Apart from that, how did you enjoy the visit?

Sorry, but I keep finding Blackgang Chine out-takes. This one's from The Quiver and a serialised inspirational novel Borne Back, by Emma E Hornibrook, another late-Victorian writer with more credits than you'd think (cue bibliography).

At a Month's End: part 3

Continuing with part 3 of At a Month's End: leaves from the diary of a man of the time, told in three parts in London Society magazine in 1887: one of the less findable Bertha Thomas stories I decided to rescue from archive limbo, in part for its Devon interest.

At a Month's End: part 2

Continuing with part 2 of At a Month's End: leaves from the diary of a man of the time, told in three parts in London Society magazine in 1887: one of the less findable Bertha Thomas stories I decided to rescue from archive limbo, in part for its Devon interest.

At a Month's End: part 1

As a follow-up to Bertha Thomas: bibliography, I decided to rescue one of her less findable stories from archive limbo: At a Month's End: leaves from the diary of a man of the time, told in three parts in London Society magazine in 1887.

The House on the Scar: A Tale of South Devon

I offer Bertha Thomas's 1890 The House on the Scar: A Tale of South Devon as a regional curiosity worth reading if you're into Victorian melodramatic romances. I found it syndicated in the Sydney Mail, starting in the Jan 18, 1890 issue, and it turned out to be in the Internet Archive. Set in the South Hams, Devon, it's one of the few - but apparently popular - novels by the Worcestershire-born author Bertha Thomas (1845-1918).

The Kestyns of Cather Castle

Further to the brief comment in Carisbrooke Castle #1, I just checked out Robey F Eldridge's 1897 The Kestyns of Cather Castle, a novel by an Isle of Wight author, which turns out to be available as a PDF from the British Library.

Two Devon romances

Just skimming through some regional notes, I found bookmarks to two Devon-based romances - with somewhat similar themes but very different mood - by authors better known for other works and other locations, Thomas Hardy and John Galsworthy.

More Wight literary miscellany

Dave Parker's very browsable Isle of Wight Nostalgia site has some transcripts from the 1948 Ward Lock Guide. The introduction has a section on literary references, which I thought worth annotating in case anyone wants a bit of an Isle of Wight reading list.

A Literary Note

It is somewhat curious that the Isle of Wight, with its wealth of natural and historical interest, should have figured so little in fiction. The writer has yet to rise who will do for it what Scott did for the Highlands, Blackmore and Kingsley for North Devon, Thomas Hardy for "Wessex," and more recently Sheila Kaye Smith for Sussex, and Brett Young for Worcestershire. Dickens, we know, stayed at Bonchurch, and wrote enthusiastically of his surroundings, but, beyond a brief reference to Shanklin Sands in Our Mutual Friend, he did not introduce them in any novel. References, more or less extended, are made to the Island in numerous well- known works, of which we need only mention Fielding's Voyage to Lisbon, Scott's Surgeon's Daughter, Marryat's Poor Jack and The Dog Fiend, and Meredith's Adventures of Harry Richmond and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

Readers with a partiality for "local colour" may be glad of references to other novels dealing with the district. Recent works can of course be purchased from any bookseller, or borrowed through the subscription libraries. For others it may be necessary to consult the files at public libraries or seek for second-hand copies.

Chronologically, our summary should commence with two excellent historical stories, The Count of The Saxon Shore, by Professor Church, and Caedwalla, or the Saxons in the Isle of Wight, by F. Cowper.

• The Count of the Saxon Shore for Britain (Latin: comes littoris Saxonici per Britanniam) was the head of the "Saxon Shore" military command of the later Roman Empire. Alfred John Church's 1887 novel, a well-researched sword and sandal adventure, is on Project Gutenberg: The Count of the Saxon Shore, or, The Villa in VECTIS: A Tale of the Departure of the Romans from Britain (Gutenberg E-Text No. 44083).

• Frank Cowper's 1887 Caedwalla takes place between 680-709 CE, and tells of the Isle of Wight campaign of Cædwalla of Wessex; I can't find it online.
•  Maxwell Gray needs little introduction ...

Topographically, we will start with the capital of the Island, Newport, which appears as "Oldport" in Maxwell Gray's The Silence of Dean Maitland, in which also "Chalkburne" is Carisbrooke.

... so I'll skip and direct you to maxwellgray.co.uk.

The Captain of the Wight, by F. Cowper, is a romance of Carisbrooke Castle in 1468; The Prisoner of Carisbrooke, by S. H. Burchell, deals with the imprisonment and attempted escape of Charles I, and the same subject is treated in The Cavaliers, by S. R. Keightley, and in Marjorie Bowen's Governor of England. The White King's Daughter, by Mrs. H. Marshall, narrates the latter days at Penshurst and Carisbrooke of Charles's young and ill-fated child, the Princess Elizabeth.

•  The Captain of the Wight follows the exploits of Sir Edward Woodville, the last "Lord of the Isle of Wight", up to his death in a disastrous and undermanned expedition to fight the French in Brittany.
•  Sidney Herbert Burchell's 1904 The Prisoner of Carisbrooke focuses strongly on the life and loves of the hero, Robert Hammond, who became the jailer of Charles I.
•  Samuel Robert Keightley's 1896 The Cavaliers tells of a young Cavalier, Thomas Duncombe, who becomes involved in the failed attempt to spring Charles I from Carisbrooke Castle; it's on the Internet Archive (ID cavaliers00keiggoog).
•  As Marjorie Bowen died in 1952, her 1913 Governor of England is in UK copyright until 2027 (though you could look for it on Project Gutenberg Australia).
•  The 1895 The White King's Daughter isn't findable.

A Reputed Changeling, by C. M. Yonge, has episodes at Carisbrooke Castle and Blackgang Chine about 1667; and Moonfleet, by J. Meade Falkner, in its early pages an exciting smuggling story of Dorset about 1757, hinges upon the discovery of hidden treasure in the well of the Castle. Jitny and the Boys, by B. Copplestone, describes a visit to the Island and especially to Carisbrooke during the Great War. Reminiscent of the War also is The Sub., by Taffrail - the training at Osborne of a naval sub-lieutenant and his after experiences.

•  Charlotte Mary Yonge's 1889 A Reputed Changeling, or, Three Seventh Years Two Centuries Ago (Internet Archive areputedchangeli12449gut) tells of episodes in the life of the rebellious and lovelorn Peregrine Oakshott, born in 1667, who becomes involved with royal politics and a plot to reinstall James II after his deposition.
•  The well-known 1898 Moonfleet, actually mostly set on the coast of Dorset, is at Gutenberg E-Text No. 10743.
•  Bennet Copplestone's 1916 Jitny and the Boys isn't online, but if you like maritime stories, his 1916 The Lost Naval Papers is.
•  "Taffrail" is the pseudonym of  the writer Captain Henry Tapprell Dorling; The Sub: Being the Autobiography of David Munro, Sub-Lieutenant, Royal Navy is one of his many naval thrillers based on his own experience.

Cowes appears as "Lowport" in The Caddis Worm and as "Thorneyhurst" in The Story of Anna Beames, by Mrs. C. A. Dawson Scott, whose The Burden is set at the mouth of the Medina. Wootton and neighbourhood are the scene of Scarlet Sails, by Mrs. Baillie Saunders.

•  The Caddis Worm refers to Catherine Amy Dawson Scott's 1914 novel The Caddis-worm; Or, Episodes in the Life of Richard and Catharine Blake: the saga of Catherine Blake (the self-effacing "caddis worm" of the title), married in her teens to the domineering but successful Lowport doctor. Her first novel, The Story of Anna Beames (1907), tells of the conflict between its titular heroine and the Heathcliff-like Stephen Barclay. The Burden (1908) seems to be in similar vein.

•  Margaret Baillie-Saunders' 1924 Scarlet Sails is a love story: according to The Bookman, "a delightful story with the fragrant beauty of the Isle of Wight for background, and a celebrated journalist on holiday and the pretty daughter of a reprobate mother".

Bembridge, Ryde and Sandown all appear in The Privateers, by H. B. Marriott-Watson. Ventnor and Shanklin, under different names, will be found in Old Mr. Tredgold, by Mrs. Oliphant. Ursula, by Miss E. Sewell, and A Romance of the Undercliff, by Mrs. E. Marshall, deal with the Undercliff, and the closing chapters of William Black's Madcap Violet take us to the same delightful region. The Rev. Wm. Adams, author of Sacred Allegories, lived at Bonchurch, the scene of his stories, and is buried there.

•   H. B. Marriott Watson's 1907 The Privateers is a thriller in which (according to the advertising blurb) "Lieut. Kerslake, a good type of the British naval officer meets Herbert Alston, a young American, and becomes involved in adventures of a Conan Doyle description".

•  Margaret Oliphant's 1895 Old Mr. Tredgold: A Story of Two Sisters (Internet Archive oldmrtredgold00margoog) is a novel of social drama and satire about two sisters, one staid and deserving, the other who elopes with her lover.

•  I've already mentioned the locations of Elizabeth Missing Sewell's 1886 Ursula: A Tale of Country Life - see "Ursula" and Blackgang and the Internet Archive (ursulataleofcoun00sewe).
•   Emma Marshall's A Romance of the Undercliff; or, the Isle of Wight in 1799, was described by the author as "a shilling story of the French War" - see Emma Marshall, a biographical sketch (1900).

•  William Black's 1877 Madcap Violet (Internet Archive madcapviolet01blacgoog) tells the story of a wilful and impulsive tomboy, from childhood to womanhood and tragic love.

•  William Adams and Sacred Allegories: see William Adams: The Old Man's Home.

Blackgang will be found in A Cavalier's Ladye, by Constance MacEwen, a tale of the sixteenth century. Freshwater and the Needles are seen in H. B. Marriott-Watson's Twisted Eglantine. The Trespasser, by D. H. Lawrence, includes a visit to Freshwater; Headon Hill's Spies of the Wight and Millions of Mischief are staged at Totland Bay, while Beacon Fires, by the same author, includes stories of Freshwater and Hurst Castle. Laurence Clark's Bernard Treve's Boots is a Wartime "spy" story set at Freshwater and Newport. And the Stars Fought, by Eva Fitzgerald, The Lady Isabella, by Sir F. W. Black (Cowes and Carisbrooke), and Towards Love, by Irene Macleod, are other good Island stories for holiday reading, as is also Yesterday, a Tory Fairy Tale of the Isle of Wight, by Norman Davey.

•  The 1889 A Cavalier's Ladye: A Romance of the Isle of Wight by Constance Macewen (aka Mrs AC Dicker) is a saga set during the English Commonwealth, purporting to be the journal recounting the adventures of an ardent Royalist, Miss Judith Dionysia Dyllington.

•  Marriott Watson's 1905 Twisted Eglantine (Internet Archive twistedeglantin00watsgoog) is a romance of the Regency, the hero being Sir Piers "Beau" Blakiston.

•  The Trespasser (1912) is DH Lawrence's second novel, drawing on the experiences of a friend of Lawrence, Helen Corke, and her adulterous relationship with a married man.

•  "Headon Hill" (a pseudonym based on an Isle of Wight coastal hill between Alum Bay and Totland) was the author and journalist Francis Edward Grainger; he wrote a number of mystery and adventure stories, including some in the paranoid pre-WW1 'invasion threat' genre. Spies of the Wight (1899) is one, in which a holidaying journalist encounters German agents. Millions of Mischief: The Story of a Great Secret is online (Internet Archive millionsofmischi00hilliala), and concerns a plot to kill the Prime Minister of England. Beacon Fires (1897) is an anthology of "war stories of the coast" generally featuring the foiling of foreign coastal invasions in various eras, including the Napoleonic Wars and Anglo-Dutch war of a century before.
•  Laurence Clark's 1920 Bernard Treves's Boots; A Novel of the Secret Service is online (Gutenberg E-Text No. 42459); it's another invasion story, involving the foiling of a German submarine attack on the fleet at Portsmouth.
•   And the Stars Fought (A Romance) (1912) by Ena Fitzgerald is an Isle of Wight romance; you may recall the author from Poets of the Wight.
•    Lady Isabella: A Thirteenth Century Tale Of Carisbrooke Castle And The Isle Of Wight Told In Verse By Sir Frederick W Black (1924) looks a fairly eccentric effort. The author was a civil servant for the Admiralty, and another of the IOW celebrities to appear in Poets of the Wight: Sir Frederick Black KCB. Lady Isabella tells the story of Isabella de Fortibus, Countess of Devon, the wealthiest woman in England in the late 13th century, and owner of Carisbrooke Castle. She is, incidentally, the Countess who Countess Wear, near Topsham, is named after.
•    Towards Love. A novel (1923) is by Irene Rutherford Macleod (later wife of Aubrey de Sélincourt). I haven't been able to find anything about it.
 •    Yesterday: A Tory Fairy-Tale (1924) is by Norman Davey, and features a near-future secession of the Isle of Wight.

Finally, The Scarlet Rider, by Bertha Runkle, is an exciting romance of a highwayman about 1780, and deals with an old manor-house, and we are informed that the manor-houses of The Reproach of Annesley and Ribstone Pippins, both by Maxwell Gray, are respectively Arreton and Westridge.

  •    The Scarlet Rider (1913) is by the American author Bertha Runkle. , and concerns the headstrong daughter of an impoverished aristocratic family who shelters a fugitive who appears to be the "Scarlet Rider", an infamous highwayman. See the Internet Archive (ID scarletrider00compgoog).
  •    I'll refer you to previous posts for The Reproach of Annesley and Ribstone Pippins.

An older edition of the Ward Lock guide is online - A pictorial and descriptive guide to the Isle of Wight in six sections : with excursions, and cycling and pedestrian routes from each centre ; upwards of seventy illustrations, map of the Island (1900, Internet Archive guidetoisleofwig00ward). There's a deal of historical and pictorial interest in there.

- Ray

The Mark of Cain

I speculated a couple of weeks back that Rider Haggard's 1888 Mr Meeson's Will might be the first Victorian novel to feature a tattooed mainstream character. This turns out to be wrong, if you can consider a criminal aristocrat a mainstream character. I just read Andrew Lang's 1886 The Mark of Cain, (Internet Archive ID markcain02langgoog) which is rather a fun yarn. The story:

Robert Maitland, a rich young academic and philanthropist, and his doctor friend Frank Barton go to a rather seedy London club, the Cockpit, to play baccarat. There they meet the disreputable Hon. Thomas Cranley. In the course of a game, Barton catches Cranley cheating by using a cigarette case and  a puddle of spilled soda water as a 'shiner' to see the cards being dealt.  Cranley is thrown out the club, disgraced. Outside, he finds a copy of The Times, reads an obituary, and has an idea ...

"So the old boy's dead," he reflected; "and that drunken tattooed ass and his daughter are to come in for the money and the mines! They'll be clever that find him, and I shan't give them his address! What luck some men have!"

Here he fell into deep thought, his brows and lips working eagerly.

"I'll do it," he said at last, cutting the advertisement out of the paper with a penknife. "It isn't often a man has a chance to star in this game of existence. I've lost all my own social Lives: one in that business at Oxford, one in the row at Ali Musjid, and the third went—to-night. But I'll star. Every sinner should desire a new Life," he added with a sneer.

... before disappearing into the night.

Some weeks later, the corpse of a "old Dicky Shields", a heavily tattooed tattoo artist, is found dead in a cartload of snow outside his lodging in a rough part of London.  Maitland gets to hear of this, as he has a connection: he paid for Dicky's daughter Margaret ("a daisy flourishing by the grimy waterside") to be "transplanted ... to a school in the purer air of Devonshire" with an eye to making her his ward and eventually marrying her. Maitland enquires of Dicky's landlady, Mrs Gullick, who tells him that Dicky had for some months been tattooing a sailor acquaintance. In the course of their conversation, another mystery is mentioned: her small daughter, Eliza, tells how she was frightened by seeing "a big Bird" on the roof.

The scene shifts to Devon - Miss Marlett's Establishment for the Highest Education of Girls at The Dovecot, Conisbeare, Tiverton, where Margaret receives a telegram from Maitland about the death of her father. Shortly after, Maitland arrives in person, only to find Margaret has gone, having left with a fur-coated "Mr Lithgow" authorised by a bogus telegram from Maitland.

Maitland enquires along the rail route, without luck, and returns to his Oxford college, St Gatien's. A few weeks later, his friend Barton visits; having seen Dicky Shields' corpse, he has the extraordinary theory that Shields was murdered (contrary to the inquest's finding of death by natural causes) by some undetectable poison.

"Well, it is strange; the murderer must have been a great traveller also. He must have been among the Macoushi Indians of Guiana, and well acquainted with their arts. I know them too. I went there botanizing."

The two come to the conclusion that the "Mr Lithgow" who abducted Margaret and the mystery sailor seen drinking with Shields on the night of his death might be the same person.

They are, as revealed to the reader: the Hon. Thomas Cranley is keeping Margaret in a house in Victoria Square, Pimlico, S.W., cared for by the violent alcoholic Mrs Darling; Margaret is unaware of Cranley's malicious purposes, and unharmed except that she has been ill for a time.  Cranley, for undisclosed reasons, wants her out of the way. Her illness interrupted his first plan, to take her to the Continent; he then tries to murder her with a poisoned orange, but chickens out at the last minute; and finally he conceives the plan of getting an acquaintance, Mrs. St. John Deloraine, to take on her and Mrs Darling to work in her philanthropic cafe, The Bunhouse (seems harmless enough, but read on). He has a brief panic when Maitland turns up during his visit to Mrs Deloraine, but Maitland (unaware of the card scandal) makes polite conversation and leaves.

Barton and Maitland, meanwhile, have found a clue: an advert in a French newspaper referring to "The gentleman travelling with a young lady, who, on Feb. 19th, left a bearskin coat at the Hôtel Alsace and Lorraine, Avenue de l'Opéra, Paris". Maitland goes to Paris to investigate, and promptly falls foul of the police. His enquiries attract attention - the advert was evidently a decoy - and, found to be travelling without a passport, he obtains his release with difficulty. He writes to Barton, saying he's tired of investigation, and is going to Constantinople and the Greek Islands.

Back in England, Barton is investigating for himself Dicky Shields' old lodgings.  He finds among Shields' tattooing kit a strange wooden needle ...

"I thought so," he said aloud, as he placed the needle in a pocket instrument-case: "the stem of the leaf of the coucourite palm!"

... but at that point is called in his capacity as a doctor to The Bunhouse nearby, where a young woman has been stabbed by another. As he arrives, the attacker stabs herself in the heart and dies. The young woman is carried to her room, and Barton eventually walks toward home. En route, he sees something amazing:

Through the crepuscular light, bulks of things—big, black, formless—were dimly seen; but nearer the hoarding than the middle of the waste open ground was a spectacle that puzzled the looker-on. Great fans were winnowing the air, a wheel was running at prodigious speed, flaming vapors fled hissing forth, and the figure of a man, attached in some way to the revolving fans, was now lifted several feet from the ground, now dashed to earth again, now caught in and now torn from the teeth of the flying wheel.

It's a crashed flying machine! Barton helps the injured pilot, called Winter, in hiding the machine and getting him to his own lodgings to recuperate.  Barton's subsequent enquiries into the recovery of the young woman, "Miss Burnside", reveal Cranley's conspiracy: to place her at the Bunhouse with the violent Mrs Darling, then (having professed affection) telling Mrs Darling he was jilting her in favour of Margaret.

Barton has geeky chats with the recovering Winter about heavier-than-air flight and its mythological precedents (actually rather interesting); and also chats with Margaret, with whom he falls in love, twigging eventually that she is Margaret Shields. The attraction is mutual, and Barton reveals that Maitland is not an impediment to their marriage; his interest in Margaret is purely avuncular.  He writes to Maitland to tell him the news.

Shortly after, Barton is called to a lawyer colleague's office on a matter of medical jurisprudence.  A Mr Richard Johnson died some time back, and left a large estate to his estranged son. All that is known is that the son travelled widely as a sailor, and had full-body tattoos. Barton has been called, as an expert of tattooing - he wrote a book called Les Tatouages Étude Médico-Légale - to verify the identity of a claimant. When shown a diagram of the tattoos, he recognises Johnson's long-lost son as having been the late Dicky Shields.

After explaining privately to the lawyer, Barton disguises himself as "Professor Lieblein, of Bonn" and examines the claimant, who shows his tattoos.

"That's the Burmese style, sir," he said, pointing to his shoulders and upper arm.

These limbs were tattooed in a beautiful soft blue; the pattern was a series of diminishing squares, from which long narrow triangles ran down to the elbow-joints.

"Sehr schôn, sehr schôn," exclaimed the delighted Professor. "It is very hubsch, very pretty, very well. We cannot now decorate, we Germans. Ach, it is mournful!" and he sighed. "And now, sir, have you to show me any moko? A little moko would be very instructive."

"Moko? Rather! The Maori pattern, you mean; the New Zealand dodge? Just look between my shoulders," and the seaman turned a broad bare back, whereon were designs of curious involuted spirals.

"That is right, that is right," whispered the Professor. "Moko, schlange, serpent-marks, so they call it in their tongue. Better moko, on an European man, have I never seen. You observe," he remarked to the elder Mr. Wright, waving his hand as he followed the tattooed lines—"you observe the serpentine curves? Very beautiful."

Finally, Barton, having seen the final proof of an Arab tattoo - "the wasm, the sharat, the Semitic tribal mark ... the mark of Cain!" - springs the trap.

"You must be tired, sir," said the Professor, in a very soft voice. "May I offer you a leedle cigarette?"

He drew from his pocket a silver cigarette-case, and, in a thoroughly English accent, he went on:

"I have waited long to give you back your cigarette-case, which you left at your club, Mr. Thomas Cranley!"

Cranley is arrested, and at his trial, the full story comes out. As one of the few people to know the true identity of "Dicky Shields", he aimed to steal the latter's inheritance by getting identical tattoos, killing the original, and then impersonating him; and naturally he wanted Margaret, the real next of kin, out of the way. Barton testifies with forensic evidence that the murder had been committed using curare. And Winter, the flying machine pilot, is carried into court to testify that he actually saw the murder being committed, as at the time he had landed on the roof near the window of Shields' room; his machine was the "big Bird" that frightened Eliza.  Cranley, saving the court the problem of further deliberation, drops dead in the dock.

The epilogue tells of the fate of the characters: Barton and Margaret Shields are married, as are Maitland and Mrs. St. John Deloraine. In conclusion:

But Fiction herself is revolted by the improbability of the statement that an Oxford Don has finished his magnum opus!

It's a good story, even if Cranley's plan is rather telegraphed from the start, and an entertaining mix of erudite detective story, romance, and borderline-SF (the flying machine subplot comes as a major surprise). The author too was a surprise: this is by the Andrew Lang, the Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology, best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales - all of which explains the general erudition and the academic protagonists. The final line is evidently self-referential, as Lang was a fellow of Merton College.

The social history side of the book is quite interesting. Like Maxwell Gray's previously-mentioned The Great Refusal, The Mark of Cain is set in the heyday of the settlement movement, when a strong initiative in help for the urban poor came from rich philanthropists who set up residential and other establishments presided-over by higher-class management. In The Mark of Cain, one central location is Maitland's philanthropic pub, the Hit or Miss ...

"The pothouse? Oh, the Hit or Miss you mean? Well, I'm afraid it's not very successful I took the lease of it, you know, partly by way of doing some good in a practical kind of way. The working men at the waterside won't go to clubs, where there is nothing but coffee to drink, and little but tracts to read. I thought if I gave them sound beer, and looked in among them now and then of an evening, I might help to civilize them a bit, like that fellow who kept the Thieves' Club in the East End.

... and Mrs. St John Deloraine's philanthropic café, the Bunhouse:

At this moment the lady's "favorite vanity," in the matter of good works, was The Bunhouse. This really serviceable, though quaint, institution was not, in idea, quite unlike Maitland's enterprise of the philanthropic public-house, the Hit or Miss. In a slum of Chelsea there might have been observed a modest place of entertainment, in the coffee and bun line, with a highly elaborate Chelsea Bun painted on the sign. This piece of art, which gave its name to the establishment, was the work of one of Mrs. St John Deloraine's friends, an artist of the highest promise, who fell an early victim to arrangements in haschisch and Irish whiskey. In spite of this ill-omened beginning, The Bunhouse did very useful work. It was a kind of unofficial club and home, not for Friendly Girls, nor the comparatively subdued and domesticated slavery of common life, but for the tameless tribes of young women of the metropolis. Those who disdain service, who turn up expressive features at sewing machines, and who decline to stand perpendicularly for fifteen hours a day in shops—all these young female outlaws, not professionally vicious, found in The Bunhouse a kind of charitable shelter and home.

- Ray

Under the cliffs again

I don't normally rate glossy regional publications very highly; they have a habit of recycling local factoids. But the 2011 Summer issue of East Devon Coast & Country has a very interesting article by the Seaton historian Ted Gosling - The Platts at Branscombe - on coastal potato farming at Branscombe.

I've mentioned previously how the slopes of the Hooken Undercliff were used to raise early young potatoes. I didn't realise that this extended to the "plats" - the more usual spelling than "platts" - that were tiny sloping fields all along the cliffside at Branscombe, where early daffodils, crocuses, tulips, broad beans and strawberries were also grown. It must have been ghastly work: donkeys were used to cart seaweed up from the beach for fertiliser, and a regular task was "drawing forehead" (carrying slipped soil from the bottom of the field up to the top). The Branscombe Project has in its postcard archive - here - views of these fields, described by the Sidmouth historian Peter Orlando Hutchinson in 1858 as "a beautiful undercliff, a sort of stage, half way down to the sea, well cultivated with corn, potatoes, etc".  Cheap imports have long since made obsolete this arduous and precarious use of the sheltered cliffside; see the modern view.

On the topic of undercliffs, I've an update to Seaton, slips and Sabine Baring-Gould. Baring-Gould's 1900 novel Winefred, a story of the chalk cliffs is now on the Internet Archive (ID winefredstoryofc00bari).

The opening paragraph ...

One grey, uncertain afternoon in November, when the vapour-laden skies were without a rent, and the trailing clouds, without a fringe, were passing imperceptibly into drizzle, that thickened with coming night, when the land was colourless, and the earth oozed beneath the tread, and the sullen sea was as lead — on such a day, at such a time of day, a woman wandered through Seaton, then a disregarded hamlet by the mouth of the Axe, picking up a precarious existence by being visited in the summer by bathers.

... definitely compares with Maxwell Gray and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and it gets distinctly geeky in places, as in this description of the Axton - Lyme Regis Undercliff and its microclimate:

But, as every tyro in geology knows, the chalk is built up over the green sand, below which are impervious beds of clay. The rain soaking down through the faults in the chalk reaches the argillaceous stratum, and, unable to descend farther, forms innumerable land springs such as come forth at the base of most chalk hills. But where the chalk cliffs rise out of the sea, the water converts the gravelly stratum into a quicksand, and that is liable to be carried into the sea, and this causes subsidences, much as would occur if you lay on a water-bed 1 that had in it a rent out of which would rush that which swelled the mattress.

There had been no sinkages of any importance along this coast within the memory of man. Nevertheless, an observant eye would have noticed that Captain Rattenbury's cottage stood on the undercliff, and was on a lower level than the down, but was nevertheless cut off from the sea by a sheer face of precipice. This undercliff formed an irregular terrace that overhung the sea. It was reached by an easy descent from the down above, and lay sufficiently below it to be sheltered from the north winds. His garden was consequently a warm spot even in mid-winter; whenever the sun shone, primroses starred the ground there even at the end of January, and crane's-bill there was never out of flower. The entire undercliff, raised three hundred feet above the sea, had a ruffled and chopped surface, was broken into ridges and depressed into basins, and was densely overgrown with thorns, brambles of gigantic growth, ivy and thickets of elder.

Nevertheless, it's very readable and a good story ("Love, iniquity, treachery, smuggling, redemption"), in which the heroine Winefred Marley, made homeless, is torn between the twin heritages of her mother (who comes from rustic stock among the smugglers and seafarers of East Devon) and her gentleman father (who moves in Bath high society). The smuggler Jack Rattenbury and the evil ferryman Olver Dench, who is after Winefred's mother's cache of gold, are thrown into the mix, with the Great Bindon Landslip of 1839 being the climax of the novel.

1. Yes, a water-bed in 1900. They're actually even older: see Victorian waterbeds.
- Ray

Adventure at Horseshoe Cove

While Googling "Horseshoe Cove" (mentioned previously) I ran into a unconnected reference; it's the name of a location in Florence L Barclay's 1910 romance novel The Mistress of Shenstone.

Like a number of writers little known a century later, Mrs Barclay was a highly popular novelist whose work included her debut romance The Wheels of Time and the bestselling The Rosary. The Times obituary favourably recalled her work,which praised her ability to tackle themes of romance and religious feelings in a way that dispensed with Victorian piety yet retained moral integrity:

Her death removes a figure as well known ten years ago to large sections of the novel-reading public as Charles Garvice, Marie Corelli, or Ethel M Dell. Her most popular book, "The Rosary," enjoyed a circulation of vast dimensions, and made friends of the author in homes all over the land.
...
It was one of the secrets of her success that she managed to be entirely sincere, and yet to infuse into an atmosphere which many people regard as narrow a kind of repressed excitement.
...
A writer who appealed to and won the affection of so many of her fellow country men and women is no negligible quantity. Indeed, there is reason to think that Mrs Barclay understood the tendency of her age better than many contemporary novelists whose technical skill exceeded her own. The way in which she blended passion with the spirit of pilgrimage was distinctly post-Victorian.
- Death of Mrs Barclay: a loss to millions of readers, The Times, March 11, 1921

The Mistress of Shenstone tells of the young and beautiful Lady Myra Ingleby, who goes for a rest cure incognito in Cornwall after the death of her husband in some unnamed military adventure at "Targai", somewhere in the Middle East.

"You know perfectly well that Lord Ingleby volunteered for this border war because he was so keen on experimenting with his new explosives, and on trying these ideas for using electricity in modern warfare, at which he has worked so long."

(Does she really want to be married to this guy? Anyhow...)  In Cornwall, her life is saved by a young man called Jim Airth, who helps her climb a cliff after she falls asleep on the beach and is cut off by the tide, and the two fall in love and become engaged. Jim, however, doesn't know that she is Lady Ingleby; and she doesn't know that Airth was the man who accidentally killed Lord Ingleby by prematurely detonating a mine. This naturally enough places a tension on their relationship, with a further twist when a telegram appears to indicate that Lord Ingleby is still alive, and there are also class issues (eventually resolved when it turns out that Jim Airth is himself an aristocrat going incognito).

Some of the book is fairly silly, such as Lord Ingleby's dog that gets vibes of his death and dies in sympathy, and also reflective of the prejudices of its time (for instance, the idea that the protagonists must be of the same class for a proper resolution). But it's well-plotted and well-paced, and not at all a bad read; it was filmed in 1921 (see IMDb).

Here's the full book at Project Gutenberg - E-text No. 26235 - and here are the chapters featuring the beach and the cliff climb: In Horseshoe Cove / Jim Airth to the rescue / "Yeo, ho! We go!" / 'Twixt sea and sky.

Many of Mrs Barclay's works are on the Internet Archive (see creator:"Barclay, Florence L. (Florence Louisa), 1862-1921") as is the subjective, but nonetheless interesting, biography by one of her daughters, The life of Florence L. Barclay: a study in personality. There's more biography, and some works, at Literary Heritage West Midlands; as the commentary says, some of her shorter works - such as "My heart's right there" - are morbidly patriotic by modern standards. Contrary to the now more popular anti-war writers and poets of World War One, Mrs Barclay (like Jessie Pope) was distinctly jingoistic at times.

It's a righteous war, my girl; and every man who fears God and honours the King, should be up, and out, and ready to do his share; and every woman who loves her home, must be willing bravely to do her part, by letting her man go. And if she has to hear that he has given his life, she must stand up, brave and true--as a soldier's wife or a soldier's mother--and say: 'God save the King!'
- from My heart's right there

- Ray