Last updated 05:17, Friday, 14 November 2008

Shakespeare may never have visited the Lake District. We have no evidence either way. There is a legend that he was friends with the jester at Muncaster Castle, one Thomas Skelton, who may have given rise to the term “tomfoolery”, and recent research suggests that a William Shakeshafte may have spent some years in the household of a Lancashire Catholic gentleman, from whence it would have been but a short step to the Lakes.

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John Ruskin leaning against wall at Brantwood, his home near Coniston

Writers in the Lakes by Alan Hankinson (Bookcase £10)

Otherwise, sadly, there is little connection between the Bard and Cumbria. In the plays there’s an odd reference to outlaws in Kendal green and one or two walk-on Earls of Westmorland and Shakespeare did talk of finding “Sermons in stone, and good in everything”.

He was, according to Alan Hankinson, a Wordsworthian before his time.

It matters little. The late Alan Hankinson of Keswick is at his button-holing best in this score or so of lively essays on our greater and lesser penmen.

The greats are here of course. William Wordsworth and Dorothy grow up in Cockermouth and Penrith and settle in Grasmere and we sense something of the writer as belonging to a place. When a stuffy aunt complains about Dorothy rambling in the country on foot, she gets a virtuous response. She lives on bread, milk and potatoes and drinks no tea and her brother is there to protect her virtue.

Beatrix Potter talks of her house, Hill Top in delightful mood: “If the rats could be stopped out . . . I never saw such a place for hide and seek and funny cupboards and closets.”

Hugh Walpole in his 40s felt “a divine call” to buy his house in Borrowdale and live out his life there. “He loved to lie in bed and listen to the running water.”

Norman Nicholson has an impressive presence: “ a slight figure but a fine strong face, bright twinkling eyes under bushy eyebrows, the whole surrounded by a mane of hair and copious side-whiskers which became snowy-white in his later years.”

Through a combination of anecdote and local detail we see how each of these different writers made their home in the Lakes and how the country they knew entered their works.

But there is also room for lesser writers.

Enid Wilson, affectionately remembered for her Country Notes in the Guardian, was the daughter of George Abraham, mountaineer and photographer from Keswick. He encouraged his young daughter on many a rock climb by placing a half-crown on the top of the crag.

Another child of the famous was Hartley Coleridge. His father described him as like “a spirit dancing on an aspen leaf”. Like his father he was brilliant but flawed: he wrote wonderfully but would also disappear for days on end on a drinking binge.

Eliza Lynn Linton was far more resolute. The daughter of a Crosthwaite vicar, she became the first professional female journalist, sold her Kent home to Charles Dickens and was a great campaigner for women’s rights although she had no time for “the shrieking sisterhood”.

Alan Hankinson, however, does find time for such other worthies as Bishop Richard Watson, Canon Rawnsley, Dr Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, and the dandyish Hall Caine among others. The dialect poet John Richardson makes a welcome appearance, as do the historians George Trevalyan and WG Collingwood.

All in all, Alan Hankinson takes us on a very pleasant ramble through the highways and byways of Lake district literature.

n Writers and the Lakes will be launched at The Skiddaw Hotel, Keswick, on Friday, November 14, at 4pm. All welcome. The book is available from Bookends in Carlisle and Keswick, and online from www.bookscumbria.com