Wiltshire writers

Wiltshire is the only landlocked county in southwest England, stretching from Dorset and Hampshire in the south to Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire in the north. It is dominated by the chalk plateau of Salisbury Plain that separates the medieval city of Salisbury in the south from the market towns on the western side of the county and the industrial town of Swindon to the north that was largely created by the Great Western Railway in the 19^th century. Wiltshire’s claims to literary merit lie with a select group of notable writers from across the centuries. These include:

George Herbert (1593-1633) (see picture)

Generally reckoned to be one of the greatest of the “Metaphysical” poets (taking second place only to John Donne), in 1630 he became the rector of Bemerton, to the west of Salisbury. Although he had written poems throughout his life, it was during his Bemerton years that many of his best-known poems were composed, including “pattern” poems such as “Easter Wings” in which the physical arrangement of the words on the page convey meaning as well as the words themselves. As well as being a poet, Herbert took his parish duties seriously and he also played a part in the life of the nearby Salisbury Cathedral. He died at Bemerton and was buried in the church.

John Aubrey (1625-97)

The antiquary and biographer was born at Kington St Michael, near Chippenham, where he inherited Lower Easton Piers house from his mother’s family, but financial problems forced him to sell up in 1671. He later lived at Broad Chalke, southwest of Salisbury. He is famed for his “Brief Lives”, his works on the history of Wiltshire, and his investigations of the prehistoric sites of Avebury and Stonehenge (the “Aubrey holes” at the latter are named after him). He is often credited as being Britain’s first archaeologist.

Charles Dickens (1812-70)

Although his links with Wiltshire are tenuous, being restricted to brief visits, the results of those visits are significant. In particular, he was struck by the name of the village of Pickwick, between Bath and Chippenham, where he stayed at the Horse and Hounds in 1836. The name of his first great comic creation (Samuel Pickwick) was thus suggested. An incident in “The Pickwick Papers” (1837) (the “bagman’s story”) is thought to have been set at the Wagon and Horses in Beckhampton, to the west of Marlborough. Part of the action of “Martin Chuzzlewit” (1844) is set in and near Salisbury, where Seth Pecksniff has his architectural practice. The Blue Dragon inn is probably a reference to the Green Dragon at Alderbury, a village to the southeast of Salisbury.

Lytton Strachey (1880-1932)

The biographer and member of the Bloomsbury Group moved to Ham Spray House, near the small village of Ham in the far north of the county, in 1924, and he spent the rest of his life there. Despite his homosexuality (known about within his circle of acquaintances but not publicly), he lived with a female companion, the artist Dora Carrington, who was so devoted to Strachey that she could not bear to live without him when he died from undiagnosed stomach cancer, and committed suicide not long after. While living at Ham, Strachey wrote “Elizabeth and Essex” (1928) and a number of shorter biographies collected as “Portraits in Miniature” (1931) and “Characters and Commentaries” (1933).

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

The poet and novelist, best known for his poems written during and soon after World War I, was educated at Marlborough College (as was John Betjeman). In 1931 he rented a house at Teffont Magna, to the west of Salisbury, and later moved to Heytesbury, near Warminster, where he spent the rest of his life. After the breakdown of his marriage in 1945, Sassoon lived alone in his large country house, which had fallen into disrepair by the time of his death. He wrote relatively little towards the end of his life, and his later work, which was deeply influenced by his conversion to Roman Catholicism, was of a religious nature and not considered to be of the same quality as the war poems that made his name.

William Golding (1911-93)

Educated at Marlborough Grammar School, where his father was a teacher, the novelist became a schoolteacher in his own right, at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury, from 1940 to 1962 apart from his years of wartime service in the Royal Navy. He lived in Salisbury and later at Bowerchalke, a village to the southwest of Salisbury. Although he moved to Cornwall in 1985, he was buried in the churchyard at Bowerchalke. His teaching years inspired his first and best-known novel, “Lord of the Flies” (1954), which presented an allegorical representation of the breakdown of society in a state of nature. Nobody can work in Salisbury without being constantly made aware of the remarkable construction that is Salisbury Cathedral with its famous spire (as the present writer can confirm from personal experience). For Golding it was the inspiration for his 1964 novel “The Spire” which, although it is fictional, has some foundation on fact, given that the real spire was also an afterthought as far as its building was concerned.

V S Naipaul (1932-2018)

The novelist and travel writer lived at Wilsford, on the northern edge of Salisbury Plain, during the 1980s. The experience of living in this bleak environment, not too far from Stonehenge, provided material for his 1987 autobiographical novel “The Enigma of Arrival”.

© John Welford