Nicola J. Watson

Children's literature : classic texts and contemporary trends

A colection of the best literary criticism relating to fifteen classic and contemporary childrens books, ranging from Alcotts Little Women to Reeves Mortal Engines.

Holiday Excursions to Scott Country

Step out of the Victorian grandeur of Waverley station in Edinburgh today, glance up to your left, and you will see rising above you a tall, blackish spire, which gives the impression of being attached to a Gothic church mysteriously buried underground. If you walk to the bottom of it, you find a kiosk, and on payment of a small sum, you can buy a ticket to climb up through its levels and platforms up ever-narrowing stone stairs, to get the finest view of Edinburgh available other than the one from the top of the neighbouring mountain, Arthur’s Seat.

Homes and Haunts

A birthplace is of course in some sense a ‘writer’s house’, but it is almost never the house in which the writing has actually been done, the workshop of genius, the apogee of literary tourist sites. One of the very few exceptions to this rule 9— and marking a transitional state between the Poets’ Birthplaces of my last chapter and the Writers’ Houses that dominate this 9— is the cottage in Upper Bockhampton in which Thomas Hardy was not only born and brought up but wrote some early poetry and the first two of his novels to meet with success and define him as a novelist of rural life. Hardy’s birthplace was celebrated as early as 1902 by one Wilkinson Sherren, some twenty years before his death, when the cottage was still in the ownership of the family, and its privacy was jealously guarded by Hardy himself. Sherren was interested especially in its perceived suitability as the source of Hardy’s oeuvre: Embosomed in this solitude is the picturesque house where Mr Thomas Hardy was born, and where his childhood days were saturated with rural peace and glamour … A more favourable environment for one who was to win reputation chiefly on account of his studies of rustic life, cannot be imagined.1

Rousseau on the Tourist Trail

For aristocrats engaged on the Grand Tour, Switzerland had primarily registered as an inconveniently mountainous barrier to any journey to Rome. By the last decade of the eighteenth century the same landscape was in the process of becoming ‘romantic’ and a tourist draw in its own right. Part of that cultural transformation was effected through the mapping of the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau — fictional and autobiographical — onto the area.1 This mapping was achieved through successive reiterations of tourist visit and travel writing, both privately circulated and published, which enabled further repetition of the experience by others whether through their own travelling or through turning pages in the drawing-room back home.

Rambles in Literary London

In this brief essay I want to consider one way in which the nineteenth century produced and consumed ‘literary London’ as an unique type of tourist terrain, namely via the literary ‘ramble.’ Arguably, the invention of ‘literary London’ represents an extreme instance of the Victorian reader-tourist’s aggressive intervention in relation to the literary, or perhaps it would be better to say, an extreme instance of the reader’s performance of readership within the topographical. If nineteenth-century grave-visiting and house-visiting tended to be an act of homage to the poet’s past materiality and historical verifiability, and if visiting authorial countries such as the Land of Burns, Scott country, or Wessex tended to be a tour scripted by a single author’s works, rambling through literary London by contrast unloosed the reader-tourist almost entirely from the dictatorial logic of any single author, text, oeuvre or genre, releasing them into a promiscuously sociable saunter through a canonical litter of biographical anecdote and imaginary episode strewing the streets of the city.

Epilogue: Enchanted Places & Never—Never Lands

The readerly impulse to locate author and text within real places may have been born out of the extended nineteenth century’s love-affair with biography and with realist fiction, but it is still very much with us a century later. It finds its most extreme form today in the recent expansion of tourism to sites associated with fantasy literature. The absolute ‘otherwhereness’ of fantasy locations would seem designed to baffle the tourist impulse to seek out and verify fictional settings. Yet the power of the desire to map the imaginary onto the actual has meant that even the ‘nonsense’ of Alice in Wonderland (1865) could eventually come to be mapped within Oxford. By way of conclusion to my investigations into literary tourism, I want to discuss this tourism of the fantastic as the limit-case of the sentimental habits and strategies associated with nineteenth-century realism which I have been exploring. I have arranged this brief epilogue therefore as a recapitulation in miniature of the structure of the book as a whole, considering three writers’ houses construed and displayed as ‘enchanted’ sites of entry into the fantastic, before looking at the ways in which three fantasy locations or ‘never-never lands’ are secured to real places and how these forms of organisation may themselves license and organise literary tourism.

Ladies and Lakes

So wrote an anonymous guidebook writer in 1838, describing a set of rationales for the ‘deep and enthusiastic interest’ of the literary tourist. He variously secretes within the landscape associations deriving from the biographical (‘the anxious eye searches for the haunts of those whom history has chronicled’), and the more purely fictive (‘the creatures of another’s imagination’). Most literary tourism is indeed a mongrel compound of both, as my discussion of Bronte country amply illustrates, but in this half of the book I am interested in tracing the origin of the practice of visiting sites associated principally with the fictive, sites where nothing historically verifiable happened, sites where, as this writer endearingly puts it, ‘the fancy feels charmed to revel with the creatures of another’s imagination’. If the governing genre of the first half of this book is therefore biography, the genre that governs this second part is fictional narrative organised within realist settings. My examples coincide in part with those of the guidebook writer 9— the Lac Leman or Lake Geneva of Jean Jacques Rousseau and George Gordon, Lord Byron, and the Trossachs and Loch Katrine of Sir Walter Scott -although I supplement his list with a book published some thirty years after his remarks, R.D. Blackmore’s best-selling novel Lorna Doone (1869).

Cradles of Genius

In 1769 the greatest Shakespearean actor of the day, David Garrick, staged the first major public celebration of Shakespeare’s 200th birthday, the Shakespeare Jubilee, five years and five months late, at Stratford-upon-Avon. Stratford would never again be the sleepy, backward, muddy little coaching-town in economic decline that the carriages full of aristocratic bardolaters arriving in their hundreds from London would find. Garrick’s extravaganza put Stratford on the national map for the generality of tourists, beginning the process of making it a must-see location in itself, rather than merely a coaching town in which the traveller might idle away the hours waiting for his dinner by visiting places of local interest, including Shakespeare’s tomb. The Jubilee would consolidate what has proved an enduring tradition of celebrating not just Shakespeare’s birthday (already being marked by some enthusiasts as early as the 1750s)2 but the birthdays of other poets as well, a tradition thriving today in the shape of the Birthday Procession held in Stratford on the Saturday nearest to 23 April and in that of the 25 January annual celebration of ‘Burns Night’, to cite what remain the two most prominent anniversaries in the literary calendar. The celebration of a poet’s Birthday is the precondition for the invention of the idea of a birthplace, and by extension, the conservation and display of a house as a Birthplace, and not the least important innovation of the Jubilee was Garrick’s initial identification and subsequent display and celebration of Shakespeare’s place of birth.

An Anthology of Corpses

Any literary tourist in Britain begins, in imagination at least, at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Deep in the heart of the metropolis, close beside the tombs of saints and kings, this is the national literary canon sculptured in stone for the benefit of posterity, an architecture of national literary consciousness, the first and still the most comprehensive attraction for the pilgrim with literary leanings. Although it is so famous it really is only an out-of-the-way corner cramped up on the outskirts of the vast royal, aristocratic and ecclesiastical grandeur of the Abbey, in which the individual monuments are so squashed together that you cannot help noticing that poets in death, as in life, are generally forced to travel economy class. There are some 120 writers, poets, actors, musicians and artists buried or memorialised here. The place is jammed with pale marbles like solidified ghosts, and with busts and plaques clinging and crowding like nesting seabirds twenty feet above. The assemblage gives the impression of some fantastic literary party worthy of the imagination of a Walter Savage Landor, in which you should be able to recognise everyone on sight, or at least to recognise the name when they are introduced, although nowadays few other than academics will know or even wish to know who were, say, William Mason, Thomas Campbell, or Matthew Prior (leaseholder of the biggest tomb in the place).