Frank Meadow Sutcliffe opened a photography studio in Whitby in 1876, where he made a living for the next forty-six years as a portrait photographer, but he is known for his incredible photographs of Whitby and its people. He has been called “the Pictorial Boswell” of the town, and his work provides “a portrait of Whitby that is both an extraordinarily detailed record of the life in and around the town at the end of the nineteenth century and also one man’s vision of the place he loved”. (Hiley).
He never tired of his subject and was one of the pioneers of “Naturalistic photography” promoted by P. H. Emerson, moving away from the more staged style that had been widely used in early photography. “Whitby Abbey, for example, had in the past, he said, usually been depicted by engravers as a bare ruin. But photographers should always aim for something more than “mere postcard records of facts.” “By waiting and watching for accidental effects of fog, sunshine or cloud,” he advised, “it is generally possible to get an original rendering of any place. If we only get what any one can get at any time, our labour is wasted; a mere record of facts should never satisfy us.” Surviving Sutcliffe photographs show the abbey under varying conditions of weather, light, and fog, and in his photographs of Whitby and Eskdale the changing seasons transform the town and countryside.” (Hiley).
During a holiday in Whitby, Stoker began writing the scene in which Count Dracula arrives on a ghost ship. “His conversations with local fishermen and coastguards, his researches in the Whitby Museum, Subscription Library and Warm Bathing Establishment on the Quay (now Pier Road), and the notes and drawings he made while he sat in the churchyard of the parish of St Mary – 199 steps known as ‘the Church Stairs’ above the east side of the harbour – were to become Chapters VI to VIII of the novel […]” (Frayling).? These two photographs, apart from being atmospheric and captivating representations of the town, also provide an interesting insight into how Stoker would have encountered Whitby when he began writing Dracula there.
St. Hilda’s abbey with some silvering to the edges, otherwise both in very good condition.
