One of the fascinating things about literature is just how much of it actually exists. What’s even more extraordinary is how much there is of it in Britain, and how it shapes where we live.
Look at a map of America and place names sing out to you. New York, New York, (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66, Kansas City, Here I Come, Long Distance Information Give Me Memphis, Tennessee, Highway 61 Revisited, Ventura Highway, Sweet Home Alabama, Oklahoma, San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair). You don’t need a satnav to guide you round the US; an iPod and a selection of suitable works from The Great American Songbook will do the trick. It’s a country where there’s almost a tune in every road sign. A couple of years ago, heading out of Albuqerque, New Mexico, on Interstate 40, for example, almost immediately a city name on an overhead gantry made me cry out: ‘Is this the way to Amarillo?’ It was.
In Britain, places and roads have never been a major source of inspiration for modern song writers, a shame when you listen to Penny Lane or anything by the Proclaimers. Regrettably, it seems there are few kicks to be had on the A66 and nobody – lyrically, at least – has ever left their heart in Sutton Coldfield. Britain, however, is celebrated in a different but no less compelling fashion: in literature. We may seem a curiously unsentimental race but burrow down into our souls and poetry lurks. There is scarcely a place in these islands that hasn’t been acclaimed in novel, verse or play.
English, as she is spoken here, is riddled with verse; lines of poetry that have simply become part of our linguistic landscape: our everyday conversation littered with verbal ornamentations that firmly display the fact that ours is the language of Shakespeare. A few examples – though I could list hundreds – include: ‘strike while the iron is hot’ (Chaucer); ‘neither borrower nor lender be’ (Shakespeare); ‘love at first sight’ (Marlowe); ‘to play with fire’ (Vaughan); ‘trip the light fantastic’ (Milton); ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’ (Alexander Pope); ‘ignorance is bliss’ (Thomas Gray); and finally – appropriately, perhaps, in this abbreviated illustration – ‘less is more’ (Browning).
Just as our mouths have been filled with their poetry, so writers have similarly shaped our views of the British landscape. No visit to the Yorkshire Moors, for example, can be undertaken without thoughts of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; Dorset will be forever glimpsed through the prism of Thomas Hardy’s fictional Wessex; the Kent marshes will always belong to Dickens. But it’s not just a transformation of the imagination – writers have left physical landmarks too.
Down in England’s southwest lies Westward Ho!, the only town in the world to have been named after a novel (by Charles Kingsley) and the only place to have an exclamation mark in its name. In London’s Kings Cross station you can find signs directing you to Platform 9¾, from J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. On a September weekend in Bath, thousands travel from as far afield as the US and Japan in order to dress up as Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy or Miss Elizabeth Bennet by Jane Austen.The most popular December walk in London takes visitors to see the real-life locations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The real-life places of a novel? Cynics might justifiably declare: ‘Bah! Humbug!’
About 200 years ago, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, someone we shall meet again very shortly, advanced the view in his 1817 Biographia Literaria that if a writer could infuse a ‘human interest and a semblance of truth’ into an extraordinary story, the reader would be happy to suspend judgement concerning ‘the implausibility of the narrative’: in other words, we are only too happy to believe that the best novels are all true.
Even if it’s only make-believe – does it really matter if we choose to take it seriously? Except that the British take their fiction very seriously indeed. A ferocious debate has raged for decades on the exact location of PG Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle, a fictitious stately home inhabited by the imaginary Lord Emsworth and his prize-winning pig (‘the Empress of Blandings’). I’ve personally been involved in stand-up rows over the likely real-life home village of Richmal Crompton’s Just William (hardcore fans have triangulated the position based on the author’s passing references to genuine locations such as the A1 and Stratford-upon-Avon).
If Britain is nationally more obsessed with literature than other countries, it may be because we have always been voracious readers – a habit dating back several centuries. In Pepys’ diary the author robustly displays four main passions: reading, writing, the theatre and sex. Pepys is wracked with guilt at his endless trips to buy new books; wasting money on books seems to trouble him more than his inappropriate extra-marital dalliances with Mrs Bagwell or Mrs Lane.
It was Britain where the novel established its powerful grip in the 19th century, with literary serials by the likes of Wilkie Collins and Dickens. Dickens’ readers in the US were so desperate to know the outcome of The Old Curiosity Shop that people stood on the dockside in New York shouting to arriving passengers: ‘Is Little Nell dead?’ Not everyone, however, was moved by the story – Oscar Wilde remarked: ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.’
Countries such as the US, France and Germany may have museums devoted to their Premier League writers: the likes of Mark Twain, Colette and Thomas Mann, who are celebrated in their own lands with due ceremony. Where Britain surpasses the rest of the world is in the eclectic range of this celebration. Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth and Keats, for example, have full-bore museums; several of them each in the case of Shakespeare, Dickens and Wordsworth.
But in the UK there are lavish galleries and museums devoted to those from among the lower divisions of literature: including – to name but a few – Roald Dahl, Dylan Thomas, Beatrix Potter, George Eliot, J M Barrie, Thomas Hardy, D H Lawrence, Dr Johnson, Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Carlyle and – remarkably – even a museum devoted to a fictional character: Sherlock Holmes. Elementary, my dear Watson. (Sherlock Holmes never said this, of course, but once again we’re venturing into the mysterious land of ‘who really gives a damn?’ – all that matters is for people to believe it was so.)
Today, I estimate that in the UK there are more than 100 attractions and places that you can visit connected with writers. There are dozens of literary properties owned by local authorities, trusts and well-organised enthusiasts. And the number continues to grow. An appeal is under way at the moment, for example, to buy the cottage owned by William Blake in Felpham, West Sussex, where he wrote Jerusalem. We enjoy the magic of great writing, so what is more natural than wanting to see where ‘the magic happened’, as the Stratford visitor described it.
I get the impression that the only people who have travelled to the furthest corners of these islands are dogged football supporters who seem to think nothing of driving several hundred miles in a day to watch their team probably lose. Most people these days are happy to jump on a plane to travel a couple of thousand miles when they have no idea what a wonderfully varied and fascinating country we have on our doorstep. If you need an excuse to discover the UK, visiting literary places is as good a reason as any. It needn’t be expensive: there are lots of good, inexpensive places to stay, and advance purchase rail tickets can be spectacularly cheap. Take your imagination out for a holiday and who knows where you’ll end up?
Treasured Island, A Book Lover’s Tour of Britain is published by AA Publishing, £16.99
