The Arts In Berwick -- Legends
Grace Darling

The Victorian period had just begun when Grace Darling helped saved the passengers and crew of a steamship off the Farne Islands.

She immediately became a media celebrity with journalists, artists and writers falling over each other in the rush to immortalize her exploit. A hurricane of artistic produce swept around the world from Bamburgh, with Grace and her family represented in all known media from china statuettes to paintings, prints, novels, plays and poems. In keeping with her image poor Grace died young in 1844, and thus could be entombed in the grandest style with a stone effigy clutching an oar like a medieval saint.

In talent the poetic effluviums on Grace Darling ranged from Wordsworth to that most famous of bad poets, William McGonagall. Interest in Grace Darling has increased in recent years with feminist re-assessment of the role of women in Victorian society. Curiously the only movies on Grace are silent comedies, the earliest made by Victoria Vesta in 1902.

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