Author

Extract

His ten weeks in Britain had seen him receive the kind of acclaim and recognition he felt he had not been accorded in his own country...

The air was full of the noise of marching feet, galloping hooves, rifle practice and bugles...

For the latter, Trinity House allowed him to spend a week on board the ‘Gull’ light-vessel which in those days marked the area of the dangerous Goodwin Sands nearest to Ramsgate...

During that time its style became less barbed but more appealing to a wider readership...

Fired by the same indignation which led him to spurn a visit to Margate two years later, Cobbett’s view of Ramsgate in 1821 was expressed in the scathing terms he always reserved for those places he considered tainted by their connection with speculators and the idle and corrupt rich...

He was particularly glad to seek refuge there after stressful experiences such as the bankruptcy of his publisher in 1819 and nursing his younger son through typhoid in 1822...

An Inveterate Bather

Coleridge had always enjoyed bathing, and his regular visits to Ramsgate included plenty of dips in the sea, no matter how cold the water...

‘Ramsgatizing’

Easily accessible from London by mail coach or steamer, Ramsgate was becoming quite fashionable by the early years of the nineteenth century, attracting a regular group of visitors from the aristocracy, politics and the professional classes who formed a seasonal society of their own, receiving and paying calls on each other in the newly built Regency terraces...

He had a first hand view from his lodgings at 29 Wellington Crescent, which was so distressingly distracting that he abandoned his work to run to the window every ten minutes...

In ‘The Fallen Leaves’, the elderly Mr...

Nonetheless, he continued to visit Ramsgate until a year before his death and it was here that a good many of his novels were begun, continued or completed...

Not many of the towns of east Kent detained Daniel Defoe for long in his ‘Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain’(1724-6)...

Accommodation seems to have been a problem for Dickens at the time when he wrote this letter to John Forster in September 1839...

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In ‘The Tuggses at Ramsgate’(1836), the town is the scene of the Tuggs family’s humiliation and dupery by Captain and Mrs Waters...

Bathing was one of Dickens pastimes when he was in Kent...

During a prolonged stay in Broadstairs in the summer of 1852, George Eliot must have had occasion to visit Ramsgate several times...

The fifteen year old daughter of the French poet, a prominent exponent of Surrealism, and his divorced wife Gala (who had become the mistress of Salvador Dali), was holidaying in Ramsgate in August 1933 when her father announced his intention of visiting her for a few days...

In 1873 he spent several weeks there in August and September with Lizzie Burns for the sake of her health...

There is a poignant note to the letter Engels wrote to Marx in 1877 from 2 Adelaide Gardens, where he had taken Lizzie for her failing health from 11th July to 28th August...

In one letter he enclosed ‘a little drawing of the view from the window of the school’...

Holiday at Ramsgate

Although chiefly remembered now as a writer of comic and satiric verses which depended heavily for their effect on his impressive gift for pun making, Thomas Hood was also admired by literary contemporaries such as Dickens, for his serious poems...

Hood’s memories of Ramsgate

Even ten years after what was probably his last visit to Ramsgate, Hood retained a very clear impression of the place when writing to John Leech, an illustrator and fellow contributor to Punch, who was holidaying there...

In August 1868, his family was in Ramsgate again, with Marx joining them for a few days...

He spent much of his remaining time in search of cures and to this end he continued to make frequent visits to a variety of British sea-side resorts and continental spa-towns...

From 21st August to 16th September, he stayed at 62 Plains of Waterloo, preoccupied by the frail health both of his daughter and his wife, who was also there...

In his short life, the poet and prose-writer whose visionary writings influenced both symbolist and surrealist poets, travelled widely in Europe and the East...