Edinburgh Napier University

  In the introduction to the Collected Poems of Norman Nicholson (1914-87), Neil Curry highlights the systematic denigration of writers from the north of England by metropolitan literary networks. The Times obituary described Nicholson as ‘the most gifted English Christian provincial poet of his century’. The accumulation of qualifying adjectives damns with a faint praise Nicholson would have resented: his broadcast On Being a Provincial (1945) and fiction Provincial Pleasures (1959) both assert the value of rural life. Even recent sympathetic studies of the north, such as Dave Russell’s Looking North (2004), have done little to move beyond familiar stereotypes.

In this paper I argue that Nicholson’s unsentimental attitude to place offers a necessary alternative to the fetishization of the Lake District, and rural Britain more generally. A lifelong resident of Millom, an ironworks town in the part of south-west Cumbria that one might topographically and metaphorically describe as the arse end of the Lake District, Nicholson wanted rural communities to thrive. Nicholson’s best-known volume The Pot Geranium (1954) reveals the need for rural communities to be allowed to embrace modernity in poems such as the highly formal ‘On a Proposed Site for Council Houses’, while the Cumbrian coast continues to be understood as a liminal space in the free verse ‘From Walney Island’ and ‘On the Lancashire Coast’. In Portrait of the Lakes (1963), he implores the reader: ‘Don’t complain about quarries; don’t protest against mineral workings. Give the dalesman a chance to go on living and making a living, and to stay more or less independent of the tourist[. …] Don’t stifle the life of a dale community for the sake of saving a view’ (p. 180).

I conclude by pushing this argument further to think about the possibility for a more democratic literary criticism. In Nicholson’s attitude towards the south-west Lakes there are principles that can refresh the work of literary criticism. He points to the need to think again about the relationship between the rural and industrial modernity, while his consciousness of the undesirability of mere preservation offers the possibility for further reflection on challenges to the literary canon.