Author

Extract

Having been born in Canterbury and had the living of parishes near Ashford and on Romney Marsh, it is not surprising that many of the Legends have a Kentish connection...

There were probably subsequent visits, one of which must have taken place in the early years of the second World War, as recorded in the poem ‘Margate, 1940’...

An early admirer of Darwin and an enthusiastic user of free libraries and lectures, Clodd was able to make his self-taught knowledge of religious and scientific issues of the day accessible to a wide readership in works such as ‘The Childhood of the World', ‘Jesus of Nazareth' and ‘The Story of Creation’...

The leading radical journalist of his age, Cobbett undertook his ‘Rural Rides’ in the 1820s, a series of horseback journeys in southern England, intended to be used as material for articles in his popular ‘Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register’ on the state of the countryside...

This was the pseudonym of Mary Mackay who in her day was one of the country’s most popular novelists, despite almost universal critical hostility to her overblown literary style...

It was during one of the periods of depression from which he suffered for much of his life that the poet William Cowper came to Margate in August 1763...

Dickens was never so fond of Ramsgate as he was of Broadstairs...

Ramsgate was only known to him as a place of transit between London and Broadstairs or as the place where one of his publishers was established...

S...

Staying with a friend at Denton, halfway between Canterbury and Folkestone, he visited Margate in June 1766 but was not impressed...

E...

Encouraged in his writing by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he became part of the large circle of contributors to Dickens’s magazines...

A frequent summer visitor to the Herne Bay area, the journalist and playwright Douglas Jerrold would also have had first hand knowledge of Margate...

In the first of two poems sent to his brother George at the time, the impressionable response of this lover of nature to his first sight of a proper seascape is clearly felt...

It may be that he was contrasting it unfavourably with the Isle of Wight – ‘so beautiful a place' – where he had been staying previously, but more likely that his mood was a reflection of the fact that he felt unable to settle to any productive work - ‘I cannot write while my spirit is fevered in a contrary direction’...

He had not been to the seaside before and his artless enjoyment of the experience can be detected in this simple comment from a letter to a friend in September 1801: ‘Your letter has found me at Margate, where I am come with Mary to drink sea water and pick up shells...

They shared most things, including their first seaside holiday at Margate, which so captivated Charles, but which Mary may not have found so enthralling, since, referring to a prospective trip to Margate in the summer of 1803, she confessed to a friend: ‘ …we shall find the flat country of the Isle of Thanet very dull...

He even made a point of emphasising the correct postal address in his letters, which tend to dwell disconsolately on the bourgeois character of the place...

The depression to which Lear was subject throughout most of his life, despite the whimsical humour of his poetry, may have been partly due to the epileptic attacks which gave him a sense of isolation...

Byron called him ‘the most epigrammatic conversationalist' he had met, and admired his ‘Advice to Julia', an epic in lively verse which contained vignettes of life in the London society of the time...

Marx suffered intermittently from painful attacks of what his family called ‘his old enemies’ –outbreaks of boils...

Here she and the baby died during the premature delivery...

In his children’s book, ‘The Sheltering Tree’, Richard Parker used the setting of the marshland south west of Margate as a background for the story of a mid-nineteenth century family’s struggle with poverty and involvement in the local smuggling trade...

In the early years of his writing career with only a few unsuccessful novels behind him, Shaw contributed music, drama and art reviews to a number of regular publications...

By 1788 the greatest successes of Sheridan’s theatrical life – ‘The Rivals’ (1770), ‘The School for Scandal’ (1777) and ‘the Critic’ (1779) – were behind him and he had embarked on his long wished –for career in politics, becoming known as a brilliant orator and a confidant of the royal circle...

Jorrocks and his friends travelled from London by the ‘Royal Adelaide’, probably on what was known as the ‘husbands’ boat’, a Saturday service which in the 1830s, before the advent of the railways, was still the quickest way of reuniting London businessmen and their families, albeit under the mocking gaze of the locals...

The forebodings he expressed about her condition were borne out barely three weeks later when his wife made her first attempt on her life during a steamer crossing to Ireland...

The public houses and hotels he names may no longer exist but the High Street and Hawley Square are still part of modern Margate...

Many years after his first visit there, and with the sobering experience of prison behind him, Wilde was still able to write a tongue-in-cheek comment in March 1898 to a friend who had been to stay in Margate...

Critics found his writing ‘generally coarse and not infrequently profane’...