James Woodforde and Yarmouth
Literary associations
The frontispiece of David Copperfield, showing the Peggotty family's home, illustration by Hablot Knight Browne, 1849 [Private collection]
Few towns can boast a history as fascinating and unusual as Yarmouth. Woodforde never refers to Great Yarmouth, just Yarmouth. Little Yarmouth, known today as Southtown, lies with neighbouring Gorleston on the opposite, western side of the River Yare. The rivalry between Little Yarmouth and Gorleston on the one hand and Great Yarmouth on the other continued through many centuries.
Located on the North Sea coast in the far east of England, and forming part of the coastal sea route to London, Yarmouth has always looked to the sea – for fishing the shoals of herring and for trade with the Low Countries. Its people have been ever aware of the danger from storms, from shifting sandbanks, of shipwreck, and foreign invaders.
Charles Dickens
The town has extensive literary associations: Anna Sewell of Black Beauty (1877) fame was born here; Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) began his adventures here; and Charles Dickens made it the home of the Peggotty family in their upturned boat on the beach in David Copperfield (1849).
David Copperfield travels to Yarmouth with Clara Peggotty, his nanny, who is proud to call herself a 'Yarmouth Bloater'. On approaching Yarmouth from the landward side, David observed:
As we drew a little nearer, and saw the whole adjacent prospect lying a straight low line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so might have improved it; and also that if the land had been a little more separated from the sea, and the town and the tide had not been quite so much mixed up, like toast and water, it would have been nicer.
Daniel Defoe
In his journalistic work, The Storm, Daniel Defoe relates the events of a week-long storm that reached its height on the night of 26/27 November 1703 (7/8 December 1703 in the Gregorian Calendar). Yarmouth Roads is a anchorage off Yarmouth which offers shelter for ships between the coast and an offshore parallel sandbank. It was there that Defoe reported, 'In Yarmouth Roads there rode at least 400 Sail, being most of them Laden Colliers, Russia Men, and Coasters from Lynn and Hull.'
Yarmouth and the Sands about it, sea chart, Capt. Greenvile Collins, c.1693 [Private collection]However, such was the ferocity of the storm that night in 1703 that even in the anchorages neither anchor nor cable would hold. Many ships in Yarmouth Roads therefore put to sea to ride it out as best they could. Defoe estimated that in consequence 300 ships were saved, though many foundered.
From Yarmouth we expected terrible News, and every one was impatient till they saw the Accounts from thence, for as there was a very great Fleet there, both of laden Colliers, Russia Men, and others, there was nothing to be expected but a dreadful Destruction among them. But it pleas'd God to order Things there, that the loss was not in Proportion like what it was in other Places, not but that it was very great too.
'We walked on foot to Yarmouth' : the shipwrecked mariners in Robinson Crusoe, illustration by William Paget, 1891 [Private collection]It was surely Defoe's observation and experience of that storm which informed his authorship of Robinson Crusoe, whose first voyage down the east coast of England led him into a North Sea storm and shipwreck off the Norfolk coast.
The sixth day of our being at sea we came into Yarmouth Roads; the wind having been contrary, and the weather calm, we had made but little way since the storm. Here we were obliged to come to an anchor, and here we lay, the wind continuing contrary, viz., at southwest, for seven or eight days, during which time a great many ships from Newcastle came into the same Roads . . .
His ship later sank off Winterton Ness to the north of Yarmouth, and having reached shore Crusoe and his shipmates walked to Yarmouth, where:
. . . as unfortunate men, we were used with great humanity, as well by the magistrates of the town, who assigned us good quarters, as by particular merchants and owners of ships, and had money given us sufficient to carry us either to London or back to Hull as we thought fit.
'The finest quay in England'
Defoe's regard for Yarmouth is apparent in his 1724 Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, where he writes:
Yarmouth is an antient town, much older than Norwich; and at present, tho' not standing on so much ground, yet better built; much more compleat; for number of inhabitants, not much inferior; and for wealth, trade and advantage of its situation, infinitely superior to Norwich. It is plac'd on a peninsula between the River Yare and the sea; and two last lying parallel to one another, and the town in the middle. The River lies on the west-side of the town and being grown very large and deep, by a conflux of all the rivers on this side of the county, forms the Haven; and the town facing to the west also, and open to the River, makes the finest key [quay] in England, if not in Europe, not inferior even to that of Marseilles.
Ham Peggotty and the Little Em'ly, with Yarmouth in the distance, pen and ink drawing, Bosworth W. Harcourt, 1872 [Private collection]
Defoe makes it clear that Yarmouth is a trading port and a seaward-looking town, as does Dickens when David Copperfield journeys from London to Yarmouth to take leave of Ham Peggotty in his sadness and solitude:
When the day broke, it blew harder and harder. I had been in Yarmouth when the seamen said it blew great guns, but I had never known the like of this, or anything approaching to it . . . I put up at the old inn, and went down to look at the sea; staggering along the street, which was strewn with sand and seaweed, and with flying blotches of sea-foam . . . The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, and the awful noise, confounded me. As the high watery walls came rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled into surf, they looked as if the least would engulf the town.
A place of inspiration
Given the town's rich history is hardly surprising that writers and artists from the eighteenth century onwards have found it a place of inspiration.
Great Yarmouth is the birthplace of many literary figures, not least Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty, who was born in 1820 at 26 Church Plain. Four years later, Francis Turner Palgrave, compiler of the much loved anthology the Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, was baptised at the Church of St Nicholas in the town. It has of course changed immeasurably since James Woodforde first set foot here in 1775, but something of the spirit which he detected and recorded in his Diary can still be appreciated today.