Author

Extract

On his last night in England, 30th August 1847, before he returned to Denmark at the conclusion of his first visit to Britain, Andersen stayed in the Royal Oak hotel, Ramsgate, right by the harbour...

If we take at face value Jane Austen’s judgement that an acquaintance’s decision to move there was ‘bad taste’, then she did not seem to have a high opinion of the place...

Ballantyne left his native Scotland at the age of 16 to work in Canada for the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company...

Burnand also wrote a great many burlesques, such as ‘The Colonel’(1881), adaptations of French farces and an operetta with music by Sullivan...

Fired by the same indignation which led him to spurn a visit to Margate two years later, Cobbett’s view of Ramsgate in 1821 was expressed in the scathing terms he always reserved for those places he considered tainted by their connection with speculators and the idle and corrupt rich...

James Gillman, where he hoped to be cured of the heavy alcohol and opium dependency which had ruined his health and paralysed his creativity...

In October 1821 he disported himself even more energetically in the sea, thanks to the bathing machines which could be wheeled right into the water...

Coleridge, who usually travelled down by steamer and returned by coach, established his own Ramsgate routine, very often completing or correcting works begun at Highgate, such as ‘Aids to Reflection’ (1825)...

He had a first hand view from his lodgings at 29 Wellington Crescent, which was so distressingly distracting that he abandoned his work to run to the window every ten minutes...

Five years later, they returned, lodging at 4 Plains of Waterloo, and the boys spent most of their time on the beach...

Ramsgate as a second home

On their annual visits, Wilkie and his entourage would sometimes stay for two to three months at a time, taking over the whole of their rented accommodation...

Not many of the towns of east Kent detained Daniel Defoe for long in his ‘Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain’(1724-6)...

Accommodation seems to have been a problem for Dickens at the time when he wrote this letter to John Forster in September 1839...

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Dickens knew Ramsgate but was not as fond of it as he was of Broadstairs...

Bathing was one of Dickens pastimes when he was in Kent...

During a prolonged stay in Broadstairs in the summer of 1852, George Eliot must have had occasion to visit Ramsgate several times...

The fifteen year old daughter of the French poet, a prominent exponent of Surrealism, and his divorced wife Gala (who had become the mistress of Salvador Dali), was holidaying in Ramsgate in August 1933 when her father announced his intention of visiting her for a few days...

They returned in 1874, staying at 11 Abbott’s Hill from mid-July to mid-August, when Engels observed that as Ramsgate became more popular with ‘the lower English middle-classes’, so the visitors were becoming ‘less respectable’, an observation which apparently had the approval of the local barber...

The next year his mistress was dead...

He had not been at the school long before it was moved to Isleworth...

Throughout his short life he was associated with magazines as contributor, founder, editor and producer – ‘The Comic Annual’, ‘Hood’s Own’, ‘Hood’s Magazine’ – and briefly as editor of ‘The New Monthly Magazine’...

Hood’s memories of Ramsgate

Even ten years after what was probably his last visit to Ramsgate, Hood retained a very clear impression of the place when writing to John Leech, an illustrator and fellow contributor to Punch, who was holidaying there...

In those days, fresh sea air and warm bathing were perceived as beneficial for a wide range of medical conditions and Marx followed the general view...

In 1874, suffering from insomnia and carbuncles, he stayed on his own at Ramsgate for about three weeks from mid-April to 5th May...

Marx’s last recorded visit to Ramsgate was in 1880 when he stayed at 10 Cumberland Road from early August to 13th September...

The origin of de Nerval’s poem ‘De Ramsgate à Anvers’, first published in 1846, is not clear, but one biographer conjectured that it may have been inspired by a return journey made after a stay in London in July that year...