Spirit of place

A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature, by Margaret Drabble

This is a book about the inner landscapes of writers, or the ones they inhabited when young, and how these informed their work and affected their readers. In the process of describing these, Margaret Drabble makes lively connections, parallels and distinctions. The languor and melancholy of Tennyson’s poetry, for example, which so surprisingly suited the Victorian mood, derives from the Lincolnshire of his youth — ‘Gray sand banks and pale sunsets — dreary wind/ Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea!’ — whereas Dickens (‘the least enervating of writers’) loathed Lincolnshire, and in Bleak House puts Sir Mortimer Dedlock’s country house there and enjoys describing it ‘with a dreariness that rivals Tennyson’s’. Drabble quotes this passage at length; and part of the last sentence is suggestive enough: ‘On Sundays the little church in the park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks into a cold sweat. . . .’ ‘An acquired taste perhaps’, Drabble adds, ‘this kind of atmosphere, but Tennyson acquired it early and passed it on to others.’

She notices that Coleridge’s poems, when homely, reek of his native Somerset — ‘This Limetree Bower My Prison’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’ — and his Lake District effusions are more strained, whereas those of Wordsworth, a native of the Lakes, are not: Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’, if written in Somerset, where he and Coleridge famously met, stays firmly in Cumbria.

Such observations bring writers and their work closer to us, but where did this ‘landscape’ stuff begin? The word itself is relatively new, dating from the end of the 16th century. Kenneth Clark declared that the medieval mind saw nature as hostile and dwelt on its horrors. The site of Fountains Abbey was described by a 12th-century contemporary as ‘more fit for the lair of wild beasts than for human use’.