English Counties

[Patrick Murtha]

As mentioned in earlier threads, especially the one on Regional American Literatures, I have always been fascinated by the relation between geography and literature. So one of my current projects is to read books related to every English county, especially old guidebooks and such.

Here is my current list, but it is not complete, because I haven’t completed backfilling titles I read years ago. Books that involve more than one county are entered more than once.

Bedfordshire

Berkshire

H.J. Massingham, English Downland (1936) (see post below)

Bristol

Buckinghamshire

Cambridgeshire

Channel Islands

Cheshire

Cornwall

Bella Bathurst, The Wreckers (not just Cornwall, but a lot on Cornwall)
Arthur L. Salmon, The Cornwall Coast (1910)

Cumbria

J.D. Marshall, Portrait of Cumbria (1981)

Derbyshire

Roy Christian, Derbyshire (1978)

Devon

R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone

Dorset

J. Meade Falkner, Moonfleet
H.J. Massingham, English Downland

Durham

Essex

Jules Pretty, This Luminous Coast
Herbert Tompkins, Marsh-Country Rambles (1904) (you can see that there were a lot of these published around the turn of the 20th Century)

Gloucestershire

Herbert A. Evans, Highways and Byways in Oxford and the Cotswolds (1905) (a model of its kind)
John Moore, Portrait of Elmbury (first in Moore’s semi-fictional trilogy about “Elmbury” = Tewkesbury)

Greater London

H.V. Morton, Ghosts of London (1939) (the “ghosts” are traces of London past)
Arthur Ransome, Bohemia in London (1907)

Greater Manchester

Hampshire

H.J. Massingham, English Downland

Herefordshire

Hertfordshire

Isle of Man

Isle of Wight

J. Meade Falkner, Moonfleet

Isles of Scilly

Kent

H.J. Massingham, English Downland

Lancashire

Leicestershire

Lincolnshire

Merseyside

Norfolk

Jules Pretty, This Luminous Coast
Arthur J. Rees, The Shrieking Pit (1919) (Golden Age mystery novel)

Northamptonshire

Northumberland

Nottinghamshire

Oxfordshire

Herbert A. Evans, Highways and Byways in Oxford and the Cotswolds

Rutland

Shropshire

Somerset

R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone

Staffordshire

Suffolk

Jules Pretty, This Luminous Coast

Surrey

H.J. Massingham, English Downland

Sussex (East, West)

H.J. Massingham, English Downland

Tyne and Wear

Warwickshire

West Midlands

Wiltshire

H.J. Massingham, English Downland

Worcestershire

Yorkshire (North, South, East, West)

James Herriot, All Creatures Great and Small

 

[Patrick Murtha]

H.J. Massingham’s English Downland (1936) is emphatically not your nicey-nice “Let’s traipse the countryside” book. First of all, the prose is exceptionally dense, poetic, vocabularistic, round-aboutly phrased, and frequently quite beautiful: Not a casual read at all, the text calls for a high level of sentence-by-sentence concentration. Allied to and expressed through that heavy style is a fervency and near-mysticism about the chalk downs of England’s Salisbury Plain, extending through Wiltshire, Dorset, and Hampshire, and harboring both Stonehenge and Avebury. The reader rightly begins to wonder if we are entering freaky territory: Was Massingham a bit of a nutter? Well…he was one of the most committed British ruralists, and for a half-century between the 1920s and 1960s, that movement overlapped considerably with fascism and the far right (think of the German right’s emphasis on the soil, the land, the folk). Not saying that Massingham was a fascist, but he was certainly proximate to…cases (Rolf Gardiner, Henry Williamson, Viscount Lymington, Jorian Jenks). And was deeply involved in the founding and administration of the Kinship in Husbandry and the later Soil Association, which included a number of those men (as well as others less politically hardcore). All of this is needless to say QUITE interesting.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

The old hardcover Signpost guides to “pleasant ports of call” (hotels and inns) in Britain were thoroughly delightful productions, with lively prose by W.G. McMinnies and photographs that really take you back. Here is my copy of the 22nd Edition from 1966.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Melvyn Bragg, whose 83rd birthday was yesterday, is one of the leading authors of Cumbria, an English county on the Scottish border (the most famous such is Wordsworth). I recently got in a copy of his Cumbrian Trilogy.