This talk will explore the formative influence of Hull on three local writers who portrayed the city in their work. The Hull poet and MP Andrew Marvell is today recognized as one of the most important poets of the seventeenth century, but Marvell’s poetry is also important for what it can tell us about the town Marvell grew up in and later represented in parliament. Marvell’s poetry registers the major role that his boyhood home, the Hull Charterhouse, played in the First English Civil War, while other Hull landmarks – the Old Grammar School and Holy Trinity Church – influenced the poet’s later writing on religious freedom. The death of his father by drowning in the River Humber adds another personal dimension to one of Marvell’s best-know poems, ‘To His Coy Mistress’.

Deeply affected by the depression years, Winifred Holtby’s Hull (Kingsport) is a place where the precariousness and hardship of life is balanced by its fleeting and necessary pleasures. The city’s distinguished theatres, glamorous cinemas and magical street names stand in stark contrast to its slums; providing leisure and escape for its ‘characterful’ inhabitants and combining with its railway and eastward facing river to open up a landlocked city to influences from London, Europe and beyond.

Stevie Smith who left the city at the age of three recalls, nevertheless, ‘the smell of the lovely Humber mud in my nose’ and ‘the water moving with dignity’.

‘Hull has a character and you will find it’ wrote Winifred Holtby to her friend Phyllis Bentley, who was preparing to lecture there in 1930. We will try and reveal the character of the city as it shaped itself to three of its most distinctive writers.