The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 6, pp. 526-528. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710760508

Many readers of fiction and literature like to visit the geographical locations where stories are set. In the last two centuries or so, this has grown in the literary tourism we know today. If we think of Hill Top and 221B Baker Street, Wessex and Exmoor, the Trossachs and Lake Katrine, and Lake Geneva, literary associations of (respectively) Beatrix Potter and Sherlock Holmes, Thomas Hardy and R.D. Blackmore, Sir Walter Scott and Rousseau come to mind. We have, then, the place of the book and the book of the place, the location of an author in a landscape, the association of a landscape with places in fiction, and as Watson says, “landscape as a historical palimpsest”.

At times, literary tourists have to look beyond topographical reality “imagination is needed to look past reality”, as in the Exmoor of Lorna Doone, and at times tourists superimpose on landscape what they think it should look like. Even so, this attempt to re‐experience the feelings readers experienced in books by Jane Austen or the Brontës or in the poetry of Shakespeare or Burns drives visitors to go to Chawton and Haworth, Stratford and Ayr. There is a long tradition of such literary pilgrimage extending back into the 18th century: we know this not just from well‐known writers like Boswell but from the numerous guidebooks and literary gazetteers published over the years (so many in fact that they become a sub‐literary form in their own right).

We know from the history of travel literature and tourism that literature and autobiography, nostalgia and adventure, sentiment and the search for the picturesque combine in this hybrid field. Watson (a lecturer in literature at the UK Open University) opens this field up well in a witty and well‐written study of such literary tourism. She keeps her brief tight to within the period of the sub‐title, stretching it slightly this end to cover the numerous literary travel guides published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (on writers and places like Hardy's Wessex). Earlier we find the same phenomenon with the Brontës (whose Haworth and its gloomy resonances derive as much from Gaskell's life of Charlotte Brontë as from the books themselves) and with Scott (whose home of Abbotsford was romanticized by writers like Washington Irving).

Many editions of works by such writers came to include drawings and photographs representing the places where scenes were set. Tours were organized, just as they are today (to find Alice's shop or Lyra's bench, from Lewis Carroll and Philip Pullman, in Oxford), opening up places like Lake Katrine and monuments like the Scott Monument in Edinburgh to a stream of literary fans. Watson has visited all these herself and analyzes the reasons, historical and current, why we want to “place the author” and “locate the fictive” (the two major sections of the book) in such literary tourism. The realism of the novel itself seems to have encouraged this. Thomas Hardy even revised some of his place names for later editions of his novels, while maps of Wessex are still remembered in collected editions of his works. Publisher John Murray capitalized on literary tourism from the 1830s by starting a well‐known series of guidebooks, and Baedecker and others continued the tradition.

The museum and heritage centre business deals with these issues today. Places like “the land of Burns”, “Catherine Cookson country”, like visits to writers’ houses, have grown in their appeal. Watson cites visits to the house of Lucy Boston, author of The House at Green Knowe series for children (and could have added Roald Dahl in the same breath). For adults and children alike, literary tourism is alive and well. What is distinctive about Watson's book is its careful study of how it all started and what forms it took. Readers of Rousseau wanted not only to visit Lake Geneva and the landscape of his book La Nouvelle Helöise but also to meet him as well. Shelley read Rousseau and so there were two reasons to visit not just Lake Geneva but Rome as well (where Shelley and Keats were buried). Dorothy Wordsworth owned guidebooks about Scott's landscape. Haworth is arranged according to what it looked like when Gaskell wrote about it. Even epitaphs and memorials add to the atmospherics and aesthetics of literary tourism.

So we have the real and the fictive, the biographical and the fictional, the rock by the stream where Charlotte Brontë wrote and the bed where Burns bedded chamber‐maids. Some of these places are never‐never lands and pastiches of real places transformed in the authors’ imagination. But it does not stop literary tourists searching in order to get closer: pilgrimage, nostalgia, memorialization are words that rightly come to mind. Watson has produced a book likely to interest readers in both the literary and tourist domains, and a study worth putting on the shelves of academic and public libraries.