The coastal floods that occurred on the weekend of 31 January and 1 February 1953 represent the worst natural disaster that Britain experienced in the twentieth century. A combination of wind, high tide, and low air pressure caused North Sea levels to rise and surge through sea defences, ravaging over 900 miles (1450 kilometres) of coastline between Yorkshire and Kent. Over 300 people died as a direct result of the flooding, which also damaged homes, industrial facilities, and infrastructure. Several comprehensive and authoritative accounts of sundry aspects of the disaster were published at the time. Yet the story of the 1953 floods did not receive a great deal of attention from writers for several decades thereafter. Perhaps it was felt that there was little more to be said.

Over time, however, a growing popular interest in social history and wider anxieties stemming from an increased risk of flooding due to climate change has stimulated a renewed interest in the events of 1953. Ongoing debates about how, and to what extent, low-lying areas of England can be defended from the sea have drawn on aspects of the human tragedy in 1953 to highlight current and emerging threats to populations in areas since developed on land vulnerable to flooding from tidal surges. Writers concerned with the politics of social responsibility have also questioned whether accounts of the bravery and resilience shown by survivors of the 1953 floods mask the fact that the British people were at the time inadequately protected from the risk of flooding due to a lack of foresight, expertise, and action on the part of central government. As a consequence, changing perceptions of risk and responsibility have affected how the 1953 disaster has been presented at different times.

In places where significant numbers of people perished, the social cost of the disaster has often been commemorated since with public memorials, and the experiences of survivors have been recorded in local histories. The anniversary of the great flood is periodically marked in televisual and print media, with the reproduction of black and white images of the event acting to highlight paradoxically both its separation from our own times and its relative closeness.

AN OBITUARY OF JOANNA Mary Boyce, by then Wells, offered by The Spectator in 1861, gave a glowing account of her career and closed with a plea that her work be recognised by the British artistic establishment:

As this tribute suggests, Boyce was highly regarded in the mid-nineteenth-century art world. Acquisition of works by contemporary artists for public collections such as the National Gallery was an indication of an artist's reputation and their success within a growing art market with numerous protagonists, fluctuating social and economic factors and variations in aesthetic taste and value. The proposal that work by the young woman artist belonged in a national collection and the intimation of its ‘intrinsic merits’ is unusual; as Jan Marsh has noted of patrons of women's art in the nineteenth century, ‘[q]uestions of merit were not involved, purchases being largely a matter of critical favour and financial investment’. Critical reviews and judgments of value were integral to the way in which artists navigated the art market in the nineteenth century. Although Boyce was highly regarded by fellow artists and critics, this appreciation did not necessarily translate into great financial success or prolific output seen in more commercially successful painters such as her husband Henry Tanworth Wells, or her brother, the landscape painter George Price Boyce. Such a comparison is of course inherently unfair given the restraints that Joanna Boyce experienced as a woman artist. Her career was also cut short by her early death while Wells lived to seventy-five. Despite The Spectator's prompt, Boyce's work did not enter public collections until 1923. During the twentieth century the artist's family gifted two paintings by Boyce to Tate and thirty-eight paintings by Wells entered public collections via a wide range of sources.

These acquisition histories alongside the disparity in representation of the artists’ work in public collections points to the differing ways in which the two artists were able to navigate the nineteenth-century art market.

“Records in the history of the coastline”

In this chapter, it is only intended to give the reader a brief history of the problem of the defences of the Suffolk Coast line. A comprehensive record would entail a vast amount of research among old books and documents for which I could find insufficient time: and I fear that having gone to such length, the detailed result might only be of interest to a limited few. Therefore my attempt will comprise a few snatches from records, sufficient to be of interest to the general reader; more especially to those who know the Suffolk coast.

With little imagination, it is obvious that the present coastline is ‘comparatively’ new. An ordnance survey map of the coast, if taken every ten years would continue to show that the sea is a master in its own domain and bent on further conquests. For hundreds of years the sea has been gnawing at the coast in some places, whilst in others such as Minsmere and Easton Bavants, the river mouths have silted up. A Minsmere man has taken up this advantage and enclosed the land from the sea – but its enclosure is for such periods as the sea decides in its periodic combined revolution with the north west wind.

The low lying marshlands are comparatively new additions to our land mass and have generally been enclosed from the rivers and the sea during the past four hundred years. In the 16th century, the Dutch were already busy on sea defences and many of their early engineers came over to this country to advise and assist with the work of building sea walls – and still do.

All the river walls which enclose the marshes of the Stour, Orwell, Deben, Ore, Alde, Blyth and the Breydon Water are therefore protecting land which has been won from tidal waters. Throughout the centuries, these marshes [Page 121] have been won and lost and then regained. Some of them to-day are temporarily lost to the tide, and in spite of the urgent need for all the acres of food producing land, the problem of financing these works must loom its critical head and wag words of economic wisdom.

MALE ART WRITERS AND reviewers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement are often cited, while the contributions of their female peers are significantly less well known. However, Joanna Mary Boyce's art writing for the Saturday Review is as worthy of further consideration as her male counterparts John Ruskin, William Michael Rossetti and Frederick George Stephens.

Scholars have recently drawn attention to the pivotal role of women art writers in the nineteenth century. Women produced a diversity of texts including travel diaries, museum guides, articles and volumes dedicated to historical works as well as reviews of contemporary art. There was already considerable precedent for female art writers by mid-century and Boyce's writing fits within the growing category of the professional art writer.

Professional art writing necessitated networks with editors and journalists. Art reviewing by its very nature required travel, visits to exhibitions, the negotiation of gallery spaces and careful examination of works of art. This was followed by the production of regular copy on demand. Boyce's columns and extant correspondence give vital clues about her writing practice and the challenges it entailed. Her personal correspondence attests to the positive reception of her writing. The letters reveal anxiety about her interventions in this new forum, but also her robust and knowledgeable responses to exhibitions. She was assertive about her own views and singled out particular works and artists for criticism and praise. These careful analyses can be related to her own interests in portraiture and landscape.

Boyce's tenure as an art writer came at an intriguing historical point. She not only coincided with Pre-Raphaelitism, but was involved in the very beginnings of The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art. Established in November 1855, the Saturday Review was to become an important and prevailing presence in Victorian mass media. Although Boyce's career was cut short, the newspaper remained a space that was open to women art writers. Boyce was an early and fascinating exemplar in the rapidly expanding realm of mass journalism.

PROFESSIONAL WOMEN ART WRITERS

Art writing was disseminated in a variety of forms by mid-century, from travel guides to historical artist biographies and collection catalogues. As scholars have recently argued there were in fact many women who were working in art writing during the nineteenth century.

The Book of the Deeds of Jacques de Lalaing has survived in thirteen manuscripts. This is a translation of the text as it appears in the earliest complete copy, dating from the late 1470s or early 1480s: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 16830. Beautifully illuminated – though less sophisticated in style than the magnificent manuscript of c. 1530, now in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles – and copied with great care, it has few obvious errors or accidental omissions; on the rare occasions when these occur (all indicated in footnotes), I have referred to the text of Lettenhove's edition (Volume VIII of his Oeuvres de Chastellain, Brussels, 1866), which was based on a late 15th century manuscript belonging to the comte de Lalaing and another from the late 15th or early 16th century: Valenciennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 665. The Paris MS 16830 is accessible on line: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10537591f/f11.item. Chastellain's edition is also accessible on line: https://archive.org/details/oeuvrespubparleb08chasuoft/page/n5/mode/2up.