Kerry Brown
Kent is a county in the south east part of the United Kingdom, bordering London and Surrey in the East, between the Thames and the Estuary in the North, and the English Channel around its other coastal edges. It is 3736 square kilometres in size, with a population of 1.8 million in 2020. Geographically, it is a place of surprising variety for a relatively small area. The North and South Downs running through the country from east to west provide boundaries to an area between of sometimes chalky, flinty or clay soils The remnants of the great Andredswald Weald wood, which covered much of this area up to modern times with dense woodlands, still exist, though vastly reduced. In between are areas of fertile agricultural land, and grazing pastures on the Romney Marsh area in the south east tip of the country. It is easy to walk only a short way to experience fields, woods, hills, and valleys. The variety and distinctiveness of the physical landscape of this territory is something that will be returned to.
Kent’s physical location between the main urban centre since Roman times of London, and the coastal ports around Dover, leading to the continent, mean that it has long figured as a major transit place. The Pilgrims Way, one track of which runs ostensibly from London, and the other from Winchester, while it claims links with the cult of St Thomas Becket of Canterbury is both much newer, and much older, than initially appears the case. It figured as a route with some level of official recognition in the Victorian period Ordinance Survey maps. Before that, it existed in a more diverse grouping of bands of pathways, tracks and roads which led back way before the Medieval period to the Neolithic and even Palaeolithic era, when human pathways for summer and winter led along the edges of the downs to the great monumental and religious landscape around Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain.
To this day, Kent figures for many as a place of transit. Since the late 1990s, the Eurostar, linking continental Europe with the UK, has streaked through the heart of the county. Before this, the ports of Dover, Folkestone, and Ramsgate were major shipping docks, serviced by ferries and the hovercraft. In the 20th century, the country was furnished with first major A roads for car traffic, and then the M2 and M20 motorways. The former of these at parts however tracks roads which existed at least as early as the first decades of the Roman occupation in the 1st century. To this day, the fort of Richborough with its impressive ruined walls near Sandwich is the start of a metalled track which quickly dies away into fields, but must have served as the first permanent road built to Roman standards constructed in Britain. In the following centuries, it was to be joined by many others. Most of these serve as the basis of the British road network this day.
Kent figures in a great deal of literature as a place where people pass through – a point of embarkation for some of Ian Fleming’s Bond escapades, or the place, out on a boat in the Thames near Gravesend where Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe begins his haunting tale in `The Heart of Darkness.’ For Chaucer, of course, it was the place along which the pilgrims assembled in his early poetic epic travelled while they relayed their tales. And for Dickens, almost half a millennium later, it was the location where figures like Pickwick, or David Copperfield, undertook journeys and travels. The cult of St Thomas meant that one of the best known aspects of the country history is the fact that it was the place for pilgrimage, for passing through, first to Canterbury, but then often further, towards Rome. These different kinds of journeys, some long, some short, will occur throughout the rest of this project, underlining the fact that a significant part of Kent’s literary meaning is how it figures as a staging place to elsewhere, rather than as a place where people were making for in the first place.
Finally, Kent is, as it already apparent, a place of historic meaning. It was the earliest of any British county to ever be furnished with a name, occurring in the works of Caesar in his account of his two aborted conquests before the Christian era. Kent existed as a kingdom from the end of the Roman occupation in the 5th century to the 8th, when it was subsumed under Offa’s Mercia, and then subsequently Wessex (a process which had been happening some time before this). It was to this Kingdom that the reconversion of Britain to Christianity occurred at the end of the 6th century with the arrival of Pope Gregory the Great’s emissary, Saint Augustine. That era leaves a shadowy trace on the landscape of the present, with fabric in churches such as St Martin’s in Canterbury, or, more elusively, Reculver some of the most ancient ecclesiastical structures in Britain. They are, however, very incomplete. Kent was the place where the Danish invasions of the 11th century left such a deep impression (devastating Canterbury in 1011), and where the Conqueror came after his victory over Harold’s armies in 1066, defeating Dover and harrowing through the countryside as he came towards London. Throughout the last millennium, this particular space has been the location of events as diverse as the origin of the Peasants Rebellion in the mid-14th century to the place where much of the Battle of Britain in the Second World War was fought, in the skies above.
The drama of that history is perhaps one reason why Kent has inspired some writers. But the key question in this project is to look at the role of imagination, and what it is about this landscape, with its mixture of historic, geographical, logistic and political importance that has mattered and appealed to a wide range of different kinds of writers in different eras.
This history of Kent as a place for writing and words is a profound one. There is the place which exists physically, and has existed with some kind of cohesive identity for many centuries. But there is also the way that place has and continues to exist in the imagination. This is where literature becomes important. As someone born in Kent, who has lived here, on and off, for most of my life, that aspect of this particular place is one I have always had as part of my life, and which has over time become more intense in terms of its meaning. What does it mean to speak about Kent not only as a real place, which one can visit, live in, and move around, but also as a place in the imagination? Is there something specific about Kent, about what has and is happening here, about its physicality, its location, that lends itself to a certain kind of imagining and wondering?
Over my life, many of the local journeys I have made have been to visit places linked to real writers, and to the events they have written about. This is the point where fantasy and the real cross over. One can, for instance, go to the house the Dickens spent the last few years of his life living in, and where indeed he died – Gads Hill, near Rochester. Today it is a private school for girls, sometimes open for outside visitors. This place had a reality in his life. He reportedly stared at it as a young boy, dreaming about living there. When he acquired it, therefore, it was the fulfilment of something immensely important in his life – a concrete sign of his success and eminence. The `imagined’ world of Gads Hill, as a symbol of Dickens, is also linked to another great, characteristically elusive figure – William Shakespeare. A scene in `Henry the Fourth, Part One’ talks of Falstaff being mugged by robbers on the road that ran past the house. That event, of course, never happened. And yet the writing about it did. And that writing has given it a sort of ghostly reality.
Kent is dense with places that Dickens experienced things, which are part of the historic record. He lived in Broadstairs, experienced a train accident near Staplehurst in mid-Kent, gave readings of his works in Canterbury, and lived as a young boy in Chatham. Houses have plaques on commemorating this. But they also often have plaques memorialising the `existence’ of events that he wrote of, and described in his books, that only have a literary history, even if they are reportedly linked to real things. One of the most evocative is the isolated St James’s Church in Cooling, which figures in the opening of `Great Expectations.’ In particular the tiny lozenge like tombs in the graveyard of children stillborn, or dying in their infancy. Guidebooks solemnly point out that while Pip, the protagonist of the novel, saw five such tombs, in `real life’ there are 13. In what way, though, does this place, which one can visit and stand in, relate to that place he wrote about in his novel? In Rochester, a city full of associations with him and his work, the remembrance of events which never actually happened reaches its climax. Restoration House, along by The Vines close to the Cathedral, has been a private accommodation for its whole existence. It is an extraordinary building. At the time during which Dickens was writing the book it was owned by Richard Berridge. There is not indication that Dickens ever entered the building. Nor for visitors of this place today is it easy to relate what they see with the kind of place with its larger scale and estate around it as is described in the book. And yet, this is reportedly the `inspiration’ for Mrs Havisham’s `Satis House’. It must have had some alure for Dickens. The last public sighting of him in 1870 a few days before his death was leaning on the railings opposite the house, gazing deep in thought at it. This project partly wants to try to understand the mysteries of how that process of inspiration and then remapping, and re-creating a real place in the mind of a writer and then in the minds of readers’ works – and how, in almost cyclical fashion, that comes back to inform, and shape, our engagement with the environment around us – and in particular, that of this place called Kent which is so rich in both visible, and invisible, memory traces.
Dickens is at least very historically present in Kent, through living here, and owning property. For others, the traces are even more elusive, though in very different ways. For a figure like the twentieth century author Jocelyn Brooke, the landscape of Kent has a strong, haunted and esoteric quality. Engagement with it is solitary, slightly unsettling, touched by Brooke’s deep passion and knowledge for local flora and fauna, but also by his own internal conflicts, where the loneliness of the countryside provides a place for reflection and retreat, but also of surprising encounters and traumas. In the very different work of the almost contemporaneous Ian Fleming, despite the glamour of his Bond books, Kent also exists – a place where golf tournaments with shadowy figures like Goldfinger happen, at the Sandwich club where Fleming himself was to have the heart attack that killed him. Charing Hill figures as the road along which Bond races in Moonraker. Both of these writers name Kent places and lived in Kent, making the link discernible. There are other more problematic cases.
There will be many of these looked at as this project proceeds. A couple to start of with are that of Daniel Defoe, who did write about his travels around the county – but about whom there is a strange myth that he produced `Robinson Crusoe’ in around 1718 while fleeing the attention of the government in a small house in Hartley, near Dartford. The myth, lightly, persists, though there is not a shred of evidence it is true. For Chaucer, too, despite the mileage extracted from Canterbury over the vast work he produced at the end of the 15th century, there is nothing linking him to any visit or period of stay at the city. The main place he can be linked to is the palace at Eltham, then in the jurisdiction of Kent. More exotic than either of these is the use that the American writer resident in the UK for much of his life, Russell Hoban, made of a brief visit to the cathedral in Canterbury in 1974, when the Medieval fresco of the myth of St Eustace inspired his dystopian masterpiece `Riddley Walker’, where Kent is imagined not as somewhere in the past or present, but as a decayed, nucleated landscape thousands of years hence. Even the language of Hoban’s novel is distorted and transformed, a broken dialect of the future.
