The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends"Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
General
The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends"
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Ingoldsby, Thomas, 1788-1845. Ingoldsby legends; Kent (England) -- Description and travel
Still hazardously up and down go those old streets and lanes of the
old town--Beach Street, North Street, Fenchurch Street, Radnor Street,
and East Street, whence you look out upon Copt Point and the serried
tiers upon tiers of chalk cliffs stretching in the direction of Dover.
Still the Martello tower stands upon that point, as it stands in the
illustration of Folkestone by Turner, but the swarming population of
to-day has blotted out much of that obvious romance that once burst
full upon the visitor. The romance is still there, but you have to
seek it and dig deep beneath the strata of modern changes before it
is found. Trivial things dot the i's, cross the t's, and generally
emphasise this triumph of convention. "Lanes" become "streets," and
that quaintly illiterate old rendering, "Rendavowe" Street, was
long since thought by no means worthy of more educated times, and
accordingly changed to the correct spelling of "Rendezvous" it now
bears.
Modern Folkestone is already, by effluxion of time, becoming sharply
divided into modern and more modern. The ancient Folkestone we have
seen to be the fishing village, the first development from whose
humble but natural existence, in days when seaside holidays began
to be an institution and the "resorts" set out upon their career of
artificiality, was the "Pavilionstone" of Dickens and Cubitt. The trail
of Cubitt, who built that South Kensington typified by the Cromwell
Road, and was followed by his imitators throughout the western suburbs
of London in the 'fifties and 'sixties, is all over the land, and is
very clearly defined on the Folkestone Leas, whose houses are in the
most approved grey stucco style. The Leas therefore are not Folkestone,
but, as Dickens dubbed them, "Pavilionstone," or, more justly,
Notting-Hill-on-Sea. They and their adjacent contemporary streets
are the seaside resort of yesterday; the red-brick and terra-cotta
houses and hotels, in adaptation of Elizabethan Gothic and Jacobean
Renaissance, that of to-day, a newer and grander place than Cubitt
conceived or Dickens knew.
All those magnificent streets, those barrack-like hotels, all those
bands and gay parterres, and all the fashion that makes Folkestone the
most expensive seaside resort on the south coast, are excrescences.
That only is Folkestone where you really do smell the salt water and
can seek refuge from the cigar-smoke and the Eau-de-Cologne, the
wealthy, the idle, and the vicious, to come to the folk who earn their
livelihood by the sea and its fish, and are individual and racy of the
water and the always interesting waterside life.
[Illustration: _After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._ FOLKESTONE IN 1830.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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