Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"From Pilgrimages to Sight-Seeing: Literary Tourism & the Modernist Reader in Early Twentieth-Century England"
Andrea P. Zemgulys
Department of English, University of California, Berkeley
zemgulys@socrates.berkeley.edu
The travel narratives of canonical authors' own "literary pilgrimages" have encouraged the assumption that great writers' homes have always been visitable. However, it was not until the turn of the century that authors' homes in England became fully accesssible to the public -- that literary shrines became a sites of organized tourism. This paper explores how the transformation of authors' homes into literary museums and the production of specialized literary tour books (distinct from touristic literary essays) emerged as projects in England over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This paper will draw on and briefly review the author's other work which illustrates how literary tourism in London was the product of material changes in the city. Demolitions and renovations of central London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were interpreted by topographers and antiquarians in ways that made "literary London" essential to the idea of a modern city. Because of railway building, private redevelopment of commercial and residential areas, and municipal "improvements" (such as street-widening, electrification, and sewage restructuring), nineteenth-century London underwent visible and well-noted transformations. This demolition and rebuilding of the city over the nineteenth century coincided with a growing interest in London's "disappearing" material and architectural heritage, an interest that was organized by the end of the century into groups devoted to recording traces of old London. The texts produced by these societies and by individuals created a way of modernizing London as an "historic" city, and at the turn of the century, the London municipal government (members of which were also members of these "recording" societies) took up the project of recording "historic" London, and used this project to assert its authority and give order to a city cluttered with history. Concomitant with the making of a "historic" London was the making of a "literary London." The houses of the literary great were integral to the "historic" character of London: the London municipal government commemorated dozens of writers' houses with plaques and many writers' houses were "rescued" from demolition by being turned into literary museums. Just as importantly, a particular genre of tour-book writing emerged at this time that also contributed to the making of a "literary London" -- a type of tour-book writing that Virginia Woolf termed "literary geography." After some detours into Warwickshire and Yorkshire, I will conclude with brief reflections on how these sites were interpreted and toured by modernist writers such as Woolf and James.
Andrea P. Zemgulys
3 St. George's Terrace,
Primrose Hill,
London, NW1 8XH,
United Kingdom.
011-44-181-586-9450
zemgulys@socrates.berkeley.edu
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