Alain Corbin's wonderful book explores the dramatic change in Western attitude towards the sea and seaside pleasures that occurred between 1750 and 1840. Interest in travel; the arrival of landscape painting, geology and natural theology; fashions in medicine and the advent of the bathing-machine; the emergence of Romanticism and the Sublime - these are only some of the elements that helped transform perceptions. By the time Jane Austen wrote Sanditon - perhaps the first 'seaside' novel - in 1817, the sea and shore had come to be viewed as something intensely and sensuously pleasurable, with beach holidays all the rage in new resorts from Brighton and Scarborough to Dieppe.