Pagelarking: Beachcombing, Mudlarking, and Textuality

ABSTRACT

Stories of beachcombing and mudlarking often emphasise the thrill of discovery. While plastic detritus is often taken as a metonym of human-caused pollution, beachcombing texts frequently juxtapose fears for the future with more personal insights and foreground the importance of individual experience in shaping environmental consciousness. Recent illustrated non-fiction by Lara Maiklem, Tracey Williams, and Lisa Woollett, ranging from picture books and field guides to memoir, also highlights the importance of the page as a textual environment. These works use a variety of typographic and illustrative approaches not only to describe beachcombing activities, but to encourage readers’ engagement with the text. Examining these texts in relation to both textual scholarship and philosophical theories of interaction and constellation highlights the complex role of the printed page in introducing readers of all ages to a variety of environmental concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Beachcombing
• field guides
• LEGO
• mudlarking
• picturebooks

Introduction

Nonfiction accounts of beachcombing have proliferated in recent years. Many authors emphasise the connection between beachcombing and personal understanding or development: in Sea Bean (2023), for instance, Sally Huband writes that beachcombing helps her ‘place [her] imagination in the sea and […] seek an understanding of its workings’ (Huband 2023, 21). Beachcombing, which Huband defines most straightforwardly as ‘search[ing] for curious or useful things that have washed ashore’ is framed in Huband’s text not so much as a hunt for treasure, but as a way to recontextualise the relation between an individual and their environment through the practice of careful attention to the shore. Wyl Menmuir’s The Draw of the Sea (2022), an account of coastal communities in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, likewise emphasises the way beachcombing is linked both to the author’s childhood memories and his current search for solace and inspiration before taking a more ethnographic approach.¹ Beachcombing, Menmuir writes, is ‘the most democratic’ activity that can be done by or on the sea (28). Beachcombers delight in happenstance and contingency, relishing the thrill of discovering an item whose value is its rarity or absurdity. At the same time, both Huband and Menmuir draw attention to what Menmuir calls the ‘wonderfully disreputable’ (23) reputation of beachcombing, highlighting the Cornish term ‘wreckers’ and the Shetland term ‘scranners’, which derive from the historic practice of scavenging the shore for flotsam from shipwrecks. Like mudlarking, which can be used to describe any search for unusual detritus along the banks of a river, beachcombing can be framed in economic terms, but is more often presented in terms of surprise and delight. Mudlarking narratives, which in British writing are frequently centred on the Thames, often foreground valuable objects that have been trapped in the sediment, while beachcombing narratives emphasise the mixture of plastic detritus and more organic items, valuing old toothbrushes as much as colourful shells. Menmuir emphasises, through interviews with Cornish beachcombing authors including Jane Darke, Lisa Woollett, and Tracey Williams, the combined need to collect and inventory the items that are scavenged and their resistance to traditional taxonomies. Beachcombing combines the need to tell a story about what is found with a recognition that any such story is always incomplete.

Whether focusing on individual experience, like Huband’s memoir, or collective experience, like Menmuir’s book, beachcombing narratives frequently emphasise what Jean Sprackland calls, in her own beachwalking memoir Strands (2013), ‘the chance nature of [her] encounters’: ‘Things arrive unannounced, then disappear again under the waves; buried history comes to the surface; traces of the past are exposed and erased’ (237, 236). For Sprackland, as in David Farrier’s account of Kathleen Jamie’s writings, the ‘assemblage of marine debris spurs a kind of epiphany’ (Farrier 2019, 51). Shores, beaches, and banks, and the objects people find there, are not valuable only in themselves, but offer new ways of thinking about both the nature of storytelling and the relation between self and environment. If shorelines have traditionally troubled ‘notions of boundaries and limits’ (Packham, Alder and Passey 2022, 7), the narratives that surround them can similarly be seen as foregrounding open-endedness and the lure of the chance encounter. Rather than pronouncing on a particular environment from a position of authority, beachcombing texts emphasise the personal, the ephemeral, and the contingent. Shorelines are enticing precisely because what is discovered there is both immediate and fleeting: they suggest the possibility of narrative without necessitating a simple solution.

I propose the neologism ‘pagelarking’ here to suggest a range of relations between reader, text, and environment that are particularly visible in, although not limited to, stories of beachcombing and mudlarking. Lara Maiklem opens A Field Guide to Larking (2021), discussed further below, with the claim that larking, as an umbrella term encompassing beachcombing, mudlarking, and even fieldwalking, encourages the discovery that ‘everything has a story to tell’ (14). Understood both as a search for unexpected objects and the creation of narratives that connect them, larking presents a model of engaged encounters with a particular landscape that focus on contingent relations. This practice can also be seen as particularly relevant to the study of texts. If shorelines are places of shifting relationships, texts that highlight these relations may invite the reader to make their own connections between different textual elements, and between the experiences presented on the page and their own understanding of the world. The illustrated non-fiction works discussed in this article, by Woollett, Williams, and Maiklem, are designed for a range of readers, from children to adults, and present different connections between text and image. Each of them, however, is noteworthy not simply for introducing a variety of environmental and historical concerns surrounding shores, banks, and the items that are found there, but for their emphasis on the printed page as an environment that the reader can navigate in different ways. These texts depict larking as an example of a material ecocritical approach, where ‘matter can be read as text […] and interpreted as forming narratives, stories’ (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 6, 1). As in Maiklem’s definition, collection and display are shown as fundamentally narrative acts, and reveal the stories embedded in detritus and debris. This is also true of the texts themselves, which highlight the narrative potential of the page as a space for exploration and discovery.

The popularity of beachcombing and mudlarking texts has paralleled an increased awareness of Anthropogenic change. For Western, and especially British, writers, the visibility of plastic detritus, in Alexandra Campbell’s words, ‘provides access to pressing concerns regarding a growing consciousness of global environmental crises as evidenced through the transnational flow of plastic debris’ (Campbell 2019). If the extent of marine pollution is often difficult to comprehend given, as Stacy Alaimo notes, the ‘persistent (and convenient) conception of the ocean as so vast and powerful that anything dumped into it will be dispersed into oblivion’ (Alaimo 2012, 477), shoreline debris can illustrate the pervasiveness of human waste. Recent studies have linked beachcombing activities to more general environmental awareness (Davies et al. 2022). Whether framed in relation to plastic debris or oil-soaked birds, the animal remains and inorganic material found on the shore function as metonyms for human-caused devastation. Writers ranging from Kathleen Jamie to Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner have written extensively on changes to coastal areas, with a repeated focus on material waste. Coastal communities themselves are prominent in discussion of anthropogenic climate change as their own boundaries erode (Armstrong and Corbett 2021).

While virtually every text on beachcombing published in recent years links plastic flotsam to environmental change, however, many beachcombing texts, including those discussed here, foreground the excitement of discovery over an engagement with environmental crises. Few marine accidents or disasters are as well-documented in British popular media as that of the Tokio Express, which spilled 62 containers, including one containing over five million pieces of LEGO, off the coast of Land’s End in 1997 after departing from Rotterdam (Menmuir 2022, Male 2020, Cacciottolo 2014). The visual appeal of the scavenged plastic, as documented in Williams’s book, co-written with Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Mario Cacciottolo, Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea (2022), serves both as an enticement for readers who have not previously considered marine debris and as a whimsical, piecemeal representation of more alarming devastation. If the scale of human-caused pollution resists conceptualisation, we can know the number of LEGO dragons − 33427 black ones, and 514 green ones – that fell into the sea (Williams et al. 2022, 99–101). The frequency with which the dragons are pictured in recent accounts of beachcombing, however, risks making them normative, and can suggest that plastic detritus is more treasure than threat. While more experimental approaches, such as the work of The Piddock Clam Collective, emphasise the possibility of new collaborative forms of writing to respond to ‘the outcome of disasters fast and slow, chance or even carelessness’ (2022, 115), repeated discussions of LEGO might seem too familiar to warrant change.

Williams’s text, alongside a variety of works by Lisa Woollett including the adult photographic texts Sea and Shore Cornwall: Common and Curious Findings (2020b), Sea Journal (2020c) and the children’s picturebook Treasures from the Sea (2018), deserve particular consideration in this context in terms of their visual strategies of representation. In their printed texts, as well as on social media, Williams and Woollett combine text and image in both traditional and a more idiosyncratic fashion to convey the joy of discovery.² Using various organisational strategies and visual representations, both writers find ways to echo the active attentiveness demanded by beachcombing on the printed page. Williams’s and Woollett’s texts do not simply articulate an argument about the pleasures of beachcombing or the spectre of environmental devastation: rather, they use a variety of textual strategies that encourage the reader to engage with environmental concerns. This intermedial approach gestures towards an environmental receptiveness that has remained relatively understudied. These texts are discussed in relation both to literary scholarship on the aesthetics and design of printed texts and theoretical approaches including Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action and Louise Green’s formulation of constellation in order to highlight their complexity and innovation.

The article then turns to consider the similarities between beachcombing and mudlarking. Woollett’s memoir Rag and Bone: A Family History of What We’ve Thrown Away (2020a), combines the activities to tell the story of her own family and to reflect on changes in British society. Like Lara Maiklem’s non-fiction accounts of mudlarking, Woollett’s discussion of material collection as a prism on personal and social transformation highlights the way material interactions relate to ideas of storytelling and history. The texts considered here use a variety of textual and illustrative approaches, including illustration, photography, and inventive typesetting, to represent their central activities. Rather than highlighting any one of these texts as particularly representative of current accounts of beachcombing, combining a wide variety of texts in a relation that is itself contingent and ephemeral suggests the possibilities of unexpected connection that are central to beachcombing and mudlarking. Reading diverse work by Woollett, Williams, and Maiklem together demonstrates not only the continual lure of shoreline discovery, and its links to environmental discovery, but the extent to which the act of reading is itself a form of larking.

Textual environments and relations

Scholars from a variety of fields have shown an increased attention to the printed page as an environment where text interacts with the space around it. In her work on blank space in Early Modern printed texts, Laurie Maguire emphasises that the ‘page is a visual unit as well as a textual unit and the relationship between layout and content is as productive for writers as it is for readers’ (Maguire 2020, 13). Evelyn Tribble’s earlier work on margins in texts from the same period similarly highlights ‘the conversation between a text and its margins, [and] the play made possible by the space of the page’ (1993, 1). Blank spaces and margins are in conversation with the printed text; they might call attention to the very thing that they seem to conceal – when vulgar language, for instance, is indicated by a space – or they might generate, as in more recent fragmentary texts, space for the reader to insert themselves. Seeing the page not simply as a vehicle for the delivery of meaning, but as an environment in which printed material is in a form of dialogue with the space around it, encourages the reader to conceive of the page as having its own particular dynamics. The page in this sense ‘invite[s] imaginative occupation, playing a conceptual game of hide and seek’ (Maguire 2020, 28). Maguire and Tribble, alongside other Early Modern scholars, posit an active relationship between page, text, and reader that does not produce a single, reified meaning, but continually shifts. While it might appear fanciful to extend this to the relationship between shore, object, and beachcomber that is discussed in the works below, they share a sense of discovery and momentary exchange with the accounts of earlier texts.

Other critics have developed more focused environmental analogies. Writing on the poet George Meredith, Nicholas Frankel argues not only that Meredith’s poetry is ‘conceptualized as a living environment’, but that Meredith further ‘repeatedly dissolves any clear distinction between the imagined environment of woods and the textual environment of the poem’ (Frankel 2007, Para. 13). Meredith, in Frankel’s account, resists Romantic positionings of Nature as a knowable other that can only be described in poetry, and instead reveals nature as something experienced in every encounter, including that between reader and page. Perhaps more directly applicable to the illustrated texts discussed here, David Lewis argues for an ecological approach to picturebooks, where words and pictures interact, or are ‘interanimated’ in Margaret Meek’s term, in response to their environment: ‘the words come to life in the context, the environment, of the pictures and vice versa’ (Lewis 2001, 48). Lewis’s ecological approach allows for a dynamic interpretation of the relation between text and image. Like the majority of picturebook critics, Lewis is anxious to avoid a hierarchical analysis where language is primary and illustrations only exist to echo or expand the printed text. Instead, he not only emphasises the way word and image shape each other, so that ‘each one becom[es] the environment within which the other lives and thrives’ (54), but uses his ecological model to suggest that this dynamic changes not only from book to book, but page to page. Lewis also suggests that the reader plays a key role in this interanimation of text and image: the relation is brought forth in the experience of reading.

Although working on very different material, then, Maguire, Lewis, and Frankel each present a similar argument. The page is not a static vehicle for the delivery of meaning; rather, page and text interact dynamically. Secondly, the reader is an active participant in the interaction between page and text. The text does not simply gesture towards or represent an outside world, as in Timothy Morton’s conception of ecomimesis, where writers explicitly situate the act of writing within a particular environment (2007, 31). Instead, the page can be seen as an environment in itself, or an ecosystem in which different elements, textual or visual, interact. The limitations of this framework, however, deserve further consideration. Lawrence Sipe, for instance, argues that the ecological terms in which Lewis frames his argument elides too many of the specific elements of the relation between words and pictures (2012, 9). Earlier theorists such as David Barton, in developing an ecological approach to literacy, similarly emphasise that while literacy may be seen as ‘an ecological issue’, the framework remains at the level of extended metaphor (Barton 1994, 31). Pronouncing a text as being like an environment does not necessarily make it pertinent to environmental thought. Likewise, drawing parallels between blank and illustrated pages, or texts intended for adults and children, risks oversimplification: while each page might be approachable as an environment, they perform substantially different work. Yet taking ecological approaches to the printed page not simply as metaphorical but as descriptive, and looking at blank and illustrated pages in tandem is a way to emphasise the material reality of the reading experience, and the place of the reader in shaping and being shaped by that dynamic.

Karen Barad’s work, deriving from quantum physics, is surprisingly appropriate here. As Barad makes clear in her explanation of what she calls agential realism, there are neither words with determinate meanings nor things with determinate boundaries waiting in the ether for some enterprising human observer to perceive them. Words and things do not pre-exist, but are known in their intra-action. The nature of what is observed changes as it is observed. This is, crucially, true of both bodies and discourses, each of which is known through material engagement. She writes:

Knowledge making is not a mediated activity, despite the common refrain to the contrary. Knowing is a direct material engagement, a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring, its ongoing articulation (Barad 2007, 379).

Barad emphasises that discursive practices are always material, at the same time that matter is not a fixed substance, or as she says, ‘not a thing but a doing’ (151). Astrida Neimanis draws on Barad in her account of the relation between humans and bodies of water (which includes thinking of humans as bodies of water) to emphasise that what we think of as bodies are not ‘separate entities interacting’, but intra-acting, or co-worlding, or ‘becoming what they are only in relation’ (2019, 34). Water, argues Neimanis, is a way in which bodies become or are related. For both thinkers one of the starting points of any posthuman feminist philosophy is resisting the tradition of thinking of bodies, or discourses, as discrete, pre-existing entities.

Beachcombing on the page: text and illustration

While Barad and Neimanis are not, of course, writing about children’s picturebooks, the relevance of their thinking, as well as ecological or environmental approaches to the printed page, become clear in an analysis of Woollett’s picturebook Treasures from the Sea (2018), with illustrations by Sarah McCartney. The story Woollett and McCartney tell is simple: Ally and her friend Finn enjoy spending time on the beach in Cornwall, and learn more about it when they encounter the older beachcomber Rae. The text introduces readers to a number of things one can find on the beach including, inevitably, LEGO. The printed environment, however, makes the story far more complicated. The text includes a variety of illustrative practices. Some pages present realistic scenes, depicting the story’s central characters on a Cornish shore and providing text that directly illuminates the image. Other pages, however, require very different reading strategies. The second illustrative spread in the book, for example, contains text describing Ally’s box filled with treasures she has collected from the sea, and explains that Ally does not know what many of the objects are. The box, however, is not depicted. Instead, the text is placed against a blank background, while illustrations of shells and other objects one might find on a beach are placed in different groupings on the page. The reader might instantly be reminded of the text’s frontispiece, which includes similar images on a white background, albeit labelled. Here, however, the various materials are simply placed for the reader to engage with individually or collectively, as they wish. The reader can read the text first, and then analyse the images, or vice versa; they can approach the various illustrations of shells in terms of their collective presentation, or can focus their attention onto just one. Like the beachcomber, the reader is selective and attentive, and given a degree of agency that differs from reading linear texts.

Throughout the book Woollett and McCartney make room for a number of different reading strategies: the reader can appreciate the book for its narrative, or use it as a rudimentary field guide. Illustrations of shells, for instance, are positioned both within the landscape of the beach and the landscape of the page: both illustrated and blank backgrounds become environments in which the objects can emerge, and to which they have different relations. As the tale progresses, more techniques are used, including the labelling not only of flotsam but marine creatures, and text that is presented in curving lines that, for instance, mimic the movement of a limpet. The LEGO pieces are introduced in a spread that primarily depicts a line of wrack across both pages, with a labelled LEGO octopus in one corner and a black dragon in the other. Rae explains that ‘“[p]lastic that gets into the ocean can be very dangerous for wildlife”’ (2018, n.p.); this is emphasised to the reader by the image of an unlabelled oystercatcher in the bottom right, picking through the debris. The story ends with an image of Rae’s cabinet of items she has collected; they are not labelled, but the enterprising reader will be able to identify each based on the previous illustrations.

Although the narrative of the book is simple, its variety of approaches suggests several key ideas that are applicable to Woollett’s adult work as well. Firstly, the reader is an active participant in the co-creation of the world, and can engage in their own larking, finding particular repeated objects in different environments. Secondly, the ‘world’ of the text simultaneously refers to a beach on Cornwall and to the page itself, with neither being given preference: as in Neimanis’s formulation, co-worlding ‘is always a collaborative process’ that emerges from the relation between different bodies (2019, 34). The text is not simply the story of several fictional characters, nor an instruction manual on how to beachcomb, but both at once: the reader must determine what they most want to take from the reading experience, and must engage actively and attentively with the text. As such, the flexibility of the text invites a sense of shifting narratives and perspectives that, in fanciful but direct ways, parallels the activities of a beachcomber. These strategies are also employed, to slightly different effect, in Woollett’s two earlier illustrated books for adults, Sea and Shore Cornwall: Common and Curious Findings (2013) and Sea Journal (2016), published in association with the Eden Project. The earlier text combines full-page photographs with explanatory text on, for instance, storms or bristleworms. A number of pages function as field guides to the strandline or rockpools; three images sit at the top of the page, with explanations of the objects of creatures beneath in columns. Other pages include lists of Cornish sea words and the Beaufort wind scale. The book as a whole has no stable organisational principle, and the reader rarely knows what material they will encounter on the next page. Instead, it invites readers to take their own approach, whether treating it as a souvenir of a visit, regarding it as an art object, or reading it from beginning to end. Woollett’s text emphasises not explanation, but discovery: words, objects, and images each open up potential avenues for future exploration.

Woollett’s work can be seen in relation to Louise Green’s development of the idea of ‘constellation’, drawing on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Constellation, writes Green, ‘offers a way of resisting the apparent immediacy of the concept of nature’ in order to create a non-hierarchical approach that includes different disciplinary knowledges (Green 2020, 7). Woollett’s texts, like the acts of larking themselves, combine multiple elements without ascribing authority or definitive status to any particular one. Textual knowledge is not presented as superior to that derived from encounters with images; instead, it is always the intra-action between text and reader that offers new perspectives. This sense of haphazard and often joyful approach is central to Woollett’s implicit encouragement to readers not to understand beaches as pristine natural environments, but as places of constant interplay and discovery. She develops this approach further in Sea Journal. As the title suggests, while the format of the book – oversized pages on heavy stock, combining photographs, illustrations, and text – is similar to Sea and Shore Cornwall, the text itself is more linear, recording Woollett’s discoveries over the year. Although the images in these texts do not depict human bodies, as Treasures from the Sea does, the use of first-person narrative is emphasised: the specific temporal and environmental conditions are emphasised as central to Woollett’s practice. Sea Journal begins, for instance, with an account of ‘last night’s storm’ (2020c, 8), suggesting an immediacy grounded in daily activity. As in many of the beachcombing memoirs discussed in the introduction, Woollett emphasises how a daily practice of beachcombing always brings new surprises. From the table of contents onwards, Woollett emphasises unusual juxtapositions: the entries for January are listed as ‘stone giants, skate, drowned forests, wind-sellers, tale of a Lego dragon, unnamed monsters, sponges’ (2020c, 7). The book depicts a constellation of different objects and elements where none takes explanatory precedence. While Sea Journal invites a more linear reading than Sea and Shore Cornwall, Woollett maintains the possibility of surprise. The discussion of LEGO, for instance, is accompanied not by a photograph of the toys, but a striking image of red dulse, looking almost like a watercolour. Woollett comments on objects which initially resist her understanding: a full-page illustration of a strange, translucent, curved item on a bed of seaweed is labelled ‘no idea at first what it is’ (2020c, 40); it is not until the following pages that Woollett, and the reader, realises that it is an empty fish eyeball, picked clean by gulls.

The close-up image of the empty eyeball is particularly significant because it encourages the reader’s own disorientation: on discovering what the object is, the reader realises that their initial interpretation of it, when it occupied a full page, was potentially incorrect. This realisation permits the development of what Barad terms ‘an ethics of worlding’ (Barad 2007, 392). Writing in response to Emmanuel Levinas, Barad claims that a ‘humanist ethics won’t suffice when the “face” of the other that is “looking” back at me is all eyes, or has no eyes, or is otherwise unrecognisable in human terms’ (392). The image closely resembles that of a ‘sea gooseberry washed up on the sand’ later in the volume; it is simultaneously both ‘all eyes’ and ‘no eyes’(2020c, 110). Woollett’s use of a cryptic label, while only later clarifying the nature of the object in the text – she writes that she is ‘ridiculously pleased to have realised’ it is an eye (2020c, 43) – further suggests that textual elucidation can only do so much: the initial encounter with an object is just as important. Every object and every image, Woollett’s work implies, requires its own relation. Throughout the book Woollett’s photographs, ranging from enormous landscapes to minute close-ups, change the reader’s sense of scale: a coastline, an eyeball, and a plastic bottle might all occupy the same amount of space on the page. Human scale and understanding are thus not automatically assumed to be inherently correct: rather, every object, regardless of both physical size and presumed significance, must be seen on its own terms.

The indeterminacy in Woollett’s text also allows further consideration of the relation between human and nonhuman bodies, and between organic life and pollutants. Neimanis introduces a discussion of the way whale bodies, like human ones, internalise plastic pollutants with a discussion of how aspiration, or a ‘thoughtful suspension … is a kind of care, and an extension of care (attentive, in-between) for that which calls us to respond’ (2019, 149). For both Barad and Neimanis, attending to the non-human other is an ethical imperative, and brings forth a call to responsibility. This question of responsibility in the face of environmental devastation is at the heart of the texts here: attending to the very different objects one finds on the shore means avoiding any thought of nature as other, kept pristine and remote. In Sea Journal this responsibility can seem almost incidental. The final page of the book argues explicitly that ‘the Earth has now entered another period of significant extinction’, but ends with a brief fragmentary discussion of her camera’s corrosion; Woollett finds it ‘surprisingly easy to ignore the rust creeping in at the edges of the viewfinder’ (2020c, 163). If in isolation this seems like an anthropocentric perspective, where global changes are minimised in comparison to personal ones, the effect of the volume overall is to illustrate that it is only by taking different constellated elements in relation that we can renew our engagement with the world. Rather than simply pronouncing on the world, Woollett’s texts invites the reader to understand different elements – human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic – in relation to each other. The world she presents is permeable and unfixed, and requires a variety of different textual and illustrative methods.

Williams’s Adrift takes a similar approach to Woollett’s work, where almost every page employs a different strategy: photographs, illustrations, literary work (it opens with poems by John Masefield and George Mackay Brown), memoir, and scientific and historical contextualisation. At times it makes direct requests of the reader for engagement: a two-page spread of shells, ‘real’ and plastic, found on Cornish beaches, asks the reader if they can tell ‘which is which’ (2022, 43), with answers provided at the back of the book. While the LEGO toys, colourful and familiar, are an inviting entry point for the reader, Williams notes repeatedly that ‘[t]here wasn’t just Lego on the strandline, though. There was so much plastic’ (40). The bibliography lists Williams’s scientific publications, where she has, for instance, studied the specific weathering patterns in the LEGO blocks (Turner, Arnold, and Williams 2020). As much as the text delights in the discovery of the colourful toys, it ends with the declaration that while ‘[f]or many people who pick up plastic from beaches, finding a bit of “treasure” is what makes it fun – a Lego dragon, a toy soldier, a Smartie lid, a tiny dinosaur – […] it would be better if it wasn’t there at all’ (Williams et al. 2022, 161). While the text presents a bid to avoid the nostalgic mourning that often accompanies accounts of environmental devastation, Williams is clear that the detritus she features represents great harm.

While Williams’s and Woollett’s texts use similar strategies, the readership of Adrift is particularly interesting to ponder. The text is awash in colour, with crowded compositions. Its direct addresses to the reader, including a number of games, suggests a juvenile readership, while the endorsements on the back of the book pointing to its meticulous research and its study of ‘global production consumption’ are more squarely aimed at an adult reader (Williams et al. 2022, cover). The text, that is, looks like a children’s book, but is not. Instead, it invites the adult reader to read as a child. This could, of course, be criticised as a strategy, and yet by emphasising readers’ collaboration Williams, like Woollett, suggests that one of the best ways for any reader to think about pollution and change is not through the passive reading of scholarly articles, but through their own active exploration of the text, or what I am calling larking. The diversity of approaches presented in the text not only open it to a wide audience, but invite a collaborative, rather than passive, approach. It is precisely because the reader must create their own strategies for working through the text that the book is successful not only as an account of beachcombing but as a call to think seriously about environmental change. The success of Woollett’s and Williams’s texts is precisely that they do not position the text as a source of authority. Rather, the text is an environment in which the reader intra-acts with words and images in a non-hierarchical fashion.

Mudlarking and the role of the personal

The importance of reader engagement is highlighted in Maiklem’s A Field Guide to Larking (2021). In Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames (2020) Maiklem distinguishes between hunting and gathering approaches to mudlarking: while hunters often use tools such as metal detectors and trowels to dig for valuable finds, gatherers, or ‘[e]yes-only foragers’, take a more ‘contemplative’ approach (Maiklem 2020, 26). Maiklem emphasises that she ‘only take[s] away what the river delivers to me, what’s left on the surface, there on one tide and gone on the next’ (122). The methodology is similar to that described by Sprackland; Maiklem values the tension between what is hidden and revealed, and the thrill of unlikely discovery. She juxtaposes her finds with both past and future; late in the book the chapter ‘Tilbury’ ends with ‘a story of overconsumption and wanton waste [that] sends us a message for the future’ (274), while the next, ‘Estuary’, begins with a Victorian account of ‘Gleaners of the Thames Bank’ (275). Mudlarking reveals material histories and suggests changes to come: it is a moment where different times and narratives meet. A Field Guide to Larking, however, goes further to stress the importance of larking as a meeting point between text and reader that transforms both. Like Adrift, Field Guide invites the reader’s participation, here in the remaking of the text. Differently formatted blank pages invite the reader to ‘draw your favourite pebble’ (2021, 31), write about their experiences, insert photographs and printouts from Google Earth, and even ‘make a muddy thumbprint’ (164). In many ways, Field Guide accords with the principles or shared features that John Law and Michael Lynch identify for field guides more generally: there is a picture theory of representation, a strategic use of texts, and a naturalistic – and in this case, historical – accountability (Law and Lynch 1988, 277–278). Law and Lynch’s fourth principle, authority, is more complicated, however. The reader is able to gain detailed knowledge from Maiklem’s text, differentiating between different types of pottery or varieties of seaweed. They are also, however, invited to serve as authorities themselves, so that the Field Guide, if used in its suggested way, becomes not a guide to larking in general, but a memoiristic record of the larking activities of one particular individual. Thus, while Lynch and Law emphasise that field guides should emphasise ‘essential’ details at the expense of ‘gratuitous’ ones (Law and Lynch 1988, 293), Maiklem’s Field Guide delights in both.

While Field Guide is positioned as an inter- or intra-active text in a way Mudlarking is not, both texts foreground the pleasure of discovering unexpected histories. Field Guide includes short biographies of historical figures expected (Mary Anning), surprising (Derek Jarman), and fictional (Mary Norton’s Borrowers). Likewise, the reader’s own history is called upon; they are given advice not only on beaches, banks, and fields, but larking in their own homes by looking under skirting boards. Mudlarking, meanwhile, is filled with unusual journalistic accounts, largely from the nineteenth century, as well as illustrative accounts of the author’s own finds and failures. This combination of the personal and collective is even more pronounced in Woollett’s Rag and Bone. Both texts are written in linear prose; rather than having illustrations throughout, photographs are provided in glossy insets. Maiklem’s photographs group objects largely by type, or single out particular finds, against a wooden backdrop, while Woollett uses a greater variety of backgrounds, from plain white to photographs of collection cupboards and objects in situ. Woollett’s volume is particularly interested in questions of family history. She introduces the book with a history of her beachcombing collections and writes: ‘Prompted by this growing collection of discarded shore finds, now spanning many centuries, I’ve kept returning to a branch of my family that included dustmen and a scavenger’ (2020a, 9). The objects she finds illustrate both the discontinuities between Woollett’s life and that of her ancestors and the continuities, including, as the text goes on, a pronounced focus on pollution and human-made waste. Rag and Bone ends – shortly after the now-familiar discussion of LEGO – with a more emphatic call for ‘systemic change’ than is found in most of the texts discussed above (204). Both books, while less formally experimental than the authors’ other texts, gesture towards the idea that larking is transformational. Finding a given object reveals something about both the society that generated it and the finder, but our understanding of the process of the search also reveals something about the writer. These texts, like the memoirs discussed in the introduction, are keen to situate the writer within a particular environment in a way that allows the reader to draw parallels to their own lives and experiences; if not as explicitly interactive as their other work, they similarly gesture to the beach or bank as a shifting locus of narrative discovery.

Conclusion

Each of the texts discussed here, although written for different audiences, presents the printed page as an environment for exploration. There is a clear didactic function: in learning to select different elements and relate them to larger narratives, the reader becomes of their own agency and storytelling capability in a way that may encourage them to translate these skills to other material environments, such as a beach or riverbank. These textual strategies are not pertinent only to beachcombing, but provide a robust argument against the common contention raised by Alaimo, Patricia Yaeger, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, among others, that ‘instead of bringing humans closer to aquatic environments, visual images, narrative representations, and aesthetic expressions may create an unintentional self-distance to disconnect the human further from them’ (Oppermann 2019, 447–448). The texts here foreground the role of the human, yet in making the reader an active participant in the narrative, they demonstrate the importance of treating encounters with texts as active. This approach is increasingly common in writing about oceans and shorelines. Sonja Boon, for instance, in writing on islands, emphasises the importance of ‘unconventional reading’ that allows readers to ‘forage through the text’ (Boon 2018, 9). The importance of reader engagement can be extended to other texts, including novels such as Katya Balen’s October, October (Balen 2020), which uses innovative typography to encourage the reader’s involvement in its story about the transformative power of mudlarking. Foregrounding the reader’s own larking, or foraging, into the text showcases the active potential of reading in developing environmental consciousness.

At the end of his influential book on oceanic science, Curtis Ebbesmeyer addresses how studies of plastic detritus, in particular, help humans understand the nature of the sea and the extent of human devastation. Beaches are now ‘haunted place[s] – haunted by the ghosts of plastic past, and premonitions of the future’ (Ebbesmeyer and Scigliano 2010, 207). Ebbesmeyer closes the book noting the tendency to ‘fetishize flotsam curiosities’ (228), and such a charge could certainly be raised against many of these texts, which often privilege the unusual or whimsical. Yet by assembling different objects, and different forms of text and image, these works gesture to the reader’s own capacity to build stories, and to shape new futures based on their own engagement with the environments of both page and world.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timothy C. Baker

Timothy C. Baker is Personal Chair in Scottish and Contemporary Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Recent publications include Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories (Goldsmiths, 2022) and New Forms of Environmental Writing: Gleaning and Fragmentation (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Notes

1. As many writers note, while beachcombing is a global activity, the specific tidal patterns near Cornwall make plastic detritus particularly visible on its beaches, and the majority of British beachcombing texts focus on that location (Woollett 2020a, Menmuir 2022).

2. See, for instance, Williams’s X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram accounts @LegoLostatSea and Woollett’s Instagram @lisawoollett.