“Into a sort of oneness: An evening with the literary ghosts of Highgate, Hampstead, and the Heath”
by Jonathan Koch
Davidson College
A personal narrative from my summer study abroad experience in the UK about a walk that I took in London and the literary history that I encountered.
“A beer and a burger,” the bartender concluded, interpreting my fumbled food order. “Perfect,” I replied, grabbing my beer and fleeing to the adjacent room, where I plopped down on a plastic chair in front of a cafeteria-style table.
Four days in London, and I had seen the sights. In and out of museums, up and down the streets of London, from ancient Roman walls to the shiny Tate Modern Art Museum. Fueled by complimentary hostel breakfasts and a steady stream of Powerbars, I spent less than 150£ during my four days and five nights in London. Tonight’s was my first real restaurant meal, and it was far from adventurous: a beer and a burger, eaten alone in the basement of my hostel. Maybe it was the greasy food in my stomach or the hoppy notes playing in my head, but as I sat and reflected on my four days, they slowly formed a grocery list of packaged cultural goods that I had checked off. Sure, my visits to the British Museum, the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, and the rare book room at the British Library were fabulous encounters with memories of and memorials to my favorite artists and authors. But boxed in by gawking tourists, I found myself sympathizing with the artifacts trapped under Plexiglas and gravestones, forced, like John Keats’s iconic Grecian urn, to watch mutely as millions of eyes ogled them.
How could I keep from suffocating on the packaged culture with which I had stuffed myself, leaving barely enough room for Powerbars?
Searching through my guidebooks, I came across one untried route in Historic London Walks: a jaunt through Highgate and Hampstead, two suburbs now subsumed by London. Pushing back my chair, I stood up, tottering ever so slightly from the strong English ale. The sun sets late on an English summer night, and the forecasted rain was supposed to hold off until midnight, plenty of time to cover the four-mile route. Donning my Teva sandals and grabbing my camera, guidebook, and rain jacket, I ventured out for my last night in London.
At the foot of a steep, dark hill, I came to a halt. To my left was a cluster of cafes looking out on the corner of Hampstead Heath. To my right was Swain’s Lane, a narrow road that curves into the small village of Highgate. I turned right, watching as the Heath—lit by daytime sentiments, the sum of my hours in London—vanished in the growing gloom of a gothic night.
Somewhere past Highgate Cemetery, I saw my first ghost. The ghost was once himself a keen-eyed ghost-spotter, for he declared, “A spectre is haunting Europe.” Few people realize that the figurehead of Communism spent half his life in London, but since his quiet death in 1883, those who venture past Highgate Cemetery can find Marx’s ghost haunting its nineteenth-century gatehouse. Quickening my pace, I left Marx in the spooky recesses of Swain’s Lane, but his words from Das Kapital rang in my ears: “Après moi le déluge.” It started to pour.
After the shock of encountering Marx, my eyes became more alert—ready to recognize other literary ghosts that romped in the darkened streets. Crossing a small, rain-soaked park, I emerged onto Highgate High Street, an old Roman road that winds north through Highgate on its way out of London. As I walked up the hill to the village center, I kept twisting my head around to gaze at the beautiful colors painted on the sky behind me. Backpedaling, twirling, then walking forward a few steps, I danced my way into Highgate, marveling at its airy distance from the shrouded city below. In the sunset that emerged from the dark rainclouds, Samuel Coleridge’s ghost appeared.
Coleridge spent the last years of his life in Highgate, at No. 3 The Grove, the home of his friend James Gillman. He came to the remoteness of this northern suburb seeking remedy for his opium addiction. I came, spewed from the glutted belly of touristy London, seeking remedy for my overdose on packaged culture. In Highgate, literary figures break free from the chains that bind them to musty books and chiseled statuettes. Tonight, Coleridge’s unencumbered spirit sang softly in the sunset:
Upon the Mountain’s edge with light touch resting.
There a brief while the Globe of Splendour sits
And seems a Creature of this Earth; but soon
More changeful than the Moon,
To Wane fantastic his great orb submits,
Or Cone or Mow of Fire: till sinking slowly
Even to a Star at length he lessens wholly.
Abrupt, as Spirits vanish, he is sunk!
Highgate High Street
After Coleridge led me through Highgate, my guidebook took me back downhill to Hampstead Heath. The rain returned with a vengeance, soaking me to the skin and rendering my guidebook a useless bundle of pulp. Passing by mansions barely visible through the trees, I found myself, like Dante’s Pilgrim, “within a shadowed forest, / for I had lost the path that does not stray.” Lost and directionless, I buried my camera underneath my rain jacket, pulled the hood over my head, and plowed forward. Days later, I looked at a map and discovered that this section of my walk was only a mile long, but as I sloshed through puddles, searching for shelter, the distance dragged on in hopeless infinitude.
When I had nearly abandoned all hope, the road ended, and a dim path opened before me, leading into a copse of trees. Finally, the Heath! Before plunging into the wood, I waited with pounding heart as Coleridge’s “soul-like Breeze possess[ed] all the Wood,” filling the stillness of “the Boughs, the Sprays” that “have stood /As motionless as stands the ancient Trunk!” so that “Every Leaf thro’ all the forest Flutters, / And deep the Cavern of the Fountain mutters.”
ऀThe Heath is hallowed ground. Here, Dickens walked and conjured up the characters for Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. The Kit-Kat Club of Addison, Steele, and Johnson gathered nearby at the Upper Flask. Hunt and his Cockney School of poets wrote among the Heath’s copses and scattered ponds. Here, Mesolithic hunters made their camp, Londoners fled the flames of the 1666 fire, and highwaymen robbed any soul foolish enough to traverse the Heath’s rugged interior at night. As I crept past the ponds that Pickwick analyzes in one of his papers, I saw neither highwaymen crouching in the bushes nor tourists clamoring for a view. But I was far from alone. On this rain-soaked summer evening, all the ghosts of Hampstead and Highgate swirled wildly over the Heath. In the open air of Parliament Hill the wakes of these airborne writers, poets, and thinkers shook me from deep within.
“It is a view of perpetual fascination at all hours and in all seasons,” said Virginia Woolf of the view from Parliament Hill, “One sees London as a whole—London crowded and ribbed and compact, with its dominant domes, its guardian cathedrals; its chimneys and spires; its cranes and gasometers; and the perpetual smoke which no spring or autumn ever blows away.” The scene before me ratified these words, and what Woolf said in prose, Joanna Baillie sang in verse. This little-known playwright and poet lived with her family in the Bolton House of Hampstead from 1806 until her death. At 9:30 on this rainy night, she sang a solo in the ghostly chorale:
It is a goodly sight through the clear air,
From Hampstead’s heathy height to see at once
England’s vast capital in fair expanse,
Towers, belfries, lengthen’d streets, and strucures fair.
St. Paul’s high dome amidst the vassal bands
Of neighb’ring spires, a regal chieftain stands,
And over fields of ridgy roofs appear,
With distance softly tinted, side by side,
In kindred grace, like twain of sisters dear;
The Towers of Westminster, her Abbey’s pride;
While, far beyond, the hills of Surrey shine
The View from Parliament Hill
Over the past days, I had visited these bastions of culture, but now through the “drizzly rain” and “tinted vapours,” they appeared different. Whereas before they had produced momentary chills and cheap thrills, now I felt “the flood of human life in motion,” which filled my soul “with sad but pleasing awe.” My mind turned with Baillie’s to “Thoughts, mingled, melancholy, undefined, / Of restless, reckless man, and years gone by, / And Time fast wending to Eternity.”
As I basked in the spirit of this place, I tried to take a picture. Miraculously, feeble light from the slumbering sun exposed the photo. Or perhaps the ghosts’ brilliance lit the sky, as they brightened the gloomy Heath with welcoming warmth. The ghosts danced together and apart, constituting at once separate parts and a coherent whole. My photo, like the Pilgrim in Paradiso, can merely sketch the scene:
In its profundity I saw—ingathered
and bound by love into one single volume—
what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered:
substances, accidents, and dispositions
as if conjoined—in such a way that what
I tell is only rudimentary.
After standing and marveling for some time, I thought I heard a soft voice coming from a nearby park bench. It was the ghost of Fanny Brawne, Keats’s love, imploring me to go down to Hampstead and see her “palely loitering” “knight at arms.” So I descended the west side of Parliament Hill, past several more ponds, and stepped onto Hampstead’s East Heath Road.
The rain slowed to a fine mist as I wandered through Hampstead, looking for the street that now bears Keats’s name. For centuries, Hampstead resisted London’s steady encroachment, serving as a secluded refuge for artists and invalids. In the 1700s, Dorothy Pippin’s Pump Room sold the village’s spring water to Londoners thirsty for something more than what the daily, downtown hustle could provide.
Keats’s Grove looked like a typical residential street: cozy houses lit by porch lamps, cars parked on the one-way street, and manicured gardens soaking in the summer rain. Nobody was out; I had the place to myself. Or rather, Keats and I had the place to ourselves, for as Woolf comments, “All the traffic of life is silenced….Only one presence—that of Keats himself—dwells here. And even he…seems to come silently, on the broad shafts of light without body or footfall.” Hoping to preserve the moment, I tried to take a picture. But after several failures, Keats’s ghost reminded me of the plight of the “little town” on the Grecian urn, whose “streets for evermore / Will silent be; and not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.” Like the urn, a photo may last forever, but it will be unable to express the spirit of place. Here was something more sublime than even a thousand-word photo: the spirit of Keats joining his nightingale on the “viewless wings of poesy.”
Keats followed me up the hill into Hampstead proper, where the clink of silverware and glasses mixed with laughter—the music of a lively evening. Across the street was a small stand, where a French couple was selling crêpes. A wave of hunger swept over me, as if I hadn’t eaten for days.
“Une crêpe avec banane et Nutella, s’il vous plait.”
I must have been a wild sight: dazed, disheveled, and soaked to the bone. Later, I would take a long Tube ride back to my hostel, only to discover that Hampstead was merely a mile away. But for now, I sat and ate my crepe in the yellow lamplight of a world apart. And before I descended to the waiting train, Keats offered a parting refrain:
Hist, when the airy stress
Of music’s kiss impregnates the free winds,
And with a sympathetic touch unbinds
Eolian magic from their lucid wombs:
Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs:
Old ditties sigh above their father’s grave;
Ghosts of melodious prophesyings rave
……………………………………….
Feel we these things?—That moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit’s.
Works cited in this piece: The Divine Comedy: Inferno (Canto I, lines 2-3), Paradiso (Canto 33, lines 85-90) by Dante Alighieri, translated by Allen Mandelbaum; “London” by Joanna Baillie (lines 1-11, 30, 33, 45, 47, 50-2); “Description of the Sun Setting in a Mountainous Country: A Fragment” by Samuel Coleridge; “Sonnet on Paolo and Francesca” (line 10), “La Belle dame Sans Merci: A Ballad” (lines 1-2), “Ode to a Nightingale” (line 33), “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (lines 38-40, 46-7), Endymion (Book I, lines 783-9, 795-7) by John Keats; Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx; “Great Men’s Houses” in The London Scene by Virginia Woolf.
Other sources referenced or consulted: London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd; London in English Literature by Percy Boyton; The Literary Ghosts of London by E. Beresford Chancellor; Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens; “Sailing to Ithaca” by Hillel Halkin in Commentary Magazine November 2005; Historic London Walks by Leo Hollis; A History of London by Stephen Inwood; London: A Social History by Roy Porter; A Literary Pilgrimage by Theodore Wolfe.
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