Chichester
Chichester and the surrounding area play a large part in Powys's novel After My Fashion, set in Sussex and America.
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' It mingled with the green moss and with the ancient ivy of the episcopal garden wall; and it interfered with his delight in those pleasant places and with the thrill of remembering that it was here that Keats must have composed his fragmentary "Eve of St Mark''. ' |
Both the Eve of St Mark and the Eve of St Agnes were written while Keats was staying in and around Chichester and both refer to the Cathedral and its environs. The former specifically mentions the bishop's garden wall and is presumably the origin of the tradition that Keats composed it while in the garden.
' He surveyed with delight the impenetrable quietude, exhaling an atmosphere of refined serenity comparable to certain passages in the English Prayer Book, of the great red-brick Georgian houses, with their polished door-knockers and high-walled gardens, mellow and rare like the fragrance of old wine.' |
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Many references in the novel identify Selshurst as Chichester, but the name itself is significant, for JCP would surely not have been unaware that the See of Chichester was originally founded in 681 by Wilfrid at Selsey, not moving to Chichester until the Council of London in 1075, which also, incidentally, transferred the See of Sherborne to Salisbury.
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