Homes and haunts : touring writers’ shrines and countries

346 Pages·2016·13.572 MB·English

by  Booth, Alison

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HOMES AND HAUNTS
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Homes and Haunts
Touring Writers’ Shrines
and Countries
ALISON BOOTH
1
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3
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For Kathie Booth Stevens, who has known the way since I began
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Acknowledgments
Although the themes of this book were incubating before the millennium, they
began to hatch at conferences of the Modernist Studies Association, Interdisciplinary
Nineteenth-Century Studies, and British Women Writers in 2001 and 2002. At
that time, I was still wrapping up my book on collective biographies of women and
about to embark on its digital sequel; these kindred projects made the develop-
ment of Homes and Haunts a longer story. MLA Conventions and conferences of
the International Society for the Study of Narrative, North American Victorian
Studies Association (NAVSA), and the Dickens Project provided occasions across
the following years to exercise the fledgling parts of the project. I am grateful to
those audiences and friends, too many to name, though I particularly thank Eileen
Gillooly, Laurel Brake, and Jay Clayton for hospitality and shared travels for
research and conferences, Pamela Corpron Parker and Alexis Easley for shared
focus on Victorian literary tourism, and the late Linda Peterson, an inspiration on
the Howitts, literary reception, and Victorian life writing. My thanks for attentive
reception and friendly hospitality go to Sally Shuttleworth of the Oxford English
Faculty, Ryan Claycomb of the Jackson Lecture committee at West Virginia
University, faculty and students of the Nineteenth-Century Area Study Group at
the University of Minnesota, and Kim Noling of the Babcock Lecture Committee
at Hartwick College. When I led a workshop at NAVSA (“Literature Travels,
but the Author Is Always at Home,” 2006), I met fellow travelers including the
ever-generous Paul Westover, who invited me to a fruitful session with the Long
Romanticism Study Group at Brigham Young University. With Ann Rowland,
Paul has co-edited a collection, Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the
Nineteenth Century (forthcoming), that invited me to pursue Helen Archibald
Clarke and think further about author country for the final revision of this book.
Nicola Watson, too, has become a welcoming friend; we met at the transformative
Tourism and Literature conference at Harrogate in 2004. Her landmark confer-
ence, “Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture,” at the University of
London in 2007 and her ensuing edited collection enabled me to travel in time
with Gaskell and the Brontës as well as Dickens. I owe much to her expert insights
as a reader of this book and to her pioneering work. I deeply value, as well, the
generous guidance of the anonymous reader for Oxford University Press.
The University of Virginia has supported this project with two sabbatical
Sesquicentennial Associateships and four Summer Research Fellowships, as well as
funding the research assistants. I wish to thank Emily Major and Brooke Lestock
for extensive work on the chapter files and Zotero bibliography, Britta Rowe for
coordinating the image production, and Neal Curtis for his teamwork as proof-
reader extraordinaire. Research funds from the summer institute in the Scholars’
Lab led by Director of Diversity Programs Keisha John, and the extraordinary
Digital Production Group in the Library, have contributed mightily to the index,
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viii Acknowledgments
cover, and illustrations of this book. Paula Durbin-Westby came to the rescue with
her indexing expertise. In the Library, Chris Ruotolo and Christina Deane have
been tireless wonder workers with sources and images. My colleagues and students
in the University of Virginia, English Department have heard or read parts of this
project and made a community of respect for interdisciplinary curiosity, print-
history scholarship, and digital humanities, again, too many to thank here. I especially
thank Steve Arata and Chip Tucker for their readings of the whole manuscript.
I am fortunate to hire Kathie Booth Stevens as an editor of the manuscript at a
crucial phase. At Oxford University Press, I would especially like to thank
Jacqueline Baker for welcoming the project and Ellie Collins, Kavya Ramu, Hilary
Walford, Lowri Ribbons, and Hockley Spare as well as Rachel Platt for the pleasant
and professional transformation into book form.
Among my visits to many shrines, I received an insider’s welcome at a few, and
I extend personal thanks. Janet Kennerley and the late Joan Leach gave us a price-
less day’s immersion in Knutsford and at Plymouth Grove. At Longfellow’s House
George Washington Headquarters, Garrett Cloer masterfully led us through over-
lapping virtual realities. Tom Beardsley and Diann Strausberg of the Old Manse
were inspiring confabulators and hosts. For warm hospitality at Dr. Johnson’s
House and delightful exchange of ideas both in London and Charlottesville, I thank
Morwenna Rae. Lin and Geoff Skippings have kept the Carlyle flame burning,
and I owe them immeasurably more than the admission ticket and guidebook that
I forgot to pay for in my delight at what I had touched as well as seen and heard.
This book not only recollects these encounters at haunted sites, but also imbeds a
history of my sister’s companionship on many English travels. I dedicate this book
to her and a lifetime of travels that we both remember.
Chapters of this book interweave previously published essays, often excerpts
transformed or redistributed; I thank the editors, Susan Griffin (on James),
Lauren Goodlad and Julia M. Wright (on Longfellow and the Brontës), David
Amigoni (on Howitts and Halls), Greg Kucich (on Mitford), Julia Watson
(on Dickens), and Kate Hill (on museums and biography) for the invitations
to submit these pieces, and their publishers for agreeing to share elements and
passages of these articles:
“The Real Right Place of Henry James: Homes and Haunts,” The Henry James
Review 25 (2004): 216–27; “Men and Women of the Time: Victorian
Prosopographies,” in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni
(London: Ashgate, 2005), 41–66; “Author Country: Longfellow, the Brontës,
and Anglophone Homes and Haunts,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the
Net, Special Issue: Victorian Internationalisms, ed. Lauren Goodlad and Julia M.
Wright, 48 (November 2007), n.p.; “Revisiting the Homes and Haunts of Mary
Russell Mitford,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 30:1 (2008): 39–65; “Time-Travel
in Dickens’ World,” Literary Tourism, ed. Nicola J. Watson (London: Palgrave,
2009), 150–63; “Houses and Things: Literary House Museums as Collective
Biography, ” in Museums and Biographies, ed. Kate Hill (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2012), 231–46.
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Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Introduction 1
1. Tours, Texts, Houses, and Things 19
English Professors on Pilgrimage 20
Pilgrimage and Tourism 27
A Grammar of Touristic Motives 31
Making a Tour and Writing It: Homes and Haunts Narratives 34
Country Houses, Gothic, and Tourism with Jane Austen 38
Literary Biography, Museums, and the Small Eponymous Collection 42
The Blue Plaque Scheme 44
Author Country 49
Reading the Haunted Spaces of Museums 51
Things 55
2. Verifying Pilgrimage 59
Voice, Rhetoric, and the Nonfiction of Prosopography 60
Washington Irving as Belated Pilgrim 66
Irving on Avon 72
The English Deer-Slayer: Manly Romance 74
William Howitt Arrives at Homes and Haunts 78
Anna Maria Hall and S. C. Hall: A Collaboration 88
Advertising Elbert Hubbard 96
3. Ladies with Pets and Flowers; with Graveyards and Windswept Moors 102
En Route to Our Village 106
Women, Men, and Pets in a Literary Gallery 116
The Pilgrimage to Three Mile Cross 125
Elizabeth Gaskell in Knutsford and Plymouth Grove 135
In Haworth with the Brontës 144
4. Tenants in Author Country 158
Wordsworthshire: Howitt, Martineau, and the Turf of the Lakes 161
Longfellow in National Headquarters 171
Park Service 184
A Concord Encounter 188
Hawthorne’s (Briefly) Home 190
James in and around Shakespearean Homes 194
A “Little” Past on the Hudson River 197
Haunting Lamb House 199