Out of Essex

James Canton

Description

Beyond the brash modern stereotypes of Essex there exists a landscape that has inspired some of England's finest writing. This book tracks the paths of those literary figures who have ventured into the wilder parts of Essex. Some are illustrious names: Shakespeare, Defoe, John Clare, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Arthur Ransome. Others may be lesser known but here are well remembered: Samuel Purchas, Sabine Baring-Gould, Margery Allingham, J. A. Baker. In ten chapters James Canton crosses five centuries into the furthest reaches of the county in search of writers and what can be seen of their work today. J. A. Baker follows the peregrines along the Chelmer valley to the Blackwater estuary at Maldon. John Clare wanders the hidden pathways of Epping Forest scribbling poetry while Arthur Ransome sails around the islands of the Hamford Waters. William Shakespeare appears in the woody glades beside Castle Hedingham, Joseph Conrad stares across the Essex marshes at Tilbury to the Thames, while Sabine Baring-Gould's Gothic heroine Mehalah lives upon a lone muddy stretch beside Mersea Island, where Margery Allingham sets her first tale of smuggling and murder; Daniel Defoe recounts the horror of the ague on the Dengie Peninsula; H. G. Wells writes a tale of the First World War from his home at Little Easton. Samuel Purchas tells such seafaring tales from his Southend vicarage as to inspire Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write Kubla Khan. Combining detailed literary detective work with personal responses to landscapes and their meanings, James Canton offers a fresh vision of Essex, its cultural history and its living legacy of wilderness and imagination.

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• English
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 23 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908493866
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Title Page
OUT OF ESSEX
Re-Imagining A Literary Landscape


by
James Canton



Publisher Information
First Published in 2013 by
Signal Books Ltd
36 Minster Road
Oxford OX4 1LY
www.signalbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2013 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© James Canton 2013
The right of James Canton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design & Production: Tora Kelly
Cover Design: Tora Kelly
Cover Images: Terence Mendoza/istockphoto; Wikipedia Commons
Illustrations/photos: James Canton 30, 31, 52, 63, 76, 103, 124, 128, 167, 178; John Cant 135; Jonathan Catton 86; Paul Harrison vi; Alan Leyin 94; the Margery Allingham Society 155, 161; Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin, Little Baddow 16; Silvermud. wordpress.com 97, 108; Wikipedia Commons 2, 21, 42, 48, 56, 92, 112, 133, 140, 147



Dedication
To Hannah, eva and Molly






Foreword
WHEREVER WE HAPPEN TO live, and especially where we happen to have been born, the fame of the local author will cast a spell. The reader will have walked in search of him or her, should it have been necessary, for generations. Haworth, Helpston, Chawton are now all shrines. They provide our pilgrimages. But the pilgrim too can entrance, as happens here, and the title does not let the reader down. Out of Essex: Re-Imagining a Literary Landscape does just that. The geography of these poets, naturalists and novelists has been much walked, only not like this. We have the ‘correct’ response to literature plus the ‘dream’ response, and it fascinates. usually the pilgrim stays clear of the latter. He sticks to the map and the works, the biography and maybe the weather. But here all these dimensions of the birthplace or workplace are drawn together and unified by the visitor’s emotion at finding, for example, the very ordinary Chelmsford terrace from which J. A. Baker emerged to write The Peregrine, one of the most perfect natural histories in the language. We knew what little there is to know about him but we lacked this beautifully articulated wondering response.
And so it is throughout James Canton’s fresh and stimulating encounters with literary essex. The county, probably due to its nearness to London, has bred and been inhabited by writers of all sorts. In native terms it was a great forest in whose ancient clearings some of the most attractive small towns and villages in england grew. Although what in essex ‘made’ natives such as John Ray we will never know. Novelists abounded between the wars, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Dodie Smith, and poets after the war, R. N. Currey, W. R. Rodgers, James Turner. But, essex being a woodland, why not Shakespeare in the guise of Lord Oxford at Hedingham? ‘On Puck’s Hill’ sets the mind running. Out of Essex is non-didactic but it likes to be suggestive. Certain lines, certain green lanes take the walker out of his way in what might be called associative terms.
Much, for instance, has been written of John Clare’s escape from an epping asylum, the poet himself providing the original account. His eighty miles home, eating grass and with bleeding feet, forever captures our pity. In the 1840s the roads were full of such poor folk but his four-day experience somehow tells all. But when Canton himself walks from High Beach to enfield, thinking his route, ‘Journey out of essex’ takes on a significance which so many tracings of it lack. This is because in his search for the county’s writers he is making an autobiography. What we have is what we do not expect. He makes essex seem unexplored. Although modern litter and downright ugliness, threatening characters and today’s ‘Waste Land’ are seen in all their powerfulness, so too is a fine remaining pastoral. The journey, say, from Peldon to Saffron Walden remains one of the loveliest english journeys. However, essex did not suit some writers. It frightened Joseph Conrad who had to move across the Thames to be at ease. The drama of the county affects this book. Finding his way, often by asking the way, Canton is sometimes ill at ease. There can be a threatening element in his search for an author’s territory. Sometimes a writer does not claim or leave a marked spot. Like the naturalist J. A. Baker, his real geography was off the map.
It is necessary to see where and how a literature comes to be created within certain bounds. This can only be done by allowing thoughts and findings to escape both ‘learning’ and platitudes. Poems, plays and stories after all, are the wildest inventions made into classic shapes. This exciting traveller’s tale shows a writer off the conventional leash and allowing his sightseeing emotions to surface. They are a pleasure to read. Although the plaque may say ‘an author lived here’, and although essex can claim an extraordinary number of writer’s bases, Canton adds something more—the feelings we have when for instance we find Puck’s Hill.
Ronald Blythe



Introduction
I come not from Heaven but from essex.
William Morris, Dream of John Ball (1888)
BEYOND THE BRASH MODERN stereotypes of essex there exists a landscape that has inspired some of england’s finest writing. It is a land with a rich literary past. But in recent years this has been forgotten. essex is now seen in images of white stilettos, drunken nights, estuary english and illiteracy. Stereotypes are not kind; nor are they easy to shift. The apparition of the essex girl, victim of crude jokes in the 1980s, has transformed into quasi-reality television: The Only Way is Essex—TOWIe to its fans—offers a revamping of the same stereotype of the county. The good people of essex are seen as stupid mass consumers, as fixated on shopping, spray-tanning and hairstyling. even The Guardian plays along with the regional typecasting of essex, reporting the growth of a tourism boom to Brentwood, where TOWIe is set, and suggesting for ‘those seeking the authentic essex’ that the locals ‘really do wear the two-inch long eyelashes’.1
Yet it is just over ten miles from TOWIe’s heartland of Brentwood to Stanford-le-Hope where Joseph Conrad first settled in england, where he forged his distinctive form of writing style and began to structure Heart of Darkness. Stroll a few miles further down the road to Tilbury and you can stand on the spot where Daniel Defoe had a home. Surely, it was high time to redefine essex. As I began to dig a little further beneath the surface images of essex girls and boys I discovered there was a world far from TOWIe. I set to excavate a deeper cultural heritage to the county. gathered here are some of the findings.
***
Some basics: the land of essex covers some forty-five miles from north to south across the county; closer to fifty miles east to west. There are about one and three quarter million people living here. It is a landscape that rests against London yet also reaches into the heart of east Anglia. On its northern borders, John Constable and Thomas gainsborough painted the pastoral scenes that served to delineate all that encompassed the gentle beauty of the english countryside. All along the eastern limits of essex land meets sea in a sinuous 350 miles of marvellously evocative marsh and beach scenes. The western frontiers are marked by the ancient forests of epping and Hatfield, the boundary vaguely drawn by the meandering flow of the River Stort. Inland are hundreds and hundreds of square miles of england’s finest green fields, filled with tales from essex writers.


To the south of the county, the suburban towns seek to dominate: Basildon, Brentwood, Harlow and Southend are all concrete oases. Chelmsford—now a proud city—keeps a hold over all, its edgelands nudging into the fields, a crop of new homes and fresh estates growing yearly. Yet essex has an ability to hold the urban within the rural. It is part of the county’s glory. Take the train from Liverpool Street through this landscape: Romford—contested essex— passes by on your left revealing fields of grass being nibbled by pied horses well before the noose of the M25 appears. Spy the splashes of bright yellow broom on the embankments before Shenfield, the arching branches of buddleia in the car park. Travel beyond Ingatestone and the segments of countryside—those stretches of green or golden fields—become wider, vaster. Stay on board beyond Witham to Colchester and the view from the window is entirely of a pastoral idyll.
In the north of essex are some of england’s most picturesque villages: Finchingfield where the ducks swarm around bread-generous tourists; Coggeshall with its leaning oldie-worldie shop fronts; Thaxted and its emblematic windmill; and a host of lesser-known treasures with their village pubs, cricket greens, duck ponds and magnificent churches. Some may tell you of the north-south divide in essex—it part exists. Most of the people live in the south of the county, most of the quaint english villages are in the north, but the map is not uniform. Remember Jaywick, tucked on the north coast below Clacton, with the designation of most deprived town in Britain.2 Think of those perfect villages outside Chelmsford: Little Ba