IT COULD only have been on one occasion that Southampton was described as “bewitching”

and “the capital of Fairyland”, and that was on September 3, 1812, when the artist Sir William Elford penned a letter to his friend, the Hampshire author Mary Russell Mitford.

Born in Alresford, Mary Mitford, best known for her book Our Village, a series of sketches of rural scenes and vividly drawn characters, was in regular correspondence with Sir William, a banker, and politician as well as a painter of some regard.

Back in those preVictorian times Southampton had still to come to prominence as a port as the town was cut off from other busy centres of trade by the absence of effective communications with the industrial areas of the north and Midlands.

As a result, when Sir William visited Southampton he was so impressed by what he saw the constant contributor to the Royal Academy wrote enthusiastically to his author friend.

These days, reading his description of Southampton, it seems so unrealistic but there was a time when visitors did wax lyrical about the charms of the area.

“I have just returned from Southampton,” said Sir William in his letter. “Have you ever been at that lovely spot, which combines all that is enchanting in wood and land and water with all that is ‘buxom, blithe and debonair’ in society – that charming town, which is not a watering-place only because it is something better?

“Do not be afraid of a long description. The scenery of the south of Hampshire is of all others the most difficult to describe; for it is not the picturesque which may be thrown off in a few careless strokes; or the sublime which, with the wish to delineate it, almost inspires the power; but the beautiful – sometimes in its gayest, and sometimes in its softest dress – but always the beautiful, of which the prevailing and pervading charm is not the woods or streams or villages, nor even the sparkling ocean, but the exquisite arrangement and combination of the whole.

“Southampton has, however, in my eyes, an attraction independent even of its scenery, in the total absence of the vulgar hurry of business or the chilling apathy of fashion. It is indeed, all life, all gaiety: but it has an airiness, and an animation, which might become the capital of Fairyland.

“The very motion of its playful waters, uncontaminated by commerce or war, seems in unison with the graceful yachts that sail upon their bosom; while the shores fringed with oak to the very margin, and studded with the fairest vestiges of the past with the present, like the wild yet bewitching imagery of a poet’s dream.

“I have always been there, that to me Southampton would be beautiful, even though it were as distressed as Winchester, or as dirty as Old Brentford.”

Sir William died in November, 1837 while Mary Mitford died in January, 1855.