Literary References
The marshes, coastline and flat landscape
have inspired many authors and artists.
A few are listed below.
Daniel Defoe
From 1724-1726, Author of
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe travelled the Country recording his
trek in "Tour through the whole island of Great Britain". His
remarks on Burnham and the Dengie Hundred were limited to ' the
strange decay of sex' with an explanation that many men had numerous
wives who they took from the uplands but the wives rarely survived
in the fog and damps of the marshland and died within a year or so
at which the men just went back to the uplands and got another wife
Alfred Hitchcock was born and
brought up in the East End. When asked, by the Times Newspaper, the
inspiration for his atmospheric films he cited his experience from a
Visit to Burnham on Crouch on a grey November day when the gulls
circled above
Would North by North West,
Psycho or the Birds have been made without the inspiration of a
visit to Burnham on Crouch?
In his classic book War of
the Worlds HG Wells used the area as a setting for his Martian
invasion.
" Then far away beyond the
Crouch, came another striding over some stunted trees, and then yet
another still farther off wading deeply through a shiny mud flat
half way up between sea and sky. By midday they passed through
Tillingham, which strangely enough seemed silent and deserted, save
for a few furtive plunderers hunting for food. Near Tillingham they
suddenly came into sight of the sea, and the most amazing crowd of
shipping of all sorts that it is possible to imagine."
