Columnist Anna Willatt aka Esoteric Isle follows a lead about Gothic author Mary Shelley’s time in Ramsgate…

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It’s time to welcome in the crisping leaves, roaring fires and creepy stories told around them. A few years ago, I was part of a working group for 23for23 - an initiative to showcase 23 prominent women connected to Ramsgate. The list took in political figures, pioneers and trailblazers and the prototype Tim-Burton-Spooky-Girl, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, whom the world knows now as Mary Shelley, the author of the spinechilling Frankenstein.

A tidbit of local history is enough to send me down a rabbit hole. I love to share stories and encourage people to travel ‘esoterically’ in their own counties and countries. We know that Kent is esoteric, but is it also Gothic?

Who better to speak with in this exploration than Dr Susan Civale at Canterbury Christ Church University, the author of an upcoming book all about our girl Mary Shelley.

As Dr Civale explains: “At the age of 13, Mary Shelley was sent by her father and stepmother to board at Miss Caroline Petman’s ‘Ladies School’ at 92 High Street, Ramsgate, between May and December of 1811.

“This trip was recommended by the family physician to help cure Mary’s skin condition through sea-bathing and daily poultices. She would have travelled from London by sea on a ‘hoy’ boat, her first time on a larger sailing ship… not unlike the one she would describe in Frankenstein.”

Sadly, Mary’s time in Ramsgate wasn’t happy. Dr Civale says: “... despite the solicitude and kindness of Miss Petman, and the considerable freedom she was given to pursue her own interests, [she] seems to have felt lonely and isolated.” Ramsgate also didn’t cure her skin condition and she returned to London in poor health and low spirits. Our poor Mary! Ramsgate would have been a bustling, popular resort in 1811 and there’s not much worse than feeling lonely in a crowd.

I asked Dr Civale if she thought Mary’s time in Kent could have influenced her Gothic writing, specifically of Frankenstein, published in 1818 when she was 20 years old. Dr Civale says: “The sense of being banished - if not punished - may have been accentuated by the scant contact with her father during her time in Ramsgate... he never visited her. The absent father/wicked stepmother is a longstanding trope in Gothic fiction. In short stories like The Mourner (1829) and The Invisible Girl (1832), Shelley writes about female characters who experience banishment or self-exile and deal with feelings of guilt, rejection and/or loneliness.’

So far, so Gothic! But what if we consider how the Gothic plays out now, 200 years on from Mary’s miserable time in Ramsgate? Apart from our foreboding architecture (shout out Pugin for the revival!), what is keeping the Goth flame burning?

I turned to excellent club night Hexed Thanet, run by “a couple of folk who love the London Goth scene and wanted to bring that same vibe to the area”. For a fairly forlorn part of the UK, especially on the Gothic windswept seafront in midwinter, it’s surprising that their extensive research into the scene suggests that “the local alternative scene has been dominated by metal and punk... speaking to others, there’s not been a dedicated night to Goth rock and counter-culture either ever or for a long time.” Well, thank all things dark and spooky for their inclusive and welcoming Goth club night - the next Hexed Thanet is this Halloween (October 31st) at Margate Arts Club.

Staying with the music of the night, beguiling record shop Saturnalia in Faversham celebrated its first birthday this summer. Co-owner Elliot tells me the shop is named after the ancient Roman harvest festival, which happens in December as a nod to the area’s hop-growing.

Its location, extremely close to the Faversham memorial stone to four women tried (and found guilty - surprise, surprise!) as witches in 1645, definitely has a touch of the Gothic to it. Throw in its large collection of Library of the Occult vinyl, tarot decks from Vieux Monde and dark and tempting perfumes by witchy maker Elvvium Botanic and it’s a spooky-season delight.

As the wheel turns and the season changes, it’s the perfect time to layer up (I’m channelling all the girls from 1996’s The Craft this autumn) and experience Gothic Kent. But where?

Canterbury tattooer Maidstone John, who is famed for his medieval woodcut style, recommended the city’s oldest areas around Burgate and the cathedral, noting the “dark imagery in the cathedral and the crypt that not everybody knows about”.

He wraps by extolling the virtues of the trees in Westgate Gardens: “You feel like you are in a scene from The Lord of the Rings.”

Elliot of Saturnalia recommends Margate Shell Grotto, saying: “It’s got an eerie calm to it and has links to occult and ritual practices, so there’s a history there that is, to date, relatively unexplained and intriguing.”

On a recent visit to the grotto I picked up the book The Enigma of the Margate Shell Grotto by Patricia Jane Marsh and a greeting card of the (in)famous 1930s photo of a seance being held in the altar room by women in furs. If the attraction, currently rated No.2 of things to do in Margate on TripAdvisor, can wear its esotericism so clearly on its sleeve, I think we can safely stick the quill-written in jet-black ink (or blood, your call) Gothic label on our fair county.

MUCH MORE…

@esotericisle
Anna will be speaking at this year’s inaugural Samhain Society in Margate (October 30th-November 2nd): @the_samhain_society

Your Gothic Kent TBR Pile, thanks to Dr Civale

Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley: Short-term Ramsgate Dweller
The Shivering Sands (1969), Victoria Hoult: Goodwin Sands
White is for Witching (2009), Helen Oyeyemi: Dover

Dr Susan Civale is a Reader in Romanticism at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her book on Mary Shelley is being published by Edward Everett Root, part of the Key Popular Women Writers Series. www.eerpublishing.com/civale-mary-shelley.html

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