As a child, the Portsmouth poet Denise Bennett lived in a house once occupied by Maria Beadnell, Charles Dickens’s first love. The house in Shaftesbury Road is as much the star of the poem as Beadnell, however, and it provides an excellent depiction of lives spent there in two very different historical periods and under very different circumstances. It is quoted here with the kind permission of the poet.

6 Shaftesbury Road

Maria Beadnell, Dickens’ first lady-love
once lived here when the house was new;
when people entered by the flight of stone steps
up to the front door, in those la-di-da days.

Years later as tenants, we entered
by a different door to the damp basement flat;
my mother bumping my pushchair
down to the squall of everyday living, below stairs –

those two gloomy rooms, shared scullery,
paint-peeling walls, where no sun shone.
Here she kept us safe, away from pointing
fingers – she a war widow left with a small son,

and me, her unexpected daughter.
We slept together in a big double bed.
If I went back, would I find my tiny thumb-prints
pressed into the door where I once fell

gashing my head on the catch? I still
carry the scar from that place where
the maid once rose at six, broke the ice in the ewer
to wash, then carried up tea to Maria.

Denise Bennett was born in Festing Road Southsea and has lived locally all her life. She had her first poem accepted by her school magazine, The Hot Potato, when she attended John Pounds School, Portsea. As many people know, John Pounds was a pioneer of education for ragged children in Portsmouth. Denise has an MA in creative writing and is a widely published, prize winning poet. She was awarded the inaugural Hamish Canham Prize by the Poetry Society in 2004. Denise has three excellent collections: Planting the Snow Queen (2011) and Parachute Silk (2015) and Water Chits (2017). She has also written a sequence of poems about the loss of HMS Royal George which foundered off Spithead in 1782, with the loss of over 900 lives. In 2010 she co-edited the wonderful anthology, This Island City: Portsmouth in Poetry with Maggie Sawkins and Dale Gunthorp.

Local history often inspires Denise’s work and many of her poems are about specific areas in the city. Denise is the stanza rep for the Poetry Society the secretary of the Portsmouth Poetry Society. She has been a long time member of the Tongues and Grooves poetry and music club, and often reads her work in public. She has taught creative writing for Portsmouth College, as part of their adult education programme, for twenty eight years, and runs poetry workshops for Portsmouth City Museum and Portsmouth libraries as part of Bookfest. She continues to run poetry workshops in community settings and also facilitates two writing groups for Havant U3A. In 2014, she was involved, alongside local artist and photographer, Jacky Dillon, and other local poets, in a photography and art project, England Remembered about the First World War. This culminated in a presentation at Art Space in Brougham Road, Southsea. In 2019, as part of the Dark Side Port Side project, the digital walking trail called Sailortown she made a poetry film, Blossom Alley which can be heard here. Denise continues to find much inspiration for her poetry in the city.

If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions about the map entries please contact the Map Director Dr Mark Frost, English Literature Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk