The Broad and Dreary Sands of Redcar

One of those moments of weird cultural dislocation, or maybe co-location. We have a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun in our bathroom — don’t ask, it’s just there. Flicking through it idly while, well, while contemplating a bowel movement, I read the following line in his own preface:

And, again, while reproducing the book, on the broad and dreary sands of Redcar,* with the gray German Ocean tumbling in upon me, and the northern blast always howling in my ears, the complete change of scene made these Italian reminiscences shine out so vividly, that I could not find in my heart to cancel them.

Yes, the *asterisk is in the text, there to link to an explanation of what and where ‘Redcar’ is. I might not know Hawthorne, but I do know Redcar. It’s on the north Yorkshire coast, right on the other side of Tees bay from the long breakwater that’s known as North Gare. Turns out that Hawthorne spent July to October of 1859 in Redcar, on the ‘broad and dreary sands’, while he was finishing the book. (He’s right about the ‘complete change of scene’ from Rome, by the way.)

Why didn’t I know about this? Goodness knows the north-east doesn’t have all that many claims to literary and cultural fame, and certainly doesn’t make enough of the ones it does have. London is in the habit of putting up a blue plaque wherever some minor poet happened to stop for a moment to clean some crap off his shoe. So where’s the academic paper on the influence of Redcar sands on the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne?