Viva Lewes June 2015 Issue #105

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David Jarman
Crossing the channel from Brighton
It was not until 1847
that the completion
of the railway link
to Newhaven by the
London, Brighton
and South Coast
Railway enabled the
town to become the
only English port
for the Dieppe sea
crossing. Before then,
Brighton was the
usual embarkation
point for Dieppe, with Shoreham being used as an
alternative if the weather was particularly stormy.
Two men, remarkable in very different ways,
wrote accounts of the Brighton crossing. In his
autobiography, Benjamin Robert Haydon recalls
the journey to France that he made in the company
of his fellow-painter, David Wilkie, at the
end of May 1814, barely a month after Napoleon’s
abdication. Their ultimate destination was not
Dieppe but Paris or, as Haydon puts it in his
characteristically fruity style, ‘that bloody and
ferocious capital, in which refinement and filth,
murder and revolution, blasphemy and heroism,
vice and virtue, alternately reigned triumphant.’
At eighteen hours, the crossing was short for
the time (Cotman’s first painting expedition
to Dieppe, in 1817, took all of forty-two hours)
which was, perhaps, just as well. The cabin was
full of French officers returning home, who
found the spectacle of Wilkie’s red nightcap, and
his unavailing attempts to ward off seasickness by
barricading himself in his berth, sources of much
boisterous merriment.
Haydon marvelled at the contrast between
Brighton – ‘gay, gambling, dissipated, the elegant
residence of an accomplished Prince, with its
beautiful women and light hussars’ – and Dieppe
– ‘dark, old, snuffy and picturesque, with its
brigand-like soldiers, its Sibylline fish-fags, its
pretty grisettes, and its screaming and chattering
boatmen.’ Whereas
the houses at
Brighton ‘present
their windows to
the ocean to let in
its freshness and
welcome its roar’,
Dieppe ‘turns her
back on the sea, as
if in sullen disgust
at the sight of an
element on which
her country has
always been beaten.’
My other traveller’s account is supplied by a man
described by Haydon as ‘a singular compound…
of malice, candour, cowardice, genius, purity,
vice, democracy and conceit’. This is the great
writer William Hazlitt. On 1 September 1824, he
left for Dieppe from the Chain Pier, which had
opened in Brighton the year before. This was the
first stage of a Journey through France and Italy,
the account of which would appear as a series of
articles in the Morning Chronicle.
Hazlitt, like Haydon before him, enjoyed ‘a fine
passage’. His ‘pleasant and unobtrusive’ fellowpassengers
included ‘an English General, proud
of his bad French’, ‘a new-married couple who
grew uxorious from the effects of sea-sickness,
and took refuge from the qualms of the disorder
in paroxysms of tenderness’, and ‘a Member of
Parliament, delighted to escape from “late hours
and bad company”’. Some solace there for Norman
Baker, perhaps.
Brighton did not please Hazlitt, who seemed to
feel that the best thing about the place was visiting
Londoners. His greatest scorn was reserved
for the Pavilion – ‘anything more fantastical, with
a greater dearth of invention, was never seen’. But
the sighting of a Frenchman, ‘playing and singing
to a guitar’, cheered Hazlitt up and reminded him
that he would soon be shot of ‘the land of Sundayschools
and spinning-jennies.’
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