Curiouser and curiouser: looks like Nick’s had his chips on a walk with Dracula and Alice
From Alice in Wonderland to the King of the Undead (via oysters and walruses): the curiouser and curiouser tale of a walk to Whitby.
IN WALKING TO Whitby, I’m on the trail of one of the creepiest stories in literary history. A tale of greed, cruelty and vicious appetites; of sinister creatures with unearthly powers. I’m talking, of course, about The Walrus and the Carpenter, by Lewis Carroll. Sorry, were you expecting something else? Of course you were. You were expecting Dracula. And fair enough, we’ll get to him in a bit. But while Whitby may enjoy (some might say endure) its fame as the setting for a large portion of Bram Stoker’s classic gothic novel, there is more to this Yorkshire coastal town’s literary fame than Count Vlad and Mina Murray.
To prove it, I’ve taken the bus eight miles north to Runswick Bay, with the aim of walking back down the coast to the very sands on which both Carroll’s walrus and Stoker’s vampire trod.
Runswick Bay is beautiful. Like the more famous Robin Hood’s Bay further south, it’s tucked into the shelves of a cliff-face above a natural, sandy harbour. Also like RHB, it has a lattice of snickleways which will either carry you down to the beach, or into someone’s washing line, depending on which way you turn.
Finally reaching the sand after two T-shirts and an apron, I turn right, plug into the Cleveland Way, and head south.
Now we’re on our way, let’s talk about Lewis Carroll. He first visited this part of the world in 1854, a full 36 years before Bram Stoker. This was nine years before he published Alice in Wonderland – and two years before he was even Lewis Carroll. In 1854 he was still going by his real name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
He was 24, and embarking on a teaching career at Oxford. He had joined a group of mathematicians who came to Whitby to give a series of lectures. But he soon found it was his creativity that was being sparked by the town, rather than his gift for algebra. Another of his party, one Dr Thomas, later recalled that Dodgson “used to sit on a rock on the beach telling stories to a circle of eager young listeners.” In fact Dodgson was so juiced by Whitby that he had his first poem published in the local paper. It was titled The Lady of the Ladle.
He took several long walks around the area, and immersed himself in its culture, mixing with artists and writers. And thus Whitby turned a mathematician who struggled with a stammer into a confident storyteller, to such an extent that Dr Thomas also opined: “It was there in those seaside stories that Alice was incubated.”
A few years later, in 1862, Dodgson (now going by his pen-name, Lewis Carroll) found himself ▶
in Oxford, visiting his friends the Liddell family. And on a fateful boating trip down the River Isis, ten-year-old Alice Liddell demanded a story. Dodgson obliged, weaving a fabulous tale of a young girl with a strangely familiar first name, who followed a White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole and into a curious adventure involving a Mad Hatter, a Cheshire Cat and a Red Queen.
Alice loved it so much she asked him to write it down. He did so, and was then persuaded to offer it to publishers. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published to stellar impact in 1865.
Dodgson, aged 33, was somewhat overwhelmed by the fame that followed.
But as well as nurturing his storytelling powers, Whitby is ingrained even more deeply into Alice’s adventures. Skip forward again to 1871 and the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. Here we find Tweedledum and Tweedledee regaling Alice with the poem The Walrus and the Carpenter, which is so Whitbyesque in its DNA that you can more or less smell the Yorkshire coast air wafting up from the page.
The poem describes the titular pair as they walk along a vast sandy beach (hello, Whitby). They come across an oyster bed and persuade hundreds of young oysters to join them on their walk. To cut a long, strange and magnificently silly poem short, they eat the poor oysters. Sorry for the spoiler. But along the way the poem includes many wonderful lines, most famously this oft-quoted gem…
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and ceiling wax – Of cabbages – and kings –
And why the sea is boiling hot –
And whether pigs have wings.’
What’s it all about? Well, no-one’s quite sure. Some read it as pure nonsense. Others see it as a satire of US-British relations, or a theological debate between the Buddha and Christ. Nonsense seems most likely though, as Carroll let his illustrator John Tenniel choose the second
character. Carroll offered him ‘carpenter’, ‘butterfly’ or ‘baronet’ as all three would fit the poem’s metre. Tenniel simply thought ‘carpenter’ was the funniest.
Whatever it’s about, one thing’s for certain: walking high above these sandy bays, and seeing oyster trawlers returning towards Whitby, it is very hard not to think it was all inspired by strolling this coastline.
A little later, we encounter another absurd world: the spoil heaps at Sandsend Ness. Resembling clifftops made of the moon, these bizarre angular peaks are strangely joyous to walk on. Once they would have looked just like the rest of the cliffs, but from Roman times through to the 19th century their mudstone and shale interiors were plundered by the alum industry. Quarrymen drew out the double sulphate of aluminium and potassium, together known as alum, which was used as a fixative in leather tanning and wool dyeing. The industry is long gone, but it has left us with these extraordinary grey lumps, with their extraordinary scaly, shaley skins.
We’ve glimpsed Whitby Abbey a couple of times on the route so far, but at Sandsend the land flitches inwards, yielding the broad curve of Sandsend Wyke – and a full frontal of Whitby and its Abbey ahead.
So, Dracula then. Bram Stoker arrived at Mrs Veazey’s guesthouse on Royal Crescent in Whitby at the end of July 1890. Stoker was the business manager of famed actor Henry Irving, and the pair had just completed a gruelling theatrical tour of Scotland. Irving knew Whitby well, and recommended it to Stoker as a place to recuperate. Stoker loved it. He walked daily, finding inspiration in the gothic scenery of the headland and the abbey. This was the heyday of the gothic novel; Stoker was already planning to write one, titled Wampyr, and Whitby quickly weaved itself into his ideas. He walked the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, high on the headland and adjacent to the abbey, studying the names and scribbling down several which would work their way into his novel. He also heard about a shipwreck off Whitby five years earlier, when the Russian vessel Dmitry ran aground on Tate Hill Sands.
And one morning, while reading in Whitby library, he came across a piece about the history ▶
of Wallachia (now in Romania). It gave florid detail of a 15th-century prince called Vlad Tepes, who was said to have impaled his enemies on stakes, and even drank blood. It said Tepes went by several names including Vlad the Impaler, The Devil and Son of the Dragon – or, in the Wallachian tongue, ‘Dracula’.
And in a nutshell, Stoker had his story. Dracula became his lead character (Stoker envisaged him as Henry Irving, although Irving never ended up playing him), and Whitby became a prominent setting. Heroines Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra visit on a holiday and witness the wreck of a ship, the Demeter, which has carried Dracula to England. (The Count leaps ashore in the form of a black hound, and proceeds to stalk Lucy, eventually turning her into a vampire.)
Dracula was published in 1897. The graveyard, the harbour, the abbey and the River Esk are all described in painstaking detail which remains more or less accurate to this day. And as we approach Whitby across the sands, it fulfils everything that so inspired Stoker: a pretty place with a strange, looming sense of gothic grandeur.
The town has thrived on its link to Dracula, with museums and cafés in his honour. Lewis Carroll isn’t forgotten, either. There’s a blue plaque on the Rosa Hotel on West Cliff where he used to stay. And down in Church Street you’ll find a tiny café called – yes – The Walrus and the Carpenter.
But here’s a cool thing: Carroll and Stoker didn’t just love-and-leave Whitby. They came back. Stoker brought his family for a holiday. Carroll returned many times, finding it a peaceful place to escape the pressure of his fame. So Whitby was no flash-in-the-pan inspiration, forgotten in the afterglow of success. It was a place of comfort and calm, where each writer could relax and talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and ceiling wax.
And the peace a good walk brings.