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years, it had been terrifying—vast, unpredictable and the supposed home of horrific monsters. As the eighteenth century progressed, a different attitude emerged. It owed much to a new sensibility, voiced with particular eloquence in Edmund Burke’s 1756 treatise Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which glorified what was dark and alarming. At least since the Renaissance, people had found the sea ugly because it frightened them. Now, people began to find the sea sublime, for the same reason—because it frightened them. Gingerly at first, they began to visit seaside villages, peering at the fishermen, their boats and gear while they worked up the stomach to gaze at the sea. Where the fishermen’s houses had turned their backs on the water, now prosperous people started to build residences that looked out on it. Seascapes, formerly a rather despised genre, began to look intriguing and would soon be crowding out the landscapes at painting exhibitions.

CRY ME AN OCEAN

The Romantic view of the sea meant that young ladies seeing it for the first time were expected to break down. When Charlotte Brontë travelled to Bridlington, where she caught her first glimpse of the sea, “she could not speak till she had shed some tears.”

A BATH FIT FOR A KING

Even royal insanity (which was in fact porphyria) might be helped by a salt-water bath. In 1789, after his first episode of madness, George III, his wife and daughters travelled to Weymouth. The entire village was decorated with signs saying “God Save the King,” and the bathing women (in charge of escorting, unwrapping and wrapping the bathers) wore the slogan around their waists and tucked into their bonnets. A band stood by, and when the regal head was submerged, they struck up “God save Great George our King.” When his health allowed, the king returned to Weymouth annually.

In 1750, Dr. Richard Russell published a Latin tome entitled Dissertation on the Use of Seawater in Diseases of the Glands. In it, he described hundreds of glandular problems in lurid detail, almost all of them cured or improved through the use of sea water. Unexpectedly, this compendium of secular miracles became a runaway bestseller in a pirated English version that went into five printings in its first decade. The historian Jules Michelet praised Russell as “the inventor of the sea”—an overstatement with more than a germ of truth. Russell had proved to the eighteenth century’s satisfaction that the sea was not only sublime but also healthful. He built a grand house overlooking the English Channel in Brighton, up until then a disregarded place that blossomed under his influence into one of England’s greatest resorts. His patients were instructed to bathe in the sea, preferably at five in the morning in the winter, and drink sea water. Some were massaged with seaweed and showered with heated sea water.

A BRINY LAXATIVE

“A pint is commonly sufficient in grown persons, to give three or four sharp stools.”

—Richard Russell, A Dissertation on the Use of Seawater

In her unfinished novel Sanditon, which takes place at the seaside, Jane Austen mocked the myriad, contradictory claims made for salt water and sea air. Together, she wrote, they were “nearly infallible, one or the other of them being a match for every Disorder, of the Stomach, the Lungs or the Blood; They were antispasmodic, anti-pulmonary, anti-septic, anti-bilious and anti-rheumatic… They were healing, softing, relaxing, fortifying and bracing, seemingly just as was wanted, sometimes one, sometimes the other.” Much the same could have been said of the grandiose claims for plain cold water.

But, although their promises were dubious, Floyer, Wesley, Russell and the other cold-water advocates were influential figures in the return of water. The popularity of mineral water spas in the seventeenth century had begun its rehabilitation, but mostly for the upper classes and the aristocracy. Now, in the eighteenth century, the revival grew, as doctors assured people from all classes that plain water from the nearest well or river or