LITERARY VISITORS
TO SUFFOLK
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fashion for travelling through the
British Isles to record life outside the great London metropolis, brought
many well-known visitors to Suffolk.
DANIEL DEFOE (1661-1731) in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain
found IPSWICH ‘one of the most agreeable places in England’, although he was dismayed
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at the decaying dockyards. Gracious living he found at BURY ST EDMUNDS (a plaque at
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the elegant CUPOLA HOUSE, commemorates his visit there) and NEWMARKET, though
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Defoe felt that the nobility and gentry were too busy with wagers and bets at the race course.
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JOHN EVELYN (1620-1706), the diarist, also enjoyed Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds
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when he stayed at EUSTON HALL, then the home of Lord Allington. He admired the
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house, but advised his host on a new layout for the park. In his Diary, Evelyn records King
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Charles II dining there while racing at Newmarket on 16th October 1671. r
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In Defoe’s day BUNGAY enjoyed a reputation as a spa town, which may be what drew the
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French visitor CHATEAUBRIAND (1768-1848) while in exile. The story is that he fell
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from his horse outside 34 Bridge Street. The Ives family, who lived there, took him in and
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invited him to become tutor to their daughter, Charlotte. Under the name M. De Combourg,
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he fell in love with the fifteen-year-old pupil. When her mother started hinting about l
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marriage, Chateaubriand was forced to admit he already had a wife in France, and left
hastily! Thirty years later, returning to England as the French Ambassador, he met
Charlotte, then Lady Sutton, again.
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Another French visitor, FRANCOIS DE LA ROUCHEFOUCAULD (1765-1848), spent a
year in Suffolk with his brother and tutor in 1784. His detailed impressions are translated
and edited by Norman Scarfe in A Frenchman’s Year in Suffolk in which he records, for
example, the English custom of tea-drinking, the elegant country houses and parks, the poor
standards of ballroom dancing, the boring Sundays, and the flourishing agriculture, ‘held
here in high regard … the ordinary farmers are not looked on, as they are in France, as an
inferior class created solely to feed the rich’. The brothers stayed first at THE ANGEL
HOTEL and then in rooms rented nearby.
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WILLIAM COBBETT (1763-1835), the radical reformer, undertook his Rural Rides on
horseback between 1822 and 1826. He was agreeably surprised by IPSWICH and noted
the attractive views for painters in the countryside, and the numerous windmills in Suffolk –
he counted 17 visible from one spot. He, too, appreciated the excellent farming and the
skills of the ploughman with his straight furrows. Cobbett thought BURY ST EDMUNDS,
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