A walk through li terary Box Hill
“He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle slur and shake.” George Meredith, The Lark Ascending
When standing on the top of Box Hill, five miles from the M25 and the second high- est hill in Surrey, it is easy to see how George Meredith was inspired to write his poem Te Lark Ascending. When sur- rounded by wildlife and green space it would not have just been a skylark soaring upwards. He described the down lands beautifully
in his novel Diana of the Crossways. “Trough an old gravel-cutting a gateway led to the turf of the down, spring turf bordered on a long line, clear as a race- course, by golden gorse covers, and left-
ward over the gorse the dark ridge of the fir and heath country ran companionably to the south west, the valley between, with undulations of wood and meadow sunned or shaded, clumps and mounds, promon- tories, away to the broad spaces of tillage banked by wooded hills, and dimmer be- yond and farther, the faintest shadowiness of heights, as a veil to the illimitable. Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of service-tree or the whitebeam, spotted the semicircle of swelling green down black and silver.” When Meredith lived in the Flint
Cottage situated at the bottom of Burford Spur, fellow writers such as JM Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson were visitors. Te slope opposite the cottage is named after Barrie and is still known as Barrie’s Bank.
Juniper Hall When Meredith died, Barrie wrote his
essay, Te Greenwood Hat, Being a Memoir of James Anon 1885-1887 which was about Meredith and his image of him on the hill. “He [Meredith] was royalty at its most
august to Anon [Barrie], whose very first railway journey on coming to London was to Box Hill to gaze at the shrine. Tere is a grassy bank, or there was (for I go there no more), opposite the gate, and the little royal residence is only some twenty yards away. Even to Anon that day it seemed small but very royal. He sat on the grassy bank and quivered. Presently he saw a face at the window of a little sitting room he was to be very familiar with in the here- after. He knew whose face it was. Ten the figure stood in the doorway, an amazing handsome man in grey clothes and a red necktie. He came slowly down the path to- wards the gate. It was too awful for Anon. He ran away. Something I wrote made him ask me to visit him, and after that I was often at Flint Cottage for stretches of time until he died in 1909. I loved this man more every time I saw him. Te last time, when he was very frail, I said I thought he had a better colour, and he replied with a smile, ‘Yes, a pretty green.’” Meredith was not the only writer to find
inspiration on the Surrey Hill. Who can forget Jane Austen’s famous picnic scene in
24 FOCUS The Magazine January/February 2019
www.focus-info.org
George Meredith
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
