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INTRODUCTIONIt is a matter for pride that the North East of England should be able to claim the first known English prose writer, Bede; the first known English Christian poets; the first English biblical text; the oldest poem in the language, Widsith, and even perhaps Beowulf, the greatest of all Old English poems - indeed the first major vernacular poem in any European language. Domesday Book too may well have been, in large part, the work of a scribe attached to the monastery at Durham.Eminent literary figures having important links with the region include Chaucer and Malory; Shakespeare and Scott; the Lake poets; Byron and Swinburne; Elizabeth Gaskell, Thackeray and Dickens; Forster and Conrad; Auden and Larkin. The three finest women poets of the 19th century can take their place in the North East literary pantheon, along with a host of major religious figures and no fewer than ten authors of classic children's stories, including the creators of Crusoe, Alice, Biggles, the Chalet School and Narnia. Among scores of other distinguished names there are four royal physicians, six pioneer feminists, a famous French revolutionary, Portugal's greatest novelist, a Pope and a Roman emperor - not forgetting Jules Verne; Wilson of the Wizard; 'the most remarkable scoundrel ever seen in the Far East'; John Lilburne's boots and Wordsworth's socks. There would seem reason enough to gather this rich profusion into book form. Another purpose in commemorating the mighty dead in this fashion has been to adjust a cultural imbalance. Much of the information contained in the present volume is extremely hard to come by in the standard reference and biographical sources. Harriet Martineau's five productive years in Tynemouth, Algernon Swinburne's fervent Northumberland patriotism, and W.H. Auden's lifelong obsession with the North Pennines, to take examples at random, are usually omitted, or receive no more than a passing mention. Even librarians are often unaware that writers of national significance have local associations. In some cases, surviving relatives could be contacted: their help was uniquely valuable and is here gratefully acknowledged.
The Golden Age of Northumbria ended with the coming of the Vikings, though Durham came under Viking rule only sporadically and Northumberland scarcely at all; there are no place endings in -thorpe or -by. The next century saw the invasion of Northumbria by Athelstan of Wessex and the extinguishing of its independence. The Norman conquest again saw the North East suffering severely, and its subsequent war-zone status on the northern frontier of England, coupled with formidable terrain and a sparse population in the Middle Ages were reasons enough for believing the region an unlikely habitation for the muses. Language came to serve as another isolating factor. Until the 11th century, Northumbrian was one of the four main English dialects, though an attempt had been made in the previous century to standardise written English with the promulgation of West Saxon. Over time, however, Northumbrian became marginalised by South East Midland speech which, as the language of the court and the universities, was eventually accepted as standard. By the 14th century, though it was still normal for writers to use their regional dialect, Geoffrey Chaucer could give his two likeable Cambridge students in his Reeve's Tale a northern accent and idiom (rendered in modern translation as Geordie) - almost certainly a comic device. The precise northern birthplace of the students is left deliberately vague, as is the northern milieu of the friar in the tales. The North is an undifferentiated 'somewhere' far distant from the dominant South East. Nevertheless, northern spoken English in the Middle Ages (via its Midlands form) was an important contributor to the modern standard written (and increasingly the spoken) language, since it pioneered many of the features basic to modern English e.g. forms of the verb in -s, as in 'he says', 'she has', 'he casts', as opposed to southern 'he saith', 'she hath', 'he casteth' and so on - forms preserved in the King James Bible out of respect to earlier southern translators of the text. Indeed, the beginning of the transformation of Old English can be traced to the north of the country in the 9-10th centuries when the highly inflected language started to shift towards the easier-to-use ('analytic') grammar of modern English, dependent on the sense order of the words (subject-verb-object) - something we now take for granted as its greatest asset. Hadrian's Wall had remained a permanent and tangible symbol of a frontier with the wilderness, and Northumberland as a grim, embattled wasteland is a recurring picture. The voluminous Italian writer Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) visited the region in 1435, while travelling south from Scotland disguised as a merchant. He clearly regarded Newcastle as the last outpost of civilisation. This perceived isolation of the North East from the settled and cultivated home counties - reinforced by a persistent attachment to losing historical causes - has often found a potent symbol in the weather. Though the populated parts of the North East are among the driest in Britain, and cold-month temperatures are the same as all of eastern England, London included, the weather is often spoken of by natives and outsiders alike as uniquely atrocious. Writers who saw the area only in winter - Lord Byron and Priestley for example - take a gloomy view. Those who knew it all the year round, however, are those who felt most passionately about it: Penelope Gilliatt, Auden, Swinburne, John Wesley. Even the melancholy Philip Larkin felt his mood lift during his Haydon Bridge holidays. On such banal considerations may the literary image of an entire region sometimes turn. The development of the coal industry was a cause for pride and fascination to the Elizabethans, who likened the rich North East coalfield to the Spanish mines in Peru, and dubbed it the 'Black Indies'. Literature, however, was still considered to be the product of a more leisured and refined society. The Border Ballads, admittedly, were admired by such as Ben Jonson and Sir Philip Sidney, but the latter's celebrated remark about being thrilled by 'the old song of Percy and Douglas' is prefaced by the words: 'Certainly I must confess my own barbarousness', a telling phrase. In the 18th century, Doctor Johnson's jibe that Scots went to Newcastle to be 'polished by colliers' reflects something of the same sentiment. In fact, the stereotype was woefully obsolete by now. The lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 signalled a remarkable change in the literary life of Newcastle. What was now the fourth largest provincial town in England became the country's most important printing centre after London. Periodicals were rare outside London, Dublin and Edinburgh: Newcastle had ten during the eighteenth century. Few towns had more than one local newspaper: Newcastle had seven start up before 1760. At least three expensive subscription newsrooms also existed. Jean-Paul Marat brought out his first political book there in 1774, and in the 1770s Newcastle published more children's books than any other in England outside London. By 1790 the town could boast twenty printers, twelve booksellers and stationers, thirteen bookbinders and three engravers, among them the internationally celebrated Thomas Bewick, enviously apostrophised by Wordsworth as : 'The poet who lives on the banks of the Tyne...' There were seven subscription libraries, as well as the St Nicholas parish library with its 5,000 books, and three circulating libraries, including that of William Charnley, set up in 1757, and Joseph Barber's 1746 establishment in Amen Corner, which, with over 5,000 volumes, was one of the largest collections outside London. No fewer than eight new theatres opened in Northumberland between 1770-1800. Newcastle luminaries like Charles Avison, Thomas Spence, John Murray, and John Brown (after whom Robespierre named his dog) saw nothing odd in addressing the whole nation from its northernmost city, and local writers and scholars, both male and female, were confident enough to essay original fields of endeavour. The Literary and Philosophical Society library founded in 1793 and still in existence, possessed books in Latin, French, Spanish and German. Its contacts were international and it debated such issues as American science and Scottish political economy. The Romantic movement, however, though it made the Lakes a desirable literary address and tourist destination, drew a sharp line of sensibility through the Eden valley. No one sought visions of God among the lead mines of the Pennine moorland or the glass factories of Newcastle. Though the 19th century was one period when the capital lost its traditional dominance, the growth of manufacturing in the great cities of the North and Midlands found little but disparagement in metropolitan literary circles. London, though England's premier port and the seat of political and financial power, was never a driving force in the Industrial Revolution, and didn't even finance it. Victorian Manchester on the other hand has been called a combination of modern Tokyo and Hong Kong, with its own banks, economists, charismatic members of parliament, even its own influential national newspaper. Disraeli considered the world's first industrial city to be as great an achievement in its way as Athens. 'Cottonopolis', with its cosmopolitan citizenry and world-wide trading connections, took small notice of London and did not expect the capital to provide either ideas or material direction. Major Victorian writers, however, persisted in regarding the capital or the country as the only acceptable places of residence, a preference which dictated their subject matter. There are no scientists, inventors or technicians to be found in the pages of Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes or George Eliot. Trollope might write about railway speculators (in London) but not railway builders. None of them felt the inclination to describe Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle or any other section of 'the workshop of the world' from the inside. On the contrary: they regarded 'England's enterprise' (as Gladstone called it in a glowing tribute to Middlesbrough) with supercilious abhorrence. Orwell has pointed out how rarely Dickens portrayed the actual world of work, and how feeble was his vision of the future, of what might be done to remedy the evils he excoriated. Nor are his poor the industrial poor. His typical working-class representative is a servant, Sam Weller. Dickens was actually a firm opponent of railway development - and universal education too. The smoke of the capital was largely a domestic phenomenon (countless hearths burning coal from elsewhere), enabling the writers who lived there, to regard the industrial North and Midlands as another country, one not only spectacularly polluted but also exclusively and ignobly devoted to 'trade', mere buying and selling. 'Dickensian London', that obsessive paradigm, is therefore a misleading picture of Victorian cities. We have no major literary description of the wealth and vitality of any provincial town. We find no patriotic sense of pride in entrepreneurship, invention or achievement, not to mention exemplary civic improvements. Karl Marx (in London) thought buying and selling a wicked affair, or he did once Engels had made enough money (in Manchester) to provide for him. Dickens' Coketown is a place aesthetically repulsive and spiritually null, and Mrs Gaskell in North and South refers to the whole Manchester area significantly as 'Darkshire'. In this context, it is curious to recall that Elizabeth Gaskell (née Stevenson) in her youth stayed in Newcastle for two winters (1829-30) with the Reverend William Turner, and lived almost next door to the Stephenson Locomotive works, at the very time when the Rainhill Trials established steam locomotion as the transport of the future. However, though she enjoyed the city greatly, she fails to mention the locomotives at all - despite the huge changes in the pattern of society which the development of railways had brought about by the time she wrote her novels. As publishing, and eventually the press, became concentrated in London, talented provincial writers went off perforce to the capital to seek recognition. They became metropolitan personalities and appeared in one another's diaries and letters. They wrote for Dickens or Ford Madox Ford; they encountered Henry James in Pall Mall; they lived together in Chelsea or Bloomsbury. Biographical material and reminiscence in this crowded milieu is plentiful, and completely overshadows any provincial connection. This is deemed of little significance and usually consists in a vague early reference to 'the north of England' when evaluating a writer's achievement. For those who stayed outside the London literary ambit, matters were a good deal worse. A richly comic writer like Robert Surtees, for example, can have the adjective 'faceless' applied to him, simply because metropolitan material is not available. Moreover, the perennial cultural trap, 'unknown equals inferior', means that words like 'little-known' or 'unsung' begin to sound like accusations rather than admissions of critical laziness or metropolitan complacency. As for the North East, W. M. Hughes in his review of the region's history conducted for the 1970 Durham meeting of the British Association, commented that: 'It is perhaps hard for us to realise after the years of intervening depression that for sixty years before 1914, the Durham (and Northumberland) pitmen and the shipyard workers of the Tyne and Wear were among the most highly-paid workers in the world outside the USA... The decline into poverty of the inter-war years was from the heights to the depths.'The industrial depression of the 1930s saw the North East, no longer the home of awesome, though repellent, Promethean industry, become the safari destination of literary figures randy for reportage: Aldous Huxley, Orwell, Priestley. Huxley's essay title 'Abroad in England' might stand for all such assignments - which speak directly and exclusively to a metropolitan audience. The tradition is still flourishing today, with newspapers, especially their weekend magazines, giving grimly downbeat accounts, illustrated by dark black-and-white photographs of their freelance reporter's brief sojourn in 'this region of chronic decline'. A resistance movement is overdue. To make exaggerated claims for the North East as a nest of singing birds, or to over-promote writers of purely local significance would be, of course, provincial. Masochistic or self-hating silence about the literary heritage of the region on the other hand allows all sorts of casual behaviour to creep in unchallenged. Ray Monk, in his fine biography, has Wittgenstein living in a district of Newcastle called Brandling Park (it's a street); Lady Lytton's dramatic account of her imprisonment and hunger strike in Newcastle is quietly transferred to London in a TV suffragette series; Andrew Motion's splendid life of Philip Larkin meticulously locates every restaurant, but puts two Weardale villages in Northumberland. No one comments; it is not very serious. But would it happen in the home counties? This compilation contends that neither shrill declamation nor pained silence is appropriate where the literary history of the North East is concerned. Instead, it seeks to provide a solid - and enjoyable - justification for civilised self-assertion. After World War II, the development of television greatly diminished the status of local live performance, while increasing the commissioning power of the capital. Prominent local performers and writers felt a steady pressure to move south, and some local literary output began to take the form of scripts for memorable TV series like When the Boast Comes In followed by The Likely Lads and Our Friends in the North. Paradoxically, the very pervasiveness and appetite of television has helped to emphasise a universality in such writing which in the shape of printed literature might have been ignored. The term 'regional writer' has largely lost its pejorative edge and the hugely popular novels of Catherine Cookson, born on Tyneside and latterly resident in Newcastle, have proved ideal for television. The broadcast and print media have also given prominence to literary prizes, and writers born in the North East, like Pat Barker, Jane Gardam and Barry Unsworth have won major awards. It is not generally known that the famous Chalet School books were written by Elinor Brent-Dyer of South Shields, but her North East successors in the field of children's literature - Sylvia Waugh, David Almond, Terry Deary and Robert Westall are all prize-winners. The Centre for the Children's Book is to be located in Newcastle. Neil Astley, director of Bloodaxe Books, takes pride in bringing out more new poetry titles than any other British imprint. Bloodaxe authors, including three Nobel laureates, have won almost every literary award since the enterprise began in 1978. Sean O'Brien, long resident in Newcastle, is the only poet to have won the substantial Forward poetry prize twice; his work frequently draws on his regional experience. The new millennium, in fact, is witnessing an upsurge of North East writing at all levels and in all genres, of a variety and quality without precedent. Authors other than poets are still dependent on London publishers and distribution networks, but even here change may be at hand. It is quite possible that political devolution will be regional in the best sense of that word, somewhat after the manner of the Italian medieval city-states. No one in Lyons, Bologna or Barcelona is impressed by the cant of cultural empire or feels the need to prove themselves elsewhere. Similar confidence engendered by devolved decision-making may renew North East publishing in a way not seen since the eighteenth century. Alan Myers
CONTACTe-mail: alan.myers3@btinternet.com
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