Where History Came Alive for Me

For our favorite writers, it was in the world of other writers

It’s not difficult to see that everywhere in Britain, visible in the landscapes and country homes, market squares and birthplaces of the famed, Here Lived History. Stories of that theme across our green and pleasant land are almost infinite—and easily taken for granted, or with a passing "interesting." But where and how does it become personal? Sometimes, when you don’t even expect it, history comes amazingly alive.
When I invited our contributing editors to recall for readers a place where history came alive to them, I really should have anticipated the theme that emerged.
As Scott Reeves pointed out: "We’re writers. It’s only natural, our interest in discovering how other writers were inspired and worked."

What could I do but follow the theme?
--Dana Huntley

THESTAGESHOREDITCH.COM

BRONTEORG.UK

BRONTEORG.UK

DANA HUNTLEY

Where do the imagination and real life of a writer meet, mingle and metamorphose? For poet Dylan Thomas, it’s most vividly apparent at the Boathouse, his "seashaken house on a breakneck of rocks" perched on cliffs in the west Wales town of Laugharne. Here in the last four years of his short life (1914–1953), he was especially creative, or more specifically, in his "word-splashed hut" just up the steps.

DANA HUNTLEY

SCOTTSABBOTSFORD.COM

BORDERSJOURNEYS.CO.UK

Hmm. Agatha Christie’s Greenway or D.H. Lawrence’s Birthplace? There are so many. Thomas Hardy’s Dorchester, though, remains a magic place for me. I first visited in 1980, duffle slung over my shoulder and fresh from graduate school. From a room up over the pub, I tromped the fields along the River Frome and through Thorncombe Wood to his thatched cottage birthplace, stood in the Maumbury Rings at dusk and walked through The Mayor of Casterbridge scene by scene, Dorchester still very much the same agricultural market town he knew and so vividly portrayed as the Casterbridge of his novels. I felt it.
I’ve returned a number of times over the years and written of Hardy’s Wessex world. Over the last generation, Dorchester’s population has more than doubled, and it has been inevitably drawn into our contemporary, homogenized world of chain stores and franchises.

"History never looks like history when you are living through it." – John W. Gardner
"It takes an endless amount of history to make even one tradition." – Aldous Huxley