The literary tourist: readers and places in romantic & Victorian Britain

You've already read the book - why visit the place? Yet thousands every year make pilgrimage to literary graves, houses, and landscapes located across Britain. This book, available in paperback for the first time,tells the story of how readers started visiting sites with bookish associations, describing the rise and development of literary tourism in nineteenth-century Britain around authors from Shakespeare, Gray, Keats and Burns to Scott, the Brontë sisters, and Thomas Hardy. It shows how authorial biography and realist fiction came to shape tourist sentiments, practices, and sites, and explores the unjustly neglected texts associated with literary tourism - guidebooks, travel memoirs, essays on the 'homes and haunts' of authors, full-length studies of literary geographies - as well as the sites themselves, from Poets' Corner to Beatrix Potter's house.Indispensable for anyone interested in the literature, the travel literature and the tourism of the nineteenth-century, and a thought-provoking read for all today's literary tourists.