Hurtfew Abbey was some fourteen miles north-west of York. The antiquity was all in the name. There had been an abbey but that was long ago; the present house had been built in the reign of Anne. It was very handsome and square and solid-looking in a fine park full of ghostly-looking wet trees (for the day was becoming rather misty). A river (called the Hurt) ran through the park and a fine classical-looking bridge led across it.
—Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
And I hope all my readers are acquainted with an old English Cathedral town or I fear that the significance of Mr Norrell’s chusing that particular place will be lost upon them. They must understand that in an old Cathedral town the great old church is not one building among many; it is the building — different from all others in scale, beauty and solmnity. Even in modern times when an old Cathedral town may have provided itself with all the elegant appurtenances of civic buildings, assembly and meeting rooms (and York was well-stocked with these) the Cathedral rises above them — a witness to the devotion of our forefathers. It is as if the town contains within itself something larger than itself. When going about one’s business in the muddle of narrow streets one is sure to lose sight of the Cathedral, but then the town will open out and suddenly it is there, many times taller and many times larger than any other building, and one realizes that one has reached the heart of the town and that all streets and lanes have in some way led here, to a place of mysteries much deeper than any Mr Norrell knew of. (- Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, chapter 2)
Anne had left her, and Mrs. Clephane, alone in her window, looked down on the new Fifth Avenue. As it surged past, a huge lava-flow of interlaced traffic, her tired bewildered eyes seemed to see the buildings move with the vehicles, as a stationary train appears to move to travellers on another line. She fancied that presently even little Washington Square Arch would trot by, heading the tide of sky-scrapers from the lower reaches of the city…
— Edith Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense (1925)
[Film: A Burton Holmes film about mid-town Manhattan in the 1920s.]
“Jellachich and the Croats had saved the Austrian Empire. They got exactly nothing for this service, except the statue which stands in Zagreb market square.”
— Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
“I felt impatient. I was getting no exhilaration out of being here, such as I had hoped for in coming to Yugoslavia. For a rest I went and stood on the steps of the statue in the middle of the square. Looking at the inscription I saw that it was a statue of the Croat patriot, Jellachich. This is one of the strangest statues in the world. It represents Jellachich as leading his troops on horseback and brandishing a sword in the direction of Budapest, in which direction he had indeed led them to victory against the Hungarians in 1848; and this is not a new statue. It stood in the market place, commemorating a Hungarian defeat, in the days when Hungary was master of Croatia, and the explanation does not lie in Hungarian magnanimity. It takes some Croatian history to solve the mystery.”
— Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Undine Spragg’s hotel, the Stentorian, sits in exactly the spot where the Dakota was built in 1884.
(More spots from The Custom of the Country can be found here.)
“Undine’s white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park.
“She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!”
— Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country
24 July. Whitby. — Lucy met me at the station, looking sweeter and lovelier than ever, and we drive up to the house at the Crescent in which they have rooms. This is a lovely place. The little river, the Esk, runs through a deep valley, which broadens out as it comes near the harbour.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
Right over the town is the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is the scene of part of ‘Marmion,’ where the girl was built up in the wall. It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits; there is a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
“Have you ever been to the Seychelles?” he asked, and Frederick grinned at the unexpectedness of the question and at his unmistakably English inflection.
“No such luck,” Frederick said, relieved that it was not a Lutheran fanatic.
— Abdulrazak Gurnah, Desertion
Powered by Tumblr; themed by Adam Lloyd.
