It may be small, but there’s something about the Isle of Wight that attracts, inspires and influences great writers and poets who have gone on to produce some of their best work while on the Island.A walk of fame, Hollywood-style, would star some of the the biggest names in writing, including Tennyson, Dickens, Swinburne, Keats, D.H. Lawrence, Auden, and Woolf. ‘Is there no-one who is commonplace herre?’ exclaimed one visitor. ‘Is everybody either a poet, or a genius, or peculiar in some way?’

In 1849, Charles Dickens wrote part of David Copperfield whilst at Winterbourne in Bonchurch. Describing the Island as the ‘prettiest place I ever saw in my life’, he is said to have based the characters of Mr Dick and Miss Havisham on local people.One of the greatest of the Romantic poets, John Keats wrote his often quoted lines ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ while gazing at Carisbrooke Castle in 1819. Already terminally ill, Keats spent that summer at Shanklin, where today you can still find Keats Green, Keats Inn and Keats Cottage.

In 1868, poet and author of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was also captivated by Shanklin when he stayed at the ‘lovely little thatch-roof Crab Inn, alls covered in ivy and extremely desirable’. Further south and more remote, Bonchurch attracted a whole colony of writers and thinkers. The Swinburnes lived at East Dene, where pre-Raphaelite poet Algernon Swinburne fell in love with the Island’s cliffs and the sea. When he died in 1909, this‘last of the great Victorians’ was buried in St Boniface churchyard.

Many other writers were attracted to Bonchurch. Thomas Macaulay wrote part of his History of England while at Madeira Hall; best-selling novelist and author of The Blue Lagoon, Henry de Vere Stacpoole, lived at Cliff Dene and gifted the pond to the village in memory of his wife. Alfred Lord Tennyson also stayed in Bonchurch before settling at Farringford, Freshwater, with his wife Emily, where they lived for 39 years. In 1850 he became Poet Laureate on the death of Wordsworth and wrote some of his best-loved works including Maud, Idylls of the King, and Charge of the Light Brigade, on the Island. Tennyson took long walks across Freshwater’s High Down in his trademark hat and cloak, while trying to escape his fans and admirers. This is now called Tennyson Down in his honour.

Tennyson entertained the great writers and Victorian ‘celebrities’ of the day at Farringford. Many returned to stay at Freshwater Bay or to buy and build their own properties nearby. In 1860 Charles Darwin, who began writing his famous Origin of the Species while on the Island, was often a guest at Farringford. Tennyson’s eccentric neighbour, Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, converted her coal shed and chicken house into dark room and studio. Here she captured famous people o n film when they visited Farringford. The Camerons’ home at Dimbola (now Dimbola Lodge museum) became a meeting point for the smart set.

Among them were author of Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray, poet Robert Browning, and Queen Victoria’s drawing master – the inventor of the limerick – Edward Lear, who performed his nonsense verse to his own piano accompaniment. Both Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) and his inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, the young Alice Liddell, were visitors there. Lewis Carroll’s summers, often spent in Sandown, inspired his Hunting of the Snark.

Countless literary giants discovered the Island’s charms, among them William Wordsworth, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, John Betjeman, Robert Graves and George Eliot. Jane Austen visited the Island and wrote home about “lovely Shanklin Chine”, while D.H. Lawrence set his novel The Trespasser in Freshwater.

Throughout the 20th century the Island remained popular with writers. Novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley bought Billingham Manor in 1933, moving later to Brook Hill House with his writer wife, Jaquetta Hawkes. David Niven famously featured his childhood home at Bembridge in his autobiography, The Moon’s a Balloon.

Philip Norman, biographer of the Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Buddy Holly, grew up on Ryde Pier in the 1950s. While Rydeborn director and writer, Anthony Minghella, scooped nine Oscars for his epic film The English Patient. Yet another Ryde writer and local reporter, Raymond Allan, famously created accident-prone Frank Spencer, in Some Mothers Do Have ‘Em, based largely, he confesses, on himself!