Edgelands without a centre: Norman Nicholson and post-industry

Frayn, Andrew

Abstract

A poet whose first editor at Faber & Faber was T.S. Eliot, Norman Nicholson (1914-87) lived his whole life in Millom, an ironworks town in the south-west of Cumbria, away from but within sight of the major fells of the Lake District. Nicholson’s family came to Millom to participate in its industrial boom in the 1860s. He wrote from his earliest poetry about the limits of the extraction of natural resources, and in later life about the closure and dismantling of the ironworks in his own town. In this paper I engage with and question recent theories of the ‘edgelands’ (Marion Shoard, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts) to situate Nicholson’s poetry. These theories attribute a generative quality to post-industrial spaces, assuming that nearby urban centres ensure through traffic. Here, I use Nicholson’s poetry to discuss what differs in places such as Millom, which are not just at the edge of the city, but on the edge of Britain itself, literally on the road to nowhere.

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Conference Name: English research seminar
• Start Date: Nov 23, 2018
• Deposit Date: Apr 27, 2023