Kent’s Literary Heritage: A (largely) untapped mine

ArticlesIssue 110

1 Dec

By Kerry Brown

Kent is a profoundly historic landscape, as the work of the KAS has testified to since its foundation in 1858. However, it is also one of the most important centres for literature not just nationally, but globally. That heritage is perhaps less celebrated than it should be. Also, while there is extensive knowledge of Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer, the literary roots go far deeper and are far more varied and influential.

Just a haphazard list of writers native to Kent, or who have lived and worked here for significant parts

of their careers over the centuries, would need to include not just the aforementioned two ‘superstars’ but figures like Joseph Conrad, Ian Fleming, Noël Coward, Sir Philip Sydney, Christopher Marlowe,

H E Bates, W Somerset Maughan, E H Nesbit, H G Wells, Jocelyn Brooke, and Jane Austen.

This list could also include those for whom significant things happened in their writing experience here – the fact, for instance, that T S Eliot wrote part of his immensely influential

The Waste Land in a shelter still preserved on Margate seafront, or that Samuel Beckett spent time in the 1930s driving around the villages of West Kent, apparently amused by the names of places like ‘Snodland’ and the curious divergence between the spelling and the pronunciation of ‘Trottiscliffe.’

Given this heritage, it is a curious thing why it is so little celebrated in the county. Dublin, which has its collection of globally recognised writers, has a splendid museum in a Georgian house in the city centre in which the works of figures like James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde are remembered and celebrated.

However, Kent lacks a focal point to bring its group of equally illustrious figures together. That seems like a lost opportunity – and a disservice to this extraordinary heritage.

Top

Shelter in Margate where TS Eliot wrote some of The Waste Land

Above

Jane Austen was a frequent visitor to Godmersham Park

Below left

Ian Fleming’s former home, Old Palace in Bekesbourne

Below right

Godmersham Park

Part of this anomalous situation can be vividly illustrated by what has become of the living places of some of these world famous authors.

Jane Austen, records show, was a frequent visitor to Godmersham Park which her brother inherited through marriage, and reportedly wrote much of Mansfield Park in the library there. Today, despite her being one of the most loved figures in English literature with appreciate societies in the US and Japan, the house is mostly off bounds, accommodating the Association of British Dispensing Optometrists. The other place she is closely associated with Goodnestone, near Canterbury, is a little more accessible (its gardens are often open), though it is likelier she stayed in Rowling House on the estate, now a private residence. Possibly here she wrote parts of Pride and Prejudice.

For Ian Fleming, his creation, James Bond, is a global phenomenon, popular in countries as diverse as China and Australia. The sole memorial to his longstanding residence in Kent (much of the time he was also in the Bahamas where he had a house) is a metal statue on Dover beach front, depicting his most famous creation rather than him. The house he lived in for some years opposite the church in Bekesbourne, the Old Palace there, is now privately owned. A pub, the Duck Inn in Pett Bottom, commemorates how he may have written You Only Live

Twice there. But for the many aficionados of his work and its multiple translations, a visit to the place he spent so much time in, and where he set some of this works, would prove frustrating, with bits and pieces memorialising and a lack of any central point of focus.

One place he did stay at was also home to Noël Coward, on St Margaret at Cliffe’s seafront.

These days, however, the house sits unmarked, seemingly let out as holiday cottages. Joseph Conrad’s habitations were of longer standing because Kent was his base for the final decades of his life. His family rented a house in Addington, which is now the home of more recent celebrities. However, the place in which one of the greatest masters of modernism in literature died, in 1924, sits next to Bishopsbourne Church. Oswald’s, as it is called, is marked by a blue plaque, but once more it is a private residence. Conrad himself is buried in Canterbury City cemetery. Some artefacts relating to him were preserved until recently in the Canterbury Heritage Museum before it closed. But for the author of Heart of Darkness, a novella that remains one of the most powerful denunciations of colonialization ever written and which was made into an epic film in the 1980s by Frances Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now) getting global audiences, it seems an underwhelming way of remembering such a great figure.

While Charles Dickens gets more proportionate treatment, with at least a part of the old Restoration House and the Guildhall Museum in Rochester dedicated to him, the house in which he lived for his final decade, Gad’s Hill, while occasionally open to the public, serves as a girls’ private school. The same could be said for H G Wells, a man who was born in Bromley, then part of the Kent area, and who spent almost a decade living in Folkstone. His works predicting the future were massively successful, both during his life, but also subsequently, with The War of the Worlds having resonance to this day. Pilgrims to his home by the seaside, however, will be met with a small memorial at the gate of what is now the Wells House Nursing Home.

A proper account of the literary history of Kent would need to factor in the ways in which, through figures like Chaucer, whose visits to the country were in the guises of a spy and a tax collector (an unholy dual career if ever there was one!) or Christopher Marlowe, the great contemporary of Shakespeare, it was a place that was present at the very beginning of the English literary tradition. This alone makes it unique.

Another important aspect is how the county has fascinating byways, where it has been associated with figures in diverse and intriguing ways. Shakespeare may well have performed in Faversham, as his group, the King’s Players, are recorded to have visited and played there. He may well have performed at Chilham Castle, owned by the

Digges family who were patrons of the players. The German writer, Uwe Johnson, regarded alongside his contemporary Günter Grass as the most important author in German after the Second War lived mostly in obscurity in Sheerness till his death in 1984.

His Anniversaries will be published in a new translation this year.

In an era when tourism is so important, and where almost everywhere is attempting to promote a brand to showcase their attributes, it seems perverse that Kent, one of the truly great global literature centres, a place that can boast an authentic link with W Somerset Maugham (who went to the King’s School, Canterbury), Mary Tourtel (who is buried here), E H Nesbit and Edmund Blunden (who both had links with Yalding), Siegfried Sassoon (a student at Sevenoaks School), Vita Sackville-West (resident of Knole House and Sissinghurst), and many more, lacks a single focal point to tell this story. At best, that is a pity. At worst, it is a lost opportunity. The literary history of Kent is in many ways the literary history of Britain and the English language. It is a story that deserves being better told, and better commemorated in the place where this all happened.