The Origins of Literary Tourism

Abstract

To ground literary tourism in theories of ideal presence is to locate its origins in the eighteenth century. Most historians of literary tourism, understandably, focus on the Victorian period, when such tourism had arrived as a mature industry and a cultural commonplace.¹ Nonetheless, literary tourism is a distinctly Romantic formation. To be sure, Romantic literary tourism drew on earlier practices, and tourism continued to evolve long after the Romantics were dead, but most of the essential rituals and concerns of literary tourism—including visits to writers’ graves, homes, and literary landscapes—were in place by the 1810s or earlier. Therefore, this chapter explores literary tourism’s beginnings and identifies reasons why it took hold so dramatically when it did, near the turn of the nineteenth century.

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All Englande reioyseth that pilgrimage is banished, and Idolatrye for euer abolished.

Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique (1553)

[T]he airy spire of the Stratford Church … point[s] to the Pilgrim of the Drama’s longing eye, the sacred shrine in which reposes the idol of his worship. … Holy Trinity … is now the shrine of many an ardent pilgrimage, for within its walls lies ‘never-dying Shakespeare.’

William Thomas Moncrieff, Excursion to Stratford upon Avon (1824)