“This town is as full of enchantments as the White Cat’s Palace”: Whitby as a Locus for Writers’ Inspiration

This article focuses upon the small North Yorkshire town of Whitby in Britain and analyses its prolific literary heritage. Most famous as the birthplace of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, recent research into the literary heritage of the area reveals that the town has proved an inspiration for a large number of texts across all literary genres. This paper focuses upon why Whitby is such a locus of inspiration for British writers. It analyses how often texts which claim a provenance to the town, link to other texts which make similar claims. This paper explores this intertextuality, how one story is entwined with another, implying that one Whitby text seems almost inevitably to lead to another. It also considers how the texts which come from the town tend to be outward looking, establishing links with other famous texts from the wider world.

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