Information
While on holiday at nearby Herne, the playwright and journalist Douglas Jerrold did not lose an opportunity to find material for his literary craft in the locality, including this description of a visit to Reculver, punctuated with characteristic touches of his sly humour.
Quotations
There, reader, there – where you see that wave leaping up to kiss that big white stone – that is the very spot where Saint Augustine put down the sole of his Catholic foot. If it be not, we have been misinformed, and cheated of our money; we can say no more.
Never mind the spot. Is there not a glory lighting up the whole beach? …
And there, where the ocean tumbles, was in the olden day a goodly town, sapped, swallowed by the wearing, voracious sea. At lowest tides, the people still discover odd, quaint, household relics, which, despite the homely breeding of the finders, must carry away their thoughts into the mist of time, and make them feel antiquity. …
The village of Reculvers is a choice work of antiquity. The spirit of King Ethelbert tarries there still, and lives enshrined in the sign of a public-house. It would be well for all kings could their spirits survive with such genial associations …
Many of our gentle countrymen – fellow metropolitans – who once a-year wriggle out their souls from the slit of their tills to give the immortal essence sea air, make a pilgrimage to Reculvers. This Golgotha, we have noted it, has to them especial attractions. Many are the mortal relics borne away to decorate a London chimney-piece.
Place | Extract |
| Herne | uk/database/en/place/Herne%20Bay">Herne Bay and the Kent coast... |
| Herne Bay | Caudle Dwells on Caudle’s “Cruel Neglect” of her on Board the “Red Rover”... |
| Margate | Caudle’s ability to use any occasion to expose her husband’s perceived failings... |
| Reculver | org... |
| Sheerness | When he was four, his family moved to Sheerness, his father having acquired the lease of a theatre in the High Street, Blue Town, the oldest part of Sheerness... |
