When, in the 1850s, the English middle classes started to discover the delights of the shore, taken there by train, accommodated in the new boarding houses, fed with the deliciousness of real, local unadulterated food—the cream tea entered national consciousness at the same time as the new delight in the coastline— it was the rock pool and its offshoot, the drawing-room aquarium, that swam into the centre of the craze.
Rock pools became the heart of a kind of Nature worship, which saw in its riches and calm a reassuring vision of creation. Life in what Philip Henry Gosse, the great apostle of the pools, called ‘these unruffled wells’ was a gathering of goodness and even happiness. It was as if the pools came from a time before the Fall, when life was innocent and unthreatened. Gosse, surely half remembering the children’s rhyme, imagined at the edge of each pool ‘Adam and Eve, stepping lightly down to bathe in the rainbow-coloured spray’. At the moment when Darwin was challenging the God-ordained vision of Nature and setting the whole of life adrift on chance driven change, the rock pools looked to those Victorians like gardens of prelapsarian bliss, glimmering enclosures in which Nature seemed to have enshrined perfection and permanence.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة August 4, 2021 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة August 4, 2021 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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