The Book of Brighton as It Was & Is

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Charles H Ross' musings on Brighton. I say ‘musings' because, despite the publisher's description of this book as a ‘guide', if you were to use it as such, you would likely end up sleeping on the pier and trying to fish your dinner out of the aquarium. Because as insightful as Ross is, it is weird to read a guide that posits what the fish in the aquarium tanks probably taste like, and strange that it offers lodging advice like “some [hotels] are very bad, and some are very good. You make your choice and pay your money, and trust to fate.” While Chas doesn't offer very sincere travel advice, he does offer some very interesting and funny stories about Brighton of the past and present (that is, as present as 1881). Ross doesn't shy away from the town's weirder stories (notably, the many affairs of King George IV) and is very quick to offer his opinion on ‘hot' topics such as the latest in women's fashion or joking about why the reader should send him money by post (seriously, he makes this ‘joke' 2 or 3 times) and sometimes it's hard to see what connection his stories have to the sea-side city. But this still felt like the one of the most vivid windows into the past I've read compared to some of the other literature from this time I've consumed , because it offered a very small glimpse into several very different slices of life, not from the perspective of a famous Victorian novelist, but just an odd cartoonist who happens to really like Brighton.