the sea are more obviously contained and controlled by religious faith. In fact, the sea, for Michelet, is the world's most pregnant revelation of Divine will and of a universal order in which even molluscs and crustaceans are cared for, and make an effort in their turn. With his mind still on Normandy, he writes, Ces petits etres ne parlent pas au monde, mais ils travaillent pour lui. Ils se remettent du discours a leur sublime pere, l'Ocean, qui parle a leur place. Ils s'expliquent par sa grande voix. Entre la terre silencieuse et les tribus muettes de la mer, il fait ici le dialogue, fort et grave, sympathique, - l'harmonique concordance du grand Moi avec lui-meme, ce beau debat qui n'est qu'Amour.76 These small beings do not speak to the world, but they work for it. They leave communication to their sublime father, the Ocean, who speaks in their place. They express themselves through his great voice. Between the silent land and the mute tribes of the sea, this dialogue takes place, powerful and grave: the harmonic concordance of the great I with itself [or himself\, the beautiful discussion which consists only of Love. There is indeed a capacity to see the large picture, here, beyond the triumphs and tragedies of self, that frees Michelet from 'morose delectation', and even, for a while, from the anxieties about the human species as a whole that mark other nineteenth-century texts and artworks. Michelet's perspective is grounded in a resolute monotheism in which the capitalised Ocean becomes an avatar of the eternal Moi, so that to look out into the Channel is to see beyond the limits of the human, and into the Divine. Despite this religious dimension, Michelet's attitude to the sea is also more obviously political than Chateaubriand's. His journal entry for that day when he first saw the Channel, in 1831, contains this rueful observation: 'L'ocean est anglais. Cela m'attristait que ce champ sublime de la liberte soit a une autre nation' ('The sea is English. It saddened me that this sublime expanse of freedom should belong to another nation').77 In fact, references to Anglo-French rivalry occur frequently in Michelet's journal, in apposition to the more generalised confrontations of humanity with the sea. And much of the later sections of La Mer, too, is devoted to a discussion of the political

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consequences, especially for France, of an inadequate relationship with the sea, and the benefits that would accrue from a renewal and strengthening of that relationship. Michelet's representation of the sea is consequently double-edged - it is sometimes an aggressor and sometimes a solace - and this is seen to depend on how humans behave towards it. He remembers a great storm, in October 1859, and the fear and agitation that it caused: Moi aussi, je regardais insatiablement cette mer, je la regardais avec haine. N'etant pas en danger reel, je n'en avais que davantage l'ennui et la desolation. Elle etait laide, d'affreuse mine. Rien ne rappelait les vains tableaux des poetes. Settlement, par un contraste etrange, moins je me sentais bien vivant, plus, elle, elle avait l'air de vivre. Toutes ces vagues electrisees par un si furieux mouvement avaient pris une animation, et comme une ame fantastique. Dans la fureur generate, chacune avait sa fureur. Dans l'uniformite totale (chose vraie quoique contradictoire), il y avait un diabolique fourmillement. Etait-ce la faute de mes yeux et de mon cerveau fatigue? ou bien en etait-il ainsi? Elles me faisaient l'effet d'un epouvantable mob, d'une horrible populace, non d'hommes, mais de chiens aboyants, un million, un milliard de dogues acharnes, ou plutot fous ... Mais que dis-je? des chiens, des dogues? ce n'etait pas cela encore. C'etaient des apparitions execrables et innomees, des betes sans yeux ni oreilles, n'ayant que des gueules ecumantes. Monstres, que voulez-vous done? n'etes-vous pas souls des naufrages que j'apprends de tous cotes: que demandez-vous? - «Ta mort et la mort universelle, la suppression de la terre, et le retour au chaos.»78 I too stared insatiably at the sea, stared at it with hate. Not being in any real danger, I only experienced the frustration and desolation all the more. It was ugly; frightful looking. There was nothing about it that recalled the vain depictions of the poets. Except that, by a strange contrast, the less vital I felt myself, the more the sea had the appearance of life. All of those waves, electrified in their furious motion, had become animate, as though possessed by a fantastic soul. In the general fury, each had its own fury. Within that total uniformity (and this is true, however contradictory), there was a diabolical multiplicity. Was this the error of my eyes and of my exhausted brain? Or was it really so? The waves gave me the impression of a terrifying mob, a ghastly rabble, not of men but of barking dogs; a

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All at Sea

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

million, or a billion savage hounds - mad ones, rather... But what am I saying? Dogs? Hounds? That still was not it. They were horrific, nameless apparitions, beasts without eyes or ears, with nothing but foaming mouths. Monsters, what is it that you would have? Are you not satiated by the shipwrecks that I hear of on all sides? What more do you ask for? - 'Your death, and universal death; the destruction of earth, and the return to chaos.' The sea is not so godly here. It is the very devil, in fact. Or rather, Pandaemonium. It has lost the unity that Michelet formerly attributed to it, and acquired a chaotic, pagan multiplicity. It is the stable singularity of the lighthouse that becomes, in this context 'le dieu meme' ('God Himself').79 Lighthouses represent the fact that there is no need to surrender to the dissolution of anthropocentric and monotheistic values in a stormy sea. On the contrary, there is the opportunity for a 'combat vivifiant' (an 'enlivening combat').80 The French Channel coast is especially invigorating: Nos ports de l'extreme Nord, Dunkerque, Boulogne, Dieppe, a la rencontre des vents et des courants de la Manche, sont encore une fabrique d'hommes qui les fait et les refait. Ce grand souffle et cette grande mer, dans leur eternel combat, c'est a ressusciter les morts. On y voit reellement des renaissances inattendues. Qui n'a pas de lesions graves est remis en un moment. Toute la machine humaine joue, bon gre, mal gre, fortement; elle digere, elle respire. La nature y est exigeante et sait bien la faire aller. Les vegetaux si robustes qui verdoient jusqu'a la cote sous les plus grands vents de mer nous font honte de nos langueurs. [...] On a vu plus haut la mer vehemente, souvent terrible, de Granville, Saint-Malo, Cancale. C'est la la meilleure ecole ou doivent aller les jeunes gens. La est le defi de la mer a l'homme, la lutte ou les forts deviendront tres-forts.81 Our far northern ports, Dunkerque, Boulogne, Dieppe, confronting the winds and currents of the Channel, are manufactories of men, making them and remaking them. That great blast and those great seas, in their eternal combat: they are enough to revive the dead. They truly bring about the most unexpected recoveries. Anyone who is not seriously injured

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recovers straightaway. The whole human machine performs at its best, regardless of your wishes; it digests, it breathes. Nature, here, is a taskmaster, and knows how to make it work. The robust vegetation which flourishes right at the edge, in the teeth of the strongest gales, casts shame on our languidness. [...] I have already described thefierce,often terrible seas of Granville, SaintMalo and Cancale. Such is the best school for our young people. There is the challenge from sea to man, the struggle through which the strong become even stronger. So the Channel served as a natural symbol for adversarial confrontation for Michelet: one which happened to occur in the space where many political conflicts had taken place, and where they might be expected to erupt again. His recommendations for the harsh improvement of the young, through exposure to the coastal elements, should be seen in the context of national anxieties about France's repeated failures, in the nineteenth century, to present a strong and unified face to the world - especially by contrast with Britain. But when Michelet talks of 'nos langueurs', he may be speaking for himself, as well. His own coastal personae fluctuate, like Chateaubriand's, between the dynamic and the passive, the resolute and the wistful. Thus, one might remember Chateaubriand's account of himself at Brest, sitting and listening dreamily to the many industrious noises of a working port, when considering Michelet's recollections of Etretat. Here, Michelet comments on the unusual nature of this harbour, and the fact that boats have to winched out of the water. He feels pity for the women of the fishermen's families, who, with great effort, turn the capstan that drags the boats across the rocky shore: Je fus d'abord attriste, blesse. Mon premier elan etait de me mettre aussi de la partie et d'aider. La chose eut paru singuliere, et je ne sais quelle fausse honte m'arreta. Mais, chaque jour, j'assistais, au moins de mes voeux. Je venais, je regardais. Ces jeunes et charmantes filles (rarement jolies, mais charmantes) n'avaient point le court jupon rouge de l'ancien costume des cotes, mais de longues robes; elles etaient pour la plupart affinees de race et d'esprit, et plusieurs fort delicates; elles tenaient de la demoiselle. Courbees sur cette oeuvre rude [...], elles n'etaient pas sans grace ni fierte; leur jeune coeur, dans ce tres-penible effort, ne donnait a la faiblesse pas une plainte, pas un soupir.82

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All at Sea

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

At first I felt saddened and wounded. My first thought was to join them, and help. It would have seemed rather odd, and a sort of false pride stopped me. But everyday I was there, contributing at least my good wishes. These youthful and charming girls (not often pretty, but charming) did not wear the short red skirts of the traditional costume of the coast, but long dresses; they were mostly rather refined in their breeding and behaviour, some of them showing true delicacy; they were really young ladies. Bent over their primitive task [...], they were not without grace or pride; despite that exhausting labour their young hearts did not concede one complaint, one sigh, to frailty. Michelet's description of the young women accentuates the passivity of his own presence in the scene, and feeds into the wider discussion of languor and decay. It also recalls the convention of the cross-Channel narrative, noted in the last chapter, in which description of the eligible female population is part of the ritual tourist experience. People who turn up on the coast (as opposed to living there) tend to be on holiday, or at least absent from their place of work, and so find themselves at a privileged but sometimes uncomfortable remove from the locals. And in the nineteenth century this situation is usually gendered: the financially independent, educated male uneasily observes captive female industry, and his resultant feelings all too easily merge into anxieties about the recent performance, and prospects, of the whole nation at the edge of which he stands (or lounges) - which, whether it were France or Britain, was still, at this time, needless to say, wholly male in representation and (Queen Victoria notwithstanding) executive power. Sure enough, Michelet's thoughts soon turn, via some remarks on the decline of the fishing industry, to a wider diagnosis of national malaise, and a tentative prescription for its cure: C'est a la science, a la loi, d'arreter cette decadence. La premiere, par sa direction habile, si elle est fermement suivie, creera l'economie de la mer et reconstituera la peche, ecole de la marine. La seconde, moins exclusivement influencee de l'interet de la terre, gardera dans le marin la fleur du pays, elite a part, nullement comparable aux grandes masses dont nous tirons le soldat, et qui sera le vrai soldat dans telles circonstances qui trancheraient le noeud du monde. Telle etait ma reverie sur ce petit quai d'Etretat dans le sombre ete de

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1860, ou la pluie tombait a flots, pendant que le dur cabestan gringait, que la corde criait, que la barque montait lentement. Elle traine aussi, celle du siecle, et elle a peine a monter. II y a lenteur, il y a fatigue, comme en 1730. II serait bon qu'on aidat et qu'on ce mit a la barre. Mais plusieurs perdent le temps, jouent aux coquilles, aux cailloux. On dit que Scipion, le vainqueur de Carthage, et Terence, captif echappe de ce naufrage d'un monde, ramassaient des coquilles au bord de la mer, bons amis dans I'indifference et dans I'abandon du passe. Ils y goutaient ce bonheur d'oublier, d'effacer la vie, de redevenir enfants. Rome ingrate, Carthage detruite, leurs deux patries, leur pesaient peu, ne laissant guere trace a leur ame, pas plus que la ride du flot. Nous, ce n'est pas la notre voeu. Nous ne voulons pas etre enfants. Nous ne voulons pas oublier, mais, de perseverante ardeur, aider la manoeuvre penible de ce grand siecle fatigue. Nous voulons remonter la barque, et pousser de nos fortes mains au cabestan de l'avenir.83 It is for science, and the Law, to arrest this decadence. The former, with its skilful management, if it is rigorously pursued, will create a marine economy and revive the fisheries, which are the school of maritime life. The latter, when it is less exclusively governed by land-based interests, will protect the flower of the nation, its mariners: a separate elite by no means comparable to the great masses from which we draw our soldiers, and which will provide the true soldiers whenever the knot of the world might really be severed. Such was my reverie on the little quay of Etretat in the gloomy summer of 1860, when the rain fell in rivers, while the capstan groaned, while the rope cried out, while the boat was slowly raised. The vessel of the century, too, is dragging; it is hauled up with difficulty. There is a slowness, a tiredness, just as in 1730. If only someone would help, applying their strength to the bar. But many fritter their time away, playing with pebbles and shells. It is said that Scipio, the conqueror of Carthage, and Terence, a captive escaped from that shipwreck of a world, gathered shells by the shore, good friends in indifference and relinquishment of the past. They tasted the happiness of forgetting, of erasing their lives, of becoming children again. Ungrateful Rome, Carthage destroyed - their two nations weighed little upon them, leaving barely a trace on their souls: no more than a ripple on the flood. 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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All at Sea

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

But this is not what we wish for ourselves. We do not want to be children. We do not want forgetfulness, but to assist, with persevering fervour, the painful motion of this great, exhausted century. We want to draw in the boat, pushing with our strong hands at the capstan of the future. And Michelet says this while reminding us that he did not even lend his muscles to the real wooden capstan that was pulling up the real wooden boat! He exemplifies the weakness that he diagnoses. He and his country must change. The Channel, as he reflects beside it, becomes a national confessional for Catholic France. THE 'SALT, ESTRANGING SEA' Many of Michelet's social and political concerns, and something of his portentous affinity with the sea, were being felt at the same time on the other side of the Channel. The most famous poem in English to take the Channel as its scene, Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach', like La Mer, contains a mixture of a gloomy significance in nature with intimations of political tension. What it lacks, however, are Michelet's compensating moments of happy surrender to the superhuman power and goodness that the sea represents in its capacity as mirror of the 'grand Moi'. Arnold's supreme being is at best semi-detached, at worst completely absent. 'Dover Beach' was first published in Arnold's New Poems of 1867, but it was probably written in 1851. Insofar as this poem really does concern 'the cliffs of England', and 'the tranquil bay' facing towards France, it makes the Channel seem very wide, empty, and imponderable.84 Speaking of the withdrawal of the 'Sea of Faith', in the third stanza of the poem, the speaker states, But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.85 The periodic flashes from the opposite shore ('on the French coast the light /

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Gleams and is gone')86 do not seem enough to stop this one from seeming to be an edge, with a void of faithlessness and death beyond it. There appears to be little specifically to do with England or France in the poem, although it can persuasively be read in relation to English religious concerns and controversies of the period, but it is significant that the Channel commends itself to Arnold as an appropriate theatre for this display of grief, fear, and loneliness.87 Michelet, as it happens, wrote very positively of the lights of Calais, as he imagines them, seen from Dover: Calais, de ses quatre phares de feux de couleurs differentes, qu'on doit voir de Douvres meme, fait a l'Angleterre, au monde qui passe par l'Angleterre, des signes hospitaliers.88 Calais, from its four lighthouses with variously coloured lights, which must be seen even from Dover, sends hospitable signals to England, and to the world that passes through England. But these warm overtures are ultimately lost on Arnold's speaker, as he agonises on his 'darkling plane'. We will understand Arnold's attitude to the Channel in this poem better if we compare it to a slightly earlier, less well known work, 'Calais Sands', which Arnold wrote in August 1850. 'Calais Sands' describes a period during Arnold's courtship of his future wife when he apparently received some discouragement from her father, and was hence held at a tantalising distance from the object of his affections. The speaker of the poem sees this separation articulated in the scenery before him, despite the good weather and gloss of historical associations that make it superficially appealing: A thousand knights have reined their steeds To watch this line of sand-hills run, Along the never-silent Strait, To Calais glittering in the sun; To look tow'rd Ardres' Golden Field Across this wide aerial plain, Which glows as if the Middle Age Were gorgeous upon earth again. 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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How exquisite thy voice would come, My darling, on this lonely air! How sweetly would the fresh sea-breeze, Shake loose some band of soft brown hair! Yet now my glance but once hath roved O'er Calais and its famous plain; To England's cliffs my gaze is turned, On the blue strait mine eyes I strain. Thou comest! Yes! the vessel's cloud Hangs dark upon the rolling sea. Oh, that yon sea-bird's wings were mine, To win one instant's glimpse of thee! I must not spring to grasp thy hand, To woo thy smile, to seek thine eye; But I may stand far off, and gaze, And watch thee pass unconscious by, And spell thy looks, and guess thy thoughts, Mixed with the idlers on the pier. Ah, might I always rest unseen, So I might have thee always near! To-morrow hurry through the fields Of Flanders to the storied Rhine! To-night those soft-fringed eyes shall close Beneath one roof, my queen! with mine.89 Taken in isolation, the last stanza of this poem seems to anticipate a brief but very intimate union with the beloved: her lovingly observed eyes will close in synchrony with those of the speaker, beneath one roof. These two people 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Oh, that to share this famous scene, I saw, upon the open sand, Thy lovely presence at my side, Thy shawl, thy look, thy smile, thy hand!

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will, very literally, sleep together - even if the speaker must depart on the morrow for travels which, within the poem, remain unexplained. But not only the biographical facts but also the self-contained text make this meaning just a fantasy. The speaker is held apart from the beloved, and possesses only her image. Her eyes will close with his only because the vision of her eyes occupies his consciousness and will leave him only when he sleeps: the vision of her eyes, that is, in the sense of her eyes as objects - the beauty that he sees in them. But also, in a way, her power of vision is contained by the speaker: for he observes her unseen. At moments, she is something less than sentient: she is a book, for him to 'spell', or she is the vessel that clouds the sea - and he the sea-bird that would fly out to her. Thus, quite whom or what he is gazing at is not entirely clear. Looking at the beloved seems to be confused with looking out to sea. The glowing, 'gorgeous' Channel is a metaphor for the beloved, or she for it. Both are allied in the speaker's vision of diffusing beauty. The 'aerial' sea communicates its splendour to the air, and this air, if she were present, would touch and animate her, in a moment in which the artist's model, like Pygmalion's, would be inspired with life: 'How sweetly would the fresh seabreeze, / Shake loose some band of soft brown hair!' The Channel divides the speaker from his beloved, and yet offers an image of what it would be like to be with her. Not for the first time, the Channel decks and shrouds itself in ambiguity. In fact, for Arnold himself, this exploration of thwarted, or at least suspended, love beside the Channel is partly a return to an earlier experience of a similar kind, in the same place, one that he had documented in another poem, 'To Marguerite - Continued', from 1849: Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone. The islands feel the enclasping flow, And then their endless bounds they know. But when the moon their hollows lights, And they are swept by balms of spring, And in their glens, on starry nights, The nightingales divinely sing; 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Oh! then a longing like despair Is to their farthest caverns sent; For surely once, they feel, they were Parts of a single continent! Now round us spreads the watery plain Oh might our marges meet again! Who ordered, that their longing's fire Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled? Who renders vain their deep desire? A God, a God their severance ruled! And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.90 Of course, this is a poem about the separation between individuals, and the impossibility, as Arnold seems to see it, of overcoming the differences between people through mere volition or desire. Like much of Arnold's poetry, it testifies to a personal loneliness that cannot wholly be relieved, in the end, by love or friendship. Or one could say - putting a positive slant on Arnold's anxieties - that it cultivates and celebrates desire by depicting two people tantalisingly close to one another, with their 'marges', like the figures on Keats's Grecian Urn, forever just about to meet. But it also speaks to the collective experience of being part of a particular nation or race, and even of inhabiting a particular geography - especially an island, separated from other people on other landmasses by the physical barrier of the sea. Arnold's discourse is simultaneously psychological, philosophical and theological, and tragic in all of these respects. His speakers and their addressees are separated from one another emotionally: the fear that they cannot relieve one another's distress is palpable in the melancholy emphasis with which he urges that they should. And they are separated epistemologically: there is a sense of despair at the task of making subjective experience known to others. And people, and peoples, are separated by God, who has composed a dwelling for his Human progeny that is physically fractured and discontinuous. 'A God, a God', in the 'Marguerite' poem, is both pious

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And lovely notes, from shore to shore, Across the sounds and channels pour -

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and wonderfully angry. A God among conceivable others? Reiterated in awe or in disgust? The Channel, in this respect, is like a symptom of the Fall. For the deeply secular Dickens, as we have seen, it was a kind of joke: a pointless inconvenience that divides communities that might otherwise have realised how much they had in common; it was no more deeply meaningful than any other accident of nature (Dickens, in this respect, is a kind of Darwinian - or, at least, an anti-Creationist). But Arnold, although in his essays he urged the English to profit from French examples in education and other social fields (indeed to be more like the French), seems always to fall back, in his poetry, on the idea of geographical separation as a kind of curse: the irremediable isolation of individual souls writ large across the globe. Perhaps he would have felt slightly less isolated had he known more about what Michelet was thinking and writing on the other side, for these two sages both rose above parochial concerns, from time to time, to become philosophers and theologians of an estranging, independent Channel that spoke darkly to the tired nineteenth-century European world as a whole.

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All at Sea

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the Channel gained a new lease of life as a significant and emphasised phenomenon in cultural geography. Relations between the literatures of Britain and France grew stronger in these years, and were fostered by a good deal of travel back and forth. British writers set off for the salons of Paris, and their French counterparts proceeded to London. In the case of the British visitors to France, the motivation was often artistic: France was held to be closer to the centre of inspiration, especially in the visual arts, than anywhere in Britain.1 In the case of French writers visiting Britain, the motivation was often more practical, but still a matter of culture. 'After 1871/ as Jacques Gury says, a France that had been humiliated by the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, which it blamed on its miscellaneous succession of regimes since 1789, was looking for an institutional, social and civic model that would ensure stability and progress. The majority of serious outre-Manche travellers between 1871 and 1914 sought the recipe for gentlemanliness in the good society that they frequented, and tried to make the Victorian gentleman a model for the French elite. A sojourn in England, preferably at Oxford, came to be viewed as part of the training for a young Frenchman destined for a prominent career. This view of Britain as a model had its darker side, however. 'For those French people who had never heard of Ruskin, the England of 1888 meant Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes.'2 The easiest, most equal meeting of French and English cultural needs and aspirations during this period seems to have occurred at resorts on the Channel coast. These were attractive, in part, because the sea now had a special prominence as a subject for literature. As literary culture took a turn towards symbolism, decadence and aestheticism, the special characteristics of the sea, as a literary subject, became increasingly timely. The sea lends

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itself to a certain vagueness, and to the expression of fluctuating moods. It connotes depth but it is also a blankness, or emptiness, and hence is open to having meanings projected upon it. It is full of colour and tone and changing light, and hence fit for a literature that drifts into the territories of music and the visual arts.3 This was a period, in fact, in which the Channel came to be prized as a mysterious and even an exotic space - an interval of danger and the unknown between one form of bourgeois civilisation and its twin: 'cette perilleuse mer de la Manche,' according to Victor Hugo, 'qui est la mer Egee de l'Occident' ('that perilous Channel; the Aegean of the West').4 The most remarkable artistic product of this exoticized turn-of-the-century view of the Channel is perhaps Claude Debussy's set of symphonic sketches, La Mer. This was written between 1903 and 1905 at a number of locations that included Dieppe, Jersey and Eastbourne: the Channel, consequently, was the mer at hand. Moreover, one of Debussy's formative experiences was being caught, Chateaubriand-like, a willing victim, in a storm in the Bay of Mont Saint Michel.5 But if one did not know this, one might easily imagine that La Mer was inspired by the tropics, or at least the Mediterranean. Debussy's literary equivalents are to be found among French symbolist poets such as Paul Verlaine and Jules Laforgue, and novelists such as JorisKarl Huysmans.6 But the technique and concerns of these writers had been anticipated and shaped by mid-nineteenth-century figures such as Charles Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier, and bore strange fruit, in turn, in Englishspeaking decadents such as Algernon Swinburne and Oscar Wilde. All of these writers existed in a specifically cross-Channel cultural universe, and all of them were impressed by the Channel itself as a phenomenon of more than simply material significance. Typically, symbolist poets viewed the Channel, a la Debussy, as an intoxicating space, a beautiful void into which they might launch themselves in their respective bateaux ivres, but the intoxication was deepened by intimations of darkness and death - of drowning and, for French authors, of a passage to the cold and inhospitable north. The Channel had all the dualistic allure, in other words, that the decadents and symbolists more notoriously explored in their depictions of love, gender and sexuality. A fine example of an early symbolist poem that makes use of the Channel is Theophile Gautier's 'Marine: flots verts, yeux verts' ('Marine: Green Waves, Green Eyes'):

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Les mouettes volent et jouent, Et les blancs coursiers de la mer, Cabres sur les vagues, secouent Leurs crins echeveles dans l'air. La nuit tombe; une fine pluie liteint les fournaises du soir, Et le steam-boat, crachant la suie, Rabat son long panache noir. Le cceur brise, le front livide, Je vais au pays du charbon, Du brouillard et du suicide!... Pour se tuer le temps est bon!

Seagulls glide and play, And the white coursers of the seas, Rearing on the waves, display Their dishevelled manes in the breeze. Night falls; a fine rain Drowns the day's fires in gloom And the steam-boat, like a sooty stain Withdraws its long black plume. Broken-hearted and hollow-eyed, I go to the land of coal, Of fog and mist and suicide!... Fit weather to extinguish the soul!

Ma tristesse avide se noie Dans le gouffre amer qui blanchit, L'ecume danse, l'eau tournoie... Un plongeon et tout serait dit.

It drowns itself, my eager sorrow, In this whiteness, bitter and vast, The foam dances, the waves wallow... A dive and it will all be past.

Oh! je me sens l'ame navree!... Les flots gonflent en soupirant Leur poitrine desesperee Le del est noire, I'abime attend!

Oh! I feel how my soul is distressed!... With a sigh the sea extends Its despairing breast. The sky is black, the abyss attends!

0 cheres peines meprisees, Vains regrets, douloureux tresor, () blessures cicatrisees, Voila que vous saignez encor!

0 suffering despised but dear, Vain regrets and treasured pain! 0 wounds, old and sere, See, how you bleed again!

Illusions d'amour perdues, Faux espoirs, folles visions, Du socle ideal, descendues, Un saut dans les moites sillons!

Impossible notions of love, False hopes, mad visionary dreams Plunge from their platform above: A leap into this basin of streams!

Livide, enfle, meconnaissable, Je dormirai bien cette nuit

Livid, swollen, no longer myself, Tonight will bring peace to my blood

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Dans les fourrures de sa mante, Sur le pont, assise a l'ecart, Une femme pale et charmante Laisse Hotter son long regard.

As I sleep on the sand's clammy shelf And am lulled by the sounds of the flood! In the furs that cover her heart, She sits on the bridge, very still, Charming and pale, a little apart, And lets her gaze float where it will.

Des yeux ou le ciel se reflete M'ont fait souffrir plus qu'en enfer; Les siens, sous leur vague paillette, Prennent les teintes de la mer.

Eyes in which heaven reflects Have brought the sufferings of hell to me; Hers, under a haze of flecks, Take on the tints of the sea.

Les teintes de la mer profonde Ou git noye plus d'un tresor; Peut-etre en plongeant dans leur onde On trouverait la coupe d'or!7

The tints of the deep, deep sea Where more than one treasure lies drowned; Perhaps in the plunge I foresee A golden prize will be found!

Gautier expresses feelings and concerns in this poem that, if not universal, are certainly very general. He makes a few allusions to things that are specific to the act of crossing from France to Britain, but much of what he has to say could have been expressed by means of an entirely different scenario. The Channel is an appropriate resource and he exploits it. Certain elements of Gautier's poem are familiar from earlier literary representations of the Channel. For example, the idea of the Channel as associated with a breach in intimate relationships had arisen, as we have seen, in the poems of Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold. Those writers had their own good reasons for looking on the Channel with an awareness of its power to separate people from those who were formerly close to them. In Gautier's case, what we have is the highly wrought rhapsodic complaint, involving all the duplicity of a 'douloureux tresor' (an unhappy treasure or 'treasured pain'), of a male speaker whose Channel-crossing seems to have been forced upon him by an indifferent woman. While the speaker imagines drowning himself, she will sit, it seems, in a state of icy poise, wrapped in 'les fourrures de sa mante' - literally in the

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furs of her mantle, but there may be some relevance in the fact that mante also means 'mantis' and, figuratively, a devouring woman. As with Wordsworth and Smith, the Channel is both a material fact in the narrative and a symbolic expression of it: Gautier's speaker has been driven away by this woman, perhaps, and experiences separation from her as a kind of Channel that divides his spirit, and in response to that feeling he crosses the actual Channel. But in doing so he does not exactly exile himself from the woman, because she is there in the sea (rather like the addressee of Arnold's 'Calais Sands'). He imagines her while he is engaged in the crossing, and her eyes '[p]rennent les teintes de la mer' ('take on the tints of the sea'). Three elements are combined in this poem, and in much other writing of the period: the first is the sea, especially this sea that is narrow enough to make relationships that bridge it quite easy to form, and yet wide enough to give an extra bleakness and finality to the rupture of such relationships; the second is death - for Gautier's speaker seems to see death as the solution, and here the Channel will again help him out; and the last is the woman, or Woman, seen with a male decadent quasi-misogynist gaze that supposedly catches her cold outlook, her 'long regard'.8 DAWDLING AT DIEPPE

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The resorts of the northern French coast enjoyed great popularity with English artists and intellectuals in the 1890s. They were then considerably more glamorous places than most of them are today. The whole idea of the coastal resort was more upmarket, in fact, in the late nineteenth century than it is at the beginning of the twenty-first. But the French coast in the 1890s could be a place of refuge for the English as well as of resort. The English who congregated there tended to be escapees of a sort, self-consciously eccentric, a trifle unbuttoned, a bit different from the English that they had left behind. A notable example of this type of escaped Englishman is Arthur Symons: poet, author of the Channel-crossing, ground-breaking critical monograph The Symbolist Movement in Literature, contributor to the Yellow Book, friend of Oscar Wilde, and leading fin-de-siecle Decadent all-rounder. Symons caught the moment in Anglo-French relations in 1895 by contributing an essay on the Norman port of Dieppe, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, to the first number of the Savoy magazine, edited by himself. This essay, titled simply

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'Dieppe, 1895', begins and ends with the observation that Symons had come to the resort that summer for a weekend, but found himself staying two months. In a way, this is the whole point of the essay. It is pervaded by a spirit of loitering, of not particularly needing to be anywhere else. Its author, like many a late-nineteenth-century gent, is clearly afflicted with leisure, and bears it with fortitude. He talks about the 'inexplicable fascination' that keeps him at Dieppe, but it is not really inexplicable at all: it is just a very easy place for a flaneur, an idler, to dawdle in. But then, it is part of the duty of such a person to find things inexplicable, to hint at the charm of a situation without committing the vulgarity of extended analysis. 'What is it, in this little French watering-place, that appeals so to the not quite conventional Englishman [...]?' Symons asks.9 He is faintly echoing Dickens, whose 'Uncommercial' traveller was also, implicitly, unconventional. In fact, there exists a general nineteenth-century motif of the Englishman who marks himself as slightly other by flirting with France. For Symons, at least, there is clearly something liberating and affirmative about being the odd sort of Englishman who takes refuge at Dieppe. T do not quite know why,' he characteristically says, but one cannot take things seriously at Dieppe. Only just on the other side of that blue streak is England: England means London. [...] One's duties, probably, call one to London or Paris, one's realisable pleasures; everything but the moment's vague immense, I say again, inexplicable, satisfaction, which broods and dawdles about Dieppe.10 So Dieppe, apparently, is a place of unrealisable pleasures. It is a kind of noman's land, or neutral space, or limbo, between the centres of commercial and even sybaritic activity, London and Paris. At times, Symons seems to hint in his Decadent way that Dieppe allows desires to be fulfilled, constructing the place as erotically pliant: 'At Dieppe the sea is liberal', he says; Dieppe is 'placid and indulgent, lets you have your way with it, is full of relief for you'.11 But part of this relief seems to consist in the fact that Symons is not even required to sin very earnestly. He goes to the Casino, for example, entirely foregoes the demonic gambling scenarios of a Balzac or a Dostoevsky, and merely dabbles in Petits Chevaux, the cheapest, most childish game available. In fact, Dieppe should have been a lively place for a writer to be, in the 1890s: there were plenty of other artistic people in town. But their lives seem

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to have revolved around low-key self-indulgence in cafes and hotels rather than any strenuous engagement with the environment, and brilliant but nostalgic anecdotalism more than new ideas.12 And Symons chooses not to emphasise intellectual companionship - or any other kind - ending instead with a self-depiction that seems all the more lonely for its allusion to phantom others: Much of the charm of life exists for me in the unspoken interest which forms a sort of electric current between oneself and strangers. It is a real emotion to me, satisfying, in a sense, for the very reason that it leaves one unsatisfied. And of this kind of emotion Dieppe, in the season, is bewilderingly abundant.13 It does not sound all that much fun, this 'unspoken interest'. There is a kind of perversely self-denying pleasure here that tends to be marked as English, and that other nations find hard to understand. Symons's allegedly 'electric' experience of dissatisfaction is refined and aestheticized, but it has something in common with the rather peculiar habit of many English people, especially elderly ones, now as well as in the nineteenth century, of driving to the shore, halting there, and spending many apparently empty minutes or even hours, with (nowadays) their cheese and tomato sandwiches and their instant soups, just staring into space.14 This is something that the American Paul Theroux noticed with an outsider's partial insight, confusion and dismay in his jaundiced but entertaining 1983 travelogue The Kingdom by the Sea: It looked sombre enough to be an English recreation, but I wondered whether it had any other significance. It seemed to me to hold the possibility of the ultimate fright, an experience of nothingness. It was only on the coast where if you angled yourself properly, you could look at nothing. I never passed these old people in their parked cars - they did not stir from them - without thinking that, in their own way, they were waiting for Godot.15 It is that sort of writing that keeps national stereotypes running. Theroux seems not to know what to make of himself, as an American who chose to live in Britain for seventeen years, and wants to mark a boundary, a channel

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of his own, between himself and the inscrutable and creepy natives of the old country. In a similar way, Julian Barnes, a contemporary Englishman who appears to be unhappy with many aspects of Britain and has identified himself strongly with France, uses the same motif, the sea - so much of which, not least in the 1890s, Britannia used to rule - to make jabs at English dullness and parochialism. Thus Geoffrey Braithwaite, Julian Barnes's metafictional author-as-character in his 1984 novel Flaubert's Parrot experiences much selfloathing as he crosses the Channel to do research on Flaubert, and, mindful perhaps of the eagerness of English literary figures of the nineteenth century, like Symons, to make the same crossing in the same direction, notes how much less excited the French seem to have been about travelling the other way: Cultural exchange between England and France in the nineteenth century was at best pragmatic. French writers didn't cross the Channel to discuss aesthetics with their English counterparts; they were either running from prosecution or looking for a job. Hugo and Zola came over as exiles; Verlaine and Mallarme came over as schoolmasters. Villiers de ITsle Adam, chronically poor yet crazily practical, came over in search of an heiress.16 Like Theroux, Barnes/Braithwaite is slightly overstating his case, but it is true that Flaubert's own four trips to England were remarkably brief, that there is very little record of them in his letters, and that the fragmentary comments on his 1865 trip in his thirteenth Cornet de Voyage give very little information about his feelings for England, apart from tiny asides such as 'magnifique campagne tres bien cultive' ('magnificent countryside, very well cultivated' - on the landscape between Newhaven and London), and the super-laconic 'Mardi - temps magnifique, le soleil brille - Hampton Court' ('Tuesday - splendid weather, the sun is shining - Hampton Court').17 So it is worth considering the ways in which Symons, in fin-de-siecle Dieppe, is behaving peculiarly like an Englishman, and unlike a Frenchman, but we should note too that he is aspiring to a kind of behaviour that transcends nationality, or, more precisely, mixes nationalities. His aestheticism, as he knew as well as anyone, has its roots in Baudelaire and Gautier. A Punch cartoon from 1889 shows a Frenchman and an Englishman on the beach at Dieppe, both preoccupied with two young women who are looking in their direction and laughing: the Englishman thinks that this attention

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must be due to a defect in his appearance ('Confound it! [...] Wonder if I've got a smut on my nose, or something!'), while the Frenchman assumes that he is an object of admiration ('Evidement elles trouvent que je ne suis pas trop mal!').18 Symons, on the other hand, seems neither constrained nor inflated by his sense of what others think of him, but rather makes a point of being an observer of the world who has no particular image, either personal or national, that it is his duty to support. Like Theroux's old couples, he stares at the sea, but unlike them, according to Theroux (although he might be wrong), Symons is able to co-opt this supposedly unpromising vista and, without worrying about the fact that he is an Englishman standing on a French shore, turn it into a source of mental nourishment: And then the sea, at night, from the jetty: the vast space of water, fading mistily into the unseen limits of the horizon, a boat, a sail, just distinguishable in its midst, the lights along the shore, the glow of the Casino, with all its windows golden, an infinite softness in the air. I have spent all night wandering about the beach, I have traced every change in sea and sky from twilight to sunrise, inconceivable delicacies of colour, rarities of tone.19 One could say of this coastal rhapsody exactly what Oscar Wilde said of the conversation of another member of the 1890s Dieppe set, the painter Charles Conder: that it is like 'a beautiful sea mist'20 - although this remark certainly says as much about Wilde as it does about Conder, whose own representations of Dieppe are animated by a dynamic, wriggling line that slightly belies the languor of most of the literary accounts. To sum up, we have in Arthur Symons an Englishman on the risky side of the Channel coast, at the fin de siecle, behaving in a way that, from a turn-ofthe-millennium perspective looks all too English, but who probably felt, at the time, that he was participating in a cultural experience that France and England shared. And to a great extent he was probably right: high artistic circles in the two countries were considerably better connected with one another at that time that they are now, thanks above all to cosmopolitan figures like Wilde, Whistler and Symons himself, who made the effort to travel from England to France, but thanks also to French writers and artists such as Verlaine and Mallarme, who were at least prepared to receive these visitors and talk to them,21 and who sometimes made reciprocal trips to the lecture halls of London and Oxford, even if they did subsequently tend to

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report, as Christophe Campos says, 'that the welcome given had been shabby compared with what they must normally consider their due at home'.22 Symons is an interesting but rather second-division figure in the 1890s. His essay on Dieppe catches the mood of a certain very harmless kind of decadence (the kind that gives decadence a good name) very well, and it is a valuable source of facts about that particular time and place. But for a richer apprehension of all the fundamental issues, of Englishness and Frenchness, of the significance of crossing the Channel, and incidentally of crossing the centuries, and for a much more dramatic engagement with the power and presence of the sea, we need to turn to one of the brightest stars of the period, Algernon Charles Swinburne. HOMMES-OCEAN Swinburne wrote about the English Channel not least because he simply loved the sea, to the point that he identified with gulls.23 But Swinburne was a complex and learned individual, steeped in both classical and modern French literature. He was a pioneering transnational aestheticist (whom the likes of Symons imitated), but he also had a strong tendency towards the patriotic, nationalist sublime. He liked to immerse himself in vague seaimages, but he was also aware of being a citizen of an island nation for which the sea denoted wealth and power. So, for Swinburne, the Channel itself - the stretch of water and its shores - constitutes a space of ideological as well as natural turbulence. In this respect, Swinburne continues a distinct tradition in British accounts of Channel-crossing, a tradition in which his outstanding predecessor, as we have seen, is a writer whom he loved and wrote about, Charles Dickens. Dickens's finest trans-Manche essay, 'A Flight' dates from 1854, but it is worth remembering the excitement, humour, disorientation and mixed historical and political allusions of that text when we look at the crossChannel cultural world of the 1890s. It was actually in the 1850s that Swinburne himself - this primary nineties figure - first crossed the Channel. To be precise, it was on the night of 23 August 1855, when he travelled from Ostend, in the company of his uncle, Major General the Hon. Thomas Ashburnham. Swinburne was eighteen years old. Like the young Chateaubriand, he was lucky with the weather: they were caught in a spectacularly

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violent storm. 'Uncle Tom', says Swinburne, 'swore that he had never known anything like it outside the tropics'.24 This incident clearly made an enormous impression on Swinburne. He returns to it in various essays, and finally creates a full commemoration and celebration of the experience in the title poem of a collection called 'A Channel Passage' and Other Poems, published in 1899. The most obvious features of this poem are an effort to recreate spectacular atmospheric effects and an emphasis on the natural environment as a living entity that appears to echo human emotions. That makes it sound like an exercise in the pathetic fallacy, but it is all too exuberant to be pathetic. This is how it begins: Forth from Calais, at dawn of night, when sunset summer on autumn shone, Fared the steamer alert and loud through seas whence only the sun was gone: Soft and sweet as the sky they smiled, and bade man welcome: a dim sweet hour Gleamed and whispered in wind and sea, and heaven was fair as a field in flower, Stars fulfilled the desire of the darkling world as with music: the starbright air Made the face of the sea, if aught may make the face of the sea, more fair. Whence came change? Was the sweet night weary of rest? What anguish awoke in the dark? Sudden, sublime, the strong storm spake: we heard the thunders as hounds that bark. Lovelier if aught may be lovelier than stars, we saw the lightnings exalt the sky, Living and lustrous and rapturous as love that is born but to quicken and lighten and die.25 This is fairly typical of Swinburne's later output: writing that was hugely popular at the time, fell into critical oblivion (with most other Anglophone post-Romantic, pre-Modernist poetry) for much of the twentieth century, and which has only just recentiy become the object, once more, of serious appraisal.26 It is poetry that is overwhelmingly concerned with conveying rapturous moods through rich aural effects. It is not conspicuous, usually,

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for its intellectual content, and it can seem terribly repetitious and obsessive: as if Swinburne wants to say what is best about life all at once, and then over and over again. And that is precisely the principle that underlies much of his work: an enthusiastic synthesis of strong emotion, the peak of being human from his point of view, with natural phenomena. The ideal Swinburnian moment is one of passion in a turbulent environment, and above all in the absolute, undifferentiated turbulence of sea and sky, without petty details. To write in this way is to enact a kind of celebration of life, which, if it happens to work for you, is of course something that you want to do over and over again. And if you do wish to immerse yourself in turbulent nature, and to feed on the resulting emotions, the English Channel is a very good place to do it, just as Dieppe used to work well, as we have seen in the case of Symons, for much milder, more languid kinds of aesthetic experience. And consequently Swinburne returned to the Channel repeatedly, in the hope of reliving his 1855 epiphany. But he was also drawn there by the possibility of experiencing an echo of his own reactions, or even an intenser version of them, by entering the natural territory, as it seemed to him, of another great Channel writer, Swinburne's French counterpart, Victor Hugo. For Hugo, the Channel was the setting not only for a series of major writings - above all the great novel Les Travailleurs de la mer - but also for much of his own life. He lived in the Channel Islands, or the Channel Archipelago, as he calls it - I'Archipel de la Manche - from 1852 to 1870. In 1882 Swinburne came to Guernsey for a holiday. In a letter, he records his continued admiration for the physical environment of the Channel, but confirms, as he does so, the extent to which that environment is bound up with Hugo: [T]he sea, with its headlands like the Hebrides and its coves like South Cornwall, has surpassed itself here, though all this part of the channel is the crown and flower of all seas in the world for splendour of beauty as well as menace - being the most dangerous of them all, as my father who knew them all assured me, in confirmation of the old seaman's accuracy in Les Travailleurs de la Mer. I need it all, beauty and splendour and grandeur and miracle of renewed wonder of every line of the coast, to halfatone for the disappointment of the Master's absence when I have come for the second time, trusting in delusive assurances of his presence, to lay my homage at his feet.. ?

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The Channel and Victor Hugo seem virtually commensurate, for Swinburne: one is a geographical, atmospheric and scenic ideal, the other an ideal type of the artist. In this respect, Swinburne is actually returning a compliment that Hugo had paid to Shakespeare, whom he characterised in a long critical and biographical study as an 'homme-ocean' - a sea of a man, a human ocean, or both. This is probably the highest compliment that Hugo could bestow, since for him, as for Swinburne, the sea is just about the most wonderful thing that there is. 'Among Swinburne's metaphors/ as Murray Pittock observes, 'the sea shows the perpetual conquest of history by itself: the flux of multiple interior worlds, of love, politics and high passions.'28 And this was not just a literary device: in his own life, Swinburne sought this conflux of elements in the sea itself, as well as in the transcribed thoughts of Hugo, who found them in turn in Shakespeare. It is worth noting that Hugo's idea of Thomme-ocean', seen from mid-Channel, is explicitly in contrast with the exclusive, Anglocentric notion of Shakespeare as cultural prince of the 'precious stone set in the silver sea'. Hugo and Swinburne both adhered to an oceanic ideal in which nationalities are comparatively insignificant - and the Channel was a significant space in which to do this. Here is an example of what it was, in Hugo, that Swinburne thought was so powerful. It is from Les Travailleurs de la mer, and describes a fog which suddenly envelops a steam-boat on its way to Guernsey from Saint-Malo, and which leads it to its destruction on the rocks: Le brouillard s'etait developpe. II occupait maintenant pres de la moitie de l'horizon. II avan^ait dans tous les sens a la fois; il y a dans le brouillard quelque chose de la goutte d'huile. Cette brume s'elargissait insensible ment. Le vent la poussait sans hate et sans bruit. Elle prenait peu a peu possession de l'ocean. Elle venait du nord-ouest et le navire l'avait devant sa proue. C'etait comme une vaste falaise mouvante et vague. Elle se coupait sur la mer comme une muraille. II y avait un point precis ou l'eau immense entrait sous le brouillard et disparaissait.

[-] Quelques minutes apres, la Durande entrait dans le banc de brume. Ce hit un instant singulier. Tout a coup ceux qui etaient a 1'arriere ne virent plus ceux qui etaient a l'avant. Une molle cloison grise coupa en deux le bateau. Puis le navire entier plongea sous la brume. Le soleil ne fut plus qu'une espece de grosse lune. Brusquement, tout le monde grelotta. Les passagers 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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endosserent leur pardessus et les matelots leur suroit. La mer, presque sans un pli, avait la froide menace de la tranquillite. II semble qu'il y ait un sous-entendu dans cet exces de calme. Tout etait blafard et bleme. La cheminee noire et la fumee noire luttaient contre cette lividite qui enveloppait le navire.29 The fog had developed. It now occupied almost half of the horizon. It was advancing in all directions at once; there was something in the fog that suggested drops of oil. It expanded insensibly. The wind pushed it without haste and without noise. Little by little it took possession of the ocean. It came from the north-west, and lay before the prow of the boat. It was like a vast, moving, indistinct cliff. It came down on the sea like a wall. There was a precise point at which the vast waters passed under the fog and disappeared. A few minutes later, the Durande entered the bank of fog. It was a singular moment. Suddenly those who were at the rear could no longer see those at the front. A soft grey partition cut the boat in two. Then the whole vessel plunged into the mist. The sun was nothing more than a sort of enlarged moon. Abruptly, everyone shivered. The passengers put on their overcoats and the sailors their sou'westers. The sea, almost without a ripple, had the cold menace of tranquillity. It seemed as though there were an insinuation in that excess of calm. Everything was pallid and wan. The black chimney and the black smoke struggled against the lividness that enveloped the boat. It is not difficult to predict that this eerie evocation of the fog gradually appearing and overtaking the boat is just the false calm before a storm of extraordinary violence and splendour, and Swinburne was intoxicated by both of these things: the seductive lure of Hugo's writing and its explosiveness. Lured into recklessness, quite possibly, by reading too much Hugo, Swinburne once nearly drowned in the Channel: he had gone for a swim from an ill-chosen point on the French coast, and was suddenly swept two miles out. It is said (but one should note that this is too good to be absolutely true) that Guy de Maupassant, who did not know Swinburne but who just happened to be walking on the overlooking cliffs, considered diving in to rescue him, and got as far as taking off his boots, but by that time Swinburne

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had very luckily been picked up by some Norman fisherman, to whom he immediately recited a poem by Hugo.30 Victor Hugo was the English Channel for Swinburne, even though Hugo was not English. Reviewing another one of Hugo's novels, L'Homme qui rit, in 1869, Swinburne again describes his 1855 crossing, which reads as having involved something more like a marine volcano than a storm, what with 'the crackling and spluttering of the water-sparks' and the 'flaming floor of water'. But these passionate hyperboles, based on his own experience, also amount, he claims, to the best possible definition I can give of Victor Hugo's genius. And the impression of that hour was upon me the impression of his mind; physical, as it touched the nerves with a more vivid passion of pleasure than music or wine; spiritual, as it exalted the spirit with the senses and above them to the very summit of vision and delight.31 So much for the aesthetic, ecstatic, anti-nationalist side of Swinburne: the side that is happy to acknowledge a French 'king' of the English Channel. That is only half of the story; Swinburne had complex ideas about sovereignty. For instance, in the 1882 letter about Guernsey quoted earlier, he describes the Channel as 'the crown and flower of all seas'. Unremarkable in itself, this mixture of regal and botanical metaphors appears again in the 1899 poem 'A Channel Passage', where another steam ship in difficulties is described thus: In the dense mid channel the steam-souled ship hung hovering, assailed and withheld As a soul born royal, if life or death be against it, is thwarted and quelled.32 It would be easy to take Swinburne's allusion to royalty as just another hyperbolical flourish. The last line of the poem regrets that 'a rapture so royal may come not again in the passage of life'33 - where 'royal' seems a rather loose intensifier, suggesting, perhaps, the ennobling effects of an extreme and beautiful experience. But much can be gained by taking these allusions literally, and thus connecting the symbolist, or rapturous, or artfor-art's-sake aspects of the poem with issues of politics and national identity. For, especially in his later years, and above all around the fin de siecle,

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Swinburne was also the author of some explicitly patriotic poetry. This is generally not thought to be very good; even now it is the kind of Swinburne that is least anthologized and least discussed. But this is probably a mistake, because his nationalism is often intimately linked with his other qualities, not least through the ubiquitous subject of the sea. Here is an example of Swinburne's patriotic maritime mode, a poem called 'Trafalgar Day', written for the ninetieth anniversary of that battle, and thus of Nelson's death, in 1895: Sea, that art ours as we are thine, whose name Is one with England's even as light with flame, Dost thou as we, thy chosen of all men, know This day of days when death gave life to fame? Dost thou not kindle above and thrill below With rapturous record, with memorial glow, Remembering this thy festal day of fight, And all the joy it gave, and all the woe? Never since day brokeflowerlikeforth of night Broke such a dawn of battle. Death in sight Made of the man whose life was like the sun A man more godlike than the lord of light. There is none like him, and there shall be none. When England bears again as great a son, He can but follow fame where Nelson led. There is not and there cannot be but one. As earth has but one England, crown and head Of all her glories till the sun be dead, Supreme in peace and war, supreme in song, Supreme infreedom,since her rede was read, Sincefirstthe soul that gave her speech grew strong To help therightand heal the wild world's wrong, So she hath but one royal Nelson, born To reign ontimeabove the years that throng. 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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No year has yet put out the day when he Who lived and died to keep our kingship free Wherever seas by warring winds are worn Died, and was one with England and the sea.34 Here is the man who is still probably Britain's favourite military hero (and certainly was then) exalted even above Christ - 'more godlike than the lord of light' - and fused in his final apotheosis with the country of his birth and with the sea that surrounds it. Nelson's violent vocation becomes an expression of the kindling, thrilling waters of the Channel and its 'warring winds', and the sympathy between the man and the elements in turn constitutes a sense of national identity. So when we have taken on board this aspect of Swinburne's view of England and its watery perimeter it is perhaps not surprising to find that, in the essay on L'Homme qui rit, he accuses Hugo, for all his merits, of not really understanding the English. 'There are great Englishmen whom no man has praised more nobly than he' (a reference, probably, to Thomme-ocean', Shakespeare), but the spirit of historic England has no attraction for his. Hence [...] the spiritual and ingrained error of the book, seen only from its social or historic side. [...] Those for whom I write will know, and will see, that I do not write as a special pleader for a country or a class, as one who will see no spot in England or nobility. But indeed it is an abuse of words to say [as Hugo had] that England is governed or misgoverned by her aristocracy. A republican, studying where to strike, should read better the blazon on his enemy's shield. 'England,' I have heard it said, 'is not "a despotism tempered by epigrams," but a plutocracy modified by accidents.'35 The point, here, is that Hugo does not understand the function of English aristocracy, or the quality of English nobility. Hugo may have artistic sovereignty over the Channel, but how the waves are ruled in a political sense is a different question entirely. Swinburne is like Symons insofar as he enjoys an unprejudiced mingling of English and French culture in and 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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The music of his name puts fear to scorn, And thrills our twilight through with sense of morn: As England was, how should not England be? No tempest yet has left her banner torn.

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around the Channel, but he is also like Dickens insofar as his Channel is a scene of conflicting identities and suppressed political tension. It is also a scene of limited mutual understanding. His point is that Hugo does not know the English very well, but there is some justice in Campos's claim that there was ignorance on both sides: 'Swinburne's attitude to France was never more than "literary" in the worst sense of the word. He did not spend more than a few weeks there, and he assumed the knowledgeable pose of the English aristocrat on the subject/36 Here are the last lines of Swinburne's 'A Channel Passage': The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness fell: And the sea and the sky put off them the rapture and radiance of heaven and of hell. The waters, heaving and hungering at heart, made way, and were wellnigh fain, For the ship that had fought them, and wrestled, and revelled in labour, to cease from her pain. And an end was made of it: only remembrance endures of the glad loud strife; And the sense that a rapture so royal may come not again in the passage of life.37 So the 'royal' ship has survived. The 'tyranny' of the storm, which had elsewhere been seen as synonymous with the Frenchman's soul, has been resisted. The soul's ecstatic survival of the worst and best that life can throw at it may also be, for Swinburne the fan of Nelson, a small victory of England over France. Victor Hugo had his own strong ideas about the political significance of the Channel. His main interest was in the Channel Islands, which he regarded as having a very distinctive liminal status: partly English, partly French, partly Norman, and partly none of these. 'Les iles de la Manche', he writes, 'sont des Morceaux de France tombes dans la mer et ramasses par l'Angleterre' ('the Channel Islands are pieces of France fallen in the sea and gathered up by England'), but later in the same essay, which is a sort of nonfiction appendix to Les Travailleurs de la mer, he says that 'tous les archipels sont des pays fibres. Mysterieux travail de la mer et du vent' ('all archipelagos are free countries: a mysterious work of the sea and the wind').38 He notes that the Islands provide a pleasant refuge for the banished Frenchman

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- a way of getting away from France - but also that they preserve aspects of Frenchness that the mainland has lost. In Les Travailleurs de la mer itself Hugo is satirical about aspects of the English class system which have made their way to the Islands, and has Lethierry, an exceptionally impressive character, launch his innovative Channel steamboat on Bastille day, the 14th of July, addressing the sea with the words, 'C'est ton tour! les Parisiens ont pris la Bastille; maintenant nous te prenons, toi!' ('It's your turn! The Parisians took the Bastille; now we'll take you!').39 So Hugo's islands are in the sea, and part of a transnational culture and economy, but they also fluctuate perplexingly between being insidious bits of England and aggressive bits of France.40 THE CHANNEL: A VOID Thus far I have just touched on a few features of Les Travailleurs de mer as a means of exploring Hugo's relationship with Swinburne. But the novel has a great deal more, in itself, to say about the Channel; in fact, it may well be the single most original and powerful literary work to take the Channel as its setting, and, at least on an allegorical plane, as one of its major themes. Les Travailleurs is not a frequently read novel these days, even in France, and it may be as well to summarize the main facts of the narrative. They are as follows: Lethierry establishes his steamboat service, running between Guernsey and Saint-Malo; it is a great success, and very profitable. His boat, La Durande, is more important to him than anything else apart from his daughter, Deruchette. As a result of treachery on the part of one of Lethierry's employees, the boat runs aground on a notorious cluster of rocks, Les Douvres, some miles from the Channel Islands. The boat is fatally damaged but its irreplaceable engine survives, pinned on the remains of the boat between two pillars of rock, like the horizontal bar in the letter 'H' (for 'Hugo' as various critics have noted). A type of outcast and simpleton named Gilliatt (the equivalent, in his own way, of the hunchback in Notre Dame de Paris) takes upon himself the incredible task of rescuing the engine, without which Lethierry will be ruined. He undertakes this single-handed because he is an uncouth loner, because it is unlikely that anyone else would have the capacity to do it, and because Lethierry has said that whoever retrieves the engine may claim Deruchette's hand in marriage. (Gilliatt has been obsessed with Deruchette for a long time, and imagines that she loves him, since discovering, one winter, that she has written his name in the

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snow.) Gilliatt succeeds in his task after weeks of incessant, solitary struggle against inanimate matter, hunger and the elements, and after many chapters of Hugo's portentous, repetitive but still vastly imaginative reflections on the wider meaning of this struggle. Gilliatt brings the engine back to Guernsey and to an astonished Lethierry, only to discover than Deruchette is about to elope with the local priest. The priest prepares to give up Deruchette in respect for Lethierry's promise to Gilliatt, but the latter, discovering that Deruchette's supposed love for him was an illusion, gives her up, and facilitates her elopement with the priest. Having achieved what seemed the impossible, in overcoming nature (both external and his own), Gilliatt goes to sit in a natural throne of rock, at the edge of the sea, and allows himself to be slowly submerged, and drowned, by the tide. The most famous passage in the novel describes Gilliatt's battle with a giant octopus. It is certainly a terrifying incident, its unlikeliness rendered unimportant by the quasi-mythic force of Hugo's mise en scene (as though Gilliatt were Laocoon), but in fact it is not so extended or so momentous as Gilliatt's battles with the sea and the storm. La pieuvre is most frightening because it is an empty bag with tentacles, a sort of nothing, a sort of void insofar as it resembles, in other words, the meaningless apparent malice of the inanimate environment.41 It is the evil of vacuity; the denial, beyond all reason and emotion, of all that Gilliatt strives for: Gilliatt, lui, savait ce qu'il faisait; mais l'agitation de l'etendue l'obsedait confinement de son enigme. A son insu, mecaniquement, imperieusement, par pression et penetration, sans autre resultat qu'un eblouissement inconscient et presque farouche, Gilliatt reveur amalgamait a son propre travail le prodigieux travail inutile de la mer. Comment, en effet, ne pas subir et sonder, quand on est la, le mystere de l'effrayante onde laborieuse? Comment ne pas mediter, dans la mesure de ce qu'on a de meditation possible, la vacillation du flot, l'acharnement de l'ecume, l'usure imperceptible du rocher, l'epoumonement insense des quatre vents? Quelle terreur pour la pensee, le recommencement perpetuel, l'ocean puits, les nuees Danaides, toute cette peine pour rien! Pour rien, non. Mais, 6 Inconnu, toi seul sais pourquoi.42 Gilliatt knew what he himself was doing. But the turbulence around him obsessed him confusedly, as an enigma. Unknowingly, mechanically, imperiously, through pressure and penetration, without any other result 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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than an unconscious, almost savage dazzlement, Gilliatt, dreaming, confounded his own work with the prodigious, pointless work of the sea. How, indeed, could he not feel and absorb, being there, the mystery of the fearful toiling wave? How refrain from meditating, to the limits of his capacity for meditation, on the swelling of the water, the relentlessness of the breakers, the imperceptible wearing down of rocks, the demented cacophony of the winds? What terrors to contemplate: the endless repetition, the unfathomable ocean, the Sisyphean clouds, all that pain for nothing! No, not for nothing. But only you, 0 Unknown, know for what. The octopus is the ultimate expression of this destructive purposeless in nature, or of this temptation to think nature purposeless in the absence of a deity who is not the Unknown. (Michelet's 'grand Moi' is not present here.) And Gilliatt is a kind of octopus himself - all active limbs, all industry, all unseen achievement; but with a dreadful nothingness at the centre. He is motivated apparently by the desire to marry Deruchette, but this is a love that he does not even know how to experience as love: 'L'amour etait pour Gilliatt comme le miel pour Tours [...]. II pensait confinement. II ne savait ce qu'il avait' ('Love for Gilliatt was like honey for a bear [...]. His thoughts were confused. He did not what it was that he had').43 He is a figure of Homeric stature in his fortitude and industry - his battle with the elements is an 'Iliade a un' ('a solitary Iliad') - but he has none of the mentalflexibilityof an Odysseus. Indeed, in his tunnel-vision, he is more like a kind of Polyphemus: constructing a forge, ingeniously, in the midst of nowhere, 'Gilliatt sentit une fierte de cyclope, maitre de l'air, de l'eau et du feu' ('Gilliatt felt the pride of a Cyclops, master of air, water and fire').44 The Channel, as a space of ill-defined identity between organised, humanised realms, is exactly the scene in which Gilliatt can both fulfil himself and manifest his nonentity. The sea does not care. It is inhuman. All seas are like this but the Channel, Hugo implies, is especially so. Lethierry has seen many seas, but, relishing adversity with much more self-consciousness and eloquence than Gilliatt, loves the Channel best: 'C'est celle-la qui est rude!' ('She [or it] is the tough [or fierce] one!').45 But Lethierry succeeds in nullifying the Channel, in a sense, by virtue of his steam-boat service: turning a barrier into a passage. The Channel takes revenge, but Gilliatt overcomes it, restoring the boat and the possibility of making a crossing. Lethierry himself could not do this, so his continued mastery of the sea is dependent on the

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wordless man of toil. But that man is not a crosser, not a mobile soul. He does not go across the Channel, least of all with others, or to his own profit. He is fixed in the Channel, finding his apotheosis with no sentient being, only seabirds, to watch him. He performs a miracle in briefly constructing a workshop on a rock, in the midst of nothing - 'le chaos en magasin' ('a stock of chaos')46 - but he does it for another's benefit, only dimly imagining that he does it to bring about for himself a happiness that proves to be without content. He is a void within a marvellously functional anatomy within a void, the unreal within the real within the unreal: a man without a bridge to others, or across the chasm between his ill-formed desires and their realisation. And consequently the Channel comes to take revenge on him for facilitating Lethierry's triumph over it - receiving him, finally, a Timon without the wit to hate, into its loneliness. Many things might be said about the character of Gilliatt in relation to Victor Hugo himself. In some ways, they are opposites. Gilliatt can barely communicate with others, and rarely tries; Hugo was an inexhaustible word machine. Gilliatt's life is a tragedy of unrealised desire; Hugo was both a sentimental paterfamilias and a sex-addict who seems to have seduced or paid for a new woman every few days. Gilliatt dies and is forgotten; Hugo was one of the most celebrated and influential men of the nineteenth century. But close examination of Hugo's life, most biographers agree, reveals incoherence behind much of the oratory, paranoia behind the egotism, and isolation behind the carnal insatiability. Hugo was a wonderful but very difficult man; a void, contained, like Gilliatt's, by phenomenal energy although in his case the energy was intellectual as well as physical. Hugo's long years of solitary dominion on an island in the Channel were not merely the result of political conflict, therefore. His appropriation of the ambiguous space between France and its old enemy was also a kind of dark self-fulfilment. If Swinburne had actually found Hugo on his island home, he might not have encountered quite the spiritual companionship that he seems to have wished for. As some of Swinburne's own judgements imply, it might have been more like trying to swap ideas with the sea. FRACTURED AESTHETICISM Victor Hugo's interest in the Channel stops in the middle. Lethierry's steamer runs between Saint-Malo and Guernsey, not to England. Hugo

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seems to have needed the space that the Channel provided; one mainland would have been as confining as the other. For most writers, however, the Channel has been a transitory experience, and an experience of transition: it is more significant as a kind of membrane between two more or less dissimilar spheres of action, than as a thing with its own substance and extent. Such may be said of Paul Verlaine, for example, who made the crossing several times, under significantly varying circumstances: first, in the company of Rimbaud, as a poor poete maudit, then as an itinerant schoolteacher, and finally as a lecture-giving literary celebrity. This is Verlaine's poem based on a Dieppe-Newhaven crossing, 'Souvenir du 19 novembre 1893'. Note its uneven rhythm, like a choppy sea, and its thematic resemblance to the poem by Gautier with which this chapter began: Mon coeur est gros comme la mer, Qui s'exile de l'etre cher! Gros comme elle et plus qu'elle amer.

My heart is great like the sea, As I leave my beloved behind me, As great and more bitter than she!

Ma tete est comme la tempete, Elle est folle et forte, ma tete, Plus qu'elle, effrenee, inquiete...

My head is like the tempest In which madness and power are expressed, And yet less contained, more distressed...

Furieuse et triste d'avoir Ce doux et douloureux devoir De m'exiler au pays noir...

Both sad and impatient At this sweet, sorrowful occasion, As I exile myself to a dark nation...

Mais puisqu'il le faut pour ma reine, Embarquons d'une ame sereine, Et fi de toute crainte vaine!

But since I must for my queen Let us embark with soul serene, And fie upon the fears that demean!

Ah! quoi que fasse le bateau Ivre des coleres de l'eau Qui tantot s'erige en tombeau,

Yes! Whatever mood the boat should assume, Drunk with the sea's furious gloom, That builds itself up, like a tomb,

Tantot se creuse, affreuse fosse, Embarquons sans nulle peur

Or sinks so, the terrible ditch, We embark with no insincere wish,

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Au del ou s'abime en l'enfer Le bateau douloureux et fier Moins que mon coeur, moins que la mer! Or, je pars pour ma souveraine Et reviendrai l'ame sereine, Charge pour cette douce reine De diamants, de perles, d'ors! Et berce, mer, en tes bras forts, Et revant de tresors, je dors.47

With no deceitful fears! Let it pitch To heaven or plunge into hell, This sorrowful, arrogant shell: Less than my heart, less than the swell! But I go for my sovereign, To return with soul serene, Freighted for that sweet queen With diamonds, with pearls and with gold! And cradled, sea, in your arms that enfold, I sleep, and in sleeping, more treasures behold.

It is not surprising that this poem expresses many of the same generalised aesthetic/decadent conventions that were apparent in the Theophile Gautier poem at the beginning of this chapter. For example: the sea as a reservoir of emotion, capable of expressing exultation and horror, love and death; the cross-Channel voyage, from south to north, as a kind of dark trial for the bright-souled poet to undergo; the adored but faceless woman as ordaining this dolefully rapturous undertaking. But it is more remarkable, perhaps, that both poems end with such similar images: involving the collection of treasure: Gautier's 'coupe d'or' and Verlaine's 'tresors'. Gautier and Verlaine both seem to offer us a type of quest-narrative, in fact, in which the trials undertaken for the lady whom their speakers serve may culminate in the discovery of something fine and beautiful, a secular grail. However, Verlaine's cross-Channel experiences also gave rise to a much less exuberant product, a very strange little poem in English, called 'In the Refreshment Room': I'm bor'd immensely In this buffet of Calais Supposing to be, me, your lover Loved - if, true? - you are please

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fausse, Sans nul regret menteur! Se hausse

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But what is morrow for me? I start to-morrow to London. For your sake, it, then, suddenly That sadness, so heavy, falls down.® According to V. P. Underwood, author of a book on Verlaine and England, this poem 'betrays once and for all the incompetence of Verlaine, grown old, in English language and prosody. These "verses", which more than one admirer of Verlaine has taken seriously, lack rhythm, rhyme, and almost sense',. The greater part of the poem translates 'literally, but not idiomatically, the French expressions in the poet's mind'.49 This raises important questions of intentionality and value. What difference does it make, exactly, whether Verlaine says what he means here? The poem is clearly concerned with issues of separation and depression, and it is difficult to imagine that a more coherent expression would have made these concerns more tangible. As it is, Verlaine alludes to an emotional dislocation involved in crossing the Channel, and illustrates it through what he must have known was a bizarre and alienated handling of the language of the Channel's other side. Whereas Swinburne seems to try to make the Channel whole and meaningful by identifying himself with the sea, and with Hugo (thereby undoing, for a while, the opposition of English and French), Verlaine here shows us a contrary possibility: the Channel as a rupture between intelligible worlds, bringing frustration and insecurity. This way of looking at the Channel, as a mirror or exacerbator of crises of identity and afflictions of the heart, is already lurking in the '19 novembre' poem ('Ma tete est comme la tempete'...), and indeed in the poem by Gautier ('Ma tristesse avide se noie'...). It both grows out of the real trans-Manche experiences of these poets and is part of a cultivated morbidity which distinguishes much French literature of this period and which held what many commentators took to be an unhealthy allure for ensuing generations of writers - not least in England. One such impressionable Dorian Gray was Rupert Brooke, who in 1907 produced his own 'Channel Passage', characterised by a tone that could hardly be more different from the euphoria of Swinburne's poem of the same

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To weep in my absence (Which) aggravated a telegram Tiresome where I count and count My own bores for your sake.

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The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew I must think hard of something, or be sick; And could think hard of only one thing - you\ You, you alone could hold my fancy ever! And with your memories come, sharp pain, and dole. Now there's a choice - heartache or tortured liver! A sea-sick body, or a you-sick soul! Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me, Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw. Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy, The sobs and slobber of a last year's woe. And still the sick ship rolls. 'Tis hard, I tell ye, To choose 'twixt love and nausea, heart and belly.50 The Channel, by this point in literary history, has almost become a cliched image for young lives in an emotional trough, and love-sickness that is no more ennobling than an intestinal upset. ANTICIPATED ANTICLIMAX The Channel Tunnel was not opened until May 1994. But, as everybody knows, this was the culmination of many decades of discussion and planning. In fact, the notion of a Channel Tunnel first arose at the time of Napoleon, but the plan that was presented to him was unfeasible. Later in the nineteenth century, while Swinburne and Hugo were conducting their territorial manoeuvres, it was seen as a very real possibility in certain quarters. In fact, a great deal of investigation into various types of fixed crossing by engineers on both sides of the Channel - especially Thome de Gamond in France between the 1830s and 60s and Sir John Hawkshaw in Britain between the 1860s and 80s - brought about a state of affairs in which the Tunnel could really have been built, in all probability, more than a hundred years before it actually came to pass. This is where politics stepped

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name, and that certainly betrays the influence of a flamboyant French despondency:

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

in, inaugurating a ponderous sequence of arguments and counter-arguments, most of which can be reduced, in essentials, to the opposite positions adumbrated in 1882 by two British Lieutenants-General, the AdjutantGeneral, Sir Garnet Wolseley, and the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, Sir John Adye. As the historian Keith Wilson puts it, 'Where Wolseley saw a tunnel as a bait tempting France to invade, Adye saw one as a way of so cementing Anglo-French relations as to remove that temptation altogether.'51 These were at once genuine reasons - which many have since shared - and the more or less unconscious covers, as Wilson argues, for broader geopolitical inclinations, either to unite the idea of Britain with that of the rest of Europe or to keep them strictly apart. The political stakes of the Tunnel, in nineteenth-century Britain, are indicated quite effectively by a minor poem from 1883. This is 'Folkestone Cliff, by Ernest James Myers, which comes with the explanatory note, 'When a tunnel under the English Channel was planned': 'Let there be Sea,' God said, and there was Sea; And in the midst thereof an Island set, Wherein the roving strength of nations met, And reared a rugged fortress of the free. 'Take back thy Sea,' men say, if men they be Who thus their fathers' perilous years forget, Nor reck the gathering thunder-cloud, which yet Looms large from many an envious tyranny. Gropers for gold, come forth! Let be awhile The stifling dark of your disloyal mine: Here where no feverish fumes the sense beguile, Where reinless waves race by in endless line, Here stand! Behind you lies the guarded Isle, And on your brows beats free the guardian brine.52 There is a latent fantasy of destruction here. Myers's phrase 'disloyal mine' combines tunnel and bomb in one word. The engineers, as well as being base materialists, are like latter-day conspirators in a Gunpowder Plot, threatening to explode British authority and freedom. Following a familiar Francophobic stereotype, they have been intoxicated by the 'feverish fumes' of a wine-drinking rival nation. Myers is clearly worried: to him, the

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undermining of the Channel suggests the jeopardising of a national glory that is implicitly a little fragile, certainly not invulnerable. It is unlikely that a Channel Tunnel would have been effective as a first point of invasion at any point in history, despite the fears of Myers and many others - but one can imagine it being used as a rapid means of reinforcement, if Folkestone, say, should already have been secured by sea- or air-born hostile forces. So it would be wrong to ridicule the strategic reasons that underlay nineteenth-century (and later) opposition to the project, even if these were clothed in unpleasantly jingoistic or xenophobic cliches. We have the Tunnel now, but, amongst other reasons, that is probably because the strategic objections no longer apply, in an age of intercontinental missiles. One can only wonder whether constructing the Tunnel sooner would really have brought disaster or might have helped, just a little, to make Europe's twentieth-century history less appalling. One consequence of the long gestation of the fixed link has certainly been to stimulate imaginations. Tunnels and bridges across the Channel were constructed and explored in great detail in people's minds, long before anything practical materialised. Jules Verne, the nineteenth century's most celebrated European hypothecator of our technological futures, does not appear to have written about the Channel, but his son Michel was the author of a short but striking story on the subject which appeared under the heading 'Zigzags a travers la science' ('Zigzags across science') in the Supplement litteraire of Le Figaro in 1888. Set optimistically in the very near future, on 25 September '189-', Verne's narrative describes a Channel crossing by rail. At the beginning of the story, the narrator sets off from Boulogne on a journey to London which he expects to take three and a half hours, 'including one hour for the crossing of the celebrated thirty-seven kilometre bridge which, for three years now, has linked France and England'. The traveller is not particularly concerned, at first, with the technology. In fact, he is more interested in the attractive co-occupant of his compartment, whom he identifies as '[u]ne de ces jeunes misses, sans doute, qui courent l'Europe en gargon' ('one of those young misses who run around Europe as if they were boys').53 He thinks that she is probably English. But she is engrossed in her book, so the sense of romantic possibility is not overwhelming. Sixteen kilometres from the English coast - in other words, roughly midChannel - the train succumbs to a technical difficulty, and comes to a halt. The narrator, anticipating some delay, decides to get out and stroll for a while on the bridge, despite thick fog (a perennial and very real concern for

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would-be cross-Channel bridge-builders). Finding himself in this extraordinary, unprecedented space, suspended far above the sea, unable to see either coast, he falls into a reverie. Such is his state of sublime transcendence or foggy alienation that he fails to notice the train start up and leave without him. Very much a flaneur, he takes this development in his languid stride, especially when it turns out that his hitherto taciturn fellow passenger has detrained as well. And she turns out to be exactly the person to have around in these remarkable circumstances. She proves, in fact, to have an encyclopaedic grasp of the technical specifications of the bridge, is very cool, pretty much in charge, and - contrary to the narrator's earlier assumption - she is American. 'C'est un puits de science, cette jeune fille! Et, en verite, regarder au fond de ce puits n'aurait rien de positivement desagreable!' ('She was a well of knowledge, this girl! And, to be honest, peering into the depths of that well was not wholly disagreeable!). This is as saucy as the story gets. Verne (like all other authors, it appears) eschews the conceivable plotdevelopment of mid-Channel canoodling, while carefully deploying the hint that something of that kind has crossed the narrator's mind. It is important precisely that these sketchy fantasies do not become realised. The girl, a Georgina Waterford of New York, takes charge, and leads the march to England. She is a New Woman, it appears, and more specifically a new sort of All-American Girl, who has been wandering around Europe by herself for some time. She had originally expected that she would be accompanied by another individual, but he or she (sex thus far unspecified) cried off, because of a cold. Miss Waterford herself would clearly not have been stopped by a cold. It seems unlikely that she would have allowed a cold to approach her in the first place. She is all efficiency and mild disdain. The male narrator, in fact, is the only person here who has qualities that might, to Verne's readers, have seemed more conventionally feminine: susceptibility, dreaminess, a wondering poetic heart: Une clarte eblouissante m'aveugle soudain. A chaque pilier un puissant reflecteur electrique s'est allume, semant la mer de charretees d'etincelles. A droite, a gauche, immense serpent de fer, le pont deroule des anneaux enflammes. C'est feerique. Petrifie d'admiration, je reste immobile. - Que c'est beau! m'ecriai-je. - Oui, pas mal, me repond, avec une moue dedaigneuse, miss Georgina. Mais c'est entre l'Amerique et l'lrlande qu'il faudrait construire un pont.

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A dazzling light suddenly blinded me. On each pillar a powerful electrical reflector lit up, sowing the sea with thousands of sparkles. To the right and to the left, like a great serpent of fire, the bridge extended its flaming curves. It was magical. Frozen with wonder, I stood motionless. 'How beautiful!' I exclaimed. 'Yes, not bad', said Miss Georgina, with a disdainful moue. 'But what we really need is a bridge from America to Ireland.' This, she reckons, would cost a billion (currency unspecified). There is not much that the narrator can say to all of this. The romantic possibilities have vanished. Georgina and he are entirely unlike. He seems rooted in the mid-nineteenth century, and for him the bridge is a miracle of the age. She is already vaulting imaginatively into the twentieth century (or beyond), and is weary of the feeble achievements of the present. They silently agree to differ, and continue the walk to England. When they reach the shore they are met by a phlegmatic young man who scarcely lives up to his chivalric name, Percival, or to his challenging status (one might think) as Georgina's fiance. He shows only the vaguest concern about Georgina's mode of crossing the Channel, or about her wanderings in general. -

Quand avez-vous quitte Paris? demandait Percival. II y a trois mois, repondit Georgina. Trois mois! qu'avez-vous done fait? Le tour du monde. Et vous, depuis mon depart de New York? Moi? J'ai gueri mon rhume.

'When did you leave Paris?' asked Percival. 'Three months ago,' answered Georgina. 'Three months! What have you been doing?' 'Circling the globe. And you, since I left New York?' 'Me? I have got over my cold.' On this note of bathos the story ends. Percival's nationality is never explicitly stated, but his demeanour (and name) seem stereotypically English. We have two European men in this story, therefore, and one American woman. The woman is the dynamic component. The men are ineffectual and static, fixed respectively by 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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hypochondria and susceptibility of spirit. They are fixed also by a sense of being stunned by modernity: by modern femininity and modern technology together. The Channel has a long history, as we have seen, as a space of symbolic uncertainty and weakness between Britain and France. The question of who is sovereign, who is at home, is moot - especially when, as in Verne's rather brilliant conceit, a French or English person is caught right in the middle of it. It seems powerfully significant, therefore, even within the context of this brief and light short story, that it is the representative of a third nation who is seen to be at ease in the Channel - to the point of boredom.54

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During the first decades of the twentieth century the status of the Channel in the wider European social picture changed radically, like so many other aspects of European life. Travel back and forth between Britain and France became a mass activity. In 1925, with the attraction of major exhibitions in both London and Paris, the annual total of travellers passing through the ports of Calais and Boulogne exceeded one million for the first time. Clearly, these were not all poets, ambassadors and aristocrats: cross-Channel travel had become accessible to a wide spectrum of social classes. And, despite the devastating interruptions of two World Wars, the democratisation of the Channel has continued ever since. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, travel between France and Britain, by one means or another, is affordable to almost anyone: some make the crossing just to buy groceries, and find this cost-effective. The very rich may isolate themselves in thousand-pound-a-night hotels, once they get to Paris or London, but this is less significant than the fundamental luxury (as it used to be) of travelling abroad at all, and, while a few of them will still reach their destination in an exclusive manner, in private or corporate jets, the majority are likely to recognise that Eurostar is even more convenient: offering, not the grandiloquent, self-defining luxury of the extremely wealthy individual, but the even greater collective investment and technological power that only whole societies can provide. These changes have had large consequences for the literature of the Channel. Personal descriptions of crossings, dutifully recording the basic features of the journey, will not be of much interest when so many are familiar with these details from their own experience. Similarly, accounts of France for the British or of Britain for the French can no longer be composed as though they document a remote, exotic race. It is more difficult, now, to surprise the reader, or (happily) to get away with stereotypes. The region of the Channel has become more generally transnational than it used to be, and literature has had to keep pace with this, imagining new Channels for a more

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complex and mobile world. Throughout most of its history, there has only been one practicable way of getting across the Channel: in some sort of boat. Blanchard and Jeffries demonstrated in 1785 that ballooning was a possible alternative, but it was not one that was ever likely to be safe or agreeable for the general traveller. In the course of the twentieth century, however, a wide range of other means appeared. It gradually became possible to cross by ship, by hovercraft, by catamaran, by train, by car (in theory; through the Channel Tunnel's central service tunnel), and in aircraft of many different types and sizes. Even swimming across, which before Captain Matthew Webb's heroic first performance of 1875 had been reckoned to exceed human capabilities, is now fairly routine: in 1974, the feat was repeated by a girl of thirteen.1 All of this has meant the diminution of the Channel's status as an obstacle, but it has also brought new ways to experience and celebrate the Channel. The great number of attempted and successful solo crossings, since Webb, testifies to the fact that the Channel remains an interesting phenomenon: a marked territory, a place in which heroic acts will be all the more conspicuous, a sort of natural stadium which may be fancied (Eurocentrically) to have the eyes of the world upon it. Even the collective feat of finally completing the Channel Tunnel can be seen in this light: the unprecedented act of two nations, taking place (as if fortuitously) in a geography already long associated with the execution and display of exceptional deeds. It was Western Europe's modest and belated answer, one might say, to America's landing on the Moon - although there is a lot of truth in Julian Barnes's claim that the Tunnel 'is the ultimate nineteenth-century project', and so, like Michel Verne's Channel bridge story, it might be taken to reveal that Europe was not quite up to speed, for the 'American Century'.2 The new technologies, such as they are, that account for most of the new ways of getting across the Channel have also changed its political status. The twentieth century saw the Channel used for the greatest military invasion in world history - the Normandy Landings of 1944 - and now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the logistical consequences of the Tunnel are complicatedly entangled with real steps towards a possibility that Victor Hugo could only call for in a Utopian manner, as something lying in the dim future: the unification of Europe, through which the Channel, already physically undermined, might even more be rendered obsolete. So, to take proper account of the modern cultural status of the Channel we need to consider it in terms of celebration, but also of exploitation and negation.

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When Louis Bleriot flew from Calais to Dover in 1909 he won £1000 for himself (from the Daily Mail) and a new level of respect for the possibilities of air travel. More generally, he reasserted the Channel's status as a testing ground for exciting new technologies that might facilitate friendly exchange between nations. At the same time, however, his crossing starkly exposed the declining efficacy of the Channel as a barrier to more hostile incursions. And indeed, the Channel was soon to be churned up by military actions that, thanks to new technologies, were far more destructive than any that had preceded them. There is not as much about the Channel in the literature of the First World War as one might expect. This is despite the fact that for so many young British men, crossing the Channel was the journey between all that they knew and loved, and the unfamiliar and terrifying places where they would very likely die. Rupert Brooke was one of those who would not survive the war, and the first lines of his 'Channel Passage' of 1909 seem dreadfully prophetic: The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew I must think hard of something, or be sick But this poem, as we have seen, proves to be about frustrated love. Brooke did not know what this pre-war crossing foreshadowed. Nor, for that matter, did many of those who crossed in wartime know how likely it was that this trip would be their last, how absolute a difference those two or three dozen miles of water would make. Brooke died of blood-poisoning on the way to the Dardanelles in 1915. Wilfred Owen, on the other hand, survived almost until the end of the Great War, and had time to observe and reflect much more. Something of the ambiguous significance of the Channel, for the British soldier, comes across in 'A New Heaven': Seeing we never found gay fairyland (Though still we crouched by bluebells moon by moon) And missed the tide of Lethe; yet are soon For that new bridge that leaves old Styx half-spanned;

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- Let's die home, ferry across the Channel! Thus Shall we live gods there. Death shall be no sev'rance. Weary cathedrals light new shrines for us. To us, rough knees of boys shall ache with rev'rence. Are not girls' breasts a clear, strong Acropole? - There our own mothers' tears shall heal us whole.3 I do not think that Owen's speakers (plural, although in unison) really mean to die on English land. There is the shadow of a thought of getting back there, wounded, and recovering, but it is only a shadow: the last line speaks of healing, but those that immediately precede it indicate that this will be a spiritual healing, after death. And this post-mortuary healing then casts a melancholy doubt over other parts of the poem: so that the trip home, across the Channel, becomes a journey in spirit, which leaves bodies behind on the Continent. In fact, one might go further, and say that the tone of the poem, in the end, is mocking (those aching knees - and are girl's breasts an 'Acropole'?), despite its moments of solemnity ('Death shall be no sev'rance'), and that perhaps this is the voice (single, and embittered) of someone who feels that he will never make the crossing, in the flesh, again, and for whom the possibility of being mourned, on the other side, is darkly ironic, and not consolatory. Not that these shades exclude a happier reading of the poem: faith or escapism, and self-mockery or despair, seem to co-exist here, jointly expressing an impossibly demanding (and, as it turned out, unsurvivable) predicament. The most enigmatic line in the poem is 'For that new bridge that leaves old Styx half-spanned'. The Styx of the Ancients is the Channel that separates the newly dead from the Underworld. For these men to be crossing the Styx, therefore - even by bridge - indicates the imminence of their death. But why only half-way? A possible meaning is that there is nothing in the modern view of the world with which Owen is working that corresponds to the clear transition, in the Classical world, from one state of being to another. The death that faces Owen fails to achieve secure significance: whether in the terms of any of the eclectic religious and fantastical narratives stirred up in

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Nor ever unto Mecca caravanned; Nor bugled Asgard, skilled in magic rune; Nor yearned for far Nirvana, the sweet swoon, And from high Paradise are cursed and banned;

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thefirsteight lines, or in the homely English consolations of the last six. The Styx-crossing, therefore, echoes the unreality of the address to the Channel ferry (Charon was a ferryman), and Owen leaves us with (amongst other possibilities) the sad picture of men who are stranded between one crossing (by the Channel, from home) that can never be undone, and another (by the Styx, or any other channel of the spirit) that can never be accomplished. Owen's way of using the Channel emphasises a profound way in which the experiences of the British and the French are divided in the First World War (and in the Second), even though, at last, these two nations were 'on the same side'. If one thinks of the Channel, French combatants were on their own side; the British had crossed. There is no reason, therefore, for twentieth-century French writers to represent the Channel as the Styx. On the contrary, to contemplate the Channel, for them, is to look away from war and death. Here is Colette, at the beginning of an important period as war correspondent, writing for Le Matin about what it was like to be in SaintMalo in August 1914: La guerre?... Jusqu'a la fin du mois dernier, ce n'etait qu'un mot, enorme, barrant les journaux assoupis de l'ete. La guerre? Peut-etre, oui, tres loin, de l'autre cote de la terre, mais pas ici... Comment imaginer que l'echo meme d'une guerre putfranchirces rochers, farouches uniquement pour que semblent plus doux, a leurs pieds, la vague, le gazon maris clairseme, le chevrefeuille, le sable gaufre par la petite serre des oiseaux... Ce paradis n'etait point fait pour la guerre, mais pour nos breves vacances, pur notre solitude. Les recifs caches sous la mer n'y veulent point de barque; l'epervier vigilant en bannit les oiseaux. Chaque jour, vers l'heure de midi, il montait au del et tardait a redescendre; notre jumelle marine le decouvrait tres haut, large ouvert, appuye sur le vent, et son bel ceil brulant ne regardait pas la terre... C'etait pourtant la guerre [...] Comment oublierais-je cette heure-la? Quatre heures, un beau jour viole d'ete marin, les remparts dores de la vieille ville debout devant une mer verte sur la plage, bleue a 1'horizon, - les enfants en maillots rouges quittent le sable pour le gouter et remontent les rues etranglees... Et du milieu de la cite tous les vacarmes jaillissent a la fois [...] Les details de cette heure me sont penibles et necessaires, comme ceux d'un reve, que je voudrais ensemble quitter et poursuivre avidement.

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Un reve, un reve... De plus en plus, un reve: car a mesure que je m'eloigne de la ville, que je retourne vers les campagnes que balaie l'aile effaree des tocsins, ces pres, ces moissons, cette mer endormie ne sont plus qu'un decor, interpose entre moi et la realite [...] Sera-ce ma plus longue soiree de la guerre, celle que je passe encore ici dans l'attente du depart, celle ou le calme plat renverse, dans la mer, l'image des rochers violets? Toute la nuit la mer se tait, sans pli, sans souffle, et balance a peine, toutes ombrelles epanouies dans un phosphore laiteux, des meduses de cristal bleu ...4 The war? Until the end of last month, it was nothing but a word, enormous, stretching across the pages of the lethargic newspapers of summer. The war? Yes, perhaps, very far away, on the other side of the world, but not here... How could anyone imagine that even the echo of war could make its way through these rocky ramparts, forbiddingly wild, the wildness accentuating the quiet calm at the foot of the cliffs - the waves, the sparse dune grass, the sand embossed by the tiny claws of birds...? This paradise was not made for war, but for our brief holidays, for our solitude. The reefs hidden beneath the sea are unfriendly to boats; the vigilant sparrow hawk has almost banished birds from these parts. Every day he climbs the sky and is slow to return to land; our field-glasses discovered him on high, wings widespread and pressing against the wind, and his beautiful glowing eye did not gaze down at the earth... Yet a war was on, there were signs of war. [...] How can I ever forget that hour? Four o'clock on a beautiful summer day at the seaside, the sky misted over, the golden-yellow ramparts of the old town facing the sea, which near the shore was green but on the horizon was blue - the children in red bathing-suits leaving the beach for their teatime snack, and climbing the choked streets... And in the centre of town, the uproar bursts forth all at once [...] The details of that hour hurt me and are necessary, like the details of a dream that I would like both to leave and avidly to pursue. A dream, a dream. More and more a dream, since the farther I go from town, the closer I come to the countryside, which is being swept by the startled wing of the tocsins. And these fields, these harvests, that drowsing sea are no more than a stage setting interposed between me and reality [...] Will it be my longest evening of the war, the one I am spending here, 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Saint-Malo was not destroyed until the following war, when General Patton showered it with incendiaries under the mistaken impression that it was full of Germans. It has since been meticulously reconstructed, and it is easy to believe, with Colette, that this is a place that has nothing to do with war - its ramparts just for show. Her interpretation of the scene on that August evening is like a knowingly doomed attempt to make the dreamy, aesthetic, benignly irresponsible life of the French Channel coast of thefinde siecle last just a littie longer, as though life might still be devoted to the appreciation of colour: yellow ramparts, the green and blue sea, the children in red. And yet, Colette also manages to convey a violence stirring even in the natural scene. The hostile reefs and the watchful sparrow hawk seem at first to be protective - they represent the self-enclosed tranquillity of the town, but it is a defensiveness that also seems aggressive - and perhaps Colette is hinting at a knowledge that Saint-Malo is not necessarily such a peaceful place. After all, looking out to sea she would have seen the tomb of Chateaubriand (a man at war in his own mind, at least), and this is also the port from which Hugo's Lethierry and Gilliatt launch their titanic assaults on the adversarial sea. Saint-Malo, moreover, has a dark history of swash-buckling criminality: this is the home of the corsaires.6 And, walking around the ramparts, one will soon come across the statue of Robert Surcouf, second only to Chateaubriand as a local hero, a great despoiler of English shipping in tiie earlier Napoleonic years, who stands on his pedestal pointing directly and urgently towards the British naval base at Portsmouth, with his other hand on his scabbard, and his eyes sweeping the town with bellicose enthusiasm - fiercely watchful, like Colette's hawk.7 Colette may well have been aware of all of this, but she understandably wished that Saint-Malo might be, and might continue to be, what it seemed on that particular holiday evening. The 'reality' to which she refers turns out to be in Paris - and she is soon on her way there to participate fully in the challenges of the war, but not before registering this impression of the town by the sea, where history and politics seem to be held at bay. It is an important part of this impression that it has no particular national overtones. There is nothing here about Saint-Malo as a French or, for that matter, a Breton

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waiting to leave, this evening when the dead calm drops the image of the purple cliffs down into the sea? All night long the sea is quiet, without a wrinkle, without a breath of life, imperceptibly swaying all the umbrellas of the crystal blue jellyfish open in a milky phosphorescence ...5

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town: in its peaceful state it seems beyond distinctions of that kind. Many who were subsequently caught up in the worst of the Great War could also see the merit of an overcoming of nationalist pretensions. Charles Hamilton Sorley was among these, finding time, before being killed in the trenches at the age of 20, to look forward to a less murderously divisive age: England - 1 am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy, that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling 'imaginative indolence' that has marked us out from generation to generation. [...] Indeed I think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth.8 In the event, the Great War brought about no such fundamental transformation in the structure of the world or in the ways in which people of different nations regarded one another. The war was barely over before Britain was making plans for the next one - in which, in the view of many, the primary opponent would be just as likely to be the French as the Germans.9 Acknowledgement that we are all strangers and pilgrims was not on the agenda. In the Second World War, collective effort, in Britain and elsewhere, was fuelled by national pride, by the robust assertion of inherited attributes, and by the invocation of heroic historical precedents. And in Britain's case, geography, too, was made to seem splendidly complicit in the national defiance. Take the great detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, for example, whose poem 'The English War' was written in 1940, and published in the Times Literary Supplement in the following year: Praise God, now, for an English war The grey tide and the sullen coast, The menace of the urgent hour, The single island, like a tower, Ringed with an angry host. This is the war that England knows, When all the world holds but one man King Philip of the galleons, Louis, whose light outshone the sun's, The conquering Corsican;

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When Europe, like a prison door, Clangs; and the swift, enfranchised sea Runs narrower than a village brook; And men who love us not, yet look To us for liberty; When no allies are left, no help To count upon from alien hands, No waverers remain to woo, No more advice to listen to, And only England stands. This is the war we always knew, When every county keeps her own, When Kent stands sentry in the lane, And Fenland guards her dyke and drain, Cornwall, her cliffs of stone; When from the Cinque Ports and the Wight, From Plymouth Sounds and Bristol Town, There comes a noise that breaks our sleep, Of the deep calling to the deep Where the ships go up and down, And near and far across the world Hold open wide the water-gates, And all the tall adventurers come Homeward to England, and Drake's drum Is beaten through the Straits. This is the war that we have known And fought in every hundred years, Our sword, upon the last, steep path, Forged by the hammer of our wrath On the anvil of our fears. Send us, 0 God, the will and power To do as we have done before;

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And send, 0 God, the English peace Some sense, some decency, perhaps Some justice, too, if we are able, With no sly jackals round our table, Cringing for blood-stained scraps; No dangerous dreams of wishful men Whose homes are safe, who never feel The flying death that swoops and stuns, The kissing of the curtseying guns Slavering their streets with steel; No dreams, Lord God, but vigilance, That we may keep, by might and main, Inviolate seas, inviolate skies; But, if another tyrant rise, Then we shall fight again.10 There is something a little unhinged about this poem - another tyrant? already? in 1940? surely Britain has problems enough? - but it must certainly have been inspirational for many readers. The Channel, 'the swift enfranchised sea', may seem narrow with Axis forces on the opposing shore, but it still functions as a mark of difference between England (not Britain, in Sayers's world) and everyone else - be it Hitler (the 'one man' who has succeeded Philip of Spain, Louis XIV and Napoleon) or the 'allies' who switch, in successive lines, to aliens. The Channel is both an ostentatious mote, here, and a timid barrier: we can see this in Sayers's Blake-like images of the 'hammer of [...] wrath' and the 'anvil of [...] fears'. The English thrive, apparently, by pounding their own anxieties. In the topographical vision of this daughter of Albion, the island of Great Britain rises 'like a tower': an image that is all the more striking for its prodigious misrepresentation of three-dimensional reality. It alludes, in this context, to the monumental south coast cliffs that face the enemy, and that contribute to the idea - apparent throughout this poem - that England, land

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The men that ride the sea and air Are the same men their fathers were To fight the English war.

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of 'tall adventurers', is not just separate from Continental Europe, but above it. Sayers's Churchillian defiance may have contributed to the war effort, but it does not seem correspondent to the long-term experience of the Second World War for most Britons. Her rhetoric is out-of-date, nineteenth-century. Hence the much greater popularity of a very different south coast vision, that which is offered by Vera Lynn's song, 'The White Cliffs of Dover', in which the cliffs are consoling and specifically unwarlike, with their attendant 'Bluebirds' - the scene of a return when all the awfulness is done with, even if (to echo Lynn's other famous song) we don't know when that will be. CULTURAL EROSION

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Modernity in Transit

The Second World War, together with the subsequent gradual dissolution of the British Empire, changed perceptions of what it was to be British, and English, radically. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the years following the War should have seen a sudden burst of attention, within England, to the history and cultural significance of the English (or British) Channel. Much of this attention was very conservative: attempting to maintain cultural continuity. Something very like the Dorothy Sayers view persisted. The Channel was perceived by many as the vital phenomenon that had allowed Britain to escape the occupations of the Continent, and that perhaps symbolized a separateness of spirit that had saved the British from succumbing ideologically. It is not such an extraordinary coincidence, therefore, that the two most substantial books devoted to the history of the Channel should both have appeared in 1959. These are The Narrow Seas: A History of the English Channel, by Reginald Hargreaves, and The English Channel: A History by J. A. Williamson. Both of these texts range across vast tracts of time: back to the Romans in the case of Hargreaves, and back to the very origin of the Channel, in prehistory, in the case of Williamson. But both conclude in ways that place them clearly as post-Second World War.11 This is apparent, above all, in the sense that they convey of Britain as a country in decline, even as a pale imitation of its former self - a state of affairs that is especially conspicuous at the nation's edge. Here is Williamson assessing the status of the coastal town of Rye, and with it late 1950s England:

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Literature, Identity and the English Channel

Its unique quality cannot be experienced simply by entering the town on wheels and gazing on its streets and buildings, rewarding though they are. Too many visitors are always doing that, and pleasure is alloyed by irritation. A show-place, as Rye is now, has an unhappy effect on its own legitimate inhabitants. A snatch of conversation, overheard on a busy summer day, may illustrate the point: 'I'm sick of all this/ said one, 'they swarm everywhere and say we're quaint.' It was a terse comment on what is called the tourist industry, the sale of the country's charms for money, a species of harlotry that is not to the taste of many who find themselves involved in it. No, all that is now the worse part of Rye. To see it with delight one must walk, far and wide over the marsh land, to west, to south and to east, by narrow tracks and footpaths. From every point Rye stands up like a jewel. The hill rises from the levels, the streets slope up the hill, the big church stands on its top, the low-pitched roof of the tower forming the apex of a flattened pyramid. In any light it is a harmony of tone and soft colour. On a day when the wind chases the broken cloud across the face of the sun it is a swiftly changing picture of enduring elements recombined. Rye seen from afar is a foundation of England. Seen from within, it sometimes suggests a dissolution.12 Williamson's image of the town changing with the fluctuating light is naturalistic enough, and testifies to his devoted observation of the English landscape and climate, but there is clearly an agenda behind this move from 'harlotry' to 'harmony'. Williamson's vision of 'enduring elements recombined' bespeaks a conservative notion of England remaining essentially the same despite historical exigencies. But the fearful thought arises that it is only possible to think this from a distance. 'Rye from afar' may be 'a foundation of England', but then, if the foundation, viewed more closely, becomes 'dissolution', then does that mean that England itself is dissolving? The possibility certainly seems to be lurking on Williamson's horizon. And he ends his narrative even more ominously, with a bleak meditation on the pollution of the coast, east of Dungeness, by chalet camps, and the prospect of a nuclear power station at Dungeness itself. This is 'the way of the world we live in. [...] The twentieth century offers growing mechanisation with no escape permitted. The individual will soon be the criminal: in many ways he is now. Perhaps it will pass in its turn.'13 Taken as a whole, Williamson's history contains much that is celebratory, not unduly jingoistic but vigorous, with touches of black humour, but perhaps the humour discloses a deeper

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unease, and it is certainly melancholia that governs the book's final words. Hargreaves's reaction to the 50s is a little different. His book is mainly an extremely detailed naval history with littie cultural or social dimension, but he ends, like Williamson, with an evocative depiction of the Channel in the atomic age: The days of Peace preserved by fleets and perilous seas Secure from actual warfare are no longer with us. In this age of nuclear-fission projectiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles, Britain could be wrecked, her fields polluted, and her cities reduced to mounds of blasted rubble. But she could not be conquered save by invasion and physical occupation. So long as her people remained unaffected by democracy's fatal tendency to undernourish the will to resistance, so long as there were survivors left to defend 'the sea that is the wall of England', the shores that bound it and the skies above it, 'the proud foot of the conqueror' would never spurn our island refuge. The grey waters of the narrow seas still constitute the lifeline of our commerce and the last ditch of our defence. Physical isolation could still prove our salvation. So long as we retain the skill to traverse those waters in times of peace and the courage to stand to their defence in time of war, they will aid us in the future as faithfully as they served us in the days gone by. 'What's past is prologue.'14 The stirring references to English Literature - including the pointedly anachronistic quotation from Coleridge's 'Fears in Solitude: Written in April 1798, During tiie Alarm of an Invasion' - do littie to disguise Hargreaves's apprehensions about modern Britain, a nation weakened by democracy, it seems, just as Williamson's is humiliated by tourism. Hargreaves tries to deny the true nature of the present, however, taking refuge in an astonishing underestimation of the changes in international destructive power that took place in the mid-twentieth century, and in the world political map. There is a touchingly awful willingness, here (much as in Dorothy Sayers's 1940 poem) to anticipate another war, although it would be sure to slaughter millions (not just pollute the countryside and demolish some buildings). Despite the

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VICIOUS CIRCUITS There is no French equivalent to Williamson's and Hargreaves's weighty tomes of Channel history. There are many histories of Brittany, of course, and Normandy, and even of the less conspicuous, more northerly French regions with stretches of Channel coast, Picardie and Nord-Pas-de-Calais. In recent years there have been at least a dozen French books devoted to the Channel Tunnel. But there is no French history of la mer de la Manche as such. The Channel coast is just one of several 'natural' frontiers or boundaries that have for centuries been enlisted in debates about the rightful shape and extent of the nation, and, these days, the Channel coast is just one side of the 'hexagon', that newer image of France that implies symmetry and cohesiveness.15 British interest in the Channel, on the other hand, increased, if anything, in the late twentieth century - again in response, more often than not, to spedfic political developments. The significant coincidence of two English-language histories of the Channel appearing at the end of the 50s has since been echoed by another. In 1982, two writers, Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban, both set out independently to perform a circuit of the island of Great Britain and to produce a book from their experiences. Theroux would proceed by foot and land-based public transport; Raban, more audaciously, by yacht. But both gave disproportionate attention to the Channel coast, and they bumped into one another at Brighton. Theroux's view of Britain's southern resorts is almost uniformly downbeat, and he is fertile with metaphors for a national decay that has clearly proceeded further than in the days of Williamson and Hargreaves. The white cliffs of Dorothy Sayers and Vera Lynn, for example, prove, on Theroux's closer examination, to be alarmingly porous: 'These chalk cliffs of Kent - so white and sturdy when seen from a distance - were frail and friable, and this coast made Britain seem like a country consisting of stale cake that softened and broke in the rain.'16 It is a neat image: very much an American's view of an England doomed by too much (supposedly unappetising) afternoon tea. Nevertheless, he clearly revels in his gloomy perceptions, and, more generally, in his ability to make so much of such unpromising material. This is an

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disappointments of the 50s, grim English pride, embodied in the Channel, carries on.

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'No,' I lied. 'I seem too busy with things like weather and navigation to notice anything on land. What about you?' 'No,' Paul lied. "There's nothing to write about, is there? I don't know whether there's a book in this at all. I may turn out to have just spent the summer walking. Still, it keeps you fit -/17 The biggest joke here is not just that both writers are lying, but that neither needs to do so. It is hardly to be supposed that either would have wanted to crib the other's notes. The greatest strength of both narratives is that so much in them has so clearly been experienced, with considerable physical effort, at first hand. But this exchange between the two writers also suggests an irony that characterises coastal narratives, and the experience of encountering the Channel, at all times. For it really is easy to think that there would be littie to write about on the coast: it is the edge, after all, the margin, the periphery. It is an exiguous zone, the antithesis of the cultural density that characterises cities. If one should wish to write about the character of a nation (and that is certainly a theme that interests both Raban and Theroux) then one might reasonably doubt that the coast would intersect with the heart of the matter. And yet, as many writers had found before them (Chateaubriand at Brest, Michelet at Etretat, Arnold at Dover, Colette at Saint-Malo, Williamson at Rye), Raban and Theroux discover that the solitary spectatorship facilitated by the coast, together with the sense that here one is standing at the utmost point of the nation (so that, in imagination at least, it is spread, like a map, all before you) facilitates a profound stock-taking, an evaluation of the place that the writer is so close to stepping off, and that, consequently, there are many notes to be taken, and there is a great deal to be said. Nevertheless, given that this is, by now, such well-trodden terrain, much of what these new visitors report is a kind of recasting of old insights in new idioms. This can be seen in Theroux's description of Rye, for example, in which his main idea is really the same as Williamson's - that the town is an ornament from a distance, but a overly touristic disappointment seen up close - but where the mode of narration is much more personal than Williamson's, suggesting a degree of self-absorption in the visitor (despite his observant powers) that almost takes us back to Sensibility and Romanticism: 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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ability that he shares with Raban, and the latter's description of their meeting at Brighton is consequently full of irony. 'You making a lot of notes?' asks Theroux.

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

Rye was the quaintest town in this corner of England, but so museum-like in its quaintness that I found myself walking along the cobblestone streets with my hands behind my back, treating the town in my monkish manner of subdued appreciation like a person in a gallery full of Do Not Touch signs. Rye was not a restful place. It had the atmosphere of a china shop. [...] But it was not just the quaint places in England that looked both pretty and inhospitable. Most villages and towns wore a pout of rejection - and there were few places I went in England that did not seem, as I stared, to be whispering at me all the while, Move on! Go home!1* No wonder - the English reader may think - with all that staring! Theroux's circumambulation defines the limits of Britain in more ways than one. It is a way of tying up the country in an imaginary bag (ready for deposit in the trash). Raban, too, visits Rye, and takes the depiction of a Britain fraying at the edges - and trying to disguise that fact - even further. He describes himself walking through the town with a friend who usefully points out that the chiming cherubs on the clock tower of St Mary's church are made of a late twentieth-century product called 'GRP' (glass-reinforced plastic): 'Are you sure?' 'You can see the lines of the mould. That's fibreglass, that is, no question.' They'd fooled me, but on second look I saw they couldn't possibly be either carved in wood or more than a few years old.19 From this point onwards, Raban sees facsimiles and counterfeits everywhere: 'fibreglass cherry blossom, fibreglass cobblestones, toppling facades of fibreglass Tudor, all protected from the sea by a dinky fibreglass castle', culminating in 'the Rye Town Model, a perfect scale replica of the place, beam for beam and eave for eave', which was 'redundant, for Rye itself was a model town: this was a model of a model, a picture within a picture, the second step of an infinite regression'.20 And Britain as a whole seems regressive, by this token, and possibly entering its second childhood. What saves the acerbic reports of both Raban and Theroux from being merely mean, in the end (kicking a once overbearing nation while it is down) is the fact that they made their journeys at the time of the Falklands War, and that they make a point of this in their narratives. The tweeness of Theroux's 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Rye, for example, and the cheap artificiality of Raban's, need to be registered alongside such loud phenomena as the bellicose headlines in the Sun. Raban quotes the particularly cruel and puerile 'STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA' several times (as if incredulously), in its original bovine capitals.21 This stirs up another coastal irony: the cosy Channel, with its GRP antiquities, gift shops and marinas, is still capable of unleashing terrible destructive power. British forces set sail for the Falklands from a range of Channel ports including Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton and Portland. The Channel coast, in other words, proves to be dualistic not only in the sense that it is a slim, easily overlooked territory that can be made to speak volumes, but also because it is the sad perimeter of a deflated country that can be blown up into immense, violent efficiency (not to mention heartless tabloid bombast) when a threat is apprehended. In peace, the coast is likely to be marginal: a place for recreation. In war it becomes the interface with danger. Raban complicates this situation significantly by pointing out that Britain itself has a certain affinity with the Falklands: [T]he Falklands stood anchored off the coast of South America very much as Britain stood anchored off the coast of Europe. You had only to look at the atlas to see that the identity of the Falklanders, like that of the British, was bound up in endless aggressive assertions of the their differences from the continental giant across the water.22 This means that the Falklands War was, in a way, another Battle of Britain in which the Channel, on a symbolic level, was stretched halfway around the globe. There is another sense, too, in which the Falklands was a Channel war: the Falklands, in Argentina, are Las Malvinas; that is, Les Malouines; that is, formerly a haunt of Malouins, from the great sea-faring town of SaintMalo. The Falklands War, in other words, was another convulsion, albeit so geographically remote, of the old opposition between English and Romance cultures that has marked the Channel for centuries. This is doubtless part of the reason why many Britons embraced the war so willingly.23 Raban's account is a very intimate, self-revelatory one, like Theroux's, and the combination of absurdity and violence that he documents on his visits to the shore feeds strangely into the dislocated character of his own life, as he sails around the coast in the wake (apparently) of a long succession of brave and cranky loners. He reaches a state, indeed, in which he surveys contemporary land-based life with an unsympathetic eye, and seems ready 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Sailing around with Collins's Pilot [1693] in the wheelhouse induces a kind of historical vertigo. On the one hand the book is bang up to date. It is so accurate on the watery front that all subsequent additions to the landscape, from Georgian country houses and Martello towers to radio masts and nuclear power stations, look equally raw. If it's not in Collins it must be new, and probably still only in its experimental phase. Yet here is a complete city, trailing a ragged crew of suburbs behind it over the hills, where not even a hamlet is shown on the chart. The smooth top of a Collins headland has sprouted towers and chimneys like the teeth of a broken comb. Staring, with some annoyance, at these upstart intrusions, you'd think they could be erased as easily as I could push a button and lift off this line of type.24 Of course, they could be erased almost that easily: just with a different button. The edge of the land, the inhuman sea beyond, seem to foster thoughts of this kind. The disappointment of Williamson, the death wish in Hargreaves (with his unease about democracy), and Sayers, with her love for a dead England, of the distant past, and her readiness for new apocalyptic challenges: all of these bespeak a darkness in the Channel life of the twentieth century that, if anything, deepens in the 1980s. Theroux, plodding from one tacky and unloving guesthouse to another, is splendidly moody and astringent; Raban, in his solitary boat, sometimes seems a Timon for our times. AN ENGLISH FRENCHMAN? There is no living author who has shown a more persistent and developed interest in the ambiguities of the Channel than Julian Barnes. The son of two teachers of French, Barnes is at least as successful a literary personage in France as he is in Britain. He has yet to win a Booker Prize, but he is an Officier de I'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. No living French author enjoys anything like this recognition and prestige in Britain. Barnes has written about Anglo-French relations, both cultural and personal, consistently since his first novel, Metroland (1980), in which the English schoolboy narrator undertakes a momentous trip to Paris. But the

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to destroy the vulgar accretions of modernity:

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real depth of Barnes's interest in and knowledge of French culture became apparent in 1984 with the publication of Flaubert's Parrot, a work which purports to emanate from one Geoffrey Braithwaite, retired doctor and obsessive amateur scholar of Flaubert. Braithwaite travels to Rouen, the Norman town of Flaubert's birth and childhood, and reflects, inter alia, upon Flaubert's own four cross-Channel visits in 1851, 1865, 1866 and 1871. Braithwaite and Barnes uncover, and offer to the reader, many odd facts about Flaubert, including most famously his use of a stuffed parrot as inspiration for 'Un Coeur simple', and the subsequent dubious multiplication of that creature in French collections of Flaubert memorabilia. This is a novel that plays a lot of tricks, and, in particular, transgresses the conventional boundaries between fiction, biography and criticism - a situation exacerbated by the metafictional resonances between G. B. and J. B., the Francophiles Braithwaite and Barnes. The real significance of this lies in the book's general concern with problems of identity, and in particular with the use that people make of stories about others and themselves in order to construct a functional self. We are not given very much factual information about Braithwaite (considerably less than we are about Flaubert) but it seems that he has profound problems in his domestic life in England, and that crossing the Channel to France, and crossing a form of channel between identities, to penetrate and merge with Flaubert, allows him complicatedly both to find echoes of those problems and temporarily to escape them. What makes this relevant to the present study is that Barnes uses the literal Channel crossing to figure the emotional states and transitions of his characters, and in doing so participates in the tradition (or, less portentously and more accurately, the recurring pattern) of literary uses of the Channel as a space of tension, crisis and change. Chapter 7 of the novel is titled 'Cross Channel'. It begins with a November crossing, Newhaven to Dieppe. Braithwaite reflects, as anyone might in the rather constrained circumstances and enforced inactivity of a ferry-trip, upon the low-key but distinctive features of the environment around him: the noises made by the boat; seagulls; a bilingual rubbish bin. It is all rather downbeat: I like these out-of-season crossings. When you're young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can't make up their minds. Perhaps it's a way of admitting that things can't ever bear the same certainty 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Literature, Identity and the English Channel

This offers us a familiar expression of the Channel-crossing as an opening for reflection - an extended moment in which you are not in England, not in France, and, unless you are a sailor, not anywhere particular at all, and certainly not in the circumstances in which your regular life unfolds. The Channel crossing, especially pre-Eurostar, has been experienced by many as a pause; and fosters self-assessments, regrets, wistfulness, hopes and gloomy apprehensions. Braithwaite's liking for 'the in-between times' echoes the fact that he is in an in-between place, and his 'preference for empty ferries' compounds the detachment that the crossing itself enforces or allows. Braithwaite is an informed, culturally sensitive cross-Channel traveller, and goes on to underline his own sense of passing through an opening or interval by talking of the differentness of the Channel's two sides. Or rather, he talks of the differentness of the Channel itself, seen from either side. This means that the Channel is given a special agency: it is not just a blank, after all, but something more like a two-way mirror: The light over the Channel, for instance, looks quite different from the French side: clearer, yet more volatile. The sky is a theatre of possibilities. I'm not romanticising. Go into any of the art galleries along the Normandy coast and you'll see what the local painters liked to paint, over and over again: the view north. A strip of beach, the sea, and the eventful sky. English painters never did the same, clustering at Hastings or Margate or Eastbourne to gaze out at a grumpy, monotonous Channel.26 Braithwaite is Romanticising, a little - and misinforming. There have been plenty of English Channel-painters. Some - Bonington for example - have agreed with Braithwaite and have chosen to work primarily from the French side, but many others, from Turner and Constable to the innumerable present-day Sunday painters whose works can be seen in small galleries all along the south coast, have found the English outlook absorbing enough. But Barnes's Braithwaite is a man who chooses to submerge his own being in that of another more fulfilled than himself, namely Flaubert, and who similarly tends to downgrade English prospects in favour of French ones. This is partly his idiosyncrasy and partly his cultural inheritance: he is certainly not the first to think that the world is 'clearer, yet more volatile' (or,

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again. Or perhaps it's just a way of admitting a preference for empty ferries.25

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one might say, more logical and yet more flighty - and given to revolutions) seen from a French as opposed to an English perspective. Braithwaite himself wanders mentally between English and French positions. He is his own rather dull British self but he knows Flaubert so well as to have a tendency to live through his words. Thus, still on the crossing, he repeats one of Flaubert's maxims, and tests it upon the surroundings: 'The whole dream of democracy', he wrote, 'is to raise the proletariat to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.' That line often makes people edgy. Isn't it perfectly fair? [...] Study a packed Cross-Channel ferry if you want to see a modern ship of fools. There they all are: working out the profit on their duty-free; having more drinks at the bar than they want; playing the fruit machines; aimlessly circling the deck; making up their minds how honest to be at customs; waiting for the next order from the ship's crew as if the crossing of the Red Sea depended on it. I do not criticise, I merely observe; and I'm not sure what I would think if everyone lined the rail to admire the play of light on the water and started discussing Boudin. I am no different, by the way: I stock up on duty-free and await orders like the rest of them. My point is merely this: Flaubert was right.27 It is easy to feel this way on cross-Channel ferries. They have amusement arcades but no libraries. Stocking up on duty-free (in the days when that was possible) and heeding the instructions of the crew do not sound especially dumb activities, but Barnes allows Braithwaite to succumb to the malaise and insecurity so typical of the Channel crossing, and in doing so to disclose some of his feelings of inferiority relative to Flaubert. Julian Barnes knows perfectiy well, no doubt, that Flaubert's own attitude to the Channel seems to have been unromantic. Having crossed from France to England for the first time in September 1851 he writes to Louise Colet complaining of his mother's 'systeme de voyage absurde' ('absurd approach to travel') which made the journey from Rouen to London take three days, and then dissociates himself neatly from rough-sea-aficionados of the Chateaubriand type: J'ai revu la Manche, et l'ai traversee bien entendu. La derniere fois que je [l'javais vue, c'etait a Trouville en revenant de Bretagne, il y a quatre ans. Quoique j'aie passe les meilleurs moments de ma jeunesse a humer son odeur et a dormir sur ses galets, je garde tout mon amour a la 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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I saw the Channel again, and crossed it, needless to say. The last time I saw it was at Trouville on my way back from Brittany, four years ago. Even though I spent the best moments of my youth inhaling its odour and sleeping on its shingle, I reserve all my affection for the Mediterranean. It is the colour that I love above all, and the peacefulness, whatever those poetic people who prefer tempests may say. Flaubert expresses his indifference to the Channel in terms of difference from another kind of writer: one whose heart lies further than his own from the equator. Braithwaite too associates his feelings about the Channel - which, as we have seen, are uneasy - with his own brand of literary activity. The insecurity of crossing, for him, blurs into his status as a more or less postmodern 'hesitating narrator': 'As for the hesitating narrator - look, I'm afraid you've run into one right now. It might be because I'm English. You'd guessed that, at least - that I'm English? I ... I ... Look at that seagull up there/29 Here, for Braithwaite, anxiety about what sort of writer he is or should be, and anxiety about his own activity relative to Flaubert's, meet anxiety about being English and on the way to France. Nearing the end of his crossing, Braithwaite expands on this last anxiety, imagining what it must be like for Continentals heading in the other direction 'towards the land of embarrassment and breakfast'. Once Britain had been a nation of some distinction, offering a liberal refuge to French intellectuals: Now what is it? First slum of Europe, one of our poets called it not long ago. First hypermarket of Europe might be more like it. [...] Now the daytrippers arrive from Holland and Belgium, Germany and France, excited about the weakness of the pound and eager to get into Marks & Spencer.30 This seems a particularly 1980s expression of British self-disgust. As I write, in mid-2000, the pound (for an expatriate) is horribly strong, and Braithwaite's day-trippers are accordingly deterred. Just as in Dickens, and in many other, earlier Channel narratives, the transManche insecurity culminates in a customs scene, although here Barnes, through Braithwaite, imagines causing difficulties of his own volition, on 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Mediterranee. J'aime la couleur avant tout, et le calme, n'en deplaise aux gens poetiques qui preferent la tempete.28

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Have you anything to declare? Yes. I'd like to declare a small case of French flu, a dangerous fondness for Flaubert, a childish delight in French road-signs, and a love of the light as you look north. Is there any duty to pay on any of these? There ought to be.31 THE COLD SLEEVE In 1996 Barnes made his interest in the space between Britain and France and the means and meanings of getting across it still more prominent, publishing a collection of short stories with the same title as Chapter 7 of Flaubert's Parrot, namely Cross Channel The collection consists of ten stories all of which have something to do with Anglo-French interactions at various points in history from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century, and all of which to a greater or lesser extent interconnect with one another through repetitions of theme and reference. Only the concluding story, 'The Tunnel', focuses directly on travel between Britain and France, 'crosschannel' (or, more accurately, sub-Channel), but this story draws all the others together and makes sense of their diversity. 'The Tunnel' in some respects resembles a modern version of Dickens's 'A Flight', insofar as it describes a journey from London to Paris, by grace of technology that still strikes the protagonist/narrator as prodigiously fast. Not that this particular Englishman, aged 69, has not had tiie opportunity to travel on Eurostar many times before: for this is the year 2015. In fact, we soon learn that we are in the company of an individual who has crossed the Channel by virtually every means available, and who has a deep fascination with the process: He had first travelled to France fifty-six years previously, on a family motoring holiday to Normandy. No roll-on, roll-off ferries then, no Eurostar or Le Shuttle. They anchored your car to a wooden pallet on the Newhaven quayside and swung it into the depths of the ship as if it were a piece of merchandise. This habitual memory set off in him the catechism of departure. He had sailed from Dover, Folkestone, Newhaven, Southampton, Portsmouth. He had landed at Calais, Boulogne, Dieppe, Le Havre,

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returning from the Continent, as if to provoke others into registering his flamboyant lack of allegiance to one side or the other:

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

Cherbourg, Saint-Malo. He had flown from Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, London City Airport; landed at Le Bourget, Orly, Roissy. Back in the sixties he had taken an overnight sleeper from Victoria to the Gare du Nord. At about the same time, there had been the Silver Arrow: four and a quarter hours from city centre to city centre had been the boast, Waterloo to Lydd, Lydd to Le Touquet, and the Paris train waiting by the airstrip. What else? He had flown from Southampton (Eastleigh, to be precise) to Cherbourg by something called an air-bridge, his dumpy Morris Minor in the hold of a lumbering freight-plane. [...]32 This character is not just a Channel-crosser; he is a compendium, an encyclopaedia of Channel crossings. He is also a repository of stories in general. His journey through the Tunnel in 2015, which is the first level of action in the story - from settling into his seat at King's Cross in the first paragraph to vacating it at the Gare du Nord in the penultimate one - is paralleled by a journey into his own past, in which he revisits previous journeys and superimposes them upon one another: '[...] the train manager announced that they were approaching the Channel. Fences, unsullied concrete, an inappreciable descent, then suave blackness. He closed his eyes, and in the tunnel of memory heard the echo of rhythmic shouting. It must have been fifteen, twenty years ago.'33 Barnes's traveller is more at ease, more suave, than Dickens's crossChannel personae. There should, after all, be less to rattle the nerves on Eurostar than on a nineteenth-century packet-boat (although he remembers witnessing some new-British hooliganism). But this person still has a pathos about him: something that seems to be related to his itinerant, shuttling, cross-Channel life, and to these multiple layers of narrative that hang about him. He has a good deal of self-irony, we find, and often amuses and dismays himself by reading meanings into his surroundings that are more exotic than the truth. His presence, on the crossing, is anachronistic (How could it not be, since it includes a whole range of different times?) and dandified: 'Perhaps it appeared an affectation to take home-made sandwiches and a half-bottle of Meursault in a cold-sleeve when lunch was provided free to business customers. But that was what he wanted, so that was what he did.'34 This particular affectation enables him subsequently to offer a glass of wine to a woman whom he imagines to be a retired dancer from Le Crazy Horse, bound for Paris and a reunion of the corps. She proves to be a Master of Wine, and coolly assesses the less-than-outstanding

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Meursault, in its cold-sleeve. Our principal traveller, by extension, is coolly assessed through this and other forays into interaction with other people who exceed his memories and imagination, and the whole story, which takes him through a sleeve (the Tunnel), under a Sleeve (La Manche), works as a kind of concentrated evaluation of his perhaps less-than-outstanding life, relative to the space in which he has chosen to live it. This man is a master of the Channel (just as his interlocutor is a Master of Wine), but this is seen to be a strictly bounded field of knowledge and experience, and the implication, thanks to the Tunnel, may be that he is something of a mole or worm, running back and forth along a settled route, too old now to develop significantly different understandings. We learn eventually that the traveller, when he returns home, will write the ten stories that make up the very book that we have been reading. And it does not come as a great surprise, after a few calculations, to find that this 'author' must have been born in 1946, like the real author of the collection, Julian Barnes. This leaves the reader speculating about how much of the rest of the story is autobiography, and how much is ludic metafiction or downright disinformation. A Barnes biographer will shed some light on this, presumably, in due course. Meanwhile, the 'futuristic' character of the Channel Tunnel ('futuristic' always being a paradoxical concept, of course: meaning a gesture towards the impossible, incomprehensible future in the terms of the present) seems to have tempted Barnes into an exercise in time travel. He imagines himself writing a book in 2015, which, in reality, he will already have published in 1996. The Tunnel, figured within the story as a tunnel of 'memory', becomes something even more adventurous: something known to the science-fiction world as a 'worm-hole', a sudden and unpredictable passage through non-Newtonian space-time. Perhaps, indeed, this is what Dickens would have had to come up with, had he been writing 'A Flight'in the 1990s. The main themes of this story, which include the relations between the present and memory, the relations between people and others' interpretations of them, and the fullness or emptiness, originality or repetitiveness, extent or brevity of a cerebral life, could have been explored in an infinite number of situations, but there is much to be said for the one that Barnes chose. He has built his career, to a significant extent, on an Anglo-French axis. Through this collection of stories he shows the depth and diversity of his Englishman's engagement with France. Through making the life of a kind of alter-ego - to be precise, an imagined other author of his own work,

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more or less resembling himself - the focus of the last story and the link between all the others, Barnes makes an issue of his own career, and of his own particular interests and expertise. His working life becomes a finite examinable entity, like the extent of the Tunnel, running on, and out, inexorably, beneath the surface complexities of narrative and memory. It is a striking performance, but also a melancholy one. A life seems to be summed up and contained here. A life that has reached its limit. Perhaps, in a characteristically 1990s way, Barnes is even imagining an end to history: the Eurostar experience of 2015 does not seem to differ in any significant respect from what it was twenty years before.35 ENGLAND IN THE CHANNEL Shortly after Cross Channel was published, Julian Barnes was interviewed in Britain, on the radio. He expressed the opinion that his story was the first work of fiction to describe a journey through the Tunnel. In fact he was wrong, as I pointed out to him in a what must have been an irritating letter but which was nonetheless rewarded by a gracious postcard showing an allegorical sculpture of 'La vigne fran^aise regeneree par la vigne americaine' ('The French vine revived by the American vine'), an interesting monument to a sticky moment in the history of French viticulture, and an encouragement, perhaps, not to become fixated on the Channel to the exclusion of the wider world (or of intoxicating beverages). To deserve this, I had sent Barnes a copy of a little-known late story by Graham Greene, called an 'Old Man's Memory', which was first published in the Independent in 1989 (a long time, that is, before the Tunnel opened), but which is set in the mid-nineties and purports to be an account, an old man's memory, of what happened on the Tunnel's first day of operation. Greene imagines (with undue pessimism, as it turned out) that Margaret Thatcher would still be in charge of Britain in 1994. In the story, she presides over the British half of the opening-day celebrations, a matter of great jingoism and bombast on both sides. She waits at Dover to greet the first French train, while the first British one proceeds in the opposite direction. This is how Greene's old man describes what happens: I wasn't at Dover myself. It was easier to watch the whole affair (or so I believed) on television. As the French train emerged from the Tunnel the

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'Marseillaise' was played and afterwards 'Rule, Britannia!' but not 'God Save the Queen'. Perhaps the Queen shared some of her people's doubts, but Mrs Thatcher stood up very straight and played the part of Britannia. On the other side of the Channel the President of France waited to greet the British train, but it never arrived. The news reached us just as Mrs Thatcher began her well-prepared speech. Bombs had exploded under the Channel and the British train had been destroyed before it reached Calais with the loss of all lives.36 The plainness of the narration (even for Greene) is conspicuous: it hardly aspires to literariness at all. It just seems that Greene wants to make a simple objection to Margaret Thatcher and the Tunnel: or to the two of them together as an exhibition of nationalistic vanity. He was probably influenced by the long series of particularly horrible and terrifying public tragedies, in Britain or involving British nationals, that occurred during the later 1980s. In fact, Greene's catastrophe is a kind of hybrid of the Zeebruge Ferry Disaster and the King's Cross Fire on the London Underground, both of which occurred in 1987. But, at the same time, Greene is giving his own apocalyptic fin-de-siecle twist to a generalised sense of threat and unease that has always been linked to the Channel Tunnel scheme. For Ernest James Myers, in 'Folkestone Cliff (as we have seen), the Tunnel proposals of the 1880s had suggested the jeopardising of a national glory that was already in danger, and needed to be protected, but for Greene it is a case of outright overreaching by an incompetent nation of which he is patently ashamed. Greene's story is exceptional in its bleakness. Other British commentators upon Britain in the run-up to the millennium shared much of his dismay about national pretensions, but their mood tended to be farcical more than apocalyptic, so that we were confronted, as in other fields, with a kind of postmodern joke-millennium, a year 2000 that would need all sorts of games and gimmicks, or at least a computer bug, to give it some character. A kind of daft apotheosis of 1990s bankrupt British nationalism seems to be what Julian Barnes attempted in his penultimate twentieth-century novel,37 England, England, which appeared in 1998. This novel fits in very well with what one expects of a certain kind offin-de-sieclework. It is all about a kind of decadence: explicitly the running down and hollowing out of British traditions, or the disappearance of tradition in the postmodern hotchpotch of the heritage industry. Significantly, it is set in the English Channel - that is, on the Isle of Wight, the 147-square-mile island that lies

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just off Southampton. Like Dickens, Swinburne and some of his own contemporaries (notably Raban and Theroux), Barnes perceives that the Channel plays a special role in constructions of British identity. The Channel Tunnel threatens or vaunts that identity, depending on how you see it, to the delight of some and the disgust of others. The Tunnel invades or admits the Continental other. The Isle of Wight, on the other hand, is tucked right next to England. In a way, it is more English than England, just as some of the Channel Islands, for Victor Hugo, were more French than France. The main narrative content of England, England revolves around a mad entrepreneurial scheme to fit everything English that a tourist would conceivably want to experience, from Stonehenge to spotted dick, onto the Isle of Wight - so as to increase the ease and satisfaction of the whole tourist experience. This project has preposterous consequences: for example the Royal Family circa 2020 (for this is a vision of the new millennium), who are so lacking in noble qualities as to make the present incumbents look almost like a Royal Family, leave the mainland to take up jobs impersonating themselves in the replica Buckingham Palace on the Island. Distinctions between reality and fakes, in general, disintegrate. The phoney Britain prospers while the real one decays, and meanwhile the outside world, in particular the New Europe, manifests copious indifference. There is a millennial vision for you: Britain shrunk to a tiny theme-park island, within the strip of sea that once embodied so much national pride and power. DIFFERANCE BETWEEN THE SHORES Barnes offers us a scene in which Pitman's Co-ordinating Committee, those charged with making England, England happen, are addressed by a French intellectual. He is a pastiche of various postmodern tendencies, especially the apparent amorality of a Baudrillard, for whom historical wars have not taken, or will not take, place. This intellectual praises the Pitman team for the modernity of their project, which involves giving precedence to the replica over the original: 'In conclusion, let me state that the world of the third millennium is inevitably, is ineradicably modern, and that it is our intellectual duty to submit to that modernity, and to dismiss as sentimental and inherently fraudulent all yearnings for what is dubiously termed the "original". We must

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demand the replica, since the reality, the truth, the authenticity of the replica is the one we can possess, colonise, reorder, find puissance in, and, finally, if and when we decide, it is the reality which, since it is our destiny, we may meet, confront and destroy.'38

When he has finished his lecture the speaker goes off to London and splashes out on luxury items from the most 'traditional' emporia: on cheese, for example, from Paxton & Whitfield. This is perhaps intended to indicate that he is a hypocrite, that he really prefers long-established old-fashioned things. But perhaps not, since a visit to the Paxton & Whitfield website reveals, beneath the arms of the Queen Mother and the Prince of Wales, and 'Cheesemongers since 1797', a timely devotion to the very new concept of 'gourmet cheese shopping', including 'the modern vogue for interesting cheeses from individual farms'.39 Paxton & Whitfield offer the old, that is, packaged and conceptualized in such a way as to connote modernity. Barnes's French intellectual is not his weightiest satirical invention, embodying in a very cartoonish manner what's wrong (in Christopher Norris's phrase) with postmodernism.40 In 1991, a real and much more formidable figure, the most celebrated (and reviled) proponent of poststructuralist philosophy and critical theory, Jacques Derrida, published a slim volume called L'Autre cap, which appeared in English the following year as The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe. In this work, Derrida addresses the feeling that something very special is happening in Europe as the twentieth century draws to a close: Quelque chose d'unique est en cours en Europe, dans ce qui s'appelle encore l'Europe meme si on ne sait plus tres bien ce qui s'appelle ainsi. A quel concept, en effet, a quel individu reel, a quelle entite singuliere assigner ce nom aujourd'hui? Qui en dessinera les frontieres?41 Something unique is afoot in Europe, in what is still called Europe even if we no longer really know what or who goes by this name. Indeed, to what concept, to what real individual, to what singular entity should this name be assigned today? Who will draw up its borders?42 The main idea behind this is nothing very original in itself. Of course Europe at the turn of the Millennium is dramatically in question. Which nations and/or states comprise Europe, according to what definition; how these

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entities will interact with one another; to what extent they will be autonomous, and to what extent subsumed; how they will relate, independently or collectively, to whatever is not Europe: all of these momentous issues are open for debate. The stakes could scarcely be higher: the results desired by significant factions within Europe range from the dissolution of the European Union and a return to wholly separate national jurisdictions to the final elimination of political boundaries within a structure that would be bigger (at least in terms of population) than the world's sole existing superpower. Derrida's contribution is important because it addresses Europe as a mental and cultural construct, and gives some sense of the crucial slippage to and fro between this virtual entity and the physical reality of Europe as a terrestrial space that contains or excludes people and determines their lives. Hence the constant movement, in Derrida's text, between the most physically apprehensible things - be it geography or violence - and a meticulous exploration of language that points to the grounding of reality in ideas, ideals, hopes and notions. This movement is coordinated by the multiple meanings of Derrida's title: En proposant ce titre, «L'autre cap», pour de breves reflexions quasiment improvisees, je pensais d'abord, en avion, au langage de la navigation aerienne ou maritime. Sur mer ou dans les airs, un vaisseau «fait cap»: il «fait cap sur», par exemple sur un autre continent, vers une destination qui est la sienne mais dont il peut aussi changer. [...] L'expression «l'autre cap» peut aussi bien suggerer qu'une autre direction s'annonce ou qu'il faut changer de destination. [...] Changer de destination, cela peut vouloir dire [...] se rappeler qu'il y a un autre cap, le cap n'etant pas settlement le notre, mais l'autre, pas seulement celui que nous identifions, calculons, decidons mais le cap de l'autre, devant lequel nous devons repondre, que nous devons et dont nous devons nous rappeler, le cap de l'autre etant peut-etre la premiere condition d'une identite ou d'une identification qui ne soit pas egocentrisme destructeur - de soi et de l'autre. Mais, au-dela de notre cap, il ne faut pas seulement se rappeler a l'autre cap et surtout au cap de l'autre, mais peut-etre a l'autre du cap, c'est-a-dire a un rapport de l'identite a l'autre qui n'obeisse plus a la forme, au signe ou a la logique du cap, pas meme de l'anti-cap - ou de la decapitation. Le vrai titre de ces reflexions, bien qu'un titre soit done un cap ou une tete de

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chapitre, nous orienterait plutot vers l'autre du cap. [...] L'Europe aujourd'hui [...] se trouve a un moment de son histoire [...], de l'histoire de sa culture (si elle peut jamais s'identifier comme une, la meme, et repondre d'elle-meme dans une memoire de soi) ou la question du cap parait ineluctable.43

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Modernity in Transit

By proposing the title 'The Other Heading' for some brief, quasi-improvised reflections, I was thinking at first, while on board a plane, of the language of air or sea navigation. On the sea or in the air, a vessel has a 'heading': it 'heads off, toward another continent, perhaps, towards a destination that is its own but that it can also change. [...] The expression 'The Other Heading' can also suggest that another direction is in the offing, or that it is necessary to change destinations. [...] Indeed it can mean to recall that there is another heading, the heading being not only ours but the other, not only that which we identify, calculate, and decide upon, but the heading of the other, before which we must respond, and which we must remember, of which we must remind ourselves, the heading of the other being perhaps the first condition of an identity or identification that is not an ego-centrism destructive of oneself and the other. But beyond our heading, it is necessary to recall ourselves not only to the other heading, and especially to the heading of the other, but also perhaps to the other of the heading, that is to say, to a relation of identity with the other that no longer obeys the form, the sign, or the logic of the heading, nor even of the anti-heading - of beheading, of decapitation. The true title of these reflections, even though a title is a heading or a headline, would orient us rather toward the other 0/the heading. [...] Europe today [...] is at a moment in its history [...], in the history of its culture (if it can ever be identified as one, as the same, and can be responsible for itself, answer for itself, in a memory of itself) when the question of the heading seems unavoidable.44 The concept of the other that Derrida addresses here seems fundamental. Of course rethinking Europe for the Third Millennium involves thinking of others: other definitions of what Europe might be; definitions of Europe that might allow for the mutual otherness of its members, that might even be free to be other than it was planned to be. But Derrida's fixation upon 'cap' seems more arbitrary. Surely there is nothing about this particular word (and all its

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associations) to merit its prominence in this discussion about urgent and capital matters? Quite what the limits of the significance of cap are for Derrida - whether it is, in the end, an entirely arbitrary signifier - is hard to determine (as with many other emphasized words in his writings). What it seems to do, however, is to serve as a metaphor for the interconnection of many historical, ideological and geographical factors that are all crucial to an assessment of what Europe might be. For our current purposes, the geographical dimension of Derrida's exposition is especially interesting: Je voulais rappeler ce qui a toujours identifie l'Europe a un cap. Depuis toujours, et ce «toujours» dit quelque chose de tous les jours d'aujourd'hui dans la memoire de l'Europe, dans la memoire de soi comme culture de l'Europe. Dans sa geographic physique et dans ce qu'on a souvent appele, comme le faisait Husserl par exemple, sa geographie spirituelle, l'Europe s'est toujours reconnue elle-meme comme un cap, soit comme l'extreme avancee d'un continent, a l'ouest et au sud (la limite des terres, la pointe avancee d'un Finistere, l'Europe de l'Atlantique ou des bords greco-latinoiberiques de la Mediterranee), le point de depart pour la decouverte, l'invention et la colonisation, soit comme le centre meme de cette langue en forme de cap [...] C'est d'ailleurs ainsi que Valery decrivait et definissait l'Europe: comme un cap; et, si cette description avait la forme d'une definition, c'est que le concept correspondait a la frontiere. C'est toute l'histoire de cette geographic Valery observe, il regarde, il envisage l'Europe, il y voit un visage, une persona, il la considere comme un chef, c'est-a-dire un cap.45 I wanted to recall what has always identified Europe with a cape or headland. Always, since day one, and this 'day one' says something about all the days of today in the memory of Europe, in the memory of itself as the culture of Europe. In its physical geography, and in what has often been called, by Husserl for example, its spiritual geography, Europe has always recognized itself as a cape or a headland, either as the advanced extreme of a continent, to the west and south (the land's end, the advanced point of a Finistere, Europe of the Atlantic or of the Greco-Latino-Iberian shores of the Mediterranean), the point of departure for discovery, invention, and colonization, or as the very center of this tongue in the form of a cape [...]. That is in fact how Valery described and defined Europe: as a cape, a

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Paul Valery provides the focus for Derrida's argument, at this point, allowing Derrida to reveal that his own particular word-choices resonate with an existing structure of thought about Europe's nature and destiny. Valery, we find, believed in an ideal of Europe as a headland in a figurative sense: a land of the mind, or a zone of leadership. And yet he perceived its physical reality as woefully disproportionate to this: L'Europe deviendra-t-elle ce qu'elle est en realite, c'est-a-dire: un petit cap du continent asiatique? Ou bien l'Europe restera-t-elle ce qu'elle parait, c'est-a-dire: la partie precieuse de l'univers terrestre, la perle de la sphere, le cerveau d'un vaste corps?47 Will Europe become what it is in reality - that is, a little promontory on the Asian continent? Or will it remain what it seems - that is, the elect portion of the terrestrial globe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of a vast body?48 Two profoundly different conceptualisations of Europe are possible here, both depending on a certain notion of the 'cap': Europe is either a headland of unimpressive magnitude compared with other regions of the globe - 'a little promontory' - or it is a headland in a more evaluative sense: a region of the earth that looks upon itself as something special, having a heading, a possibly dangerous sense of exemplariness, election and mission - comparable perhaps with the American concept of Manifest Destiny. Derrida's European cap is also, sometimes, a prow (proue), making a Europe a vessel charting its own ideal course. According to Jules Michelet, in his Tableau de la France, Rien de sinistre et formidable comme cette cote de Brest; c'est la limite extreme, la pointe, la proue de l'ancien monde. La les deux ennemis sont en face: la terre et la mer, l'homme et la nature.49

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headland; and, if this description had the form of a definition, it was because the concept corresponded to the border. It is the whole history of this geography. Valery observes, looks at and envisages Europe; he sees in it a face, a persona, and he thinks of it as a leader, that is, as a head.46

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The old animate enemy, England, was not far away, and Michelet had elsewhere lamented England's maritime dominion, but here the human antagonist is elided in favour of the natural one, and the British Isles are jettisoned, in the process, from Tancien monde'. In Michelet's Histoire de France, another 'prow' appears: When confronted with Europe, with Dunkirk, with Antwerp in ruins, this odious country of England seems to me truly mighty. All tiie other countries - Russia, Austria, Spain, France - have their capitals in the west and look towards the setting sun. The great ship of Europe seems to float there, its sails distended by the wind blowing out of Asia. England alone has its prow in the east, as though it is preparing to confront the world, unum contra omnia.® The collective prow of Europe, as envisaged by Valery and Derrida is made more complicated here. Rather than being a single entity with a single direction, Europe is seen as having at least two contrary tendencies, facing one another across the Channel. Derrida does not mention the Channel, but in fact this rift between two common notions of what 'Europe' entails 'Europe' as a continent and community of nations which includes Britain, and 'Europe' as the alliance of alien states in which Britons find themselves when they cross the water - disrupts Valery's headland and complicates the notion of a shared European heading. It is a point emphasised by the cover of the Indiana University Press translation of L'Autre cap, which shows a map of Europe reduced so as to fit the concept of a headland: Iberia, France, the Low Countries and Germany jut out westwards, dragging Switzerland, Austria, Italy and even Sicily with them, but, to avoid disrupting the unified north-west front, Scandinavia and the British Isles are omitted. The English Channel, in this picture, has lost its identity in a greyish-blue Atlantic that spills across the top half of the front cover, around the spine, and all over the back of the volume. Derrida was not directly responsible for this, but it is a view of 'Europe' that his text might be thought to encourage, even though he is so set - politically - against exclusion. Other texts by Derrida, on the other hand, strongly advocate confrontations across channels of one sort or

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Nothing is so sinister and tremendous as the coast at Brest; it is the final limit, the point, the prow of the Old World. There the two enemies are face to face: the land and the sea, man and nature.

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another. One might think of Glas, for example: the text in which Derrida pursues a confrontation between philosophy and literature (and a great deal else) in two columns, one devoted to Hegel, the other to Jean Genet.51 That text has the effect of making the reader reconsider each author radically, through the other, and much is deconstructed as a result, including Hegel's pursuit of absolute knowledge. Setting versions of English and French culture against one another, across the Channel, has a similar capacity to change the way that we feel about each of them, and also may have the effect of undermining an absolute, excessively homogenised project for Europe. This is not to be taken as an argument against further political integration what it suggests, rather, is that such integration might involve an ongoing discovery of differences, as much as a creeping sameness. In placing this emphasis upon the Channel, I am simply relating some of the concerns of this book to some of those that Derrida pursues, in different ways, in VAutre cap. For there he is much concerned with the notion of the exemplarity of Europe. He argues for an exemplariness for Europe that does not exclude or preclude a different exemplariness for Europe at a later date. To raise the problem of the Channel, therefore, is not to say that Derrida is wrong but rather to divert from him (or take another heading) in a manner that he implies must happen even though he cannot anticipate the form of the divergence. I recently had the opportunity to ask Jacques Derrida about this matter: about the Channel as a possible complication of the 'headland' in LAutre cap. His wholly unprepared reaction was that it did not make any difference: the British Isles were part of the cap as far as he was concerned.52 Valery would probably have said the same thing. But the tendency to see the Channel as a problematic factor - which may well be a British tendency (or heading), much more than a French one - has to be allowed for within Derrida's vision of a Europe of others (indeed a Europe of Europes), amongst which gaps and fissures are bound to proliferate. The Channel is an exemplary discontinuity in an idea of Europe. Channels may be necessary to Europe. A particularly strong display of the mind-altering potential of these interstitial waters occurs (again) in Jonathan Raban's narrative, as he draws to the end of his circumnavigation of the island of Great Britain, and sails upChannel towards his home. It is a kind of alienation: They ... Them. Eight miles off Dungeness, with the coast of continental Europe showing as a thread of tinsel on the horizon of the east, the British 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Modernity in Transit

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

looked to me like a very peculiar bunch of foreigners, definitely third persons and not first. [...] I was heading for the Thames and London. I'd promised that I'd be there in two days' time but... It would be so easy to quit Britain now. The French shore looked hardly further away than the English one.53 That is not to say that it looked nearer, and Raban does not end his narrative by emigrating. It seems more that spending so much time offshore has placed all land-based life into the third-person category. The sea, and the Channel in particular, has become an alternative living environment, and even an alternative object of allegiance or citizenship: not merely a discontinuity which emphasises the finiteness of the nations that it flows between, but a positively viewed other home that few of the land-lovers on either side may be expected, for all of Raban's evocative skills, fully to appreciate. This speaks of a Europe that is much more than the sum of the nations that are included within it, but which cannot be generalised into a collective that serves the ambitions and desires of everybody. It is a patchwork of identities, but one with habitable rips.

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154

It is time to assess what can be learned from this survey of the Channel in the English and French literature of the last two hundred years. It is clear, to start with, that the Channel has been significant in both literatures. It is clear also that the status of the Channel differs considerably according to the side from which it is viewed. Also, communication between French views and English ones is sporadic. The French texts that have had most to say about the Channel (by Chateaubriand, Michelet, Hugo and others) are currently neglected in Britain. On the other hand, there is probably no major French writer since Voltaire who has shown the same level of interest in the process of crossing to England that Wordsworth, Dickens, Swinburne or Julian Barnes have shown in crossing to France.1 Britain has a very long history of dominance at sea: the Channel has all sorts of proud associations for the English, and relatively few for the French. It is likely that historical facts such as these are what underlie the asymmetries of interest in the Channel, rather than innate national dispositions. Moreover, the significances of the Channel change over time. Its cultural status has changed a great deal over the period discussed in this book, from the 1780s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Britain and France were locked in a state of on-and-off warfare at the start of this period, and are close allies at the end of it. The process of crossing the Channel was arduous and dangerous at the beginning, swift and straightforward at the end. And such changes are likely to continue. The Tunnel will make a big difference, even though many still prefer to cross above the water. 'As an artifact of this new legal structure [tiie European Union], the Channel Tunnel represents the undermining of Britain's island status and the encroachment of France and Europe', as an anthropologist has recently noted.2 In Britain, it is possible that the significance of the Channel will also be affected by devolution. Scotland (and perhaps even Wales) may conceivably become an independent state, and therefore no longer part of a larger state that has the Channel at its southern perimeter. England, in these circumstances, would be more like France, having at least one land border with another state, so that the Channel would cease to be the

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Conclusion: In Between

156

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

HOW THE CHANNEL IS UNIQUE AND HOW IT IS NOT To consider the meanings of the Channel is potentially to enter a very important area of debate about the viability and role of Europe as a whole, and even to approach a reassessment of the dynamics of the boundary in general, and of the mutual alignment of cultures throughout the world. The fact that the Channel is not just a site of English and French concern has been starkly emphasised in the last few years by a long series of incidents involving refugees and would-be illegal immigrants - including the horrifying discovery in June 2000 of 58 dead Chinese in a sealed container lorry at the docks at Dover.3 Meanwhile, the identity politics on either side have become much more complicated than the old English-French opposition. Bucolic Kent has seen an upsurge of racism - directed against incoming Kurds and Albanians, not prosperous Continentals.4 France and England have been thrust into new confrontations due to their shared unwillingness to deal with people foreign to both nations: as I write these last pages, in September 2001, there is a low-key diplomatic crisis rolling on about the French refugee camp at Sangatte, near Calais - which springs both from British reluctance to receive refugees and French reluctance to keep them.5 In these circumstances, appropriating the Channel culturally, as the property of England or Britain and/or France, becomes more strained than ever.6 But the strain has been there - visible to many sensitive commentators - throughout the period addressed by this book. It reveals itself in the impassioned but grotesque misdescriptions of Dorothy Sayers, for example, when she writes of her 'single island, like a tower'. We see here a kind of nationalism that asserts itself by blatantly pretending that the brute environment (which could belong to anybody or nobody) is something that it is clearly not. 'Your island is not a tower', here, would be tantamount to 'We will invade you!' 'Oh, but it is a tower', amounts to 'Just you try!' One can still see the magnificence of this, in the context of 1940s Britain, but, right now (two weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center) it seems tragically hubristic. Towers can be knocked down. Possibly, the international crisis that is looming now, in September 2001,

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single definitive interface with 'abroad'. But even if devolution does go this far, and even if almost everyone takes to travelling through the Tunnel, the Channel will still be an egregious presence on maps and in imaginations.

157

will lead to a re-evaluation of cross-Channel politics (many of those currently trying to pass through the Tunnel illegally, on or even under the trains, are Afghans), as well as of so much else. In his 'Coda' to a recent collective volume on 'the translatability of cultures', Wolfgang Iser writes that '[t]he need to inspect cross-cultural relations is triggered by an awareness of crisis [...]. Crisis [...] is a prerequisite for knowing that one is embedded in a culture'. Knowing that we are so embedded reveals the value of comparing ourselves with other cultures, and even of engaging in 'a cross-cultural discourse [that] requires a certain amount of self-effacement, perhaps a suspension of one's own stance, at least for a certain time, in order to listen to what the others are trying to say.'7 This echoes back, across two centuries, to Wordsworth's black co-passenger, in the sonnet from 1802: Meek, destitute, as seemed, of hope or aim She sate, from notice turning not away, But on all proffered intercourse did lay A weight of languid speech, or to the same No sign of answer made by word or face Today's cross-Channel refugees are conspicuously silent, at least as they are represented in the media - a cowed and passive presence whose individuality is obscured by the loud negotiations on either side. Hugo, too, would have been interested in these people who are, in a sense, more authentically of the Channel than most English or French will ever be. The silent Gilliatt is another non-person who plunges into the void of the Channel, hoping to come through it to something better, but gets no further. When I began this project, I hoped that it would bring the indirect personal benefit of helping me to understand the European Union, and even the Euro. I am not at all sure that this has happened. What the cultural history of the Channel implies about Britain and the Continent and the relation between the two is too various and unschematic. And, as I have just tried to suggest, its implications are not confined to Europe, however that entity might be defined. What is more striking than any particular national or European identities that seem to be associated with the Channel, is the force of the Channel's own identities, or the various idiosyncratic non-nationalist identities that the Channel brings out, as a reaction, in those who encounter it. What may be most interesting about the Channel, in other words, may be its status as something material, external, and resistant to a collective 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Conclusion

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

solipsism, or the idea that everywhere has to be included in a dominant organising cultural model, be it French, English or anything else. Consequently, I have tried to expose some of the forms and varieties that the Channel assumes as a function of its physical presence - some of which are negotiations with the human, and some denials or interruptions of the human. The Channel may be a barrier, a gap, a means of access, a test, a void, a more or less well- or ill-disposed animate being. Its coasts are edges (jumping-off points, in more ways than one), borders, defences, resorts, places of change, ambiguity and transformation. Perhaps, unwittingly, this has been an effort at a kind of ecological criticism, arguing for the value of a 'real presence' of water and stone that has rights (at least to attention and respect) that supplement, parallel or criticise the human. What the study of the Channel does reveal, even in the era of the Tunnel, is the extent to which our lives and politics continue to be conditioned by the dumb facts of geography - of living in territories of a particular size and shape, with particular kinds of boundaries, making our neighbours more or less straightforwardly accessible. The Channel is not unique in this respect, even in Europe. The recently bridged Oresund, between Denmark and Sweden, offers a parallel, as (in a different way) do the Alps or the Pyrenees. Literature dwells upon such boundaries, contemplating difference and severance, but also engaging in intellectual trade. Much that I have described in this book testifies to the creative interaction of cultures, across the Channel: a sort of common intellectual currency, or what Michel Mollat du Jourdin has called 'une civilisation de la Manche'.8 But this is a dialogue that fails sometimes, and that rarely overwhelms the standpoints of individual writes and artists who may sometimes try to speak for England, or for France, or for those excluded from Europe, or even for themselves. The differences that the Channel has been made to express, therefore, are unbounded. And this, perhaps, is the way in which the culture of the Channel has most to offer, in terms of new visions of Europe and the world. A homogeneous Europe (as though the Channel and many less blatant geographical, linguistic and cultural divides were not there) would seem to be bound to involve tremendous losses, and could only be imposed tyrannically. But a modular Europe, in which each nation fits to its neighbours with an airtight seal, is just as monolithic in its self-presentation to the outside world - and needs some way of relieving its claustrophobia and potential complacency. This is not to say that Europe would be better if it were an archipelago, with Channels between every state. Rather, the Channel seems 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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to stand as a real formation that functions metaphorically for at least some European thinkers who sense the need for something other than their home nation and its equivalent, opposite, numbers. The Channel lets fresh air and water into a particular part of the world, but it symbolises the monitory and invigorating effects that might be associated with borders everywhere: geographical moments where identities are interrupted or exchanged, but, for a while, not taken for granted, and open to supplementation and renewal.

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Conclusion

Literary works are placed according to their dates of first publication, unless indicated otherwise. 1778

France declares war in support of the Americans. Indecisive battle between the British (under Keppel) and French off Ushant.

1779

Franco-Spanish fleet approaches the Channel with the intention of invading via the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth: the invasion is aborted, mainly due to high winds.

1782

Eight vessels sailing fairly regularly by this date on the Dover-Calais route (four French and four English).

1783

Treaty of Versailles. First visit to Brighton of the Prince of Wales (subsequently to become the Prince Regent and, eventually, George IV).

1784-85

Charlotte Smith in Normandy with her spendthrift husband.

1785

Blanchard and Jeffries cross the Channel by Balloon.

1786

Commercial Treaty between Britain and France.

1789

Beginning of the French Revolution. George III begins to patronise Weymouth.

1790

William Wordsworth crosses the Channel for the first time (with Robert Jones; Dover to Calais).

1792

Monarchy deposed in France. Chateaubriand goes to Jersey.

1793

France declares war against Britain. Chateaubriand arrives in 160 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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The English Channel / La Manche: A Cultural Chronology, 1778-2001

Chronology

161

1796

J. M. W. Turner'sfirstrecorded oil painting, a nocturnal view off the Isle of Wight, exhibited at the Royal Academy.

1797

First telegraph link from Portsmouth to London. British Channel fleet refuses to put to sea, mainly due to inadequate pay.

1798

J. Coriande Mittie's invasion drama, La Descente en Angleterre performed at Paris. The Princess Amelia begins to patronize Worthing.

1800

Chateaubriand returns to France, via Calais.

1802

The Peace of Amiens. Many British visit France. William and Dorothy Wordsworth spend a month at Calais, which is also visited by the Edgeworths and Fanny Burney. Turner's first visit to France. Albert Mathieu presents plans for a Channel Tunnel to Napoleon.

1803-05

Napoleon makes preparations for an invasion of England.

1803

Turner's Calais Pier exhibited. John Constable'sfirstencounter with the sea: a boat trip from London to Deal.

1804

Napoleon becomes Emperor.

1805

Napoleon sues for peace to George III, but is rejected. French fleet defeated at Trafalgar (SW Spain); death of Nelson.

1806

Death of Charlotte Smith.

1807

Smith, Beachy Head and Other Poems.

1808

Napoleon considers a scheme for invading England by balloon.

1811

Mary Aiming discovers thefirstichthyosaur at Lyme Regis.

1814

Benjamin Haydon and David Robert Wilkie cross from Brighton to Dieppe on a painting expedition.

1815

Battle of Waterloo. The Bellerophon, carrying the captive Napoleon, calls at Torbay and Plymouth on its way to St Helena. 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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London (beginning an exile of 7 years' duration).

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

1816

Constable honeymoons in Dorset, and paints Rough Sea, Weymouth.

1817

Richard Parkes Bonington moves as a teenager with his family to Calais; begins studying painting with Frangois-Louis Thomas Francia. John Sell Cotman paints in Normandy.

1820

First regular crossings by steam boat (Dover-Calais).

1822

Sea-bathing facilities and Casino established at Dieppe.

1824

First steam crossing, Brighton-Dieppe. William Hazlitt writes articles about Normandy for the Morning Chronicle.

1825

Commencement of Newhaven-Dieppe crossings, by paddle steamer.

1827

Constable, Marine Parade and Old Chain Pier, Brighton.

1830

July Revolution in Paris, followed by abdication of Charles X in favour of Louis Philippe d'Orleans. Chateaubriand visits Madame Recamier at Dieppe.

1831

Jules Michelet sees the Channel for the first time, at Le Havre.

1835

Chateaubriand and Hugo both visit Dieppe.

1837

Accession of Queen Victoria. The Peninsular Steam Navigation Company (later P&O) begins passenger services from Southampton to Portugal, Spain and Gibraltar.

1840

Death of Beau Brummell in a lunatic asylum at Caen. Opening of the London and Southampton Railway.

1841-43

British navvies work on the Paris-Rouen line, under the direction of Joseph Locke.

1841

Opening of the railway from London to Brighton.

1842

The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company begins passenger services from Southampton to the West Indies. Steamer Camilla (Southampton-Le Havre) wrecked off the Channel Islands (one survivor).

1843

Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort visit Louis Philippe at Eu, via Treport (the first visit by a British monarch to France

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162

Chronology

163

1844

State visit by Louis Philippe to Britain (disembarks at Portsmouth). Opening of the railwayfromLondon to Dover.

1845

Second state visit by Queen Victoria to Louis Philippe (landing at Le Treport). Turner sketches in Normandy.

1846-48

Dickens, Dombey and Son.

1847

Opening of the railway from London to Portsmouth, via Chichester. Chateaubriand visits Dieppe on Bastille Day.

1848

Revolution in Paris; abdication and flight to England of Louis Philippe, followed by establishment of the Second Republic. Louis Napoleon elected President. Death of Chateaubriand, followed by funeral at Saint-Malo and burial at Grand Be. Opening of the railway linesfromLondon to Torbay and from Dieppe to Rouen. John Ruskin in Normandy. Musgrave, The Parson, Pen and Pencil.

1849

Repeal of the Navigation Acts, opening the coastal trade to foreign shipping. Eugene Boudin visits Dieppe. Arnold writes 'To Marguerite - Continued'.

1850

Opening of the railway from London to Hastings. Arnold writes 'Calais Sands'.

1851

Increase in Channel crossings due to the Great Exhibition in London. Flaubert's first visit to England. Coup d'etat in Paris. Dickens, 'Our Watering Place', 'A Flight'. Arnold writes 'Dover Beach'.

1852

Establishment of the Second Empire: Louis Napoleon (well disposed towards England) becomes Napoleon III. Hugo begins his exile in the Channel Islands (Jersey). Courbet and Delacroix visit Dieppe.

1854

France and Britain together oppose Russia in the Crimea. Dickens, 'Our French Watering-Place'. Charles Francois Daubigny begins to paint regularly at Villerville-sur-Mer.

1855

Franco-British forces defeated at Sebastopol. Increase in 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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since Henry VIII). Opening of the railway from London to Folkestone.

164

Channel crossings due to Exposition Universelle in Paris (with excursions organised by Thomas Cook). Napoleon III visits London. Swinburne's first Channel crossing. Hugo expelled from Jersey by the British Government; moves to Guernsey. Dickens, 'Out of Town'. 1857

Opening of the railway from London to Weymouth. New passenger services established from Southampton to South Africa and North America. New Casino at Dieppe. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal.

1858

Assassination attempt by Felix Orsini on Napoleon III; Britain held to be partly responsible, leading to a period of crossChannel tension.

1859

Opening of Brunei's viaduct across the Tamar. The French launch the Gloire, the first substantial ironclad. New fortifications (Talmerston's Follies') constructed around Plymouth and Portsmouth. Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

1860

Commercial Treaty between Britain and France, followed by new wave of French Anglophilia. Maiden voyage of Brunei's Great Eastern, from Southampton. Inauguration of DoverOstend route. The British Navy launches its first ironclad. Dickens, 'Travelling Abroad'. William Dyce, Pegwell Bay.

1861

Inauguration of Southampton-Le Havre route. Pier constructed at Bournemouth. Jules Michelet, La Mer. Arnold, Report on the Popular Education of France.

1863

Dickens, 'The Calais Night Mail'. Taine, Histoire de la litterature anglaise.

1864

The American ships Alabama (Confederate) and Kearsarge (Union) fire upon one another off Cherbourg - an event witnessed and painted by Edouard Manet.

1865-66

Gustave Courbet spends summers at Trouville and Deauville, painting many seascapes (sometimes in the company of James McNeill Whistler).

1865

Faster, screw-propelled passenger steamers begin service in the Channel. Flaubert's second visit to England. 10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

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Literature, Identity and the English Channel

165

1866

Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer. Flaubert's third visit to England.

1867

Arnold, 'Calais Sands' and 'Dover Beach' (published).

1870

France declares war on Prussia. Napoleon III deposed; end of the Second Empire; beginning of the Third Republic. Hugo returns to France. Siege of Paris. Prussian occupation of French Channel ports. Courbet, Mer Orageuse (La Vague) exhibited at the Paris Salon.

1871

Paris capitulates to the Prussian forces. Paris Commune established, then violently suppressed. Many French artists and intellectuals take refuge in England. Flaubert's fourth and last visit to England.

1872-73

Hugo in Guernsey again.

1872

Verlaine and Rimbaud cross together from Ostend to Dover.

1874

First Impressionist exhibition, including Monet's Impression, soleil levant (showing the harbour at Le Havre).

1876-77

Verlaine employed as a schoolmaster at Bournemouth.

1878

Oscar Wilde at Dieppe, staying with the Sickert brothers.

1879 1882

Verlaine teaches at a school at Lymington. Petition against a Channel Tunnel, on military grounds, organised by the journal Nineteenth Century: approx. 1,000 signatories, including Tennyson and Robert Browning.

1884

Wilde honeymoons at Dieppe.

1885

George Seurat begins painting regularly on the Normandy coast (continuing until his death in 1891). Many other painters are at work in the area, including Sickert, Degas, Whistler and Gauguin.

1890

The Empress Dock (suitable for large liners, irrespective of tides) opens at Southampton. Arthur Symons in Dieppe.

1891

Inauguration of the Southampton-Cherbourg and Southampton-Saint-Malo routes.

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Chronology

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

1893

The American Line transfers passenger services from Liverpool to Southampton (allowing liners to call at Cherbourg). Verlaine crosses the Channel (for the first time since 1879) for a lecture tour.

1895

The short-lived Savoy magazine is set up at Dieppe by Symons, Aubrey Beardsley and Leonard Smithers. Symons, 'Dieppe, 1895' and related poems.

1897

Wilde in Dieppe following his release from Reading Gaol; subsequently takes up residence, as 'Sebastian Melmoth', at Berneval (where he is visited by Ernest Dowson, Beardsley, Andre Gide and others).

1899

Swinburne, 'A Channel Passage' and Other Poems.

1901

Death of Queen Victoria; accession of Edward VII.

1902

First turbine-powered Channel steamer, the Queen (DoverCalais; the first vessel to make the crossing in one hour).

1903

Edward VII makes influential pro-French speech in Paris. State visit by French President Loubet to England.

1904

Signing of the Entente Cordiale (mainly involving AngloFrench collaboration in foreign/ imperial policy). Claude Debussy composes VIsle joyeuse at Dieppe.

1905

Debussy at Eastbourne; completes La Mer.

1908

Franco-British Exhibition, London.

1909

Bleriot: the first Channel crossing by aeroplane.

1910

Casino established at Deauville.

1914-18

First World War. Many ships sunk in the Channel by German submarines.

1914

The British Expeditionary Force embarks at Southampton, landing at Le Havre.

1915

Mata Hari sails from Dieppe to Folkestone, and is arrested.

1919-20

The Cunard Line and the Canadian Pacific relocate passenger services to Southampton.

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167

1919

Channel Tunnel discussed again in the British Parliament; strong opposition led by Maurice Hankey, on grounds of anticipated threat from France.

1925

Exhibitions in London and Paris. The number of passengers passing through Calais and Boulogne in the year exceeds one million for the first time. Locarno Conference: Britain opposes French political and military aims.

1928

First cross-Channel car ferry (Dover-Calais). Georges Braque begins painting seascapes in Normandy. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West stay at Auppegard, near Dieppe.

1932

Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth visit Dieppe.

1936

Inauguration of the Dover-Dunkerque train ferry service, making it possible to travel in the same railway compartment from London to Paris.

1937

Braque visited at Varengeville by various major artists, including Leger, Miro and Calder.

1939-45

Second World War.

1940

Occupation of Paris and end of the Third Republic. Evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk. German cross-Channel invasion plans thwarted in the Battle of Britain.

1942

Disastrous exploratory landing of several thousand allied troops at Dieppe.

1944

Normandy Landings. Liberation of France.

1959

J. A. Williamson, The English Channel; Reginald Hargreaves, The Narrow Seas.

1973

United Kingdom joins France in the European Community (a.k.a. the Common Market).

1982

British fleet sails from Portsmouth for the Falklands.

1984

Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot; Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea.

1986

Jonathan Raban, Coasting.

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Chronology

Literature, Identity and the English Channel

1989

Graham Greene, 'An Old Man's Memory'.

1991

Jacques Derrida, LAutre cap.

1993

Formation of the European Union.

1994

Official opening of the Channel Tunnel (6 May).

1996

Barnes, Cross Channel.

1998

Barnes, England, England.

2001

Foot and mouth disease crosses the Channel from Britain to France. General election in Britain: William Hague (Conservative) campaigns on a Eurosceptic platform, and fails to displace the French-speaking Tony Blair.

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Notes 1. The term 'English Channel' has been in use since the late sixteenth century, when English naval superiority was established with the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588). During the eighteenth century, and to a lesser extent in the nineteenth, 'English Channel' and 'British Channel' seem to have been used interchangeably. In the twentieth century, 'English Channel' was almost invariably used. 2. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Great Britain and Ireland (1981), 2nd edn, ed. by Dorothy Eagle and Meic Stephens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Margaret Drabble, A Writer's Britain: Landscape in Literature (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979); Guide litteraire de la France, ed. by Raymonde Bonnefous, Bibliotheque des Guides bleus (Paris: Hachette, 1964); La France des ecrivains (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). 3. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (first published in Italian, 1997; London: Verso, 1998), p. 3. 4. 'The Narrow Seas', as a term for the Channel, can be traced back to the sixteenth century in literary texts, but may well have been in use much earlier. 5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), rev. edn (London: Verso, 1991); Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 6. Bernard Crick, foreword to The Idea of Europe in Literature, ed. by Susanne Fendler and Ruth Wittlinger (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's now Palgrave; in association with the University of Durham, 1999), pp. ix-xiv (p. xii). This interesting collection seeks to 'give literature, as an important constituent part of a culture, a more prominent place in the discussion on European integration' (editors' introduction, pp. xix-xxi [p. xxi]). 7. For a lucid discussion of the fifteenth-century 'destruction of all the dreams of Anglo-French family unity and the creation of two separate nations' see Robert Gibson, Best of Enemies: Anglo-French Relations Since the Norman Conquest (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), p. 31 ff. This very readable book, by a historian who is also a literary scholar, is probably the best single-volume introduction to cultural interactions (in the broadest sense) between Britain and France, from William the Conqueror to Jacques Delors. 8. Aubrey de Selincourt, The Channel Shore, The Regional Books Series (London:

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1 ROMANTIC PROMONTORIES 1. For the detailed historical background, see Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793-1815 (London: Macmillan - now Palgrave, 1979) and Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992; London: Pimlico, 1994). 2. Le Voyage outre-Manche: anthologie de voyageurs frangiis de Voltaire a Mac Orlan, du XVUIe au XXe siecle, ed. by Jacques Gury (Paris: Laffont, 1999), p. 2. 3. See Rupert Croft-Cooke and Peter Cotes, Circus: A World History (London: Elek, 1976), pp. 46-9. 4. Luc Robene, L'Homme a la conquete de lair: des aristocrates edaires aux sportifs bourgeois, 2 vols (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), I: La regne des aeronautes 18e et 19e siecles, p. 248. 5. Quoted in Leon Coutil, jean-Pierre Blanchard, aeronaute, Les Andelys, 4 juillet 1753-Paris, 7 mars 1809: biographie et iconographie, 2nd edn (Evreux: Herissey, 1911),p.7,n.l. 6. ibid., p. 8. 7. Doctor [John] Jeffries, A Narrative of the Two Aerial Voyages of Doctor Jeffries with Mons. Blanchard; with Meteorological Observations and Remarks (London, 1786), pp. 47-8. 8. Coutil, p . 9. 9. Marie-Emile-Guillaume Duchosal, Blanchard: poeme en cjuatre chants, dedie a messieurs les maire et citoyens de Calais (Brussels, 1786), p. xviii. 10. Coutil, p. 10. 11. Quoted in Coutil, p. 56. 12. Jeffries, p. 48. The reference is to the meeting between Kings Henry and Francis at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. 13. Quoted in Gury, p. 4. 14. Duchosal, p. 23. 15. ibid., p. 43. 16. ibid., pp. 46-7. 'Architas' is presumably Archytas of Tarentum (fl. 400-350 BCE),

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Hale, 1953), p. 2. 9. Ernie Bradford's Wall of Empire: The Channel's 2000 Years of History (New York: Barnes, 1966) is actually cooler in its assessment of Britain's status in post-war Europe than its title might suggest, but still concludes with a stirring evocation of the Channel as symbol of English independence and resilience; Hillas Smith's The English Channel: A Celebration of the Channel's Role in England's History (Upton-upon-Severn: Images, 1994) places a good deal of emphasis on military heroics. 10. Christophe Campos, The View of France: From Arnold to Bloomsbury (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 170-1.

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a Pythagorean mathematician and engineer whose inventions are said to have included a steam-powered mechanical pigeon (Encyclopaedia Britannica). 17. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 129 and 131. 18. An English print published ca. 1801 shows French troops invading by means of a squadron of balloons (as well as through a tunnel and, more conventionally, by boat). The print is reproduced in Keith Wilson, Channel Tunnel Visions 18501945: Dreams and Nightmares (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), pi. 1. 19. For the facts of Smith's life see Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's - now Palgrave, 1998). 20. The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. by Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 217 (11.1-10). 21. Fletcher, p. 332. 22. Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. 61. 23. See the statistical tables in John Surtees, Beachy Head (Seaford: S. B. Publications, 1997; rev. 1999), pp. 126-7. 24. Louis de Bernieres, 'Legends of the Fall: The Short Way Down an English Cliff, Harper's Magazine, January 1996, pp. 78-82 (pp. 79-80). 25. Jonathan Raban, Coasting (1986; London: Picador, 1987), p. 220. 26. De Bernieres, p. 80. 27. Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. 219 (11.50-60). 28. Fletcher notes that Smith's 'passion for Shakespeare [...] was as strong as' that of any of the Romantics, and that Lear was 'the play she quoted most often' (p. 241). 29. King Lear, ed. by Kenneth Muir, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, corrected reprint (London: Methuen, 1972), IV. 6.11-15. 30. See Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986) - although he says nothing about Smith. 31. Timon of Athens, ed. by H. J. Oliver, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, corrected reprint (London: Methuen, 1963), IV. 3.380-3. See also V. 1.213-17. 32. ibid., V. 1.204-11. 33. ibid., v. 4.75-9. 34. A. D. Nuttall, 'Timon of Athens', Harvester New Critical Guides to Shakespeare (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1989), p. 135. 35. Poems of Charlotte Smith, pp. 245-6 (11.671-91). 36. ibid., pp. 245, n., and 246-7 (11.697-731). 37. Charlotte Smith, A Narrative of the Loss of the Catharine, Venus and Piedmont Transports, and the Thomas, Golden Grove and Aeolus Merchant Ships, Near

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Weymouth on Wednesday the 18th of November Last: Drawn Up from Informatio Taken on the Spot by Charlotte Smith, and Published for the Benefit of an Unfortuna Survivorfrom One of the Wrecks, and Her Infant Child (London, 1796). See Fletcher, pp. 248-50. 38. Poems of Charlotte Smith, p.72. 39. ibid., p. 133. 40. ibid., p. 138 (1.90). 41. ibid., p. 141 (1.157-61). 42. ibid., p. 147 (1.345-6 and n.). 43. ibid., p. 148 (1.366 and 382). 44. ibid., pp. 149-50 (II. 7-10). 45. ibid., p. 156 (II. 210). 46. ibid., p. 163 (II. 434-4). 47. Opinions differ widely over the precise nature of Smith's political views, and must continue to do so, since she never set them out systematically like a Burke or a Paine. Matthew Bray, for example, performs a rather selective reading of several of her works, including Beachy Head, in order to argue that she might have favoured a reunification of the English with their Norman cousins, brought about, if necessary, by a French invasion ('Removing the Anglo-Saxon Yoke: The Francocentric Vision of Charlotte Smith's Later Works', Wordsworth Circle, 24.3 [1993], 155-8). Daniela Carpi Sertori, on the other hand, analyses some of Smith's novels, and concludes that she passed through a series of reactions to the French Revolution that was fairly typical for an English radical, before turning to a belief in freedom through solitary self-expression, away from politics altogether ('Charlotte Smith: una scrittrice impegnata nei fermenti rivoluzionari', Lingua e stile, 27.1 [1992], 125-38). 48. The Remains of Robert Bloomfield, 2 vols (London, 1824), 1,74; Literature Online, 21 June 2000 . 49. For a similar insight in relation to a more recent conflict, see Ernie Bradford, Wall of Empire: The Channels 2000 Years of History (New York: Barnes, 1966): 'It was fortunate, indeed, for the continent of Europe in 1940 that Britain happened to be an island, but it would be a great mistake if the British expected any thanks for this accident of nature' (p. 87). 50. William Wordsworth, 'Poems, in Two Volumes', and Other poems, 1800-1807, ed. by Jared Curtis, The Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 170. 51. Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. 218 (11.40-2). 52. Wordsworth, 'Poems, in Two Volumes', p. 155. 53. ibid., p. 155 n. 54. journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2 vols (London: Macmillan,

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1941; repr. 1959), 1,174-5. 55. Wordsworth, 'Poems, in Two Volumes', pp. 161-2 and nn. 56. Anon. [Jakob Heinrich Meister], Souvenirs d'un voyage en Angleterre (Paris, 1791), pp. 8-10. 57. See Bernard Williams, 'Moral Luck', in Moral Luck Philosophical Papers 19731980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 20-39. 58. For a discussion of an earlier English poet's significant interfusion of geography, politics and private melancholy, in relation to that other channel, the Irish Sea, see Lawrence Lipking, 'The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism', PMLA, 111 (1996), 205-21. Milton's political designs are much more rigidly nationalistic than Wordsworth's, on this account, but Lipking draws attention to a nostalgic literary-geographical emphasis on boundaries that links these two poets, and many others mentioned in this book. 'The role of maps, and of some poems as well, can be to establish a sphere of protection - indeed, to look homeward' (p. 207). 59. Jean d'Ormesson, Une autre histoire de la litterature frangaise, 2 vols (Paris: Nil, 1997), 1,154. 60. John Ardagh, France in the New Century: Portrait of a Changing Society (Harmondsworth: Viking-Penguin, 1999), p. 331. 61. For a full discussion of what it means to be Breton in our own time, see Maryon McDonald, 'We are not French!' Language, Culture and Identity in Brittany (London: Routledge, 1989). McDonald's vivid discussion of her own 'problem of being English' when trying to communicate with Breton militants underlines especially clearly that there is more cultural conflict going on beside the Channel than simply the English-French interactions that I am concerned with in this book (pp. 119-21). 62. Quoted in Shirley Harrison, The Channel (Glasgow: Collins, 1986), p. 200. 63. [Francois Rene, Vicomte de] Chateaubriand, Memoires d'outre-tombe, Edition du Centenaire, ed. by Maurice Levaillant, 2nd edn, 4 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 1949), 1,28-9. 64. See Levaillant's note, Chateaubriand, I, 29, n. 10, and George D. Painter's description in Chateaubriand: A Biography, I: The Longed-For Tempests (New York Knopf, 1978), p. 3. 65. Chateaubriand, 1,45-6. 66. Jean-Paul Clement, Chateaubriand: Biographie morale et intellectuelle (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), p. 157. 67. Chateaubriand, II, 680. 68. ibid., 1,96-7. 69. See the discussion of this scene, and of Chateaubriand's relationship with the Breton coast, in Merete Grevlund, Paysage interim et paysage exterieur dans les

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'Memoires d'outre-tombe' (Paris: Nizet, 1968), pp. 37-44. "The sea thus appears as the only constant in Chateaubriand's turbulent life, and it serves to link together the many diverse episodes of which the Memoires consist' (p. 38). 70. Chateaubriand, 1,357-9. 71. ibid., 1,453-4 72. ibid., 1,519,531. 73. ibid., 1,508-9. 74. When I visited the tomb in March 2001, the injunction, on a nearby plaque, that visitors should let this great writer contemplate the sea in silence, was being ignored - but in a way that Chateaubriand would probably have liked. An elderly couple were sitting there, reading to one another - and to Chateaubriand's ghost - the works of Chateaubriand. 75. Chateaubriand, 1,60 and n. 14. 76. Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. 42. 77. ibid., pp. 103-4. 78. ibid., pp. 104-5. 79. See Stuart Morris, Portland: An Illustrated History (Stanbridge: Dovecote Press, 1985; corr. 1996), pp. 70,93-8 and 125. 80. ibid., p. 103 n. 81. Aubrey de Selincourt, The Channel Shore, The Regional Books Series (London: Hale, 1953), p. 129. 2 ALL AT SEA

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1. Le Voyage outre-Manche: anthologie de voyageurs frangais de Voltaire a Mac Orlan, d XVUleau XXe siecle, ed. by Jacques Gury (Paris: Laffont, 1999), pp. 66-7. 2. The painting is at the National Gallery, London. It is reproduced in colour in William Gaunt, Marine Painting: An Historical Survey (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1975), pi. 123. 3. [Rene-Joseph-Hyacinthe] Bertin, Quelques observations critiques, philosophiques et medicales, sur l'Angleterre, les anglais, et les frangais detenus dans les prisons de Plymouth (Paris, 1801), pp. 6-7. 4. Anon. [Mary Shelley], History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland; With Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers ofChamouni (1817), in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ed. by Nora Crook and others, 8 vols (London: Pickering, 1996), VIII: Travel Writing, ed. by Jeanne Moskal, p. 15. 5. For evidence of this fact see a good navigational chart of the Channel, such as La Manche, 7040/INT1070,3rd edn (Paris: Service Hydrographique et Oceanographique de la Marine, 1992). Shirley Harrison provides a vivid description of one of the more famous nineteenth-century wrecks, that of the steamer Victoria in

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

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1887, off Dieppe, in The Channel (Glasgow: Collins, 1986), pp. 215-16. Other nineteenth-century losses include those of the Southampton-Le Havre steamer Camilla, which struck the Casquets (close to Alderney) in 1842, with the loss of all hands except the mate; the Mary, sunk in a collision in 1870, en route from Southampton to Jersey, with the loss of 33 lives; and the Stella, in 1899, another victim of the Casquets, with many lives lost (C. Grasemann and G. W. P. McLachlan, English Channel Packet Boats [London: Syren & Shipping, 1939], pp. 23, 53 and 87). For references to many more accounts of rough crossings endured by travellers from Britain to France earlier in the eighteenth century see Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 6-8. Maria Edgeworth in France and Switzerland: Selections from the Edgeworth Family Letters, ed. by Christina Colvin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. xiv and 18. Le Citoyen [Pierre-Nicolas] Chantreau, Voyage dans les trois royaumes d'Angleterre, d'Ecosse et d'lrlande,fait en 1788 et 1789,3 vols (Paris, 1792), 1,3. G[eorge] M[usgrave] Musgrave, The Parson, Pen, and Pencil; Or, Reminiscences and Illustrations of an Excursion to Paris, Tours, and Rouen, in the Summer of 1847, With a Few Memoranda on French Farming, 3 vols (London, 1848), 1,11-13 and 15. Musgrave, Parson, Pen, and Pencil, I, v. None of Musgrave's works appears to be listed in The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999-), IV: 1800-1900, ed. by Joanne Shattock (1999), despite this edition's newly expanded coverage of travel writing, books on cookery and sport, and other hitherto neglected genres. Smollett, as a traveller on the Continent in the 1760s, is a great predecessor who is likely to have influenced most of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury British travellers mentioned in this chapter. See Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, ed. by Frank Felsenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Smollett's views often show an exuberantly fierce prejudice that later, more self-consciously responsible writers, such as Dickens, tend to lack. For example, 'If a Frenchman is admitted to your family, and distinguished by repeated marks of friendship and regard, the first return he makes for your civilities is to make love to your wife, if she is handsome; if not, to your sister, or daughter, or niece' (p. 59). Musgrave, Parson, Pen, and Pencil, 1,24. Musgrave is not making this up: see, for example, Harrison, p. 170. The misquotation in the middle of the extract is from Trinculo's description of Caliban in the Tempest, II. 2. 'Matthews', however, has not been traced. Bertin, pp. 12-13. ibid., p. 13. For the reasonableness of this expectation, on the basis of earlier

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travel narratives, see, for example, Samuel Sorbiere, Relation d'un voyage en Angleterre (1667), quoted in Robert Gibson, Best of Enemies: Anglo-French Relations Since the Norman Conquest (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), p. 75. 15. Anon. [Louis Simond], Voyage d'un frangais en Angleterre pendant les annees 1810 et 1811; avec des observations sur letat politique et moral, les arts et la litterature de c pays, et sur les mceurs et les usages de ses habitans, 2 vols (Paris and Strasbourg, 1816), p. 2. 16. Bertin, p. xv. 17. Simond, p. 3. 18. Maria Edgeworth in France and Switzerland, p. 1. 19. Journal for 15-19 April 1802, in The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay), ed. by Joyce Hemlow and others, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972-84), V: West Humble and Paris 1801-1803 (1975), p. 232. 20. Chloe Chard explores this subject, taking her starting point in Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), in Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600-1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 'Women's resistance to understanding is implicitly defined as a characteristic that must positively invite investigation, and excite an eager curiosity on the part of the reader. Female traveller-narrators, when commenting on the behaviour and desires of foreign women, are able to claim an additional authority by reference to their gender: the authority of someone who, having firmly established that foreign women are not easily understood, can nevertheless claim to enjoy privileged opportunities to enquire into female manners' (p. 129). 21. Simond, pp. vi-vii. 22. ibid., p. 4. 23. Simond's narrative, like many others of its kind, ceases to have relevance for the present study after the first few pages, when he leaves the Channel coast and ventures deeper into England. As a general account of early-nineteenth-century England seen through French eyes, however, it is well worth reading as a whole, being peppered with eccentric but memorable observations. Plymouth, for example, reminds Simond of Philadelphia, except that it is full of soldiers and sailors instead of Quakers; Bath is a city 'qui a l'air d'avoir ete jetee au moule d'un seule coup, et qui vient d'en sortir toute jeune et toute fratche' ('looks as though it has been cast in a mould all at once, and has just come out, all fresh and new'); Stourhead is all very well in its way, but has too many laurels, and there is weed in the lake (pp. 9,22 and 267). 24. See Norman Page, A Dickens Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan - now Palgrave, 1988). 25. See Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles

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Dickens (1990; rev. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). 26. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Madeline House, Graham Storey and others, The Pilgrim Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-), V, 30. 27. 'Our French Watering-Place', Household Words, 4 November 1854, repr. in Dickens' Journalism, ed. by Michael Slater, The Dent Uniform Edition, 4 vols (London: Dent; Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994-2000), III: 'Gone Astray' and Other Papers from 'Household Words' (1998), pp. 229-11 (pp. 230-1). 28. 'Travelling Abroad', All the Year Round, 7 April 1860, repr. in Dickens' Journalism, ed. by Michael Slater, The Dent Uniform Edition, 4 vols (London: Dent; Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994-2000), IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers 1859-70 (2000), ed. by Michael Slater and John Drew, pp. 83-96 (pp. 86-7). 29. See Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapter IX, David Copperfield, Chapter XXIV, and Dorothy Van Ghent's famous essay, 'The Dickens World: A View from Todgers's', Sewanee Review, 58 (1950), 419-38. 30. 'The Calais Night Mail', All the Year Round, 2 May 1863, repr. in Dickens' Journalism, IV, 209-18 (p. 212). 31. As John M. L. Drew has remarked, the 'effects of motion on the mental processes, and the fundamental similarity between physical displacement or trajectory and wanderings or flights of the imagination, seem to be concepts underlying many of Dickens's sketches and essays about traveling and travelers' ('Voyages Extraordinaires: Dickens's "travelling essays" and The Uncommercial Traveller (Part One)', Dickens Quarterly, 13 [1996], 76-96 [pp. 86-7]). The cross-Channel disorientation which I discuss here should thus be seen as a politically significant special case of a much wider Dickensian tendency. 32. Letters of Dickens, 1,281. 33. ibid., V, 5. 34. ibid., VII, 100. 35. Dickens' Journalism, in, 231. 36. For more on the many ways in which fearful responses to the French Revolution emerged in literature on the other side of the Channel, see The French Revolution and British Culture, ed. by Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), especially David Lodge's essay 'The French Revolution and the Condition of England: Crowds and Power in the Early Victorian Novel' (pp. 123-40). 37. 'A Flight', Household Words, 30 August 1851, repr. in Dickens' Journalism, ill, 2635 (p. 31). 38. Christopher Johnson, In with the Euro, Out with the Pound: The Single Currency for Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 193. 39. Dickens' Journalism, ill, 32-3.

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40. The apparent exchange of attributes between the old and the young is something of a general obsession in Dickens, cropping up in a wide range of different social and geographical circumstances. But Dickens does not seem to be aware of this fact about himself, and rejoices in the discovery that France shows him something that he always wants to see. 41. Dickens' Journalism, III, 33-4. The narrator's reverie here discloses Dickens's sympathetic knowledge of French literature: specifically, Alexandre Dumas, Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1844-5). See Andrew Sanders, The Companion to A Tale of Two Cities', The Dickens Companions, 4 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 155. 42. Dickens' Journalism, IV, 88. 43. ibid., IV, 214. 44. ibid., IV, 215. 45. ibid, IV, 216. 46. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. by George Woodcock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 50-1. 47. 'Our Watering Place', Household Words, 2 August 1851; repr. in Dickens' Journalism, III, 9-18 (pp. 14-15). 48. Dickens'Journalism, ill, 234-5. 49. ibid., Ill, 238. 50. ibid., Ill, 240. 51. 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time', in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-77), III: Lectures and Essays in Criticism (1964), pp. 258-85. 52. 'On Going a Journey', in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. by P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930-34), vili: Table Talk; or, Original Essays (1931), pp. 180-9 (pp. 188-9). 53. Dickens' journalism, III, 240. 54. 'A Monument of French Folly', Household Words, 8 March 1851, repr. in Dickens' Journalism, ed. by Michael Slater, The Dent Uniform Edition, 4 vols (London: Dent; Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994-2000), II: 'The Amusements of the People' and Other Papers: Reports, Essays and Reviews 1834-51 (1996), pp. 327-38 (p. 331). 55. Guardian, 28 November 1996, p. 24. The representation of the Channel in political cartoons is a large field of study in itself, beyond the scope of this book. It has been taken up by Jeremy Price, who is currently completing a PhD thesis at the University of Poitiers, with the title 'La Traversee de la Manche: Britannia et Britanite en danger dans les dessins humoristiques de la presse britannique de 1945-2000'. 56. Letters of Dickens, VII, 523 and 606. 57. ibid., VII, 103-4.

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58. For a vivid indication of the ubiquity of French or Frenchified villains in British nineteenth-century fiction (including novels by Dickens), see the map and commentary in Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 30. France, as Moretti says, 'is clearly the epicentre of the world's evils': which is why the attitudes expressed in Dickens's journalism are so remarkable. 59. Dickens' Journalism, ill, 241. 60. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. by Nina Burgis, The Clarendon Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 11. 61. Dickens's treatment of the French provides a favourable contrast, on the whole, to the attitudes of another major Victorian novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray. See, for example, The Yellowplush Papers (1837-38) and The Paris Sketch Book (1840). Christophe Campos discusses Thackeray in The View of France: From Arnold to Bloomsbury (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 69-89. 62. Musgrave, Parson, Pen, and Pencil, 1,27. 63. Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. by Alan Horsman, The Clarendon Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 561. 64. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Adrian Poole (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 128. 65. Flora Fraser, Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Lady Hamilton (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), pp. 366-71; Lewis Melville, Beau Brummell: His Life and Letters (London: Hutchinson, 1924), pp. 261-9; Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp. 502-14. 66. Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830-1890 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 26-7. For a similar but more extensive analysis of the painting see Marcia Pointon, 'The Representation of Time in Painting: A Study of William Dyce's Pegwell Bay', Art History, 1 (1978), 93-103, and William Dyce 1806-1864: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 169-73. 'The effectiveness of William Dyce's portrayal of a concept of universal human time in opposition to human daily time is equalled in its period only, perhaps, by Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"' (William Dyce, p. 173). The canvas itself is at Tate Britain. 67. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. M. R. Ridley (London: Dent, 1976), LX, 14. 68. John Kenyon, Poems: For the Most Part Occasional (London, 1838), p. I l l ; Literature Online, 6 May 2001 . Anning was a cabinetmaker's daughter with little education, but her discoveries at Lyme included the first ichthyosaur (1811) and the first British pterodactyl (1828). See Horace B. Woodward, The History of Geology (London: Watts, 1911). 69. In fact, this particular La Vague (also known as La Mer orageuse) is one of a long

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series of similar paintings, dating from 1868-70. See nos. 676-710 and 743-57 in Robert Fernier, La Vie et Iceuvre de Gustave Courbet: Catalogue raisonne, 2 vols (Geneva: Fondation Wildenstein, 1977). 70. James H. Rubin, Courbet (London: Phaidon, 1997), p. 266. The Courbet painting (no. 755 in Fernier) is at the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, and the Hugo at the Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris. Colour reproductions of the two works may be viewed side by side in Rubin's book, pis 167 and 168. 71. One might compare James Joyce's rather Victorian reflections, through Stephen Dedalus, on the relationships between the sea, art, and human suffering, in Ulysses. I discuss these briefly in Authorship, Ethics and the Reader: Blake, Dickens, Joyce (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's - now Palgrave, 1997), p. 208. 72. Jules Michelet, La Mer, ed. by Jean Borie (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. 56. 73. E. de Saint-Denis, 'Michelet et la Mer de la Manche', Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France, 61 (1961), 36-47 (p. 38). 74. Michelet, La Mer, pp. 48-9. 75. Saint-Denis, p. 46. 76. Michelet, La Mer, p. 60. 77. Journal for 5 August 1831, in Jules Michelet, Journal, ed. by Paul Viallaneix, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1959-76), I (1959), 82. 78. Michelet, La Mer, p. 96. 79. ibid., p. 104. 80. ibid., p. 281. 81. ibid., pp. 290-1. 82. ibid., p. 320. 83. ibid., pp. 320-1. 84. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. by Kenneth Allott (1965), 2nd edn, rev. by Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979), p. 254. 85. ibid., p. 256. 86. ibid., p. 254. 87. For a wide-ranging discussion of Arnold's attitudes to France, especially in the field of education, see Campos, pp. 13-48. 88. Michelet, La Mer, pp. 101-2. 89. Poems of Matthew Arnold, pp. 247-8. For a straightforwardly biographical reading of this poem see Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), pp. 108-9. 90. Poems of Matthew Arnold, pp. 129-31. 3 LES FLEURS DU MAL DE MER 1. Walter Pater, for example, gave precedence to France as a fount of art and

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culture in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). 2. Le Voyage outre-Manche: anthologie de voyageurs frangais de Voltaire a Mac Orlan, du xvmeau xxe siecle, ed. by Jacques Gury (Paris: Laffont, 1999), p. 12. 3. See Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), for Mallarme's conception of poetry as '"music" in its purest form' (p. 89). 4. Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer, ed. by Yves Gohin, in 'Notre-Dame de Paris 1482'; 'Les Travailleurs de la mer', Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 759. 5. See Rene Peter, Claude Debussy: vues prises de son intimite (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), pp. 112-25. 6. For more on Debussy's relation to literature see Arthur B. Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 7. Theophile Gautier, 'Marine: flots verts, yeux verts', Caprices et Zigzags (1852), repr. in Le Voyage outre-Manche, pp. 90-1. The textual history of this poem is complicated: see Theophile Gautier, Emaux et camees, texte definitif (1872), suivi de poesies choisies, ed. by Adolphe Boschot, rev. edn (Paris: Gamier, 1954), pp. 34-6,50-2 and 326-9. 8. For a wide-ranging account of negative associations between femininity and the sea in late-nineteenth-century literature and art (especially as embodied in depictions of sirens and mermaids), see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 258-71. 9. Arthur Symons, 'Dieppe 1895', The Savoy, 1 (January 1896); repr. in Cities and SeaCoasts and Islands (New York: Brentano, 1919), pp. 227-48 (p. 227). See also the fairly sharp parody of this essay, attributed to 'Simple Symons', in Punch, 1 February 1896. 10. Symons, p. 228. 11. ibid., pp. 228,245. 12. For vivid descriptions of the artistic social life in Dieppe in the 1890s, which was centred on the painter Jacques Emile Blanche, and included Symons, Beardsley, and, towards the end of the decade, the declining Oscar Wilde (post-Reading Gaol), see Simona Pakenham, 60 Miles from England: The English at Dieppe 18141914 (London: Macmillan, 1967); Anna Gruetzner Robins, 'No Ordinary Visitors: Dieppe at the fin de siecle', in The Dieppe Connection: The Town and Its Artists from Turner to Braque, ed. by Caroline Collier and Julia MacKenzie (London: Herbert Press, in association with The Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, Brighton, 1992), pp. 33-43; and Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1998), pp. 254-63 and 331-7. 13. Symons, pp. 247-8. 14. A mode of recreation personally familiar to me (and not unmissed), from early

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excursions with my Aunt Joan to Mudeford quay. 15. Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey around the Coast of Great Britain (1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 47. 16. Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (London: Cape, 1984), pp. 41-2. 17. Appendix I: 'Flaubert's Skeleton Diary in Garnet de Voyage 13', in Hermia Oliver, Flaubert and an English Governess: The Quest for Juliet Herbert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 148-50 (p. 149). 18. 'Different Forms of Self-Consciousness', Punch, 7 September 1889; reproduced in The Dieppe Connection, p. 86. 19. Symons, p. 245. 20. Quoted in Mark Longaker, Ernest Dowson, 3rd edn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967), p. 291. 21. For an account of Wilde's and Whistler's visits to Mallarme's Parisian salon, see Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp. 31619. 22. Christophe Campos, The View of France: From Arnold to Bloomsbury (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 186. 23. See Philip Henderson, Swinburne: The Portrait of a Poet (London: Routledge and KeganPaul,1970),p.l2. 24. Quoted in Henderson, p. 24. 25. The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. by Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, The Bonchurch Edition (London: Heinemann; New York: Wells, 1925), VI, 195. 26. For a taste of the Swinburne revival see Rikky Rooksby, 'Swinburne Without Tears: A Guide to the Later Poetry', Victorian Poetry, 26 (1988), 413-30, and The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne, ed. by Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993). 27. The Swinburne Letters, ed. by Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959-62), IV, 296. 28. Murray G. H. Pittock, 'Swinburne and the 'Nineties', in The Whole Music of Passion, pp. 120-35 (p. 133). 29. Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer, pp. 772,773. 30. Henderson, pp. 144-5. 31. 'L'Homme qui rit' (1869), Complete Works of Swinburne, xin, 206-19 (p. 207). 32. Complete Works of Swinburne, VI, 198. 33. ibid., VI, 199. 34. ibid., VI, 248-9. 35. ibid., xin, 210. 36. Campos, p. 53. 37. Complete Works of Swinburne, VI, 199.

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38. Victor Hugo, CEuvres completes, ed. by Jacques Seebacher and others (Paris: Laffont, 1985-), III: Roman III, ed. Rene Journet (1985), pp. 14,33. 39. Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer, p. 672. 40. For further historical information about Anglo-French tensions over the Channel Islands in the nineteenth century, see John Uttley, The Story of the Channel Islands (London: Faber, 1966), pp. 164-90. 41. As a semi-fantastical creature, Hugo's octopus derives in part from the large body of French (and especially Breton) folklore about the sea, most of which predates the period covered by this book. For an introduction to this subject see Paul Sebillot, La Mer, Le Folklore de France (1904-06; repr. Paris: Imago, 1983). 42. Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer, pp. 847-8. 43. ibid., p. 974. 44. ibid., pp. 953,846. 45. ibid., p. 653. 46. ibid., p. 843. 47. Paul Verlaine, CEuvres poetiques completes, ed. by Y.-G. le Dantec, rev. by Jacques Borel, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 1005. This poem was originally published as 'Mal de Mer' in La Revue blanche in April 1894; a somewhat different version, entitled 'Conquistador', was published in the Pall Mall Magazine in November 1894 (ibid., pp. 1003-4). 48. ibid., pp. 1009-10. 49. V. P. Underwood, Verlaine et l'Angleterre (Paris: Nizet, 1956), p. 434. 50. Rupert Brooke, The Poetical Works, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1970). 51. Keith Wilson, Channel Tunnel Visions 1850-1945: Dreams and Nightmares (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), p. 27. Other valuable books on the history of the Channel Tunnel and related projects include Jules Moch, Le Pont sur la Manche (Paris: Laffont, 1962), Thomas Whiteside, The Tunnel under the Channel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), Michael R. Bonavia, The Channel Tunnel Story (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1987), Christophe Bouchet, Le Chantier du siecle: le tunnel sous la Manche (n.p.: Solar, 1991), and Bernard Sasso, Le Tunnel sous la Manche: les medias et levenement (Paris: Documentation frangaise, 1994). 52. Gathered Poems of Ernest Myers (London and New York: Macmillan, 1904); Literature Online, 2 August 2000 . 53. Michel Jules Verne, 'Zigzags a travers la science', Le Figaro, Supplement Litteraire, 14.24(16 June 1888), p. 94. 54. An American perspective on the complexity of European identities in the late nineteenth century may be traced further in the novels of sometime Rye resident Henry James. The eponymous child-heroine of What Maisie Knew (1897), for example, revels in Boulogne in a way that exposes the uncomfortable

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Literature, Identity and the English Channel displacement of the more irredeemably English adults who accompany her. 'She was "abroad" and she gave herself up to it, responded to it, in the bright air, before the pink houses, among the bare-legged fishwives and the redlegged soldiers, with the instant certitude of a vocation' (Henry James, What Maisie Knew, ed. by Douglas Jefferson and Douglas Grant [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966; repr. 1980], p. 173). 4 MODERNITY IN TRANSIT

1. For a concise, agreeable history of cross-Channel swimming, see Margaret A. Jarvis, Captain Webb and 100 Years of Channel Swimming (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1975). Webb was congratulated by the Mayor of Dover for doing what 'probably will never be done again' (p. 14). The thirteen-year-old was the Egyptian Abla Khairi (p. 61). 2. Julian Barnes, 'Froggy! Froggy! Froggy!' (1994), in Letters from London 1990-1995 (London: Picador, 1995), pp. 312-27 (p. 327). 3. The Complete Poems and Fragments of Wilfred Owen, ed. by Jon Stallworthy, 2 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), I: The Poems, p. 82. 4. Les Heures longues, in CEuvres completes de Colette, 15 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 1949-50), V, 321-86 (pp. 325-7). 5. Translation by Herma Briffault, in Colette, Earthly Paradise, ed. by Robert Phelps (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1966), repr. in The Penguin Book of First World War Prose, ed. by Jon Glover and Jon Silkin (1989; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 33-5. 6. See Rene Blemus, Les Derniers corsaires de la Manche (Rennes: Ouest-France, 1994). 7. Surcouf was also an enthusiastic slave-trader (like Chateaubriand's father) even after the trade had supposedly been abolished. 8. Charles Hamilton Soriey, letter to A. E. Hutchinson, 14 November 1914, in The Penguin Book of First World War Prose, p. 25. 9. See Robert Gibson, Best of Enemies: Anglo-French Relations Since the Norman Conquest (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), pp. 247-52. 10. Dorothy L. Sayers, 'The English War', Times Literary Supplement (1941); repr. in Brian Gardner, ed., The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939-1945 (1966; repr. London: Magnum-Methuen, 1977), pp. 45-7. 11. Significantly, Hargreaves's book is dedicated 'to my friends in the Armed Forces of Britain and America, of two world wars' (Reginald Hargreaves, The Narrow Seas [London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1959], p. v). 12. J. A. Williamson, The English Channel: A History (London: Collins, 1959), p. 106. 13. ibid., p. 370. 14. Hargreaves, pp. 494-5.

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15. See Peter Sahlins, 'Natural Frontiers Revisited: France's Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century', The American Historical Review, 95 (1990), 1423-51. 16. Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey around the Coast of Great Britain (1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 28-9. 17. Jonathan Raban, Coasting (1986; London: Picador, 1987), p. 196. 18. Theroux, pp. 53-4. 19. Raban, p. 208. 20. ibid., p. 209. 21. ibid., p. 149. 22. ibid., p. 101. 23. For an admirable and much more extensive discussion of Raban, Theroux and the Falklands, see David Monaghan, The Falklands War: Myth and Countermyth (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's - now Palgrave, 1998), pp. 11749. 24. Raban, p. 41. 25. Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (London: Cape, 1984), p. 83. 26. ibid., p. 83. 27. ibid., p. 85. 28. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1973-), II (1980), 5-6. 29. Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot, p. 89. 30. ibid., p. 101. 31. ibid., pp. 101-02. 32. Julian Barnes, Cross Channel (London: Cape, 1996), p. 192. 33. ibid., p. 199. 34. ibid., p. 191. 35. Cf. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992). 36. Graham Greene, 'An Old Man's Memory' (1989), in 'The Last Word' and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Viking-Reinhardt, 1990). 37. Unless you think that the twentieth century ended at the beginning of the year 2000. 38. Julian Barnes, England, England (London: Cape, 1998), p. 55. 39. Paxton & Whitfield, 10 Sept. 2000 . 40. Christopher Norris, What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). 41. Jacques Derrida, L'Autre cap; suivi de La Democratic ajournee (Paris: Minuit, 1991), p. 12. 42. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

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43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Literature, Identity and the English Channel 1992), p. 5. Derrida, VAutre cap, pp. 19-22. Derrida, The Other Heading, pp. 13-16. Derrida, LAutre cap, pp. 24-5. Derrida, The Other Heading, pp. 19-20. Paul Valery, La Crise de Iesprit, Note (or L'Europeen), in CEuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 1,995, quoted in Derrida, lAutre cap, p. 27. Paul Valery, 'The European', trans, by Denise FoUiot and Jackson Mathews, in History and Politics (New York: Bollingen, 1962), p. 31, quoted in Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 22. Jules Michelet, CEuvres completes, ed. by Paul Viallaneix, 21 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 1971-87), IV: Histoire de France, ill, 336. Translated in Gibson, p. 190. Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilee, 1974). Conversation with Jacques Derrida, Southern Danish University, Kolding, 26 May 2001. Raban, p. 219. CONCLUSION: IN BETWEEN

1. As this book goes to press, a new collection of essays on France by Julian Barnes has just appeared: Something to Declare (London: Picador, 2002). 2. Eve Darian-Smith, Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 193. This is probably the most substantial book yet written on the cultural consequences of the Channel Tunnel, although it neither deals with the Tunnel in literature nor addresses the French half of the trans-Manche equation. Darian-Smith is particularly illuminating on the identity politics of England's front-line county, Kent. 3. See '58 Dead in Port Lorry', BBC News Online, 19 June 2000; accessed 22 September 2001 . 4. See 'Port in a Storm', The Economist, 19 August 1999. 5. See Burhan Wazir, 'How I Walked into Squalid Asylum Camp', Guardian Unlimited, 9 September 2001; accessed 24 September 2001 and Jonathan Duffy, 'Fortress Europe's Most Notorious Town', BBC News Online, 5 September 2001; accessed 22 September 2001 . 'Sangatte grew up as a smart little resort town for the well-heeled folk of Pas de Calais. But most of the people pacing its main streets today seem at odds with the surroundings' (Duffy).

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6. As Ruth Wittiinger remarks, 'the creation/construction of a common European identity that transcends the nation-state [...] would first require the establishment or construction of difference [...]. This is no doubt a dubious aim to pursue because it would merely shift the border of exclusion to a different level, with a still very artificial and restricted division of the world into "us" and "them", the binary opposition still being intact' ('Englishness from the Outside', in The Idea of Europe in Literature, ed. by Susanne Fendler and Ruth Wittiinger [Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's - now Palgrave; in association with the University of Durham, 1999], pp. 192-206 [p. 204]). 7. The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. by Sandford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 302. 8. Michel MoUat du Jourdin, L'Europe et la mer, Faire l'Europe (Paris: Seuil, 1993), p. 310.

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Notes

Adye, John, 114 Anderson, Benedict, 4 Arming, Mary, 70-1,179 Ardagh, John, 36 Arnold, Matthew, 65,82-7,91,92,133 Astley, Philip, 11 Barnes, Julian, 3,95,120,136-47,155 Baudelaire, Charles, 45,89,95 Baudrillard, Jean, 146 Beachy Head, 17-26,42,44,74 Beardsley, Aubrey, 92 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de,14 Bell, Steve, 66 Bertin, Rene-Joseph-Hyacinthe, 48-9, 50,52-3,54,56 Bhabha, Homi K., 4 Blair, Tony, 8 Blake, William, 25 Blanchard, Jean-Pierre-Francois, 11-17, 42,120 Bleriot, Louis, 121 Bloomfield, Robert, 27-9,34 Bonington, Richard Parkes, 71,138 Boudin, Louis-Eugene, 71 Boulogne, 52,58,59-60,64-5,67,68, 115,119 Bradford, Ernie, 170,172 Brest, 38-40,79,133 Brighton, 17,26,29,68,72,132-3 Brittany, 35-6,41-2,132,173,183 Broadstairs, 64

Brooke, Rupert, 112-13,121 Brummell, Beau, 69 Burney, Fanny, 55 Caen, 69 Caesar, Gaius Julius, 7 Calais, 12-13,29-33,40,41,49,55,58-9, 64,69,83-5,119,156 Campos, Christophe, 6-7,97,105 Channel Islands, 36,40,89,99-100,1056,146 Channel Tunnel, 6,13-14,46,113-15, 119,120,132,141-5,155-7,158 Chantreau, Pierre-Nicolas, 50,56 Chard, Chloe, 176 Chateaubriand, Frangois-Rene de, 1, 35-43,54,68,75-6,79,89,97,125, 133,139,155 Chesil Beach, 25 Chichester, 17 Churchill, Winston, 129 Clement, Jean-Paul, 38,40 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 131 Colette, 123-6,133 Conder, Charles, 96 Constable, John, 71,72,73,138 Corneille, Pierre, 14 Cornwall, 36 Courbet, Gustave, 71,72-3 Cowper, William, 26 Crick, Bernard, 4 Croy, Due de, 14 Darian-Smith, Eve, 186

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Index

Darwin, Charles, 69,87 Darwin, Erasmus, 18 Davey, Michael, 20 De Bernieres, Louis, 19-20 Debussy, Claude, 89 Delacroix, Eugene, 71 Derrida, Jacques, 147-53 De Selincourt, Aubrey, 5-6,44-5 Dickens, Catherine, 58 Dickens, Charles, 1,50,57-69,70,87, 93,97,105,140,141,142,143,146, 155 Dieppe, 89,92-4,95-7,99,110,137 D'Ormesson, Jean, 35 Dorset, 44 Dover, 11,31,33,41,48,52-3,58,64, 82-3,133,144,156 Drabble, Margaret, 1 Duchosal, Marie-Emile-Guillaume, 1416 Du Jourdin, Michel MoUat, 158 Dungeness, 130 Dyce, William, 69,70,71 Eastbourne, 89 Edgeworth, Charlotte, 49-50 Edgeworth, Maria, 55 Etretat, 79-82,133 European Union, 8,60,148,157 Exmouth, 17 Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas), 134-5 Falmouth,53,54,56-7 Flaubert, Gustave, 95,137,138-40 Folkestone, 114,115 Forster, John, 59,66 Francis 1,14 Gamond, Thome de, 113 Gautier, Theophile, 89-92,95,110, 111, 112

189

Genet, Jean, 153 George III, 10 Gibson, Robert, 169 Gilmour, Robin, 69 Grand Be, 41-2 Gravelines, 48,53,55 Greene, Graham, 144-5 Guernsey, 106-7 Gury, Jacques, 10,46-8,57,88 Hague, William, 8 Hamilton, Emma, 69 Hargreaves, Reginald, 129,131-2,136 Hastings, 44 Havre, see Le Havre Hawkshaw, John, 113 Hazlitt, William, 65 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 153 Henry VIII, 14 Hitler, Adolf, 128 Homer, 108 Hugo, Victor, 3,36,72-3,89,99-102, 104-10,113,146,155,157 Hutchinson, Mary, 29 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 89 Isle of Wight, see Wight, Isle of James, Henry, 183-4 Jeffries, John, 11-15,120 Jersey, 89 Johnson, Christopher, 61 Joyce, James, 180 Keats, John, 42,86 Kent, 132,156 Kenyon, John, 70-1 Laforgue, Jules, 89 Le Havre, 74-5 Louis XIV, 128 Louis XVI, 13 Lyell, Charles, 69

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190

Lyme Regis, 70 Lynn, Vera, 129,132 Major, John, 66 Mallarme, Stephane, 96 Manet, Edouard, 71 Marie Antoinette, 27 Michelet, Jules, 73-82,87,108,133,1512,155 Middleton, 43 Milton, John, 68,173 Monaghan, David, 185 Monet, Claude, 71 Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de, 7 Mont Saint Michel, 89 Moore, Thomas, 63 Moretti, Franco, 2 Morisot, Berthe, 71 Musgrave, George Musgrave, 50-2,55, 62,68 Myers, Ernest James, 114-15 Napoleon 1,10,15,28,65,113,128 Nelson, Horatio, 103-4,105 Newhaven, 110,137 Nord-Pas-de-Calais, 132 Normandy, 17,36,69,73-6,105,132 Norris, Christopher, 147 Nuttall, A. D., 23 Ostend,97 Owen, Wilfred, 121-3 Pater, Walter, 180-1 Patton, George Smith, 125 Philip II, 128 Picardy, 132 Pittock, Murray, 100 Pliny, 42 Plymouth, 48,135 Portland, 43-5,135 Portsmouth, 125,135

Prince Regent, 26 Raban, Jonathan, 20,132-6,146,153-4 Racine, Jean Baptiste, 14 Rainsford, Dorothy Joan, 181-2 Rimbaud, Arthur, 110 Rozier, Francois Pilatre de, 11 Rubin, James H., 72 Rye, 129-30,133-4 Saint-Denis, E. de, 75 Saint-Malo, 36-7,42,100,106,123-6, 133 Sangatte, 156 Sayers, Dorothy L, 126-9,131,132,156 Schama, Simon, 16 Shakespeare, William, 21-4,40,42,100, 104 Shanklin, 68 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 49 Sickert, Walter, 71 Simond, Louis, 53,54,55-7,176 Smith, Charlotte, 3,17-27,29,30,31,36, 40,42-4,68,74,91-2 Smith, Hillas, 170 Smollett, Tobias, 50,51,175 Soriey, Charles Hamilton, 126 Southampton, 135 Sterne, Laurence, 50,176 Surcouf, Robert, 125 Sussex, 17 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 3,45,89, 97-100,101-5,106,109,112,113, 146,155 Symons, Arthur, 92-4,95-7,99,104 Ternan, Ellen, 57-8 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 179 Thatcher, Margaret, 144-5 Theroux, Paul, 94-5,96,132-4,135,136, 146

10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Index

Wight, Isle of, 68,145-6 Wilde, Oscar, 69,89,92,96 Williams, Bernard, 34 Williamson, J. A., 129-31,132,133,136 Wilson, Keith, 114 Wittiinger, Ruth, 187 Wolseley, Garnet, 114 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 31,47 Wordsworth, William, 1,29-33,35,36, 40,47,91-2,155,157 0resund, 158

10.1057/9781403919281 - Literature, Identity and the English Channel, Dominic Rainsford

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

TroUope, Thomas Adolphus, 36 Turner, J.M.W., 47,71,138 Underwood, V. P., 112 Valery, Paul, 150-2,153 Vallon, Annette, 29 Verlaine, Paul, 1,89,96,110-12 Verne, Michel, 115-18,120 Verne, Jules, 115 Voltaire (Frangois Marie Arouet), 7,155 Washington, George, 15 Webb, Matthew, 120 Weymouth,17,44 Whistler, James McNeill, 71,96