There can’t be many who, spending a holiday at the seaside as a child, didn’t collect something – stones, shells, pieces of glass polished by the sea – but ‘The Girl’s Own Paper’ of August 1880 had something much more serious in mind for its readers…..
The author is quick to acknowledge that the more ambitious aquarium project is not always popular while on holiday especially among lodging-house keepers and is kind to remind their young readers not to put ‘scratchy shells and damp seaweed on polished tables.’
Then there is the question of the right container, no need the author is quick to point out to buy a showy, fashionable glass tank when perfectly good household goods are available. The bedroom jug, worryingly described as ‘if tolerably fresh,’ earthenware pans, foot pans…
From then on the author proposes some ambitious inhabitants for the aquarium..
The author then narrates a harrowing tale of forgetting about a crab she had kept and then found him several weeks behind a sofa cushion…hazards indeed!
The Solitary Reader 
I mean, if you can’t have an octopus in a chamber pot then is it really a proper holiday? 🐙💚
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