Grace Darling: The Fate of a Victorian Heroine
The Grace Darling legend as an early manifestation of the terrifying power of sustained publicity; Richard Armstrong writes that she may well have been its first victim.
On November 24th, 1815, Grace Horsley Darling, boldly and unequivocally labelled “Heroine” in the Dictionary of National Biography, was born in the home of her grandparents at Bamburgh, Northumberland.
Three weeks later, she was taken by her mother to the Outer Fames where her father was the lighthouse keeper; and, for the remainder of her brief life, that five-mile-long complex of exposed rock and hidden reef was both the centre and, in effect, the circumference of her world.
It is known she made two journeys to Alnwick, seventeen miles away; but that was after her apotheosis; and until then, apart from some possibility that she was in domestic service for a time at a school near Berwick-on-Tweed, twenty miles away, there is no evidence that she ever moved further afield than Bamburgh or North Sunderland—villages in sight of the islands and involved with them both socially and economically.
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