Lewis Carroll

A walk along the beach at Whitby is an uplifting experience for any visitor to the stirring Yorkshire coast, but fo the Rev Charles Dodgson it was inspiration for the vivid fantasy of his poem ‘The Walrus and The Carpenter’.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand:
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,”
They said, “it would be grand!”
-Lewis Carroll, ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’

Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, often stayed nearby with the family of his Oxford University colleague, Henry Liddell. The stories he invented for Liddell’s daughters were written down at the insistence of one of the girls, Alice, and became the most famous children’s books ever written.

Those cliffs, rocks, beaches and fishing villages, all with the magnificent backdrop of the North Yorkshire Moors, have given inspiration to other writers and artists over the centuries. Whitby is where Count Dracula landed in Bram Stoker’s novel. In 1890, Stoker, a civil servant in Dublin during his early years, stayed at a Whitby inn – reputedly The Duke of York – while writing the novel. He heard of the shipwreck of the ‘Demetrius’ some years earlier, the loss of its grisly cargo of full coffins and stories of bodies being washed ashore for days. In his novel, Dracula arrives following the wreck of the ‘Demeter’ at Whitby. Now a Dracula industry is hard at work in the area, with tours, exhibitions and meetings of Dracula fans.

But the writing started much earlier. A settlement has existed on the banks of the estuary of the River Esk since before Christianity. But in 657AD, Hilda, the grandniece of Edwin, Saxon King of Northumbria, founded Streanshach Abbey. This was almost unique in that it was a ‘double’ abbey, for men and women, who lived in adjoining quarters. It became one of the primary religious centres of England, and boasted the English poet Caedmon as one of its members.

The soul of Whitby is the river, its harbours and the narrow, steeply rising streets. Its history as a centre of whaling and herring fishing has been an inspiration, and the sweeping 190-odd steps down from the Abbey to the harbour have featured regularly in flims and on TV.