The novelist Charles Kingsley lived here as a child from 1831 to 1836, while his father, the Reverend Charles Kingsley served first as Senior Curate then as Rector. Later, in 1855, his novel Westward Ho! did much to stimulate interest in Clovelly and to boost its tourist trade. Clovelly is also described by Charles Dickens in A Message from the Sea and was painted by Rex Whistler, whose cameos of the village were used on a china service by Wedgwood. The surgeon Campbell De Morgan (1811–1876), who first speculated that cancer arose locally and then spread more widely in the body, was born here. Clovelly is mentioned in passing by Rudyard Kipling in Stalky & Co. as being located to the west of the boys' academy. Clovelly is in an advert where a woman is seen rolling down the hill and out onto the pier on a trolley: John West Tuna, BMW, John Smith Beer Turner's painting of Clovelly harbour hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.