Author

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A friend of Hook, Dickens and Thackeray, he was a regular contributor to Bentley’s Miscellany, a magazine under the editorship of Charles Dickens...

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

He continued to live at Aldeburgh, where he entertained such prominent Victorians as Thomas Hardy, T...

Thus in east Kent he responded warmly to the fertility of the countryside but could not bear to enter Margate which to him symbolised much of what was wrong with the economy...

The same weakness for hyperbole is evident in her description of the Shell Grotto at Margate as ‘one of the most beautiful, fantastic and interesting relics of the ancient days that exist in England or anywhere else...

Recovering from his brush with near madness with the help of sympathetic medical care and the support of friends, Cowper went on to write his best known works – ‘A Tale in Verse’ (1781), ‘Poems’ (1782), ‘The Task’ (1785)...

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

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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...

The Infirmary made a depressing impression on Henley, reminding him of a workhouse,'so gaunt and cheap and business-like it looked’...

He nonetheless retained a taste for adventure, spending seven years in Australia on Crown business in the gold fields of Victoria...

Caudle’s ability to use any occasion to expose her husband’s perceived failings...

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...

It is in the ‘Last Essays of Elia’, the second collection of essays which he regularly contributed to the ‘London Magazine’ between 1820 and 1823, that he described the vivid impression made on him all those years ago by Margate, in comparison to which any similar resort fell far short...

Taken into care, she returned three years later to live with her brother Charles, who looked after her for the rest of her life...

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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...

Luttrell’s reputation was as a wit, ‘a talker and a diner-out’, according to a contemporary judgement in the Dictionary of National Biography...

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...

Under the name ‘Corno di Bassetto’, he wrote articles which expressed his forthright opinions on a number of subjects, not just musical ones, including a visit he made to Margate in December 1888, while staying at Broadstairs in an attempt to escape the intrusive inanities (as he saw it) of the festive season...

By 1788 the greatest successes of Sheridan’s theatrical life – ‘The Rivals’ (1770), ‘The School for Scandal’ (1777) and ‘the Critic’ (1779) – were behind him and he had embarked on his long wished –for career in politics, becoming known as a brilliant orator and a confidant of the royal circle...

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...

They rented rooms at 1, Bridge Terrace from 20th August to 6th September 1840...

The public houses and hotels he names may no longer exist but the High Street and Hawley Square are still part of modern Margate...

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...

Obviously a devotee of Margate, his vigorous verse captures well the energy of the town’s social scene and the earthiness of some of its participants...