At the start of the 19th century, the poet Southey had spoken of seeing only “desolation” here, but within twenty years a town had been founded on Bourne Heath and made its literary debut in a satiric local playlet about the area’s main economy: smuggling. Bournemouth’s central chines (wooded ravines down to the beach) were smugglers’ routes, and the area appears in earliest guise in local stories of Isaac Gulliver, the legendary King of Smugglers who eluded arrest by Captain Tregonwell’s Rangers and retired into wealthy respectability, while Tregonwell became official founder of Bournemouth, with the start of a planned township around 1810.

The town itself really arrived on the literary scene only after the late poet Shelley’s son had a home built here, Boscombe Manor, for his ailing mother Mary Shelley, widow of the poet and herself author of Frankenstein. She did not live to see its completion in 1851, but it became the home of her son and his wife, Sir Percy Florentine Shelley and his wife Lady Jane, both enthusiasts of the arts, he writing plays for their in-house theatre and she overseeing publication of the poet’s verse, letters and official biography. It was the world’s only Shelley Museum until it was closed in 2001 due to dilapidation. It also held a literary shrine seen by many a distinguished London visitor, where the poet’s heart was kept in a casket. Later the heart was re-interred along with the bones of her free-thinking parents William Godwin (author of Political Justice) and Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women), in a family tomb in St Peter’s Churchyard in the centre of Bournemouth.

Thomas Hardy visited the town when shopping for a matrimonial home in 1872, calling it “a city set in a garden” and “a complete and extensive watering place ... a city of detached mansions”. It is a setting in his The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). He remarked that “on the very edge of that tawny piece of antiquity (Hardy’s beloved heath), such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up ... a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel”. He concluded: “The pines, the chines, steeply-rising cliffs, parks, gardens, heathlands, amusements, esplanades, sands, and sprawl add up to the strange unique character of Bournemouth. A fascinating, pine-scented phenomenon”.

On his release from prison for shooting his fellow poet and teenage lover Rimbaud, the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine taught French in 1876-7 at a Westcliff school (originally where the Cadogan Hotel now stands in Poole Road), living quietly, writing two local poems (in his Amour and Sagesse), “Bournemouth” and “La Mer de Bournemouth”.

In the 1870’s John Galsworthy sang in the school choir of St. Swithun’s Church, attending for 5 years an Eastcliff prep-school called Saugeen nearby (now the site of the Majestic Hotel, Derby Road) gaining a local connection that would help inspire his Forsyte Saga based on a Swanage family.

Literary Bournemouth in the 20th century >>