Literary Geographies

Abstract

La Nouvelle Hélöise, The Lady of the Lake and Lorna Doone were all seminal in the nineteenth-century development of the notion of literary ‘countries’. This notion reached a height of popularity between about the late 1880s and the 1920s, although it finds its inception much earlier with Scott, and is still alive and well today. Those particular forty years brought to birth a slew of publications with titles such as About England with Dickens (1883), Glimpses of the Land of Scott (1888), A Week’s Tramp in Dickens Land (1892), Weekends in Dickens Land (1901), The Thackeray Country (1905), The Blackmore Country (1906), and The Charm of the Scott Country (1927), suggesting a healthy market for this species of parcelling-up different areas of the British Isles via the collected works of different popular authors. In parallel, there was a brisk trade in articles about literary tourism for the periodicals; some books began life as such articles, notably William Sharp’s Literary Geography (1904). Sharp’s contents list usefully suggests the range of other literary countries that had recently been precipitated: ‘The country of George Meredith’, ‘The Country of Stevenson’, ‘The Country of George Eliot’, ‘Thackeray-land’, ‘The Brontë Country’ and so on. In their purest form, the form that interests me here, literary countries and the genres associated with them typically tie verifiable topography, whether rural or urban, primarily to an author’s works, rather than to authorial biography, and they are almost invariably associated with novelists.