L is for Literature
Literature is powerful. It engages us, and it forces us think. Its authors deploy a wonderful range of conceits to conjure life and landscape from mere ink on paper. Take ‘simile’ — a figure of speech that compares one thing with another of a different kind — it is a potent means of stimulating the imagination. Here is a delightfully playful example related to Canterbury’s heritage:
Resembling (to compare great things with smaller)
A well-scooped, mouldy Stilton cheese, — but taller.
To what does this refer? To those who know it, it is a perfect evocation, even today, of the mouldering remains of Canterbury’s Norman castle. At the time that the Rev. Richard Barham described it in the mid-nineteenth century, in his The Ingoldsby Legends, it suffered the additional indignity of housing the local gas works! Other of Barham’s ‘legends’ associated with historic Canterbury include the melancholy tale of ‘Nell Cook: a legend of the ‘Dark Entry’, in which a ‘comely lass’ meets a sticky end after poisoning a Canon of the Cathedral, and subsequently haunts a dark passage used by scholars of the King’s School where she had been secretly buried.
Canterbury’s literary fame is international, based largely on Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales. The pilgrims, however, never reached Canterbury, and there is no hard evidence that Chaucer did either. But a number of writers did live and work in the city, including Aphra Behn — one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing. Others include the aforementioned Barham, the prolific adventure writer G. A. Henty, and Mary Tourtel — creator of Rupert Bear. More recently, Canterbury has featured as the epicentre of the ‘cult’ post-apocalyptic novel, Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban, which projects the city and its surroundings into an ‘iron-age-style’ existence of hunter-gathering, scavenging for buried metal, and primitive farming.
The King’s School, with premises within the Canterbury UNESCO World Heritage Site, can boast several well-known writers among its alumni, including the playwright Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s contemporary. In 1915 Somerset Maugham, another old boy, lambasted the school under its own name in Of Human Bondage, although he did change Canterbury to Tercanbury! Hugh Walpole, himself a novelist, who attended the school ten years after Maugham, would find himself pilloried as the careerist man of letters Alroy Kear in Maugham’s Cakes and Ale (1930).
One of our most famous novelists, Charles Dickens, had few direct connections with Canterbury, yet he provided a positive view of the city. In his autobiographical novel David Copperfield (1848–50) a footsore and lonely boy is transformed by his encounter with ‘the sunny street of Canterbury, dozing as it were in the hot light’ and ‘its old houses and gateways, and the stately, grey Cathedral, with the rooks sailing round the towers.’
Running away from the soul-destroying child labour to which he has been put in London, the orphaned David makes his way to Dover, where he is taken in by his benevolent aunt and sent to Dr Strong’s Academy in Canterbury. The school is clearly modelled on King’s; David’s first delighted impression is of ‘a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air about it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws who came down from the Cathedral towers to walk with a clerkly bearing on the grass-plot’. The original of Dr Strong’s own house is believed to have been in Lady Wootton’s Green.
Given Canterbury’s literary heritage it is appropriate that the city should also be home to the Beaney ‘House of Art and Knowledge’, a museum that was also the first library in Great Britain to receive public funding in 1845.
Professor Carolyn Oulton is the Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers at Canterbury Christ Church University
International Centre for Victorian Women Writers.
The University will also be hosting a two-day conference on Canterbury and other UNESCO World Heritage Sites around the world on Friday 24 and Saturday 25 May at Old Sessions House, Longport.
