Why are writers obsessed with Tunbridge Wells?

It’s just a moderately sized town in Kent, but Tunbridge Wells seems to have a literary status disproportionate to its size. And, perhaps as a corollary, it seems to occur in fiction much more frequently than considerably bigger towns of otherwise greater significance. Or certainly this has been my impression over a lifetime’s reading. 

The town has numerous literary connections. Thackeray lived there and set part of his The Virginians in the town. Dickens visited, as did Jane Austen – her brother is buried there. And it’s surrounded by smaller towns and villages with extraordinarily rich literary connections. This satellite list includes Sir Philip Sidney in Penshurst, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Crowborough, Rudyard Kipling in Burwash, Siegfried Sassoon in Brenchley, Vita Sackville-West at Knole and then Sissinghurst and A.A. Milne at Ashdown Forest. 

Virginia Woolf lived a little further afield, in Rodmell, near Lewes, but regularly shopped in the town. The first book shop, and stationer, that I ever browsed as a child, Goulden and Curry on the High Street, had previously had Woolf as a regular customer; it’s conceivable the paper she wrote on came from that shop. E.M. Forster went to Tonbridge school and knew the town well – but loathed the sense of restriction he felt there. It is mentioned in Room With a View. Then, naturally, it appears in John Betjeman:

Tunbridge Wells on a Lord’s Day morning
Rung from rest by the gospel bells
Climbs to light through the mist adorning
Towers and steeples of Tunbridge Wells.

It gets further mentions in Oscar Wilde, Arnold Bennett, and H.G. Wells, who wrote: ‘Tunbridge Wells is Tunbridge Wells, and there is nothing really like it upon our planet’. And it is these book mentions which particularly intrigue me. 

I first encountered such a reference to Tunbridge Wells as a young teen in the 1980s, reading one of those then-popular grizzly but also slightly racy James Herbert horrors about deadly fog or rats or something – and it made me sit up and pay attention to have my home town play a sudden cameo. 

I’ve noticed references ever since. I recall, for example, almost falling out of my chair when it suddenly featured in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow – good old Tunbridge Wells in this sprawling American epic! More recently it made an appearance in one of the biggest bestsellers of our time, The Thursday Murder Club. But Richard Osman had wrongly credited the town with having a Waitrose – it feels like it should but it doesn’t – and had to hold his hands up over his poor research.  

When I read about this it reminded me once again of my impression that the town has appeared in dozens of novels that I’ve read over the years. But as I had never kept any notes, my memory largely fails me on what most of these other mentions might have been – and in what books. So this time last year I decided I would record it whenever Tunbridge Wells appeared in any book I read. 

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Simon Cook

Pensioners have never had it so good

The Green Hat – Michael Arlen (1924)

This bright young things melodrama  mostly takes place in Mayfair. The reference to a spa town in Kent comes in a dreamy sequence of exotic evocations: a night in Algeria, waves of music… ‘’And the best-dressed women’ ‘Of Tunbridge Wells.’’ 

England, Their England – A.G. Macdonell (1933) 

Here Tunbridge Wells is a pitstop on the extended pub crawl that is a prelude to the drunken country cricket match which is the comic centrepiece of the novel: ‘After halts at Catford, the White Hart at Sevenoaks, the Angel at Tunbridge Wells, and three smaller inns at tiny villages, the char-à-banc drew up triumphantly beside the cricket ground of the Kentish village of Fordenden.’  

Slipstream – Elizabeth Jane Howard (2002) 

I suspected this one was coming because the town was mentioned several times in Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles – and this memoir reveals how closely they were based on her own life. But it’s not an especially pleasant visit – she is taken on ‘endless visits to Tunbridge Wells in her teens…to get her teeth fixed.’ 

Climbers – M. John Harrison (1989)

This was more of a surprise. This excellent novel about obsessive mountain climbers is set almost entirely in the gritty north and Wales so one character’s back story is set up as a contrast to this world:  ‘He went to grammar school in Tunbridge Wells.’ So did I – so we’re presumably fellow alumni. 

The Kingdom by the Sea – Paul Theroux (1983)

American abroad Theroux begins his travels around the coastline of the UK just as the Falklands are invaded. At Bexhill-on-Sea he encounters a reactionary Daily Express reader whom he caricatures as ‘Albert Crapstone’ ‘who had come here from Tunbridge Wells to die’ – and Albert duly gives Theroux what’s what about the imminent war.  

Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls – David Sedaris (2013)

The American humorist relocated to Sussex so was presumably conversant enough with the town’s ethos to use it as colour detail in a skit around the caustic correspondence between a man’s second and first wives.

Overall my little personal straw study found Tunbridge Wells in around 5 per cent of books I read over the course of 2023. In an attempt to make it slightly more scientific, I also tried to record any mention of Maidstone, a nearby but considerably larger town in Kent. I didn’t see Maidstone once. There was, though, a mention of the near namesake neighbouring town in a poem by Stevie Smith:

Our char has left
And good riddance too
Wages are very high in Tonbridge.

When I mentioned this to a friend he had, by chance, just come across Tunbridge Wells in another Smith, Zadie – and her latest, The Fraud. The character living there is friends with Charles Dickens. And this suddenly reminded me that a mention in her first book, White Teeth, was one of the many I had come across but long forgotten.

So I feel vindicated in my belief that Tunbridge Wells has some literary cachet greater than its status. It does appear to be true. Presumably it is because it’s an easy way to evoke a certain perception of Englishness. 

To illustrate this most neatly I would look not to a novel but a screenplay, Lawrence of Arabia, from 1962, and this exchange, which closes the film:

Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness): You, I suspect, are chief architect of this compromise. What do you think?
Mr Dryden (Claude Rains): Me, your Highness? On the whole, I wish I’d stayed in Tunbridge Wells.