The Toast’s literary pilgrimages archive can be found here.
When you live across the ocean from where your favourite stories are set, Europe can seem nearly as imaginary as Middle Earth. London and Paris are real, but in my mind they exist as an amalgam of stories. Pure text doesn’t provide the sensory cues of visual media, so it demands that readers participate in creating the world of the story. It’s an intimate act of collaboration, a subjective and often meaningful experience, reading a book and imagining its setting.
For bookworms, the only way to bring our experiences with a text into the real world is through a literary pilgrimage. The actual location may never replace the image in a reader’s mind, but the experience in a real space can lend concreteness to the text. After we mentally inhabit a story, does visiting a tangible space feel more real than the story, the inner lives of the characters? Can seeing a writer’s desk give us as much insight into their mind as the words they wrote, even if they haven’t sat at that desk in a hundred years or more? If not — if the places we imagine will always be more vivid than the ones we see and later remember — why are literary pilgrimages so alluring?
I work literary stops into vacations at every opportunity. I’ve been losing myself in books for as long as I can remember (my elementary school nickname was Mr. Frodo), and despite growing up in Canada, I devoured a lot of European literature. A semester studying in England gave me the chance to see locations of significance and relate them to some of my favourite European texts. First I spent four months at Herstmonceux Castle, which Horace Walpole visited before writing The Castle of Otranto. Between the spooky atmosphere and ghostly legends, I was writing Gothic novels in my head; it was even easier than usual to picture myself in the books.
In that mindset, I sought out literary sights at every opportunity. My number one must-see was Paris, as Les Misérables has been one of my favourite books since I was a teenager. Modern Paris is a far cry from Hugo’s vision, but that didn’t stop me from imposing the book on the city. Every time I’ve read Les Mis I’ve had to create 19th-century Paris in my mind, but seeing the actual city lent depth to my mental picture. Nearly all of the locations in Hugo’s sprawling epic are real, but the city has been thoroughly restructured in the years since the novel was written. Nonetheless, I wanted to visit the spot where Javert famously plunged into the Seine between Notre Dame Cathedral and the Palais de Justice. Standing there, I thought, surely I would be able to conjure an image of him in despair, torn between symbolic value systems.
Whether it was because it was nighttime, because Google Maps lies sometimes, or because of my apparent inability to read maps, I never quite found the right spot. The experience remained theoretical, but the night was saved from anticlimax by a much stranger sight. Despite his dedication to accuracy, Hugo seemingly invented the street where Valjean lived. I walked by its approximate location and, glancing down the street, I saw the exact building I’d always imagined. Nothing about it was unique or distinct, but it was exactly what I’d pictured when I read the book. As I got closer I noticed that this building had the same number as Valjean’s home in the novel. Of course, it’s unlikely that Hugo had that specific building in mind when he was writing, but the writer’s intentions pale beside my personal experience with the text.
Reading fiction is always an act of collaboration between the reader and the story, and physical spaces can be read in the same way. These experiences can then become entwined with our ideas of the text itself, enriching our interpretation of it. Hugo wove the symbolism of the Cathedral and the Palais into his novel, but that significance is most apparent to readers who know Paris. And while both buildings have symbolic value on their own, I cast subjective meaning onto a nondescript one because of my love of a story.
Something similar was at play when I visited the Keats House. When I learned that it’s possible to visit the garden where John Keats wrote “Ode to a Nightingale,” I couldn’t book the trip fast enough. It’s been turned into a museum dedicated to the poet who lived there briefly, but the building itself has no inherent meaning; whatever ghosts or echoes of Keats we feel there are projections. The tours are led by docents; ours largely drew anecdotes from Keats’ letters as we walked through the building. The letters you see, like Keats’ poetry, give more insight into his mind, but in his house you can also view a statue that sits at his real height (barely five feet) and the small portrait of Shakespeare he kept for company when he was living away from home.
Such details and tangible realities are like an anchor; they tie the literary pilgrim to their subject by creating a sense that this was a person, not just an author. It’s difficult to separate Keats’ life from his poetry, so bringing the poet to life through his everyday existence enriches your appreciation for his work as well. He and his lover famously wrote each other letters from either side of this duplex, but the walls have been knocked down, so you can practically see Fanny Brawne’s room from Keats’. I stood outside his tiny room, thinking about his horrible death from misdiagnosed consumption and his firm belief that he would quickly be forgotten after his death. It’s easy to imagine the two lovers sending letters, but standing there and seeing how little distance actually separated them made it much clearer and sadder — I unsuccessfully suppressed a sob, worrying the kind old British ladies on the tour.
We fall in love with writers for their works, for their words. The places where they worked and lived act as reminders that they were real, flawed people — they existed outside of their works, and we can love them even more for it. Physical spaces feel authentic; they can’t be manipulated and twisted as easily as language. Yet with the act of preservation comes curation. The literary pilgrim remains removed from the real person, since others have decided how to present the writer’s life. Even Keats’ friends regretted expanding the inscription on his tombstone beyond the simple epitaph that the poet himself requested (Stanley Plumly goes into this at length in his lovely Posthumous Keats). If people who knew Keats found their thoughts of him muddled (and changeable) after his death, readers, from this distance, can’t possibly get a completely authentic view of him, even aided by visiting the place where he lived and imagining his everyday physical reality.
But a biased reading isn’t inherently negative; after all, such adventures are ultimately about the reader more than the writer. The most memorable literary pilgrimages are those undertaken for texts that are most important to us; anything we learn will then be coloured by our pre-existing knowledge and opinions. Further details and experiences can still enrich the text, and we gain better understanding of our relationship to it alongside others on a similar journey.
Other readers and pilgrims also made my experience at Oscar Wilde’s grave more meaningful. I visited Paris only months after the plexiglass shield was erected around the tombstone to protect it from fans’ lipsticked kisses, but naturally people now just kiss and write on the barrier. Messages like “thanks for getting me through high school” and “thanks for giving me the courage to be myself” adorned the glass alongside quotes from Wilde’s works; people had also shoved flowers and multi-page letters under the barrier. His gravestone has become an ever-changing, living monument, and a testament of the profound effect that Wilde’s work and legacy have had on people’s lives. Countless strangers from all over the world have had intimate, personal moments with Wilde through this physical symbol, but they form a collective experience. I may not have learned anything new about Wilde’s life by visiting, but I felt connected to him through others who had made this same pilgrimage and left their mark on it.
Literary pilgrimages offer the opportunity to make reading more social than is usually possible — we watch plays, movies, and television with other people, but we tend to read alone. That means that reading can be a very isolated experience, but still an intimate one, since we create meaning and connection with the text. Our individual histories and biases shape our perceptions of a book or an author, and the literary pilgrimage is another lens that colours our reading. But it’s also a shared experience, with the people who come with us and every other passionate fan who has made (or will make) the same journey.
When readers visit the setting of a favourite novel (whether the actual site, or the inspiration for the novel’s setting), we’re accepting this fictional history as authentic, connected to our real world in some way — and as far as our own experiences go, it is. No matter its real history, a place has the meaning that we give to it, since the experience of a pilgrimage is as subjective as reading the text. When we impose our imaginations on the real world, we’re essentially melding our mental visions with the landscape, creating something that feels more genuine than the literary worlds that have previously existed only in our minds. When we can see, hear, and touch something, it’s much easier to accept that it’s real. We’re drawn to film adaptations of our favourite books for this reason, too — because we can see and hear the characters that had before existed only in our minds. When we make a literary pilgrimage, we’re writing ourselves into the history of a space, one shared with a text, a writer, and countless other pilgrims. While the negotiation between physical and imaginary space is tricky to pin down precisely, literary pilgrimages allow the two spaces to meet, if only briefly, and bring readers a step closer to something they love.
All photos courtesy of the author.
Tags: allison o’toole, authors, books, john keats, literary pilgrimages, oscar wilde, travel, victor hugo
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Doc’s house in Cannery Row.
(eta: we are honeymooning in Monterey; said destination was cemented when MrChouffe realized that the Cannery Row in Monterey was, in fact, that Cannery Row.)
Unrelated to literature, but the aquarium there is awesome! (I’ve been several times now)
The aquarium was a HUGE selling point, believe me. 🙂
! If you were to look uphill from CR and wave, a wild DishKit would wave back! It’s really beautiful here. The beachhh. The mountainssss.
I grew up loving books so, so much – according to my mother, I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia in kindergarten, to the disbelief of my teachers – but I haven’t made pilgrimage yet. I am going to New Zealand in February to hike Mount Doom, and I’m chomping at the bit. Obviously it’s not precisely a literary pilgrimage, as I’m sure JRRT was not envisioning Ngauruhoe when he described Frodo’s journey into the volcano, but it’s as close as I’ll ever get to Middle Earth.
I intend to visit Hobbiton for the same reason!! It’s the best I can do…
I would love to go to New Zealand for the same reason! 🙂 I live in England, so I guess I have seen some of the scenery that Tolkien would have been referencing, but the films were amazing and I want to go!
I’m working a literary pilgrimmage into my trip to London next week: 221 B Baker St 🙂
I peregrinated to Montreux this summer to see Nabokov’s grave, the fancypants hotel where he lived, and a great statue of him wearing shorts and looking grouchy (perhaps due to the indignity of being immortalized in shorts?)
I would recommend peregrinating on a day when it’s not pouring rain, but apart from that, I really enjoyed it.
It took me a long time to realize that my plain uncomplicated love for reading BOOKS, all the BOOKS was a priming me for deep Anglophilia.
I ended up going to an Oxford College for my study abroad, which fulfilled all kinds of Harriet Vane and Harry Potter dreams I’d only half realized I had. I remember sitting on a riverbank, eating a sandwich, reading chunks of Three Men In a Boat and being ridiculously happy.
Weirdly, stratford-on-avon didn’t do much for me, it reminded me of a Colonial Village more than an authentic place, which is silly, since it’s not like I had a personal audience with any of the OTHER dead authors I care about, but that’s how I felt. “This is a bed much like the one Shakespeare might have slept on…this is a wash basin much like the one he might have used…” etc
i visited Pere Lachaise, the cemetery in Paris where Oscar Wilde is buried, in 2005/2006, pre-plexiglass. I brought chocolate truffles for the grave of Brillat Savarin, and peonies for Wilde. His grave was amazing and ridiculous – kisses, quotes, misquotes, personal testimonies. The penis is missing off the art deco angel of his grave, or at least was when i visited. The story at that time was that it had been stolen so many times that they’d stopped re-attaching it, and the current one rested on the groundskeeper’s desk as a paperweight.
I felt the same way about Stratford-Upon-Avon! I really loved the statues but otherwise it felt entirely like edifice…
When I was living in Britain, I had a job I didn’t love near Victoria, and most days I’d go for a walk through Green Park, and walk down Piccadilly. And then one day I realised the walk was just where Peter Wimsey would have lived, and whole days got a bit better.
I studied at Stratford upon Avon for three months some years ago and absolutely hated it. Admittedly that was down to various things, like living with the landlords from hell and the student community being a goldfish bowl (60 students and rather more sexism and homophobia than you’d hope in a place studying Shakespeare, for heaven’s sake), but I didn’t warm to the town at all.
I’ve been to the Keats House! Weirdly, I felt less of a sense of his presence in the house than I did walking around on Hampstead Heath afterwards. But that day two actors were doing a staged reading of selections from Keats’ letters to and about Fanny Brawne on the front lawn of the house, and that turned out to be unexpectedly wonderful. Oh, Keats. I wish you’d lived longer.
When I was living in Britain, I had a job I didn't love near Victoria, and most days I'd go for a walk through Green Park, and walk down Piccadilly. And then one day I realised the walk was just where Peter Wimsey would have lived, and whole days got a bit better.
I visited Flannery O’Connor’s farm in Georgia and appreciated that they still keep peacocks around.
I know what you mean. The peacocks bring across the feeling of living continuity between Flannery and the visitor that’s missing for me at many other literary pilgrimage sites. Sort of like the polydactyl cats at Hemingway’s Key West house, all descended from his own cat.
I visited Flannery O'Connor's farm in Georgia and appreciated that they still keep peacocks around.
A few years back, I spent a week with a choir in residence in Oxford (Christ Church), and it was AMAZING. Everyone else in the group was geeking out over the Harry Potter spots while I skipped all the day tours and made my own Gaudy Night walking tour. Best week of my life.
I visited Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, just a few weeks ago. A lot of the place had been altered to fit their new museum approach, so there were big signs and exhibition placards everywhere, as well as many unnecessary tweaks to Wharton’s original plan. So the interior wasn’t quite what I had hoped. But the gardens were pure Edith: wild and tame at the same time, bowing to society’s demands yet expressing her own personal twist with a wink. I came away with a sense of her as a full person that was completely new.
Hemingway’s grave is in my town, and although the town is where he was said to have been the happiest in his depressed life, it’s also where he basically drank himself to death. People pour him shots of whiskey as tradition, which is a bit morbid but I suppose fitting. It’s odd to visit there- graves are such small places that don’t reflect such an enormous legacy.
When authors try to create a sense of place, it’s like magic to find out you can literally step into it. One of the coolest thing I’ve ever done was take a Romanticism class in college that involved hiking in the Lake District and reading Wordsworth. We read “Michael” sitting in the actual sheepfold, and it was such a powerful connection to the text.
If you like Keats, visit the Keats and Shelley House in Rome. You can sit in the room where Keats died and look at his death mask – very eerie. The sense of claustrophobia in the small space made me extra sad for his last days, feeling like nobody would ever remember him.
The saddest pilgrimage is visiting 84 Charing Cross Road and seeing McDonald’s. I know it hasn’t been a bookstore for decades, but SOB.
A Macdonalds? Ye gods. It was a different bookshop when I was growing up and visiting the Charing Cross Road second-hand bookshops regularly, then it turned into a record shop, which we mourned. But that’s nothing compared to a Macdonald’s. Heresy.
We might have completely planned a family vacation with children around books that were important to us.
The ones we needed most to locate were Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, and Winnie the Pooh. We got Ransome brilliantly, by inhabiting the Lake District for a couple days, staying in the B&B that could have been Holly Howe, and sailing a small boat to an island. It turned out Beatrix Potter was also in the Lakes District. That gave me a huge thrill because they are so strongly tied to my Bostonian grandmother, and to able to prowl the Potter house and see her books open to illustrations that you see as you raise you head was amazing.
Winnie the Pooh was different, and slightly odder. We found the place in the south west of the country, and found a place to sleep and eventually located the Hundred Acre Wood and had a surreal hike through it. The landscape was so profoundly captured by the Shephard illustrations, including the sandy pit and the special place and the bridge where Poohsticks was played. It was not one whit diminished when a herd of tiny children with wellington boots and amazing accents came in from the other direction (clearly a school outing) seriously carrying their own sticks, and were read a short except from the story and dropped their sticks over the upstream side of the bridge. We looked later, and there is an edifice of sticks on the first sandbar downstream.
Funnily enough, I felt like Shakespeare’s ghost could well be at the rebuilt Globe theater. It felt SO different from auditoriums where I normally work, and it smelled lovely, like fresh wood and rushes. I’m not surprised you didn’t find him in Stratford on Avon – he was a London dude.
We might have completely planned a family vacation with children around books that were important to us.
The ones we needed most to locate were Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, and Winnie the Pooh. We got Ransome brilliantly, by inhabiting the Lake District for a couple days, staying in the B&B that could have been Holly Howe, and sailing a small boat to an island. It turned out Beatrix Potter was also in the Lakes District. That gave me a huge thrill because they are so strongly tied to my Bostonian grandmother, and to able to prowl the Potter house and see her books open to illustrations that you see as you raise you head was amazing.
Winnie the Pooh was different, and slightly odder. We found the place in the south west of the country, and found a place to sleep and eventually located the Hundred Acre Wood and had a surreal hike through it. The landscape was so profoundly captured by the Shephard illustrations, including the sandy pit and the special place and the bridge where Poohsticks was played. It was not one whit diminished when a herd of tiny children with wellington boots and amazing accents came in from the other direction (clearly a school outing) seriously carrying their own sticks, and were read a short except from the story and dropped their sticks over the upstream side of the bridge. We looked later, and there is an edifice of sticks on the first sandbar downstream.
Funnily enough, I felt like Shakespeare's ghost could well be at the rebuilt Globe theater. It felt SO different from auditoriums where I normally work, and it smelled lovely, like fresh wood and rushes. I'm not surprised you didn't find him in Stratford on Avon – he was a London dude.
I grew up in London, albeit in the suburbs so that it was a fair journey into town, and London’s so huge that I only ever got to know pockets of it. Actually, the main thing I explored in detail was the British Museum, I was all over that when I was 14 going to lectures and gallery talks, and I still wish I had access to it. Then when I was a bit older, it was a trip around the second hand bookshops and music shops and Foyles with my best friend, followed by a student ticket to a concert or one of the many amazing theatres, or perhaps a meal in Chinatown. This was the mid-90s, the RSC were still in London, and I saw so much incredible theatre. So I didn’t really go to author’s homes or what have you much, at least not at an age where I could appreciate it (not that I’ve got into Keats since), but it was enough to feel connected to literature as a Londoner.
In 1996 I moved to Edinburgh to study English literature, and I’ve stayed ever since. There’s less literature set here, and for a lot of people it means the Harry Potter tour, but there’s so much history and an incredible atmosphere. If you want to see what the atmosphere in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is really like, don’t bother with London, it was only nominally set there. Come to Edinburgh and go to the narrow wynds of the Old Town at night. We used to walk the cat regularly in Canongate kirkyard when my partner lived round there, and weirdly I feel so much more connected to the place after reading all those tombstones talking about the lives of people who lived here centuries ago. There’s a wonderful historic kirkyard near my flat too, it has some fascinating gravestones including the surprisingly-worded one of Charles Darwin’s uncle and an Elizabeth Bennet, but it’s full of broken glass and needles and the council won’t keep it cleared up.
In Berlin last year, I was sitting in the sunshine having a cocktail with a friend, when I noticed a plaque on the building opposite. It was the house Christopher Isherwood lived in. I am a HUGE Isherwood fan and had been meaning to find the house anyway, and it was so wonderful to just come across it like that – slightly tipsy as well, which was fitting. He writes so much about the house in Goodbye to Berlin, and I especially kept thinking about the part near the beginning where he mentions people throwing bits of gravel at the windows to attract the attention of their sweethearts (the ‘Christopher Isherwood’ of the book then sighs that no one ever calls for him, while the real one revealed in Christopher and His Kind that there were so many strapping young men calling on him in this way that it caused problems with the landlady). Absolutely one of the happiest moments of my life.
Chiming in to recommend Helene Hanff’s series of short, delightful trips to London – as well as 84 Charing Cross Road, there’s the Duchess of Bloomsbury and Q’s Legacy. In the latter, someone shows her a private house in London and complains that there’s no plaque “because the powers that be think it’s too scandalous”; it’s the former home of Oscar Wilde. This was the 1970s!
Chiming in to recommend Helene Hanff's series of short, delightful trips to London – as well as 84 Charing Cross Road, there's the Duchess of Bloomsbury and Q's Legacy. In the latter, someone shows her a private house in London and complains that there's no plaque "because the powers that be think it's too scandalous"; it's the former home of Oscar Wilde. This was the 1970s!