Literary Britain

Onward, ye literary pilgrims

A remarkable gazetteer shows what writers owe to places – and how places are changed by writing

Toby Barnard

A story is told that Princess Margaret, having read Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, craved to see Nether Stowey. Accordingly she instructed her pilot on the way back from an official chore to circle several times around the Somerset cottage. If true, the incident shows the passion (and disregard for others) of literary pilgrims. It also suggests how biography kindles interest and can create cults. Byron Rogers’s recent life of R. S. Thomas is currently driving devotees deep into the Lleyn peninsula. Indeed, ever since the biographies of writers came to be seen as an aid to appreciating their writings, their places of birth, education and residence have been scanned for presages and echoes. Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and John Boydell’s promotion of Shakespeare through his gallery were vital in popularizing the biographical approach. Pilgrimage was being secularized; the educational value of tourism strengthened.

Because admirers bring custom, institutions and municipalities eagerly advertise associations. On occasion, indeed, they have exaggerated the links. Schools and colleges hoard, and sometimes exhibit, memorabilia from past pupils. Thus, the curious may stare at Johnson’s teapot, Philip Larkin’s spectacles, numerous locks of hair, quills and inkhorns, even, in the case of Jeremy Bentham, his embalmed body. More orthodox stimulus comes from portraits and busts. In the dining hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, hang images of Byron and Tennyson. The Long Room of the eighteenth-century library at Trinity Dublin, boasts Roubillac’s head of Jonathan Swift, which is placed among the serried ranks of stern divines and forgotten scholars. Hull University Library proudly displays personal mementoes of Philip Larkin. In the Tate Gallery, the mawkishly mauve corpse of Chatterton, dead in his garret, in Henry Wallis’s posthumous image continues to fascinate. The National Trust, with its astute blend of commerce and high-mindedness, has long preserved authors’ houses. After all, one founder of the Trust was Beatrix Potter. As well as her Lake District home, the Trust’s équipe includes Thomas Hardy, T. E. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, Bernard Shaw and Thomas Carlyle. Smaller organizations cherish Laurence Sterne, John Keats, William Wordsworth, the Brontës, William Morris, D. H. Lawrence, Barbara Pym and P. G. Wodehouse. Where no residence can serve as a museum, relics are venerated, graves tidied and monuments erected. More modest cults agitate for blue plaques to record men and women of letters.

Requirements for entry into Oxford University Press’s astonishing gazetteer vary. Birth, residence (no matter how brief) and death frequently suffice. In many cases, therefore, the connections are accidental and glancing. To evade landlady, bailiff, discarded lover, or Child Support Agency, writers frequently change addresses. Lurking here too is an uncertainty as to how much the specifics of a locality matter to writers. The euphony of the place names – “Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun” – can suffice.

Ideally, a literary guide should address what writers owe to places and how places come to be seen, and are even changed, through writing. In general, the compilers of The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland associate literature with poets, dramatists and novelists (the creative), rather than with journalists, diarists, letter-writers, antiquarians, philosophers and memoirists. But no genre or its practitioners is altogether excluded, even if inclusions are erratic. Authors vary between those who name real places, those who lightly veil them and the inventors. Among the last group, some break up the ground and reuse the fragments in their own patterns. For visionaries, locality is the starting trap out of which the imagination streaks. The compilers, the third pair to toil on the vast enterprise, have inherited a rich deposit. Indeed, there is a thick silt of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century obscurities. The principal novelty of this fresh version is to include the living and recently dead. Vividness in evoking particularity is seldom the qualification for admission. Both the meticulous and the sloppy find a place. The sharp startle us into seeing scenes as they did: “our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs”: “ale like goldy foam that frocks an oar on Penmaen Pool”; “Their proper habits vaguely shown / As jointed armour, stiffened pleat”. Hazier and maybe lazier characterizations – “England’s green and pleasant land”, “those blue remembered hills” – offer comfort. So serviceable is Housman’s line that it serves as title both for the biography of the once popular historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff and for a business selling cricketing memorabilia.

Towns sometimes undeservedly become the focus of writers’ revenge. Yet Slough was not without fault when Betjeman singled it out for bombing. One of the supreme haters, Patrick Hamilton, spared few localities: Brighton, Henley, Reading and numerous London districts. Hamilton has his place in the Guide, although in it Reading escapes his invective. That unlovely town, maybe not courting literate sightseers, features equably in the volume for the schooling of Jane Austen, the home of Mary Russell Mitford’s family, the incarceration of Oscar Wilde, an overnight stay of Jude the Obscure and, unexpectedly, the university education of Laurie Lee. In “The Friar” (can it be the still-extant “Monk’s Retreat”?), Hamilton describes the public house in which Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce and her set of barflies, bores and tricksters met (or “foregathered”) of an evening. Piling horror on horror in his evocation of interwar Reading, Hamilton adds Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce’s pebble-dashed and semi-detached house in Sispara Road. Expertly he dots the garden with gnomes and the interior with brass bric-a-brac. Friends of Reading – and of the Thames Valley – could take away the taste of Hamilton’s bile with one of the most topographically alert novelists. Regrettably, Elizabeth Taylor is a missing person. The cramped backstreets of the town, through which she had quixotically distributed left-wing leaflets during the 1930s, appear in varied guises in her stories. Once married to a successful chocolatier, she removed to a more salubrious Thameside life. Beneath the banal routines, she charted eddying emotions. In addition, she registered the unspoken but vital distinctions expressed in the old London postal districts (still understood today) and the (now forgotten) telephone exchanges – BAY[SWATER], FLA[XMAN], WEL[BECK]). The social slippages between W4, W8 and W12 have no finer recorder.

The Guide alerts readers to so many recondite associations that, overwhelmed by the trivia, they may ask ungratefully: what does it signify? To stand in the cramped quarters at Haworth, Chawton, or Shandy Hall is to grasp something of the enforced intimacies. Among poets, novelists and dramatists, surroundings trigger invention as well as reportage. The real and unreal are mixed together. Skilful juxtapositions of the imaginary alongside the actual foster the illusion of recognition. These fabrications, only patchily documented here, deserve more extended discussion. Angus Wilson, a currently unfashionable writer generously represented in the Guide, wrote revealingly of this, as of other aspects of fiction, in The Wild Garden. A master of deft topographical positioning, Wilson loaded places with cultural and social connotations, some of which were personal but most of which were readily grasped by his readers. He expected the attentive to recognize and respond appropriately to “a neutralized compound of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire”, the windswept tedium of Seaford impaled as “one of the more hideous of seaside towns” (it has no entry in the Guide) or his “new town”, Carshall. Wilson, in common with many writers, seemed a thwarted architect. He erected a grandiose but plausible baroque palazzo, Tothill House, between Dolphin Square, where he had a flat, and Westminster Abbey.

Imagined architecture belongs to a long tradition. With a creation like Henry James’s Poynton, “the exquisite old house itself, early Jacobean, supreme in every part”, it matters less to trace it plausibly to prototypes than to note its function as “a provocation, an inspiration, a matchless canvas for the picture”. John Meade Falkner, retired to the precincts of Durham, invoked the boding presence of his abbey of Cullerne in The Nebuly Coat, but moved it closer to Wimborne Minster or Christchurch Priory. The dizzying raising of the Spire by William Golding’s novel attests to his schoolmastering in Salisbury. The literary itinerant will be tested harder in tracking the originals of Oswald Fish’s St Aidan, Purgstall Heath. Two accomplished fictive builders, both absent from the Guide, splice the real to their inventions. Alan Hollinghurst bounds his territory with Ladbroke Grove, the Portobello Road and Lowndes Square. In south Dorset, Litton Gambril is reached from the railway station at Crewkerne and is close to Weymouth. Maybe the author’s own exasperation with geographical slovenliness causes a character to be corrected for assigning Plymouth to Dorset. Elsewhere, “Barwick” epitomizes the joyless towns of the South Midlands – Northampton, Rugby, Bedford, Wellingborough, Kettering – that swung readily to Thatcherism in the 1980s. “Hawkeswood” serves well for a Rothschild-like mansion. Hollinghurst even fabricates entries from Pevsner’s Buildings of England and constructs a black book of plans for the imagined mansion of Tytherbury. A second virtuosic literary constructor is Neil Bartlett. The cutting rooms of a manufacturing furriers, with nineteen employees, is set with such exactitude that, had it not been consumed by fire, it ought to be easy to locate. Number 4, Skin Lane is related precisely to London Bridge Station and St James’s Garlickhythe. Similarly, in Mr Clive and Mr Page, Bartlett uses the former Turkish Baths in Jermyn Street and the long-defunct banking department at Selfridges to frame an all-too-plausible town house designed by H. H. Richardson in his “Romanesque” mode at 18 Brooke Street.

The Guide is calculated to cash in on and increase travel. Literary people, like the bulk of the population, were, for a long time, circumscribed by slow and costly means of movement. Resources allowed some, and need forced others, to move about. So long as the manner of locomotion was horse, coach or Shanks’s pony, progress was slow. The ambling pace encouraged prolonged contemplation. Minute variations of altitude, accent, dialect, fauna and flora were obvious. Hungry for copy, writers noted and perhaps exaggerated these. Rivers, canals and coastal waters also offered leisurely exposure to a range of sensations. Then, suddenly, with steam power, travel sped up. The secluded were no longer trapped; privacy was easily disturbed by the sightseer. Tennyson, having fallen for the wild west of Wight, happily received Prince Albert, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and the Ballyshannon-born poet William Allingham. But quicker and cheaper ferries brought the celebrity-hunters from Southampton, so, forsaking the bluebells, primroses and windy cliffs near Farringford, the poet fled to mainland Hampshire. Undeterred, publications such as George G. Napier’s The Homes and Haunts of Tennyson (1892) sustained the curiosity about the sights that had inspired the Poet Laureate.

First the advent and then the increasing ownership of automobiles enlarged the circuits of writers. Soon intrepid motorists joined bicyclists in pursuing even the most reclusive authors. Faster travel quickly altered what there was to view – crooked streets bulldozed for relief roads and car-parks, placid meadows bisected by motorways – and how it was seen. The more that centralization, uniformity and mechanization smoothed away parochial and regional oddities, the more the vernacular was cherished. Published tours of England during the 1930s, most famously J. B. Priestley’s English Journey, were shot through with an ambivalence about modernity. Other sentimental perambulators – S. P. B. Mais, Robert Gibbings, E. V. Lucas, H. V. Morton, Arthur Mee, even Professor Joad of The Brains Trust, a passionate rambler – are ignored. Yet their influence in coupling writers with habitats was considerable. Moreover, they elevated the quaint and twee, the rustic over the urban or industrial. By doing so, they pandered to, even helped to foster, a nostalgic and self-congratulatory view of Englishness or Britishness.

During the Second World War, unified resistance involved the sacrifice of local quirks. Yet, paradoxically, the propaganda behind the war effort insisted that what was being defended was the physical idiosyncrasy of Britain. With tourism stunted by security and shortages of coal and petrol, reading offered the vicarious pleasures of travel. Anthologists busied themselves. John Arlott, G. Rostrevor Hamilton (by day, a special commissioner of Income Tax), Geoffrey Taylor, John Betjeman and – above all – Geoffrey Grigson resurrected the minor, the provincial and the parochial. Thankfulness for victory, tempered by austerity, expressed itself in new celebrations of the terrains of Great Britain (and Ireland). Fresh publishing ventures – series such as the Vision of England and Mee’s patriotically titled The King’s England – focused on the supposed personalities of counties. Fairgrounds, circuses, canals, even graveyards were treasured as oases of individuality. At the very moment when the look, names and boundaries of places were endangered, scholars were mapping their solid foundations. The historian W. G. Hoskins, and Alec Clifton-Taylor, through his revelatory book The Pattern of English Building (1962), documented what hitherto had been sentimental hunches. Auden might inventory the bedrocks of the island in “In Praise of Limestone”, and remember a time when regional railway companies named their engines “after knights in Malory”. But this instinct for local particularity was dwindling. Indeed, sceptics contended that only commercialized sport produced widespread identification with the county, through cricket, and with drab townships, via soccer and rugby.

In this Indian summer of literary localism, images frequently backed words. The Betjeman-Taylor anthology was illustrated by John Piper. In his Buildings and Prospects (1948) and Romney Marsh (1950), Piper wrote as well as drew. Another notable illustrator, Edward Bawden, conjured Life in the Village, as earlier his close associate Eric Ravilious had commemorated the visual and commercial variety of The High Street. Shell, profiteers from the transport revolution, helped to ensure that motoring brought cultural enrichment. Leisure was organized around goals. Through its county guides, started in the 1930s, Shell brought together writers (Betjeman, Robert Byron, James Lees-Milne) and artists (Piper, Paul and John Nash). Even in Shell’s later “Shilling guides”, distinguished painters were employed and in composite representations of counties writers peep out.

Ardent in promoting informed awareness of the distinctiveness of place was Geoffrey Grigson. He pioneered the appreciation of two writers – William Barnes and John Clare – whose sense of belonging caused them to use an idiolect. He also rekindled interest in George Crabbe and Samuel Palmer, whose vision was centred on the then hermetic Darent Valley around Shoreham. He bicycled in Cornwall with Piper. Grigson’s astringent eye unfailingly detected the slack and slick. His own writing – accounts of his upbringing in Cornwall and of Donegal, Limerick, West Looe, the Isles of Wight and Scilly and the Burren – reveals an erudite and unrivalled topographer. This understanding of local complexity also runs through his wife Jane’s English Food. In the Guide, Grigson creeps onto the Isles of Scilly, the title of his early book of poems, but not into the index.

Conjurors of place through words are properly the business of this Guide. Whether the written leaves a stronger imprint than the pictorial is not an issue that it addresses. In luring tourists into an area, who is the more powerful: Kyffin Williams or R. S. Thomas; Stanhope Forbes or Charles Causley? The passionate sightseer dithers between Constable and Shakespeare Country. Sadly, the interweaving of the visual and verbal is not probed. Few entries show equal facility with pigments and prose. The exceptions – Blake and Wyndham Lewis – did not bother much with specificity of place. The engraver Gwen Raverat is mentioned on the strength of her memoir Period Piece. Other artists have evoked places memorably through words: Kenneth Lindley on Swindon; Paul Nash with surreal Swanage; Lynton Lamb’s Chelmsford. Clare Leighton, an equal of Raverat, describes in Tempestuous Petticoat the prosperous Edwardian ménage in St John’s Wood, financed precariously by her mother’s popular romances. The father, too, aspired to be a man of letters, but his laboriously researched westerns failed to find many readers. When newspaper commissions ceased, the family removed to an alarming house in Lowestoft facing directly into the North Sea towards enemy Germany.

The literary brio of the painter Edward Burra was appreciated only after his death. His letters, published in Well, Dearie!, are dashed off in a memorable argot. Burra’s translation of Rye into the grotesque “Tinker Belle Town” corrects its sanctification as the home of Henry James and the quaint setting for E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels. Another whose artist’s gaze animates his writings is Denton Welch. Invalidism after a road accident accentuated the obsessional and myopic quality of Welch’s work. His descriptions of Derbyshire around Repton, where he was at school, of Croom’s Hill, Blackheath, where he set off on his bicycle towards the fateful smash, and of Wealden Kent, during the 1940s, relish topographical minutiae. At school, the weedy Welch was beaten by Roald Dahl, Christopher Isherwood, Edward Upward and Vernon Watkins; all of these are noted here as Reptonians, except for Dahl, although he is given his due elsewhere under Cardiff and Great Missenden. Welch is forgotten.

Inclusions inevitably prompt reflections on the distinguished salon des refusés. Aintree racecourse hardly needs more punters, so neither Dick Francis nor Nancy Spain’s crash to earth there (with her lover) is mentioned. Spain’s detective stories are set in a girls’ school, Radcliffe Hall, modelled on Roedean. She was sued by Evelyn Waugh for alleging in the Daily Express that the books of his brother Alec sold better than his. What more does she need to be admitted to this particular Pantheon? The Guide’s aim (wonderfully achieved) is to amuse and inform. It is not conceived as an aid for the earnest, battling in high winds with a linen-backed Ordnance Survey map on the bonnet of the tourer. Yet the lavish format hardly lends itself to consultation in the Welcome Break during a sat-navigated quest for the setting of the latest television adaptation of Jane Austen or Inspector Morse. Instead, in its prodigious plenty, it updates the inconsequential charms (and annoyances) of Napier’s Homes and Haunts.


Daniel Hahn and Nicholas Robins
THE OXFORD GUIDE TO LITERARY BRITAIN AND IRELAND
Third edition
370pp. Oxford University Press. £30 (US $60).
978 0 19 861460 9