Virginia Woolf in Britain: the travel diaries and the country as it was

Between 1905 and 1908 a young woman of just over twenty, then still called Virginia Stephen, travelled around England and Wales with a notebook in her pocket. She was not yet a famous writer: she published reviews and short essays in newspapers, had lost both parents and was soon to lose her brother Thoby too. She would become Virginia Woolf only in 1912, on marrying Leonard Woolf, and her first novel came out in 1915. Those notebooks, which she never meant to publish, appeared in English as part of A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, and in Italian as Qui è rimasto qualcosa di noi. Diari di viaggio in Gran Bretagna (Mattioli 1885, 2012), edited by Francesca Cosi and Alessandra Repossi.

This special launches a strand of the site devoted to travellers of the past: books and diaries that show us the country as it was and let us measure how much it has changed. We follow Virginia stage by stage, from Cornwall to Wales, comparing places and daily life then and now, with some charts and an itinerary for anyone who wants to retrace her journey.

The eight journeys at a glance

Cornwall 1905: back to St Ives

The longest and finest journey in the book begins on 10 August 1905, when Virginia, her sister Vanessa and brothers Thoby and Adrian board a Great Western Railway train for Cornwall. After eleven years they are returning to the places of their childhood summers: their father, the critic Leslie Stephen, had rented Talland House, a villa above the bay of St Ives, from 1882 to 1894. On the first evening the young Stephens creep into the garden, peer through the hedge at the lit windows of the house that is no longer theirs, and slip away like ghosts at the sound of footsteps. Those summers would give rise, in 1927, to the novel To the Lighthouse, whose lighthouse is Godrevy, visible from the bay.

The diary describes a still rural, poor Cornwall. Virginia walks alone for hours on paths as narrow as rabbit runs, climbs granite walls using protruding stones as steps, and asks for water at isolated farms where she is shown a grandfather's sword hanging over the fireplace. She visits the washerwoman, the keeper of the bathing tents, the woman at the inn: all remember the family and her mother, Julia, who died in 1895. The old bathing attendant complains that now even working people go sea bathing, whereas once it was the privilege of good families: a sign of a social change the 20th century would accelerate.

The pilchard fishery

The most spectacular pages describe the pilchard fishery. One September morning Thoby throws open the window and shouts that the pilchards are in the bay. From the small stone lookout on Porthminster Point, the man called the huer spots the shoals, purple shadows sliding under the surface, and directs the boats with a megaphone and white globes waved by hand. The boats shoot their great seine nets in a circle and then scoop up the fish in baskets, in a shower of silver. Virginia notes that one wrong manoeuvre loses a shoal worth a thousand pounds, an enormous sum at the time.

It was the twilight of an age-old industry. Pilchard fishing had enriched Cornwall from the 18th century to the late 19th: in 1868, at St Ives itself, a single seine had enclosed 5,600 hogsheads of fish, millions of pilchards, the all-time record. But after 1880 the shoals dwindled, and seine fishing at St Ives ended in 1924. The huer's little lookout still stands. In recent years the fishery has revived at Newlyn under a new trade name, Cornish sardines, and much of the catch goes to Spain and Italy.

Land's End and the first tourists

Virginia also goes to Land's End, England's westernmost point, and complains that every ten minutes a heavy coach or a dusty motor car unloads visitors onto that little strip of land. In 1905 there were just over thirty thousand registered cars in the whole United Kingdom; today there are more than thirty-three million, and Land's End is a visitor attraction drawing hundreds of thousands of people a year.

Yorkshire 1906: the Giggleswick moors

In April 1906 Virginia sets off alone, with her dog Gurth, for Giggleswick, near Settle in Yorkshire, where her cousin Will Vaughan is headmaster of the school. She lodges in a clean, plain boarding house and discovers the pleasure of solitude: deciding when to dine, reading in peace, hearing the night express to Edinburgh pass on what is now the famous Settle-Carlisle line. She walks the moors, among dry-stone walls, ewes with lambs and no trees, and looks out at hills such as Ingleborough. Even then she grumbles about the bicycles and motor cars that spoil walking on the roads. Today those hills are part of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, created in 1954, and are among British walkers' favourite places.

Norfolk 1906: a house outside time

In August the Stephen sisters rent Blo' Norton Hall, an Elizabethan house in Norfolk, on the Little Ouse, seven miles from the station. Virginia describes it as a place where time has stopped, where light filters in slowly and windmills turn with nobody to tend them. She cycles around the area, and arriving in Thetford, with its walls and river, thinks it looks like an Italian town. This is rural, agricultural England before mechanisation: in 1901 farm workers were still a significant share of the workforce, while today they are around one per cent. Of the many windmills that once dotted Norfolk only a few dozen remain, many turned into homes or museums.

New Forest 1906: a Christmas of mourning

The shortest, most painful pages describe Christmas 1906 in the New Forest. A month earlier, on 20 November, Thoby had died of typhoid fever, caught on the trip to Greece and not recognised by the doctors. Virginia writes that the forest, like Christmas, always promises something sparkling and merry and then disappoints. The New Forest, William the Conqueror's ancient hunting ground with its free-roaming ponies, became a national park in 2005.

Thoby's death at twenty-six is a reminder of how fragile life was at the start of the 20th century: in England and Wales life expectancy at birth was about 48 for men and 52 for women, against about 79 and 83 today. Infectious diseases such as typhoid were among the main causes of death.

London 1907: the Tube reaches the countryside

The chapter most surprising to today's reader is Golders Green. In June 1907 the new Hampstead tube line opened, the ancestor of today's Northern line, running as far as Golders Green, then open country north of London. Virginia goes there on a summer Sunday: she descends into the electric gloom of the tunnel among the houses and emerges among fields, cows and streams, but cars are already racing around the crossroads, day-trippers crowd the lanes, and on the horizon the first rows of villas appear, like toy bricks set on end. Without knowing it, she is witnessing the birth of suburban London.

The figures prove her right. Hendon, the district that included Golders Green, had about 22,000 inhabitants in 1901; thirty years later it had over 110,000. Right after the station opened, roads and houses were laid out south of the station and around Temple Fortune, followed by shops, churches, a theatre, a cinema and, from the 1920s, a large Jewish community. Today Golders Green is a densely populated London district, and the fields Virginia described survive only in nearby Hampstead Heath.

Sussex 1907: Rye and the moon through a telescope

In summer 1907 Virginia and Adrian rent a cottage at Playden, above Rye in East Sussex, while Vanessa, newly married to Clive Bell, stays in the town. Virginia admits that writing about a town that has lived for five centuries would take time, knowledge and inspiration, and that she feels rather tired of all that history-soaked brick. Her finest pages describe evening walks, the scent of tobacco plants, the moon seen through a telescope, a lit train passing in the night like a phosphorescent caterpillar. She dreams of buying a tiny cottage at Peasmarsh, to think of on London days when the whole world seems made of brick. Rye, with cobbled streets such as Mermaid Street, is now one of England's best-preserved medieval towns and a magnet for cultural tourism. A few years later Virginia and Leonard did buy a house in Sussex, Monk's House at Rodmell, where she lived until 1941.

Somerset 1908: the bells of Wells

In August 1908 Virginia goes alone to Wells in Somerset, with her dogs Hans and Gurth, to write the first chapters of her first novel, which would become The Voyage Out. She rents a room in Vicars' Close, the medieval street built for the cathedral choristers, considered Europe's oldest continuously inhabited residential street, then moves to a house on the cathedral green. She wryly observes the theology students, her landlady explaining that the Church is like a tree, a quack haranguing farmers in the market square, and writes that a 17th-century print of Wells is identical to a 19th-century photograph. From the surrounding hills she sees the outline of Glastonbury Tor. Wells, with just over ten thousand inhabitants, is still England's smallest city, and its cathedral one of the country's finest.

Wales 1908: Manorbier, the empty coast

The journey ends in the second half of August 1908 at Manorbier, on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales. Virginia finds thin, poor countryside, a church like a grey barn, a vast ruined castle over the bay and a beach all to herself. She lodges in a cottage with a stonemason and his wife and writes, in one of her wrong predictions, that nobody will ever turn the place into a seaside resort. Today Manorbier lies within the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, created in 1952, the coast path running through it is one of Britain's finest, and in summer the beach is busy with families and surfers.

How the country has changed

Virginia's diaries portray an England halfway between two worlds. On one side steam trains, carriages, isolated farms, full churches on Sundays, fishermen and farmers speaking incomprehensible dialects; on the other the first cars, bicycles, the electric Tube and middle- and working-class holidaymakers conquering the beaches. The population was growing fast: England and Wales went from 32.5 million at the 1901 census to almost 60 million in 2021.

Travel has changed too. In 1905 Virginia reached Cornwall on the Great Western: the newly introduced express to Penzance took about seven hours from London; today it takes about five. The rail network was then close to its historic peak, around thirty-two thousand kilometres; the 1960s closures known as the Beeching cuts almost halved it. Many of the villages Virginia reached by train and carriage can now be reached only by car.

Curiosities

• The Italian title of the book echoes a thought on the last page of the Cornish diary: leaving St Ives, Virginia feels that something of her family has been left behind there.
• The card game that keeps the Stephens hooked for three days at Carbis Bay is Racing Demon, a team patience still popular in British families and pubs.
• The page describing a night walk in the Cornish fog became a short piece published in the Guardian in December 1905: one of Woolf's earliest published texts.
• Manorbier Castle was the birthplace in the 12th century of Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), the chronicler of medieval Wales.
• The St Ives figure who guides Virginia at the pilchard fishery, Edward Hain, was a shipowner, mayor and MP: his wife raised funds for a nurse in memory of Virginia's mother.

In Virginia Woolf's footsteps: the itinerary today

Anyone wanting to retrace Virginia's journey today can plan a ten-to-twelve-day itinerary by train and car.

1. London: her birthplace at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington and the Bloomsbury houses, then the Tube to Golders Green and a walk on Hampstead Heath (see London).
2. Rye (two hours from London): Mermaid Street, the Ypres Tower, Henry VIII's Camber Castle; with a detour, Monk's House at Rodmell and Charleston, Vanessa Bell's home.
3. New Forest (an hour and a half): Lyndhurst and the free-roaming ponies.
4. Wells and Glastonbury (two hours): the cathedral, Vicars' Close, the Bishop's Palace and the climb up the Tor; Bath is half an hour away.
5. St Ives (three and a half hours): Tate St Ives, the Barbara Hepworth Museum, Talland House seen from the road, Carbis Bay, the huer's hut, and an outing to Godrevy lighthouse and Land's End.
6. Manorbier (by car across South Wales): the castle, the beach and a stretch of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path.
7. Yorkshire Dales (a long trip north): Settle, Giggleswick and the scenic Settle-Carlisle railway.

Norfolk's Blo' Norton can be combined with a visit to Cambridge, an hour's drive away.

The book

Qui è rimasto qualcosa di noi. Diari di viaggio in Gran Bretagna by Virginia Woolf, edited and translated by Francesca Cosi and Alessandra Repossi, with an afterword by Francesca Frigerio, is published by Mattioli 1885, which has also published Woolf's travel diaries from Italy, Greece and Turkey. The original English text is in A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. It is ideal reading to take on the road, to discover a vanished Britain and a great writer at the start of her career.

See also the history of the United Kingdom and travellers of the past.