Lyonesse's Literary Tourists: The Isles of Scilly in Writing, 1847-1967

Abstract

This thesis will examine representations of the Isles of Scilly in the years 1847- 1967, an era in which writings about this South-Western archipelago reached a particular peak. Following a paper trail of travel guides, periodicals, postcards and newspaper cuttings, the chapters presented here will critically evaluate the ways in which Scilly, a traditionally “isolated” area, was introduced and put forward in a range of media, analysing the rise of island tourism through a literary lens. Analogously, the thesis will consider to what extent the Lost Land of Lyonesse, a submerged stretch of land said to have once connected Scilly with Mainland Britain, was reimagined as an island “utopia” by urban metropolitan writers. By tracking the Arthurian vision of Alfred Tennyson, the travel writings of George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, the Gothic narratives presented by Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, and Daphne du Maurier, the Scilly-set modern romance of Walter Besant, and the petrocritical poetry of Jack Clemo and Charles Causley, this project examines the ways that the islands and their waters served as sources of romance, intrigue, anxiety, and hope. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the industrialisation of Modern Britain seemed to encourage and invite reflections on a “lost,” remote, and yet conveniently close archipelago, yet the literary culture of Scilly has received little critical attention, appearing as an absence in anthologies of archipelagic or regional literature, and in studies of the long nineteenth century, ever since. This thesis therefore seeks to redress this gap, recovering the story of Scilly’s lost literary tourists but also pointing towards the island stories that these metropolitan writers ignored or effaced from view.