Deluge on Brighton

If you’ve ever stood on the promenade and watched a squall gallop in from the west, you already know Brighton can be gloriously contrary. That mix of charm and cheek is exactly what an anonymous 1840s writer - hiding behind the classical pen-name ‘Arion’ - bottled for a Victorian magazine called Blackwood’s. No one now can say who ‘Arion’ really was; the signature was a wink, the voice the point. What matters is the mood: Brighton as a place that can blow your hat off one minute and have you laughing about it the next.

Half a century later, Lewis Saul Benjamin (pen name, Lewis Melville) gathered some of Brighton’s best tales and reprinted Arion’s verses in his 1909 book Brighton - Its History, its Follies, and its Fashion, keeping their quickstep rhythm and salt-spray humour intact. Read today (the book is freely available at Internet Archive), they feel like dispatches from any wet weekend here: gaslights won’t stay lit, the Downs shove you back to town, and everyone looks a bit drowned but somehow game for it. Below is the first half of Brighton in Storm as Benjamin preserved it - proof that our weather has always had a starring role. (This - unattributed - image is dated 1835 and has been used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.)

Brighton in Storm

So, this is your summer

To meet a new comer!

The sky’s black enough to benight one.

From Mondays to Mondays,

(Above all, on Sundays,)

It pours down its deluge on Brighton.

If I walk on the cliff,

From the sea comes a whiff,

That whirls off my hat, though a tight one;

If I stroll through the streets,

Every soul that one meets

Looks like a drown’d weasel, in Brighton.

If I stir in the day

I’m half-buried in clay,

And, ’twixt sand, salt, and chalk, I’m a white one;

If I slip out at night,

Not a glimpse of gas-light

The tempest will suffer, in Brighton.

If I ride on the Downs

A hurricane frowns—

I’m off, ’tis quite useless to fight one;

On one of those days

I fairly missed stays,

And came by the life-boat to Brighton.

For my dreams of gay gambols,

My waterside rambles,

Serenades, promenades, to delight one;

With an old telescope

In my window I mope,

From sunrise to sunset in Brighton.

Then, as for the shows,

I see none but wet clothes,

Umbrellas, and faces that fright one;

Fat squires with lean daughters,

By salt and spa waters

All come to be plump’d up in Brighton.