David Seabrook’s All the Devils Are Here turns Kent’s coastal towns into a haunted archive of erased buildings, local scandals, and literary afterlives. Margate, Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Deal, Dover, Rochester, and Canterbury appear as mapped waypoints where Dickens, Eliot, and Richard Dadd cluster around themes of mystery, death, and fragmented history. Seabrook’s own ambiguous death and the reported loss of his writings intensify the book’s fixation on disappearance and unresolved narrative.

Katie Holdway discusses the Kent places and landscapes which feature extensively in Dickens’s first serial novel, The Pickwick Papers.

Charles Dickens sets a key scene of Bleak House in Deal, using fog, beach clutter, and narrow streets to create a bleak coastal mood that contrasts with the town’s weaker Dickensian reputation. Esther Summerson’s coach journey to the army barracks and her attention to ropemakers link Deal’s maritime labor to Dickens’s own memories of dockyard work and to wider patterns of Kent’s literary place-marketing.

Prof. Carolyn Oulton introduces the key characters and Margate setting of Pamela Wynne’s novel: Love in a Mist.

Richborough’s hidden wartime port transformed a silted Roman landing place into a self-sufficient logistics town that kept the British army supplied on the Western Front. Rail links, barge building, and a pioneering roll-on roll-off ferry system accelerated the movement of troops, munitions, and wounded before the site was rapidly dismantled after 1919.

Victoria Holt, the pen name of Eleanor Hibbert, drew on late-1960s stays in Deal and a restored house in Sandwich to shape the Gothic romance atmosphere of The Shivering Sands. The Goodwin Sands and nearby Kent landscapes and castles anchor a Victorian-era mystery in which place intensifies foreboding through wrecks, legends, and coastal desolation.

Folkestone became a critical Channel port in the First World War, moving nearly 10 million soldiers and large numbers of nurses, war workers, civilians, and refugees between Britain and the Western Front. Embarkation logistics, Shorncliffe’s imperial troop presence, and the Tontine Street air raid reshaped the town’s social life and exposed it to early total war pressures, including the white feather campaign against non-enlisted men.

Margaret Emily Shore’s journals trace a young diarist’s encounters with the Thanet coast and the Medway dockyards in the 1830s, turning convalescent travel into close observation. Her notes on chalk cliffs, seaweed and botany, printing, steam-packets, and Chatham Dockyard machinery reveal how seaside leisure and industrial infrastructure fed a middle-class girl’s scientific curiosity and technical imagination.

Prof. Carolyn Oulton traces the begins of seaside holidays from their inland spa town origins and explores the health benefits are variable etiquettes of sea bathing.

Laura Allen's visual essay introduces Kent author Bessie Marchant (pesud. John Comfort) who drew on the places and dialect of her home county.

John Marsh’s journal places late Georgian musical life in Nethersole and Canterbury within the practical limits of night travel and poor road engineering. Moonlight dinners, coaching inns, and the adoption of McAdam’s road-building method reveal how mobility shaped concert culture and theatre circuits across east and north Kent.

In this visual essay, Dr Peter Merchant documents the relationship between author Henry James and Hever Castle, Kent home to Anne Boleyn.