Keats at Dawlish:

Thought for the Day:

 

Did you know that in 1994 Britain voted for a European Union directive requiring statutory rest periods for transported animals, but against statutory rest periods for factory workers?

 

Bill Bryson, Notes From A Small Island

 

 

 

 

This Sunday we went for a morning walk in Dawlish, a small seaside town 12 miles from Exeter.

 

The town’s existence has been defined by two features of the natural landscape: the sea (salt was probably made here in Roman times)….

  

  

…and the rivulet usually known as Dawlish Water or The Brook, which flows down to the sea through what was once the town’s central area:

  

 

 

Dawlish Water is a natural stream, but was reconstructed in the early nineteenth century to minimize flooding – hence the weirs, which were added to a previous ‘remake’ after earlier efforts failed to prevent severe flooding in 1810. (http://www.dawlish.net/aboutdaw/history.htm - an excellent website, from which I have taken much of the information below)

 

The Water is also home to the town’s famous black swans:

 

  

Terraced churches are unusual, but walking along the road that runs alongside The Lawn (a park through which Dawlish Water flows just before it reaches the sea) we spotted two opposite each other:

 

  

 

  

  

The earliest written reference to Dawlish is 1044, but the town’s modern history was determined by that huge cultural change by which the British came to love ‘the seaside’. George 111 (1760-1820) is best known for losing America and being spectacularly mad for important parts of his reign – ‘Prince’ Charles and others like to claim that he wasn’t really mad, just suffering from some disease – proponents of this theory differ as to which – that carefully mimicked the symptoms of lunacy: ordinary people, apparently, are just plain bonkers for no particular reason, while a Royal would never address a tree as the King of Prussia (for example) without some good medical cause. Anyway, before that digression I was about to say that George introduced aristocratic males to sea bathing for health purposes, and Dawlish and other coastal towns started to acquire a gentry following.

  

 

Bigger houses joined the thatched cottages, John Manning effected the changes to Dawlish Water that I mentioned above, and, as the fashion for coastal holidays spread through all classes, Dawlish’s road to ‘seaside resort’ was unstoppable, especially after the greatest ever English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel built his revolutionary atmospheric railway (working on a kind of air suction principle) between Exeter and Newton Abbot. The line is a busy one today…

 

 

 

…although powered in the usual way, and is widely regarded as one of the most scenic in Britain:

 

 

This is a picture of part of the beach in the late nineteenth century:

 

 

Image: Wikimedia Commons

  

Note the wheeled bathing machines – these allowed men and women (but, you guessed it, particularly women) to wade in the sea without violating nineteenth century ideas of modesty, although the kind of costumes then fashionable were not, perhaps, as revealing as those favoured by some bathers today.

  

The twentieth century didn’t add as much of the usual ‘seaside’ tackiness to Dawlish as it did to other resorts:

  

 I have to confess I like this kind of thing though – the tackier the better. It’s what the English seaside’s about!

Anway, what I’m really interested in are the intersections between social and cultural history and poetry. Consider these rather cryptic lines:

 

O Dawlish, though unclassic be thy name,

….             To thee will I consign

Often the timid virgin, to thy pure

Encircling waves; to thee will I consign

The feeble matron; or the child on whom

Thou may’st bestow a second happier birth

From weakness unto strength…

 

Dr. Hugh Dowman, Infancy, 1790 (I’m not claiming I’d ever heard of this poem myself – I found these lines in in Peter Yapp’s The Travellers’ Dictionary of Quotations.)

 I translate: ‘Even though it’s got a silly name that doesn’t sound in the least like it’s derived from Greek or Latin, I recommend Dawlish to emotionally unstable young women, physically weak older women and sickly children – sea bathing will do them a power of good!

This part of the coast’s reputation for promoting good health attracted George and Tom,  the two younger brothers of poet John Keats (1795-1821), who, like Hugh Dowman had a medical background, but unlike him knew how to write poetry (strangely, Dowman was admired in his day – perhaps this extract doesn’t do him justice!). Tom Keats was suffering from the TB that would one day kill his famous brother and it wasn’t the sea bathing, however, but the mild climate and the presence of a well-thought of doctor that attracted him to the Devon coast.   Late in 1817 he and George Keats rented a house in Teignmouth, and John joined them in March 1818.

 

I’ll blog more about Keats’ stay there in the future, as his few months on the Devon coast marked an important stage in his personal and philosophical development, but for the moment it’s a day trip to Dawlish that I want to focus on.

 

On March 23, 1818, Keats walked the three miles from Teignmouth to Dawlish to visit the Easter Monday fair (which I think might have ben held on The Lawn, but I’m not ceratian about this) and the same day he sent this poem in a letter to a friend:

Notes: I’ve used a modernised text.

 Bourn = stream; rantipole = wild; Jack and Jill are names from a well-known nursery rhyme – ‘I”ll be your boy if you’ll be my girl’; at a parley = having a conversation; hawing = ‘an inarticulate utterance, as of hesitation, embarrassment, etc.’ – in other words, at this point she stops pretending to be reluctant; hie = go.

                   

Over the hill and over the dale,
          And over the bourn to Dawlish-
        Where gingerbread wives have a scanty sale
          And gingerbread nuts are smallish.

        Rantipole Betty she ran down a hill
          And kicked up her petticoats fairly.
        Says I, ‘I’ll be Jack if you will be Jill.’-
          So she sat on the grass debonairly.

        ‘Here’s somebody coming, here’s somebody coming!’
          Says I ”tis the wind at a parley.’
        So without any fuss, any hawing and humming
          She lay on the grass debonairly.

        ‘Here’s somebody here and here’s somebody there!
          Says I, ‘Hold your tongue you young gipsy.’
        So she held her tongue and lay plump and fair
          And dead as a Venus tipsy.

        Oh, who wouldn’t hie to Dawlish fair,
          Oh, who wouldn’t stop in a meadow,
        Oh, who would not rumple the daisies there
          And make the wild fern for a bed do!

It looks like he didn’t think much of the fair – lines 3 and 4 of stanza 1 suggest that the produce was poor and that not many people bought it.

But that didn’t matter so much, as his thoughts were not on gingerbread but on girls. In fact, the poem is on the same theme as one he wrote a couple of days earlier and sent in a letter to a different friend:

Note: Meads = meadows; junket = milk-based dessert

Where be ye going, you Devonmaid?
And what have ye there i’ the basket?
Ye tight little fairy, just fresh from the dairy,
Will ye give me some cream if I ask it?

I love your meads, and I love your flowers,
And I love your junkets mainly,
But ‘hind the door, I love kissing more,
O look not so disdainly!

I love your hills, and I love your dales,
And I love your flocks a-bleating;
But O, on the heather to lie together,
With both our hearts a-beating!

I’ll put your basket all safe in a nook,
Your shawl I’ll hang up on this willow,
And we will sigh in the daisy’s eye,
And kiss on a grass-green pillow

Keats was a smart young Londoner and these poems, although hardly amongst his greatest work, are very revealing culturally. As far as I know, Keats didn’t spend his time on the south west coast bedding the local girls – or, as in these poems, enjoying passionate encounters in the open air. They are pure fantasy, and they illustrate a rather common way for modern city people to think about the countryside. ‘Rantipole Betty’ and the anonymous ‘Devon Maid’ are simple creatures, uneducated and unsophisticated, but attractively as ‘wild’ as the fern they lie on. They are seen as little more than opportunities for sexual encounters, their reluctances merely flirtatious pretences, deftly brushed aside by the suave lad from the city. 

Sex is seen as the kind of natural activity that inevitably arises down here in the countryside, and that’s basically, Keats implies, a good thing. He wasn’t a Christian, and he regarded passion as a beneficent force that was now finally freeing itself from the shackles of Christian morality and artificial constraint. They’re so much healthier here in the countryside, we are led to assume, living amidst natural beauty away from the smoke of towns, and their attitude to sex is so much healtheir too!

  

Of course, this is pure urban fantasy, apart from the bit about the country being healthier than the city, which is well documented for the later nineteenth century and almost certainly true in Keats day too.  And the bit about how good it is that sex is now freed from Christian moralising.  

 

The fantasy bit is seeing country girls as somehow simple, natural and uninhibited because they live in the middle of nature. If – and it is a big if – they’re were any differences between country and city in Keats time or are any in ours, then these differences result from a social process and have nothing to do with nature.  Chinese readers will understand this if they ponder the fact that ‘living in the country’ is something that many British people aspire to, while ‘living in the countryside’ (I claim, subject to correction from these readers) is seen as undesirable by most Chinese people, who think of poverty and cultural stagnation rather than beautiful scenery and a slower pace of life.

  

  

In other words, ‘the country’ is a cultural and social construct, and Keats is showing us how he, like many modern urbanites, had been led to think and feel in a particular way about rural people, in particular rural women. Why, after all, should country girls be seen as any more sexual than town girls? And would the young London poet have considered actually marrying a Devon ‘lass’ he kissed in the grass or bedded in the fern? The natural may be desirable and ‘healthy’, but the artificial, the sophisticated (a word that means both ‘knowing and refined’ and ‘spoilt’) will always come out on top (very literally in the case of these poems!) in the end.

(Interestingly Keats brother George did marry a Devon woman, Georgiana Wylie – but he knew her before he came down to Teignmouth and I’m betting she was of moderate social status not a milkmaid – watch this space for the results of further research).

  

My intention is  not to criticise Keats or to claim that ‘statistics show town girls are in every way as sexual as country girls’. It’s not a matter of good or bad, right or wrong. My favourite Eagles’ song, ‘Lying Eyes’, begins:

  

City girls just seem to find out early
How to open doors with just a smile -
rich old man
And she won’t have to worry,
she’ll dress up all in lace and go in style.

 

 

It’s not that this is a true or false claim about city women – it’s simply a way of seeing them, just as Keats shows us a way of seeing ‘Devon Maids’ and other rural dwellers. This is how we humans work: we don’t encounter people or things directly but through ideas, ideas that come to us through our society.  That was as true of me as I walked through Dawlish on a sunny morning as it was of Keats almost 200 years ago. But through careful study of ourselves and others we can win a little bit of freedom in the way we percieve what’s going on around us: we don;t have to believe every idea that’s floating around our society, and we can hold those ideas we do accept lightly, free from the fatal belief that we ‘see things as they are’.

  

 

  

Anyway, Keats went on to write some of the finest poems in English, moved to Rome in the hope that the climate there would slow down the progress of his TB, lived in this house close to the Spanish Steps…

  

  

  

…and succumbed to his illness at the age of 26. He died believing he’d accomplished nothing and his poems would be forgotten.

  

 

 

  

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