Ex Carta

Lionel Charlton’s antiquarian history of Whitby documents the town and its abbey through local records, topographical description, and early historical research. Its evocation of Whitby’s dramatic coastal landscape and ruined abbey would later lend the setting a powerful literary afterlife in Bram Stoker’s 

Lionel Charlton (1720?–1788) was a schoolmaster and topographer originally from Bellingham in Northumberland. Educated charitably due to a physical disability, he settled in Whitby in 1748, where he worked both as a teacher and as a land surveyor. (Cooper, 2004) His 

The History of Whitby and of Whitby Abbey

, published in 1779, draws upon detailed investigation of local records as well as information supplied by Thomas Percy, whose family had been associated with the abbey since the grant of land for the original monastery in the twelfth century.

The work documents the history of the coastal Yorkshire town, its monastic ruins, and its surrounding landscape, but it also includes a detailed fold-out map of the town and harbour. In this, the cruciform abbey – already a ruin – dominates the composition, perched atop the cliff overlooking the North Sea.

The Gothic potential of this setting did not go unnoticed. More than a century later, Bram Stoker (1847–1912) visited Whitby and began his researches for what would become 

 (1897). In the novel, the eponymous count arrives in Whitby Bay and, in the form of a black hound, ascends the 199 steps known as ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ to the graveyard beneath the abbey ruins. Charlton’s map, though produced as a work of antiquarian topography, already contains the elements that would later be reconfigured into one of the defining landscapes of Gothic fiction.