This book has been eight years in the making, and has its origin in travels which began more than twenty years before that. I am much indebted to Clémence and Ralph O’Connor, Robert Macfarlane, Peter Scupham, Margaret Steward, Jane Stevenson and Jill and Stephen Wolfe for the conversations that defined it.
I owe a great deal to Daniel MacCannell for his enviable dexterity as research assistant, prose stylist and picture researcher. Harry Gilonis at Reaktion Books has offered an exceptional and creative contribution to the final choice of images and to the shaping of the whole book. I would like also to acknowledge the exceptional help of my editor Aimee Selby and the creative and thoughtful contribution made by Simon McFadden’s design.
I am grateful to those who have invited me to give parts of the book as conference papers or public lectures: the University of Oulu and Prof. Anthony Johnson; the National Galleries of Scotland; the universities of Newcastle and York; Gresham College and the City of London Festival.
This book touches on works in many languages and I am grateful, as ever, to those whose knowledge of them is greater than my own: to Jane Stevenson for the ancient languages; Hugh Salvesen, Daniel Höhr and Sophie Dietrich for German; Winifred Stevenson for Old Norse and Old English; Laura Tosi, Loredana Polezzi and Susan Bassnett for Italian; Clémence O’Connor and Alison Saunders for French; my beloved cousins Nicola and Paula for Spanish and for their corroborative recollections of our grandparents’ crepuscular household.
I am most grateful to those who have made the crucial suggestions which have given the book its present form: to Jane Stevenson, as always; to Robert Macfarlane, who has selflessly fostered and encouraged the whole and who wrenched a wandering project back onto course at an early stage and read it in its entirety at a late one; to Laura Tosi for an introduction to Gozzano and the crepuscolari; to Jelena Todorovič for hospitality in Trieste and for extraordinary illuminations in the discussion of Baroque twilights and the lighting of twilight baroque paintings; to Janet Graffius, who brought the nineteenth-century element of the book to focus around the figure of Hopkins as poet and scientist; to Mark Gibson, who guided me to Ruskin’s later writings and who has been endlessly willing to discuss ghost stories, Tenebrae psalms, Pope’s grotto and lighted windows; John Morrison, who guided me to an apprehension of the convergences of Scottish and Low Countries landscape painting in the nineteenth century; Andrew Biswell and Tim Brennan, whose English Anxieties project generated a whole series of thoughts and conversations about Cambridge in the twilight.
Alexandra Harris has, with great generosity and friendship, read the completed text, to its vast improvement. This book moves, like one of the double oratorios or operas of Pietro Raimondi (1786–1853), in counterpoint with her own remarkable Weatherland. This harmony, this fugue of two texts on related themes, written at the same time, is atmospheric and instinctive: she did not read this book until her own was finished, nor I hers.
The chapter on ‘Dark Corners’ could not have been written without the extraordinary kindness of scholars and custodians of the heritage of recusant Catholicism in Britain: Maurice Whitehead, Thomas McCoog sj, Alison Shell, Anne Dillon and Janet Graffius, whose generosity in granting access to the collections in her care at Stonyhurst is matched only by her profound knowledge of those collections and by her hospitality and that of her family. I am most grateful to Catriona Graffius for a defining conversation about the nature of ‘dark corners of the land’, which stretched through the whole of one lucid midsummer day in the valley of the Hodder.
I have also cause to extend warm thanks to Giles Connacher OSB, Victoria Crowe, Sophie Dietrich, Rt Rev. Hugh Gilbert OSB, Jane Griffiths, Patricia Hanley, Michael Leaman, Paul Mealor, Duncan Rice, Malachy Tallack, Adriaan van der Weel and Bill Zachs.
I cannot find words to thank two of my former colleagues at the University of Aberdeen, Mary Pryor and John Morrison, both of whom have gone far beyond any plausible call of duty or friendship to help me to finish this book, sometimes by actions which can only be described as providing covering fire.
I am lastingly in the debt of those companions on crepuscular excursions through the cities and landscapes of the 1970s and early 1980s who have become the friends and teachers of a lifetime: Edward Coulson, Mark Gibson, Alan and Susanna Powers, James Stourton.
Jonathan Key has offered me unstinting help with every aspect of film and photography discussed in this book. A long conversation with him about cricket and slowly dimming summer evenings was vital to the beginning of work on this project. His sheer courage in adversity and his long-during friendship have respectively merited the epigraph and more than earned the dedication.