What we did at the seaside – nothing!
Charles Doyle
1862
Wood engraving by Joseph Swain
6½ x 4¾ inches
London Society 2 (1862): facing 385.
’Going to the seaside’ was a popular holiday activity for the Victorian middle-classes of the middle of the nineteenth century. Doyle satirizes leisure as a matter of pointless laziness, with male figures lolling in the foreground and others promenading in the background; he also suggests that a visit to the seaside was boring, a notion encapsulated in a young woman reading as she walks. There is indeed nothing to do.
Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke