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

250 Pages·2006·31.81 MB·English

by  Nicola J. Watson (auth.)

The Literary Tourist
Also by Nicola Watson
THE ANTIQUARY (edited)
AT THE LIMITS OF ROMANTICISM; Essays in Cultural, Material, and Feminist
Criticism (edited with Mary Favret)
ENGLAND'S ELIZABETH; An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (edited with Michael
Dobson)
REVOLUTION AND THE FORM OF THE BRITISH NOVEL, 1790-1825
The Literary Tourist
Readers and Places in Romantic &
Victorian Britain
Nicola J. Watson
Senior Lecturer in Literature
Open University
* ©Nicola J. Watson 2006
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-9992-4
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First published 2006 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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ISBN 978-0-230-21092-9 ISBN 978-0-230-58456-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230584563
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Watson, Nicola]., 1958-
The literary tourist : readers and places in romantic & Victorian Britain
I Nicola]. Watson.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4039-9992-4
1. Literary landmarks-England. 2. Authors, English-Homes and
haunts-England. 3. Tourism-England. I. Title.
PR109.W38 2006
914.2'0486-dc22
2006044635
Transferred to Digital Printing 2007
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction: Readers and Places 1
Part I Placing the Author 21
Chapter 1: An Anthology of Corpses 23
Poets cornered 23
Grave matters 32
In a country churchyard 39
In a city cemetery 47
Chapter 2: Cradles of Genius 56
Shakespeare's Birthplace 59
Burns's Birthplace 68
'The Land of Burns' and 'Shakespeare's Stratford' 77
Chapter 3: Homes and Haunts 90
Abbotsford 93
Haworth 106
Part II Locating the Fictive 129
Chapter 4: Ladies and Lakes 131
La Nouvelle HelOise (1761) 133
The Lady of the Lake (1810) 150
Lorna Doone (1869) 163
Chapter 5: Literary Geographies 169
Literary countries 169
Hardy's Wessex 176
v
vi Contents
Epilogue: Enchanted Places and Never-Never Lands 201
Notes 213
Index 232
List of Illustrations
Cover Cover/Frontispiece: David Roberts (also variously
Picture attributed to Sir William Allan and to Benjamin
Haydon), 'Sir Walter Scott on the occasion of his visit
to Shakespeare's tomb in Holy Trinity Church,
Stratford-upon-Avon on 8 April 1828.' Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust.
Figure 1.1 Gray's monument, Stoke Poges, from Charles
Mackenzie, Interesting and Remarkable Places (London,
1832). Writers' Resources, Oxford. 40
Figure 1.2 The graves of Keats and Shelley in the Protestant
cemetery in Rome, from William Howitt, Homes and
Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (1847:
3rd edn, London, 1858). Writers' Resources, Oxford. SO
Figure 2.1 Frontispiece to Samuel Ireland, Picturesque Views on
the Upper, or Warwickshire Avon (London, 1795).
Writers' Resources, Oxford. 65
Figure 2.2 New Brig of Doon, with Burns' monument, from The
Land of Burns: A Series of Landscapes and Portraits,
illustrative of the Life and Writings of the Scottish Poet.
The Landscapes from paintings made expressly for the
work by D.O. Hill esq. R.S.A. The Literary Department by
Professor Wilson ... and Robert Chambers esq. (Glasgow,
Edinburgh and London, 1840). Bodleian Library. 75
Figure 2.3 'The Poet's Dream', from The Land of Burns: A Series of
Landscapes and Portraits, illustrative of the Life and
Writings of the Scottish Poet. The Landscapes from
paintings made expressly for the work by D.O. Hill esq.
R.S.A. The Literary Department by Professor Wilson ...
and Robert Chambers esq. (Glasgow, Edinburgh and
London, 1840). Bodleian Library. 85
Figure 3.1 Abbotsford, from William Howitt, Homes and Haunts
of the Most Eminent British Poets (1847: 3rd edn,
London, 1858). Writers' Resources, Oxford. 104
Figure 3.2 Haworth Parsonage, from Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life
of Charlotte Bronte (London, 1857). Bodleian Library. 117
vii
viii List of Illustrations
Figure 5.1 J .H. Field, 'A Map of the Wessex of Thomas Hardy's
Novels' (1935). Dorset County Museum, Dorchester.
©The Dorset Natural History and Archaeological
Society. 200
Figure 5.2 'Alice's Shop- a Wonderland in the heart of
Oxford', postcard, c. 2002. Alice's Shop, Oxford. 208
Introduction
I Readers and places
This is a book about literary tourism as it develops over the course of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is about the ways in which read
ing, at least for a noticeable and mainstream category of literature's con
sumers, becomes progressively and differentially locked to place, over a
period defined by the works of Thomas Gray and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
at one end and those of Thomas Hardy at the other. This period saw the
practice of visiting places associated with particular books in order
to savour text, place and their interrelations grow into a commercially
significant phenomenon, witnessing the rise of William Shakespeare's
Stratford-upon-Avon, Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford, Robert Burns's
Alloway and the Bronte sisters' Haworth, amongst other flourishing sites
of native literary pilgrimage.
After all these years of postcards from Anne Hathaway's Cottage and
biscuit-tins from Haworth, this continuing desire to situate canonical lit
erary texts in equally canonical landscapes may seem almost natural, but
in other respects it remains a deeply counter-intuitive response to the
pleasures and possibilities of imaginative reading. If I think back to my
own sense of place when reading as a child, for example, I do not
remember ever bothering to believe that places described were real in the
way that my own domestic and school existence was real and physical.
'Real' was where I was when reading-in a window-seat, up the walnut
tree or under the bedclothes (and they were still bedclothes then). The
book itself was, in Norton Juster's resonant phrase, 'a phantom toll
booth', or the 'wardrobe' that C.S. Lewis imagined as delivering you to
Narnia, an entry-point or escape-hatch to a place altogether elsewhere.1
Robert Louis Stevenson's formulation of 'The Land of Counterpane'
1