But no after years, alas! were to succeed, and Keats’s fervid ‘Blüthenmond’ was all his allotted span. Winchester is happy in the memory of his eventful connection with her, brief in time though it was.
Our next name is Thackeray, who seems to have loved to locate his scenes in our city and neighbourhood, though in general his references have too little local colour to permit of identification—assuming, that is, that any such local image was really intended.
Vanity Fair and Esmond are full of local allusions; Sir Pitt Crawley, for instance, would appear to derive his names from Pitt and Crawley, two villages close to Winchester; and in Esmond, Hampshire allusions, tantalisingly veiled, it is true, seem to meet and to baffle you everywhere. It seems impossible to avoid identifying Castlewood, with its ruined house battered down by Cromwell, and the Bell Inn with Basing House and Basingstoke; and while Alton, Alresford, and Crawley are all mentioned, it is round Winchester that interest centres and perplexes most. Where else in literature is a scene so inimitably conjured up and told so charmingly and with such restraint, where else is the real Thackeray so fully revealed, as when Esmond rides on from Walcote to the ‘George’ at Winchester on the fateful 29th December, and
walked straight to the Cathedral. The organ was playing, the winter’s day was already growing grey, as he passed under the street arch into the Cathedral yard and made his way into the ancient solemn edifice.
Wonderful is the chapter that follows—when Esmond and his ‘mistress,’ reconciled once more, first become mutually conscious of their love, and the words of the anthem, “He that goeth forth and weepeth shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him,” find their joyous refrain in the loving words they exchange.
But where is Walcote? Conjecture would almost naturally settle on Lainston House, some three miles away, the memories of which, in the person of the notorious Duchess of Kingston, doubtless suggested the character of Beatrix the incomparable, the breaker of hearts, the wilful and selfish beauty, did not distance put this out of question. Prior’s Barton House, at St. Cross, would fit us better. But the problem is a baffling one, if indeed it has any solution at all.
Of a different kind are the memories which linger round the immediate neighbourhood—the villages of Twyford, Otterbourne, Hursley. At Twyford the poet Pope was sent to school, and in a house close by the great Dr. Benjamin Franklin composed his autobiography; Otterbourne was the birthplace and lifelong home of Charlotte Yonge, the high-minded and accomplished, whose books will always be a standard for what is highest and most womanly in fiction—who loved to weave the details of local association with the stories she told so skilfully and well; and on a higher level still we have at Hursley the memories of Keble and the Christian Year,—not that Keble wrote the Christian Year at Hursley, though his connection with the place as curate commenced before it was completed, but his life-work was in reality here. Hursley Church, practically rebuilt by him from the profits of the sale of his Christian Year, is his truest memorial, and the beautiful church and peaceful churchyard, where he sleeps his last earthly sleep, will be ever a spot of hallowed association and pilgrimage. Winchester may be proud of its hymn-writers: Ken and Keble were two, and a third less well known, but certainly deserving to be honoured, was William Whiting, master of the College Choir School some two generations or so back, whose beautiful hymn, “Eternal Father, strong to save,” will ever hold a high place in the affections of church-going people.
Following on these memories we have a host of references in modern fiction which centre more or less definitely round the neighbourhood. Trollope’s Barchester has been conjecturally identified with Winchester, and there is a wonderfully minute and circumstantial correspondence in The Warden between the details of Hiram’s Hospital and St. Cross. Miss Braddon takes us to Winchester indeed, but gives us little, if any, actual picture of the city. The immortal Sherlock Holmes honoured it also with a visit in the Adventure of the Copper Beeches, keeping an appointment at the ‘Black Swan,’ “an inn of repute in the High Street,” and the Cathedral and Close seem to be suggested in the Silence of Dean Maitland. Allusions direct, and what seem allusions barely veiled, are frequent, but none can vie in tragic interest and solemn faithfulness with the last awful scene in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles—when Angel Clare and Liza, her husband and sister, are awaiting the moment of poor Tess’s execution:—
When they had reached the top of the West Hill the clocks in the town struck eight. Each gave a start at the notes, and walking onwards yet a few steps they reached the first milestone ... and waited in paralysed suspense beside the stone.
The prospect from the summit was almost unlimited. In the valley beneath, the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings showing as in an isometric drawing—among them the broad Cathedral tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave; the spires of St. Thomas’s; the pinnacled tower of the College; and more to the right the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale....