Author

Extract

Many of these contributions formed the basis of his most popular work, ‘The Ingoldsby Legends’...

We know from his letters that Betjeman visited Margate in 1929 while staying at nearby Birchington with his convalescing employer...

He was born in Margate, where his father captained a brig which traded between Margate and the north...

The leading radical journalist of his age, Cobbett undertook his ‘Rural Rides’ in the 1820s, a series of horseback journeys in southern England, intended to be used as material for articles in his popular ‘Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register’ on the state of the countryside...

This was the pseudonym of Mary Mackay who in her day was one of the country’s most popular novelists, despite almost universal critical hostility to her overblown literary style...

Here he found some distraction from his anxieties, but returning to London in the autumn, he became so tormented by the prospect of a forthcoming public law examination that he attempted several times to commit suicide...

Dickens was never so fond of Ramsgate as he was of Broadstairs...

Consequently, the town is not described in great detail in any of his writings...

Eliot was given 3 months sick-leave from Lloyds Bank to recuperate from nervous exhaustion, he spent the first 3 weeks of it at Margate, staying at the Albemarle Hotel, 47 Eastern Esplanade, Cliftonville...

Best known for his ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ which achieved instant success when published in 1751, Thomas Gray spent much of the rest of his life researching for a planned history of English poetry (which was never published) and travelling around England and Scotland...

In 1872 the fear of losing his right foot brought him to Margate, to the Royal Sea-Bathing Infirmary, founded in 1791 for the ‘Relief of the Poor whose Diseases require Sea-Bathing’ and recommended by ‘the extreme Salubrity of that part of the Coast and the ready and cheap Conveyance hither’...

Encouraged in his writing by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he became part of the large circle of contributors to Dickens’s magazines...

Caudle’s Curtain Lectures’(1846), it provides a good example of Mrs...

After obtaining his Apothecary’s Licence the previous month and becoming increasingly drawn to poetry as a way of life, he undoubtedly welcomed the opportunity of a change of surroundings...

This mood prevailed during the whole of his stay, despite the comfort of returning to his ‘old Lodging' and the presence of his brother Tom...

We do not know exactly how many times Charles Lamb came to Margate but it is certain that it was his first visit he enjoyed most...

They shared most things, including their first seaside holiday at Margate, which so captivated Charles, but which Mary may not have found so enthralling, since, referring to a prospective trip to Margate in the summer of 1803, she confessed to a friend: ‘ …we shall find the flat country of the Isle of Thanet very dull...

It was actually Kingsgate, properly speaking within the boundary of Broadstairs, where he and Frieda Weekly stayed for nearly three weeks in July 1913...

The depression to which Lear was subject throughout most of his life, despite the whimsical humour of his poetry, may have been partly due to the epileptic attacks which gave him a sense of isolation...

Byron called him ‘the most epigrammatic conversationalist' he had met, and admired his ‘Advice to Julia', an epic in lively verse which contained vignettes of life in the London society of the time...

Despite dosing himself with a variety of remedies such as creosote and arsenic, he discovered that the best relief lay in visits to the seaside, as advised by his friend and fellow philosopher, Friedrich Engels...

When the stay making business which he had set up in Sandwich failed, Paine moved with his pregnant young wife of less than a year to Margate in the spring of 1760...

In his children’s book, ‘The Sheltering Tree’, Richard Parker used the setting of the marshland south west of Margate as a background for the story of a mid-nineteenth century family’s struggle with poverty and involvement in the local smuggling trade...

From 1888 he was the music critic for ‘The Star ‘, a new London evening newspaper...

After his death two days later, his son made arrangements for him to be buried in the north aisle of St...

Jorrocks and his friends travelled from London by the ‘Royal Adelaide’, probably on what was known as the ‘husbands’ boat’, a Saturday service which in the 1830s, before the advent of the railways, was still the quickest way of reuniting London businessmen and their families, albeit under the mocking gaze of the locals...

These were, however, for his wife, who was suffering from depression after the birth of their third child and who was beginning to show increasing signs of mental instability...

He wrote this in 1857, twelve years after he had to place his wife in care for the rest of her life and ten years after the overwhelming success of ‘ Vanity Fair’...

Many years after his first visit there, and with the sobering experience of prison behind him, Wilde was still able to write a tongue-in-cheek comment in March 1898 to a friend who had been to stay in Margate...

The ‘ Dandelion’ referred to in his verse was the site of the Dandelion pleasure gardens in Garlinge, just outside Margate, renowned for their bowling green, dancing music and public breakfasts...