Last week I picked up a cheap copy of “An Illustrated Literary Guide to Shropshire” by Gordon Dickins. It was published in 1987 and only included writers already dead, so luckily my doomed search for myself in the index was not too hard to bear.
It's an interesting read. He repeats the assertion that PG Wodehouse based Market Blandings on Shifnal, though sadly that is the only proper mention our town musters. Dickens is subject to a long entry, mainly based on his use of Tong church (“The Cathedral of the West Midlands” - Anne's mum) in The Old Curiosity Shop. He also writes about the inspiration for my favourite Dickens' character:
“It was while he was staying at the Bear Hotel (in Newport) that Charles Dickens heard a rather sad local story. Elizabeth Parker of Chetwynd House in Newport had been jilted on the very day of her wedding. Totally distraught she became a virtual recluse, living in the upper rooms of her house while the lower floor was kept unfurnished apart from one room in which her wedding cake was kept as a poignant relic. The story goes that she made just one public appearance after this, at a county ball in Newport where she had hoped to meet the man who should have been her husband – but she was disappointed again.”
The other entry that took my eye was that of DH Lawrence, who used Pontesbury and the Stiperstones as the location for his novel St Mawr, which I haven't read, but will now. This book was apparently written in New Mexico after a brief visit to Shropshire and expresses his disillusionment “at the country and its people.” The novel includes a rather striking and not much dated description of the Stiperstones and of Shropshire's place in things:
“They came at last, trotting in file along a narrow track between heather, along the saddle of a hill, to where the knot of pale granite suddenly cropped out. It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers, the old savage England, whose last blood flows still in a few Englishmen, Welshmen, Cornishmen.”
It's an interesting read. He repeats the assertion that PG Wodehouse based Market Blandings on Shifnal, though sadly that is the only proper mention our town musters. Dickens is subject to a long entry, mainly based on his use of Tong church (“The Cathedral of the West Midlands” - Anne's mum) in The Old Curiosity Shop. He also writes about the inspiration for my favourite Dickens' character:
“It was while he was staying at the Bear Hotel (in Newport) that Charles Dickens heard a rather sad local story. Elizabeth Parker of Chetwynd House in Newport had been jilted on the very day of her wedding. Totally distraught she became a virtual recluse, living in the upper rooms of her house while the lower floor was kept unfurnished apart from one room in which her wedding cake was kept as a poignant relic. The story goes that she made just one public appearance after this, at a county ball in Newport where she had hoped to meet the man who should have been her husband – but she was disappointed again.”
The other entry that took my eye was that of DH Lawrence, who used Pontesbury and the Stiperstones as the location for his novel St Mawr, which I haven't read, but will now. This book was apparently written in New Mexico after a brief visit to Shropshire and expresses his disillusionment “at the country and its people.” The novel includes a rather striking and not much dated description of the Stiperstones and of Shropshire's place in things:
“They came at last, trotting in file along a narrow track between heather, along the saddle of a hill, to where the knot of pale granite suddenly cropped out. It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers, the old savage England, whose last blood flows still in a few Englishmen, Welshmen, Cornishmen.”
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