After the death of her brother, Lord Auckland, in January 1849 and the death of her beloved sister, Fanny, three months later, Emily Eden, poet and novelist, spent the next twenty years, dividing her time between her home in London and a cottage in Broadstairs, where she lived with her niece Lena and five servants. Emily had visted Broadstairs with her sister Fanny in 1830, writing “with the utmost courage, the greatest magnaminity, Fanny and I stepped into a Margate steamboat and set off on a visit to Mrs Vansittart at Broadstairs … To my utter surprise I was not the least sick.”1 She wrote to Lady Charlotte Greville afterwards:

‘We enjoyed our Broadstairs so very much, and all the more, because it was not Ramsgate. I took the look of Ramsgate in great aversion. We knew nobody at Broadstairs but Lady G. de Roos, who was without her husband, and therefore very glad to be a great deal with us. The quiet and dowdiness of Broadstairs is a great charm. We were out all day, sketching or poking about for shells. I wonder whether you went to Shellness, a little creek whose shores are covered with shells - not a stone or a bit of sand - all shells. I never saw such a curious place. We made one long expedition to Dover, and if I ever went to the sea on my own account, I mean not on a visit to anybody, I should pitch my tent at Dover. It is so very beautiful and so cheerful looking. We stayed a fortnight at Broadstairs.’2

By the time she moved to Broadstairs in 1850, Emily was 53 and her health was deteriorating. She wrote to Lady Theresa Lewis: “My health is in a very poor state, and I am obliged to give up going down to the Baths, but a cottage always has room for everything; and we are turning what is by courtesy called a Greenhouse, into a bath-room, opening out of my sitting-room. I like the place, and its quiet and bracing air and its busy sea. It is always covered with ships, and I do not regret the move.”3

Emily’s novel The Semi-Detached House (1859) may have been inspired by her house in Broadstairs, and when Blanche complains to her Aunt Sarah “… you don’t mean that you expect me to live in a semi-detached house?” it may be Lena’s voice were hear. On finding out that their neighbours are called the Hopkinsons. Blanche is dismayed to find out that her Aunt knows nothing of the family who will be “under the same roof” as them. Emily and Lena lived next door to Edward and Ann Birch, a farmer and his wife - socially, very different to their London neighbours. However, Emily enjoyed visitors from London, including Lady Grey and Lady Ellesmere, and in the Autumn of 1851, Charles Dickens called whilst holidaying at Fort House.

In 1857, Charles Dickens wrote to Emily.**4

‘As to the time when I had the pleasure of talking with you at Broadstairs5, you know how certain particular scenes will sometimes fix themselves in the mind. Inseparable from my remembrance of that coast, and I verily believe from my abstract idea of a Lighthouse, is an Autumn afternoon in a little garden full of red geraniums, on the road to the North Foreland – you on your couch – Lord Clarendon on one side of it – myself on the other – a bright sky over the cornfields, and the ships sailing away in the distance. All this has, ever since that hour, been still and unchangeable in my memory; - got itself daguerrotyped there in some indelible / way, and has gone up Swiss mountains with me and gone floating about Venice and gone drumming and dancing about France, as distinct as ever, everywhere.’

Bibliography

Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, eds. The Pilgrim Edition: The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 8: 1856-1858. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. 332-333. Violet Dickinson. Miss Eden’s letters 1797-1869. London: Macmillan. 1919. 202.

References

  1. Miss Eden to Miss Villiers. Wednesday, September 1830, in Violet Dickinson. Miss Eden’s letters 1797-1869. London: Macmillan. 1919. 199 ↩︎

  2. Miss Emily Eden to Lady Charlotte Greville. Thursday, October 1830, in Violet Dickinson. Miss Eden’s letters 1797-1869. London: Macmillan. 1919. 202. ↩︎

  3. Miss Emily Eden to Lady Theresa Lewis, Wednesday, 1850, in Violet Dickinson. Miss Eden’s letters 1797-1869. London: Macmillan. 1919. 382. ↩︎

  4. Charles Dickens to the Hon. Miss Emily Eden. 25 May 1857, in Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, eds. The Pilgrim Edition: The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 8: 1856-1858. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. 332-333. ↩︎

  5. The editors of the Pilgrim edition note this must have been autumn 1851. ↩︎