An address to the East Anglian Society on the occasion of a dinner to Mr. William Dutt, author of “Highways and Byways in East Anglia.” March 25, 1901.
I appreciate the privilege of being allowed to speak this evening for a few minutes upon the literary associations of East Anglia, of being permitted to ask you, while doing honour to a well-known East Anglian writer of to-day, to cast a glance back upon the literature of the past so far as it affects that portion of the British Empire with which we nearly all of us here are proud to be associated. There is necessarily some difference of opinion as to what constitutes East Anglia. I find that our guest of to-night tells us that it is “Norfolk, Suffolk and portions of Essex, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire.” Dr. Knapp, the biographer of Borrow, says that it is Norfolk,
Suffolk and Cambridgeshire; personally I am content with that classification, because, although I was born in London, I claim, apart from schoolboy days at Downham Market, a pretty lengthy ancestry from Norwich on one side—which is indisputably East Anglia—and from Welney, near Wisbeach, on another side, and Welney and Wisbeach are, I affirm, just as much East Anglia as Norwich and Ipswich. With reference to those other counties and portions of counties, I think that the inhabitants must be allowed to decide for themselves. I imagine that they will give every possible stretch to the imagination in order to allow themselves the honour of being incorporated in East Anglia, a name that one never pronounces without recalling that fine old-world compliment of St. Augustine of Canterbury to our ancestors, that they ought to be called not “Angles” but “Angels.”
Every one in particular who loves books must be proud to partake of our great literary tradition. If it is difficult to decide precisely what East Anglia is, it is perhaps equally difficult to speak for a few minutes on so colossal a theme as the literature of East Anglia. It would be
easy to recapitulate what every biographical dictionary will provide, a long list of famous names associated with our counties; to remind you that we have produced two poet-laureates—John Skelton, of Diss, the author of Colyn Cloute, and Thomas Shadwell, of Broomhill, the playwright—the latter perhaps not entirely a subject for pride; two very rough and ready political philosophers, Thomas Paine, born at Thetford, and William Godwin, born at Wisbeach; a very popular novelist in Bulwer Lytton, and a very popular theologian in Dr. Samuel Clarke; as also the famous brother and sister whose works appealed to totally different minds, James and Harriet Martineau. Then there was that pathetic creature and indifferent poet, Robert Bloomfield, whose Farmer’s Boy once appeared in the luxurious glories of an expensive quarto. Finally, one recalls that two of the most popular women writers of an earlier generation, Clara Reeve, the novelist, and Agnes Strickland, the historian, were Suffolk women.
But I am not concerned to give you a recapitulation of all the East Anglian writers, whose names, as I have said, can be found in any biographical
dictionary, and the quality of whose work would rather suggest that East Anglia, from a literary point of view, is a land of extinct volcanoes. I am naturally rather anxious to make use of the golden opportunity that has been afforded me to emphasize my own literary sympathies, and to say in what I think lies the glory of East Anglia, at least so far as the creation of books is concerned. Here I make an interesting claim for East Anglia, that it has given us in Captain Marryat perhaps the very greatest prose writer of the nineteenth century who has been a delight to youth, and two of the very greatest prose writers of all times for the inspiration of middle-age, Sir Thomas Browne and George Borrow. It has given us in Sarah Austin an example of a learned woman who was also a fascinating woman; it has given us again the most remarkable letter-writers in the English language—Margaret Paston, Horace Walpole and Edward FitzGerald. To these there were only three serious rivals as letter-writers—William Cowper, Thomas Grey and Charles Lamb; and the first found a final home and a last resting-place in our midst. It has given us that remarkable novelist and entertaining diarist,
Fanny Burney. Finally, it has given us in that same William Cowper—who rests in East Dereham Church, and for whom we claim on that and for other reasons some share and participation in his genius—a great and much loved poet. It has given us indeed in William Cowper and George Crabbe the two most natural and the two most human poets in the English literature of two centuries, only excepting the favourite poet of Scotland—Robert Burns. It is to these of all writers that I would pin my faith in talking of East Anglia and its literature; it is their names that I would have you keep in your mind when you call up memories of the literature which has most inspired our East Anglian life.
In connexion with many writers a point of importance will occur to us. Only occasionally has a great English author a special claim on one particular portion of England. He has not been the lesser or the greater for that, it has merely been an accident of his birth and of his career. The greatest of all writers, the one of whom all Englishmen are naturally the most proud, Shakspere, has, it is true, an abundant association with Warwickshire, but Shakspere stands almost alone
in this, as in many things. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Byron and Keats were born in London; they travelled widely, they lived in many different counties or countries, and cannot be said to have adorned any distinctively local tradition. Shelley was born in Sussex, but a hundred cities, including Rome, where his ashes rest, may claim some participation in his fine spirit. Wordsworth, on the other hand, who was born in Cumberland, certainly obtained the greater part of his inspiration from the neighbouring county of Westmorland, where his life was passed. But when we come to East Anglia we are face to face with a body of writers who belong to the very soil, upon whom the particular character of the landscape has had a permanent effect, who are not only very great Englishmen and Englishwomen, but are great East Anglians as well.