Abstract
Literary tourism began to develop as a popular pursuit of the middle classes in Britain at the same time as literary biography, marketed in various forms to the same audience, emerged as one of the success stories of publishing. In many ways biography encouraged and sustained the practice of literary tourism. It was one of the most significant means of establishing authors as celebrities and disseminating their homes and habitats to a wide audience. Biographies named and described writers’ houses, sometimes including collectable engravings of them, investing these homes with iconic significance and making them desirable and consumable spaces. As I shall show, biographers offered their readers imaginary tours, which functioned as vicarious experience or even as the inspiration to set out on actual literary pilgrimages.
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Notes
Thomas Medwin, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron. Noted During a Residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822 (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), 17.
William Howitt, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1847).
Review of the Account of the Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough, Gentleman’s Magazine (March 1842), cited in Samuel Johnson, The Lives of The Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. 1, 80.
For Johnson’s sense of the democracy of biography, see Idler, no. 84 (1759), in The Ilder and The Adventurer, ed. W.J. Bate, John M. Bullitt and L.F. Powell, vol. 2 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), 261–4, esp. 263. See also Robert Folkenflick, Samuel Johnson, Biographer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘A Prefatory Observation on Modern Biography’, The Friend, no. 21 (1810), in The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, no. 4, vol. II of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series, lxxv, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London and Princeton: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 1969), 287.
William Wordsworth, A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns: Occasioned by an Intended Republication of the Account of the Life of Burns, by Dr. Currie (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1816)
W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. 3, 111–36: 122.
James Buzard, The Beaten Track. European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
Thomas Medwin, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron. Noted During a Residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822 (London: Henry Colburn, 1824)
James Henry Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries; with Recollections of the Author’s Life, and of his Visit to Italy (London: Henry Colburn, 1828)
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Lady Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron. London: Henry Colburn, 1834
Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1830).
See Mary Shelley’s biographical prefaces and notes to The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 4 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1839)
Henry Fothergill Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans. With Illustrations of her Literary Character from her Private Correspondence, 2 vols (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836)
Leman Blanchard, Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1841).
Byron’s poems, ‘Fare Thee Well’ and ‘A Sketch from Private Life’ were privately circulated in 1816 but widely pirated after being reprinted in the Champion newspaper as ‘Lord Byron’s Poems On His Own Domestic Circumstances’. See Samuel Chew, Byron in England. His Fame and After-Fame (1924; New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 19–26.
Thomas Medwin, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron. Noted During a Residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822 (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), 1.
James Henry Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries; with Recollections of the Author’s Life, and of his Visit to Italy (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 4.
Leman Blanchard, Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1841), vol. 1, 78–9.
The epigraph is from Mary Howitt, The Citizen of Prague, 3 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1846).
Howitt, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1847), vol. 2, 138.
William Hazlitt, Review of’ spence’s Anecdotes of Pope’, Edinburgh Review (May 1820), in P.P. Howe, ed., The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, Centenary Edition, vol. 16 (London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1934), 152–81: 153.
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© 2009 Julian North
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North, J. (2009). Literary Biography and the House of the Poet. In: Watson, N.J. (eds) Literary Tourism and Nineteenth- Century Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234109_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234109_5
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