Elizabeth von Arnim’s comic novel The Caravaners turns a 1907 caravanning trip into a satire of English holiday-making across Kent and Sussex. A boorish narrator steers readers through Chatham, Leeds Castle, the Medway and Canterbury, exposing how guidebooks, scenery, and local landmarks become props for self-importance rather than understanding place.

Nineteenth-century Ramsgate cultivates a reputation for royal respectability and genteel leisure while satirists and novelists expose its cracks and contradictions. Literary visitors and seaside guidebooks frame the resort’s rivalry with Margate, its display of hotel luxury, and the mingling of class aspiration with popular holiday culture.

Nineteenth-century Margate grows from a medically minded sea-bathing resort into a mass leisure town as steam packets and railways bring larger, less exclusive crowds. Writers and artists from Keats and Dickens to Turner and later Pamela Wynne register the tensions between gentility, vulgarity, health, and entertainment along this stretch of Kent coast.

Nineteenth-century Folkestone grows into a fashionable seaside resort as rail links, promenades, and new amusements reshape its social life and tourist economy. Local elites police respectability on the Leas and curate reading through libraries even as popular print culture and satirical writing expose flirtation, class anxiety, and the performance of taste.

Nineteenth-century Dover balanced genteel seaside resort culture with the practical noise and scrutiny of a major Channel port. Literary and travel accounts link the town’s baths, libraries, theatre, castle and white cliffs to cross-Channel mobility, smuggling anecdotes, and debates over protecting historic buildings amid military and railway development.

The murder of Thomas Arden in 1551 Faversham sparked a domestic tragedy that fused true-crime printing with early modern theatre and made local places central to dramatic meaning. Faversham Abbey, Arden’s house, the Fleur-de-Lis, the quay, and routes to Canterbury and Sheppey anchor debates about marriage, divorce, household governance, and social order, while disputed authorship and modern attribution studies keep the play’s status unsettled.

Sir John Franklin’s 1845 Arctic expedition departed from Greenhithe on the Thames, linking a small Kent riverside village to a national drama of exploration and loss. The narrative tracks the voyage of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror from refurbishment and delayed sailing to disappearance, then follows later searches and local commemoration in pubs and place-names.

Susan Civale discusses the many family visits to Kent of famous English novelist Jane Austen and how these might be reflected in her writing.

In this visual essay, Carolyn Oulton explores the role of the Kent hop picking culture in Nineteenth/Twentieth Century literature.