"Newlyn was large enough in which to find a variety of models and subjects but not too busy."

"Newlyn was large enough in which to find a variety of models and subjects but not too busy."

This study explores whether such points of contact can be identified in the case of one marginal occupational group: the fishing communities of the small ports of west Cornwall in the later nineteenth century. Specifically, were the representations of Cornish fishing places and people popularised by the Newlyn School of painting in the 1880s and thereafter independent of the economic and social structures of those communities, floating autonomously in the ether of imagination?

Two factors helped to prevent the full flowering of a picturesque tourist gaze in the early nineteenth century. Close up, what struck visitors was the narrow, ‘intricate and capricious’ streets in the fishing villages. For the author of Cooke’s Topography the streets of St.Ives in 1805 were ‘disagreeably narrow, dirty, irregular and ill-paved’. Such townscapes did not fit preferred expectations of open, ordered landscapes and uncluttered vistas. But the irritation visitors felt at the chaotic micro-geography of Cornish fishing ports paled into insignificance when compared to the effects of the fishing industry on their nostrils. The attraction of Cawsand was seriously compromised for George Lipscomb in 1799 when he ‘descended a very steep hill, amidst the most fetid and disagreeable odour of stinking pilchards and train oil’.

At the same time, Maton concluded that at St.Ives ‘the stench arising from the stores, and from the putrid rejectamenta lying about the town, is to strangers almost intolerable’. In 1812 Daniel Webb found the smell from the curing houses at Newlyn and Mousehole ‘excessively offensive’. Local writers seemed more immune to the conditions. Samuel Drew makes no mention of offensive smells in his 1820s account of Cornish fishing ports. Even Mevagissey, while its streets were ‘frequently dirty’, was noted as a place in which ‘from time immemorial’ the houses of the inhabitants ‘have been proverbial for cleanliness’. This was perhaps overstating things, as Mevagissey suffered severely in the cholera outbreak of 1848 and was dismissed bluntly by Murray’s Handbook of 1859 as ‘noted for dirt and pilchards’.

Dubious smells and poor sanitation were becoming less commonplace in urban Britain after mid-century as sanitary inspectors and suburban builders set about their work. In such a context, Cornwall’s fishing ports became ripe for ‘othering’, seeming to contain the essential primitiveness and the proximity to nature lacking in centres of modernity. From the 1850s narrow streets and even bad smells served to add to the ‘strangeness’ of the fishing communities when gazed upon by the modern sophisticate. For Walter White in the 1850s places such as Looe and Polperro were not merely picturesque; they were ‘queer-looking’, ‘strange’ and ‘rare’. Moreover they were ‘foreign’. The American observer Elihu Burritt in the 1860s found Looe to be a ‘strange-looking, wild, scrawny village’ with houses the ‘most un-English in appearance that I had ever seen in England - looking like a Mediterranean fishing village broken off whole and transposed upon this Cornish coast’. Not only were Cornish fishing ports now spatially adrift; they were temporally unmoored. St.Ives, for Burritt, seemed to have ‘drifted in here whole, from some portion of an older world’. This discourse then became more commonplace and by the 1900s places like Polperro were being routinely described as charming, old-world quaint and picturesque.

At first, ‘othering’ focused on place rather than people, as did the picturesque discourse in general. The inhabitants only made fleeting appearances. In the 1850s White, for example, had noted only the ‘hardy and adventurous’ fishermen of Newlyn who ‘had sailed from thence on a mackerel boat of sixteen tons for Australia’. For all the other-worldliness of St.Ives Burritt found its people ‘loyal, patriotic, intelligent and virtuous’, textbook subjects of modernity. It was the Reverend Richard Warner in 1809 who had pre-figured later representations of the fishing communities. ‘The inhabitants’, he wrote of Mousehole, ‘exhibit the finest specimen of Cornish strength and beauty. The broad and muscular outline of the male, and the luxuriant contour of the female form, here, evince that the climate, food, or employment of these people, (or perhaps all together) are highly conducive to the maturation and perfection of the human figure’.41 But it was to be the artists based at Newlyn in the 1880s who brought the people of these communities back into the frame of the picture, as primitive components of the landscape.