To a newly orphaned boy, whose first language was French, and who had been accustomed to comfortable, elegant surroundings, and close acquaintance with the sophisticated world of Parisian high society, the Whitstable of 1884 must have seemed alien indeed. It was here that the ten-year-old Somerset Maugham was sent to the care of his paternal uncle Henry, the local vicar, and his German-born wife, Sophie. He came into a town whose economy, based mainly on a thriving oyster fishery and the Newcastle coal trade, was very healthy, but whose sense of social niceties and class distinctions was rigid and insular. Add to this the penny-pinching discomfort of his new home, the often insensitive approach of his childless guardians, and the bullying he sustained at the hands of some teachers and fellow pupils at the King’s School, Canterbury, and it is not surprising that he viewed those early years as some of the most miserable of his life. He developed a stammer which never left him.
Much of this misery is conveyed in his semi-autobiographical novel, 'Of Human Bondage', which contains identifiable references to local places and people.
The inflexible social and religious prejudices which beset a small town like Whitstable in Victorian times inform almost every description of the place. The author and his alter-ego, Philip Carey, may have found them suffocating, but they also seem to have reinforced Maugham’s inherent snobbishness.
Blackstable was a fishing village. It consisted of a high street in which were the shops, the bank, the doctor’s house, and the houses of two or three coalship owners; round the little harbour were shabby streets in which lived fishermen and poor people; but since they went to chapel they were of no account.
Maugham also made use of the surroundings of his early years to reflect and intensify his characters’ moods as in this extract from 'Mrs. Craddock' 1902):
Bertha’s solitary walk was to the sea. The shore between Blackstable and the mouth of the Thames was very wild. At distant intervals were the long, low buildings of the coastguard stations, and the prim gravel walk, the neat railings came as a surprise, but they made the surrounding desolation more forlorn. One could walk for miles without meeting a soul, and the country spread out from the sea low and flat and marshy. The beach was strewn with countless shells, and they crumbled underfoot, and here and there were great banks of seaweed and bits of wood and rope, the jetsam of a thousand tides. In one spot, a few yards out at sea, high and dry at low water, were the remains of an old hulk, whose wooden ribs stood out weirdly like the skeleton of some huge sea-beast. And then all round was the grey sea, with never a ship nor even a fishing-smack in sight. In winter it was as if a spirit of loneliness, like a mystic shroud, had descended on the shore and the desert waters.
The later 'Cakes and Ale' contains similar material but is much less biting. After leaving Whitstable to train as a doctor, Maugham returned only infrequently, usually staying at the ‘Bear and Key’ in the High Street.
