H.D., ‘The Shrine’, Seagarden, 1916

In her enormously popular book British Seaweeds (1870), Margaret Gatty urged her readers to ‘forgo conventional appearance’ and ‘adopt boy’s’ boots’ when seaweed hunting, noting – almost regretfully – that ‘if anything could excuse a woman for imitating the costume of a man, it would be what she suffers as a sea-weed collector from those necessary draperies’. Addressed to a speculative female reader, the book suggests that seaweed hunting had become a respectable, if nevertheless thrilling, pastime for Victorian ‘gentlewomen’. If their feminine dress required some adjustment, they were relatively unencumbered otherwise, free to scramble over the shorelines in their pursuit of untamed nature.

Gatty was part of a generation enthralled by the natural and aesthetic properties of seaweed. Middle-class men and women flocked to the seaside to trawl the coastlines, and an industry of handbooks emerged to accompany them. Even George Eliot spoke rapturously of the ‘these tide-pools [that] made me quite in love with seaweeds’. An 1858 cartoon in Punch, ‘Common Objects from the Seaside’, poked fun at the craze, showing collectors in their droves, hunched over in their fervour to gather the precious strands. Women outnumber the men considerably, ludicrously displaying their undergarments as they are reduced to nothing more than cubic backsides.

If this and subsequent cartoons in Punch mercilessly satirised women for treating seaweed and the seaside as ‘beautiful’, rather than simply ‘jolly’, this was in part because of the intensity of feeling expressed. Shirley Hibberd’s The Seaweed Collector, published two years after Gatty’s handbook, treats the seaweed as a manifestation of the divine: a ‘complete expression of the will of God’. Hibberd treats seaweed almost as if it is animate, describing the ‘seed-like bodies’ in reproduction that exert themselves through ‘vital forces’. Theoretical approaches to seaweed puzzled over this animacy, as its forms of reproduction remained obscure. Why did the ‘bodies’ whirl pointlessly round and round, ‘like a cat round its tail’, before it could find a happy home on the rocky floor? Seaweed appears as creaturely and alive in Victorian writings, the embodiment of an untamed nature. For this reason, Hibberd claims, algae are not just beautiful, but actually the ‘inspirers of a temporary enchantment’.

What if we attended to this enchantment of seaweed? Its slippery substance might let us chart a queerer route through seaweed’s history, one that opens up space for the nonhuman at the same as it reveals the entanglement of seaweed in queer lives and cultures. Just as Andrea Long Chu described wanting to ‘trawl through the seafloor of my childhood’, I want to trawl the seafloor of queer history. By returning to the nineteenth century, natural forms like seaweed are shown to be enfolded in the lives of nonconforming Victorians, histories of quiet companionship and subterfuge joy.

The first book of photography was about seaweed. Made by Anna Atkins using the cyanotype technique, a process involving soaking paper in chemicals and allowing the seaweed specimen to mark itself on the page through light exposure, it was a breakthrough in scientific documentation. Dedicated to ‘my botanic friends’, the shimmering images reinvest the dead forms with new life.

Unlike the mounted specimens of previous books, these algae were drawn by light on the page. As I was researching Victorian approaches to seaweed, I came across another kind of trace in a first edition of Hibberd’s The Seaweed Collector. Someone, at some unknown time, had put a plant cutting in the book. The specimen itself was shrivelled, basically disintegrating as I opened the page, but its trace presence bloomed across two margins. Reading the book meant destroying this historical touch that lingered on the pages. Its life flittered on and off; matching, in some strange way, the way the Reverend Landsborough spoke of the algae life cycle in 1849, how ‘the plant yields its heart and dies’. The seaweed described is the Griffithsia, named in honour of one of the most famous seaweed scholars Amelia Griffiths. Griffiths was in communication was the leading scientists of her day, and W. D. Harvey dedicated his book British Marine Algae to her. Griffiths’ lifelong companionship, however, was with Mary Wyatt, who had been employed as a servant in the Griffiths household before setting up her own pressed plant shop. Together they mapped the coastlines of Devon. Wyatt published the results of their findings in Algae Damnoeusius, diary in algae of their days together. As with Atkins, who co-created the final albums with Anne Dixon, ‘like a sister’, these seaweed albums are archives of Victorian companionship, a lifewriting through the natural environment.

Falling in love with seaweeds was not only a pursuit of science. It was also something magical. Christina Rossetti’s Hero: A Fairyland maps the magical world, describing objects from fairyland that have been washed ashore and found by humans. One of those fairy things are ‘unfading seaweed, exquisitely perfumed’. Seaweed, in other words, could be conceived of as a magical substance, that vitalised the world around it with its sensorial properties. In 1905, Punch reissued a cartoon with the title ‘Common Objects from the Seaside’ that had appeared in 1858. This time, however, the seascape has been transformed into a fairy world. Humans have been replaced by goblins who mischievously swarm the seaside. The cartoon offers a new perspective on seaweed by alluding, comically, to its associations with magic and fairy folk. The illustration was commissioned to Arthur Rackhaw, had originally come to fame for his illustrations of Rossetti’s better-known poem Goblin Market. The gothic poem dramatizes a fractious encounter between humankind and magical creatures, as goods move between the worlds. In Rossetti’s ‘Hero’ seaweed is one of those objects from fairyland.

Seaweed could also, however, be monstrous, reanimated in spirits such as the lore of the Orkney islands, from Nuckelavee who rages when humans burn his seaweed to Tangie, the shapeshifting seaweed covered beast. Mary and Elizabeth Kirby’s The Sea and its Wonders (1871) tells the story of a ‘monstrous’ piece of seaweed that transforms itself into a sea serpent, terrorizing sailors. In Daphne du Maurier’s gothic novel Rebecca (1938), seaweed finds its last gasp as the boundary between the known and unknown world. It marks a final frontier between ground and water, ‘the woods came right down to the tangle of seaweed marking high water’. Seaweed is an in between thing, ‘as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare’. It marks the wildness of the place, the desolation felt by Rebecca in a foreign land.

In 1898, Edith published a Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll. The importance of Cornwall for Edith was underlined by a heartbroken Havelock when, many years after her death, he dedicated a chapter of his autobiography to her life. Despite an initially lukewarm meeting, Havelock and Edith fell into companionship in Cornwall when Edith was there on a walking tour with her ‘faithful servant’ Ellen Taylor. Through walks on the Cornish coast, they came to realise their agreeable kinship and agree to a modified version of the free love then fashionable in radical circles. Havelock was well aware of Edith’s relationships with other women. At the time of the novel’s publication, Edith was in a relationship with the artist Lily Kirkpatrick, who died only a few years later. Havelock describes stolen nights together, as they manoeuvred their relationship under the watchful and disapproving eye of Lily’s sister (Havelock claims to have given over his studio space to give them time together). After Lily died, Edith devoted herself to an invented spiritualism, a religion of Lily in which she could still communicate with her lover through death. Almost a decade after Lily’s death, Edith wrote A Lover’s Calendar. It is dedicated to those ‘who are divided, either by Life or Death’, and Havelock tells us it was written for Lily.

Seaweed explores the possibilities and complexities of free love. It is centred around the couple Kit and Janet, who live in poverty following a workplace accident that has left Kit paralysed. Janet leaves the house for long periods of time on the pretext of gathering seaweed to make an ointment for Kit. Kit reflects on the practicalities of his marriage to Janet during these absences. He feels unable to provide for her sexual needs and so tries to explain to the village curate that he would be comfortable with Janet having sexual relationships with other men. The curate, the proprietor of bourgeois morality, is horrified: ‘Do you seriously mean to imply that you have some idea of letting your wife – ahem! – cohabit with another man while keeping up a semblance of a relationship with you?’. The curate cannot see out of the normative marriage structure; for Kit, however, a change in affairs is necessary and entirely justifiable.


Figures around Kit are suspicious of Janet and the seaweed. As Kit tries to work out a solution to help both parties, the others ridicule the benefits of seaweed, since ‘it seems to me that the seaweed oil is nothin’ but a snare to trap a fule’s money’. Seaweed gathering was part of Cornish industry at the time. Cornwall was in particular famed for Dulse, a seaweed commonly used to make soda. An undated photograph from the late nineteenth century shows seaweed being gathered by two men to be loaded onto a cart. Seaweed harvesting was widespread across the British and French coastlines and romanticized in artistic depictions from James Hook’s The Seaweed Raker (1889) to Émile Bernard’s Breton Women Gathering Seaweed (c. 1892). Janet’s use of the seaweed therefore belongs both to a vernacular medical tradition at the same time as it also points to a magical and fantastical history of seaweed that had been part of British lore for centuries. Seaweed was not just fairylike, but also monstrous, capable of maliciously bewitching humans. The treatment is advocated by an ‘old witch doctor’ who quickly becomes the object of suspicion herself. Kit jokes, half-heartedly, that ‘perhaps the woman ‘ave melted her character into the seaweed stuff and it’ll come out’. People start to distrust Janet: is she really gathering seaweed, or is something more deviant happening? Seaweed stands in for forbidden activities; a byword for treachery and deceit, ‘nothin’ but pap to stop up Kit’s mouth wi’.

A review in the University Review praised the book for its ability to, just like seaweed, ‘lay hold of the reader like a spell’. The novel, however, was instantly tangled up in the furore surrounding Ellis’ Sexual Inversion and withdrawn from sale. Years later it was republished under a new name, Kit’s Woman. Seaweed had disappeared from sight.

More reading -

Feuerstein, Anna. ‘Falling in love with seaweeds: the seaside environments of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes’, Victorian Writers and the Environment, (Routledge, 2017), p. 188-204.

Garascia, Anna. ‘“Impressions of Plants Themselves”: Materializing Eco-Archival Practices with Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae’, Victorian Literature and Culture 47.2 (2019), p. 267-303.

Hunt, Stephen E. 'Free, Bold, Joyous': The Love of Seaweed in Margaret Gatty and Other Mid-Victorian Writers’, Environment and History 11.1 (2005), p. 5-34.

Wallace, Jo-Ann. ‘"How Wonderful to Die for What You Love": Mrs. Havelock Ellis's "Love-Acre" (1914) as Spiritual Autobiography’, Victorian Review 37.2 (2011), p. 137-51.