But evidently he didn't have a good time:

"On Margate Sands
I can connect
nothing with nothing."

Since Solo beat me to the punch with the Lord Chancellor's Nightmare Song, let me point out one of the five distinguishing traits of a snark, as defined in Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark":

The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,
Which it constantly carries about,
And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes--
A sentiment open to doubt.

With all of the photoshopping and air-brushing popular now, I wonder if future photo perusers will long for the original as much as I do with this photochrom.

You know what? Scratch that question. I already do.

The block of houses in the centre is still there in a street called Buenos Ayres. The low building immediately to its left is the old Margate Sands station from London via Ramsgate - replaced in 1926 by a larger station a bit further inland with direct access from London. The block at the centre right is still there - Royal Crescent. The houses at the left have gone and been replaced by a monster tower block. Most of these holidaymakers would have come from London by steamer on the 'Long Ferry' about 50 miles. There weren't exactly many bathers or horses when I last went there in 2012.

In Act II of "Iolanthe," the Lord Chancellor has opportunity to shine with "The Nightmare Song," which contains the immortal line "something between a large bathing machine and a very small, second-class carriage." Learning the song as a small boy, I thought that a bathing machine must be some kind of Rube Goldberg contraption that picked one up for a dunking and a scrub up, perhaps a product of the famous firm "Acme." On being shown a photograph of one, I wondered what the horses were for.

I live in Margate, Kent in England where this is set. It was the first seaside resort in England, generally considered to be about 1736. A local gent named Benjamin Beale was the putative originator of the bathing machines seen here. The seafront still looks very much like this on the beach and we still have a blue flag status, which gives us the highest quality of bathing water.

Margate, like many English seaside resorts, fell out of fashion in the late 20th Century but is having a renaissance due, in no small part, to the Turner Contemporary, a national level art gallery, and, in equal part, the wider interest in history and our place in it to which Margate can contribute significantly due to its amazing collection of historical and architectural resources, due to its continuous habitation from the Neolithic to the present day.

Try not to think too much about those horses you're splashing around behind.