Briny Beach

Briny Beach is a fictional beach in the A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket.

The beach’s name is a literary allusion to Lewis Caroll’s famous poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There), which relates the tale of how two chaps (a walrus and a carpenter) eat a bed of talking oysters to cure their melancholy over the fact that the briny beach is so sandy and unclean (unfortunately, this feast only serves to increase their melancholy). A verse from the poem goes as follows:

“O Oysters, come and walk with us!”

The Walrus did beseech.

“A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,

Along the briny beach:

We cannot do with more than four,

To give a hand to each.”

According to the carpenter in the poem, the briny beach has boiling water (“The time has come to talk of many things: of ... why the sea is boiling hot...”), although it seems unlikely to be true of Briny Beach.

Brine itself is water heavily saturated in salt, such as that found in the sea, and is commonly used in pickling.

In the first novel, The Bad Beginning, Briny Beach is where the Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, learn from Mr. Poe that their parents have died in a fire which destroyed their home. From then on, the series occasionally mentions the beach in referring to the orphans' ongoing misery and woe. In The Grim Grotto (the eleventh novel), the beach is where the Baudelaires meet Kit Snicket for the first time when she picks them up to take them to Hotel Denouement, leaving behind Mr. Poe, who had come to take the children to the police. This visit, the Baudelaires' second in the series, is alluded to in the "Author's Notes" section of the Rare Edition of The Bad Beginning. These notes also allude to Violet returning to Briny Beach alone for a third time in the series during Book the Thirteenth, which is to open with the Baudelaire children sailing in a boat on the ocean with Count Olaf.