The Literary Tourist Readers and Places in Romantic Victorian Britain 1st Edition Nicola J. Watson (Auth.) Download PDF

Full download ebook at ebookname.
com
The Literary Tourist Readers and Places in

Romantic Victorian Britain 1st Edition Nicola J.
Watson (Auth.)
https://ebookname.com/product/the-literary-tourist-readers-
and-places-in-romantic-victorian-britain-1st-edition-nicola-
j-watson-auth/
OR CLICK BUTTON
DOWLOAD NOW
Download more ebook from https://ebookname.com

More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Schubert in the European Imagination 1 The Romantic and

Victorian Eras Eastman Studies in Music 1st Edition
Scott Messing
https://ebookname.com/product/schubert-in-the-european-
imagination-1-the-romantic-and-victorian-eras-eastman-studies-in-
music-1st-edition-scott-messing/
Stolen Daughters Virgin Mothers Anglican Sisterhoods in

Victorian Britain 1st Edition Mumm
https://ebookname.com/product/stolen-daughters-virgin-mothers-
anglican-sisterhoods-in-victorian-britain-1st-edition-mumm/
Victorian Freaks The Social Context of Freakery in

Britain 2nd Edition Marlene Tromp (Ed.)
https://ebookname.com/product/victorian-freaks-the-social-
context-of-freakery-in-britain-2nd-edition-marlene-tromp-ed/
Managing Tourist Health and Safety in the New

Millennium Advances in Tourism Research 1st Edition J.
Wilks
https://ebookname.com/product/managing-tourist-health-and-safety-
in-the-new-millennium-advances-in-tourism-research-1st-edition-j-
wilks/
Creating Yoknapatawpha Readers and Writers in Faulkner
s Fiction Studies in Major Literary Authors 1st Edition
Owen Robinson
https://ebookname.com/product/creating-yoknapatawpha-readers-and-
writers-in-faulkner-s-fiction-studies-in-major-literary-
authors-1st-edition-owen-robinson/
Neuromusculoskeletal Examination and Assessment 2nd

Edition Nicola J. Petty
https://ebookname.com/product/neuromusculoskeletal-examination-
and-assessment-2nd-edition-nicola-j-petty/
The Politics of Race in Panama Afro Hispanic and West

Indian Literary Discourses of Contention 1st Edition
Sonja Stephenson Watson
https://ebookname.com/product/the-politics-of-race-in-panama-
afro-hispanic-and-west-indian-literary-discourses-of-
contention-1st-edition-sonja-stephenson-watson/
Communication Yearbook 29 1st Edition Pamela J.

Kalbfleisch (Ed.)
https://ebookname.com/product/communication-yearbook-29-1st-
edition-pamela-j-kalbfleisch-ed/
Quantitative Trait Loci Methods and Protocols 1st

Edition Nicola J. Camp
https://ebookname.com/product/quantitative-trait-loci-methods-
and-protocols-1st-edition-nicola-j-camp/
The Literary Tourist
Also by Nicola Watson
THE ANTIQUARY (edited)

AT THE LIMITS OF ROMANTICISM; Essays in Cultural, Material, and Feminist
Criticism (edited with Mary Favret)
ENGLAND'S ELIZABETH; An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (edited with Michael
Dobson)
REVOLUTION AND THE FORM OF THE BRITISH NOVEL, 1790-1825

The Literary Tourist
Readers and Places in Romantic &
Victorian Britain
Nicola J. Watson
Senior Lecturer in Literature
Open University
*
© Nicola J. Watson 2006
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted

save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90
Tottenham Court Road, London W1 T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as

the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2006 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave

Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European
Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-0-230-21092-9 ISBN 978-0-230-58456-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-58456-3
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Watson, Nicola]., 1958-

The literary tourist : readers and places in romantic & Victorian Britain
I Nicola]. Watson.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4039-9992-4
1. Literary landmarks-England. 2. Authors, English-Homes and
haunts-England. 3. Tourism-England. I. Title.
PR109.W38 2006
914.2'0486-dc22
2006044635
Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

Contents
List of Illustrations vii

Introduction: Readers and Places 1
Part I Placing the Author 21

Chapter 1: An Anthology of Corpses 23
Poets cornered 23
Grave matters 32
In a country churchyard 39
In a city cemetery 47
Chapter 2: Cradles of Genius 56
Shakespeare's Birthplace 59
Burns's Birthplace 68
'The Land of Burns' and 'Shakespeare's Stratford' 77
Chapter 3: Homes and Haunts 90
Abbotsford 93
Haworth 106
Part II Locating the Fictive 129

Chapter 4: Ladies and Lakes 131
La Nouvelle HelOise (1761) 133
The Lady of the Lake (1810) 150
Lorna Doone (1869) 163
Chapter 5: Literary Geographies 169

Literary countries 169
Hardy's Wessex 176
v
vi Contents
Epilogue: Enchanted Places and Never-Never Lands 201
Notes 213
Index 232
List of Illustrations
Cover Cover/Frontispiece: David Roberts (also variously

Picture attributed to Sir William Allan and to Benjamin
Haydon), 'Sir Walter Scott on the occasion of his visit
to Shakespeare's tomb in Holy Trinity Church,
Stratford-upon-Avon on 8 April 1828.' Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust.
Figure 1.1 Gray's monument, Stoke Poges, from Charles
Mackenzie, Interesting and Remarkable Places (London,
1832). Writers' Resources, Oxford. 40
Figure 1.2 The graves of Keats and Shelley in the Protestant
cemetery in Rome, from William Howitt, Homes and
Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (1847:
3rd edn, London, 1858). Writers' Resources, Oxford. SO
Figure 2.1 Frontispiece to Samuel Ireland, Picturesque Views on
the Upper, or Warwickshire Avon (London, 1795).
Writers' Resources, Oxford. 65
Figure 2.2 New Brig of Doon, with Burns' monument, from The
Land of Burns: A Series of Landscapes and Portraits,
illustrative of the Life and Writings of the Scottish Poet.
The Landscapes from paintings made expressly for the
work by D.O. Hill esq. R.S.A. The Literary Department by
Professor Wilson . .. and Robert Chambers esq. (Glasgow,
Edinburgh and London, 1840). Bodleian Library. 75
Figure 2.3 'The Poet's Dream', from The Land of Burns: A Series of
Landscapes and Portraits, illustrative of the Life and
Writings of the Scottish Poet. The Landscapes from
paintings made expressly for the work by D.O. Hill esq.
R.S.A. The Literary Department by Professor Wilson ...
and Robert Chambers esq. (Glasgow, Edinburgh and
London, 1840). Bodleian Library. 85
Figure 3.1 Abbotsford, from William Howitt, Homes and Haunts
of the Most Eminent British Poets (1847: 3rd edn,
London, 1858). Writers' Resources, Oxford. 104
Figure 3.2 Haworth Parsonage, from Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life
of Charlotte Bronte (London, 1857). Bodleian Library. 117
vii
viii List of Illustrations
Figure 5.1 J.H. Field, 'A Map of the Wessex of Thomas Hardy's
Novels' (1935). Dorset County Museum, Dorchester.
©The Dorset Natural History and Archaeological
Society. 200
Figure 5.2 'Alice's Shop- a Wonderland in the heart of
Oxford', postcard, c. 2002. Alice's Shop, Oxford. 208
Introduction
I Readers and places

This is a book about literary tourism as it develops over the course of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is about the ways in which read-
ing, at least for a noticeable and mainstream category of literature's con-
sumers, becomes progressively and differentially locked to place, over a
period defined by the works of Thomas Gray and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
at one end and those of Thomas Hardy at the other. This period saw the
practice of visiting places associated with particular books in order
to savour text, place and their interrelations grow into a commercially
significant phenomenon, witnessing the rise of William Shakespeare's
Stratford-upon-Avon, Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford, Robert Burns's
Alloway and the Bronte sisters' Haworth, amongst other flourishing sites
of native literary pilgrimage.
After all these years of postcards from Anne Hathaway's Cottage and
biscuit-tins from Haworth, this continuing desire to situate canonical lit-
erary texts in equally canonical landscapes may seem almost natural, but
in other respects it remains a deeply counter-intuitive response to the
pleasures and possibilities of imaginative reading. If I think back to my
own sense of place when reading as a child, for example, I do not
remember ever bothering to believe that places described were real in the
way that my own domestic and school existence was real and physical.
'Real' was where I was when reading- in a window-seat, up the walnut-
tree or under the bedclothes (and they were still bedclothes then). The
book itself was, in Norton Juster's resonant phrase, 'a phantom toll-
booth', or the 'wardrobe' that C.S. Lewis imagined as delivering you to
Narnia, an entry-point or escape-hatch to a place altogether elsewhere. 1
Robert Louis Stevenson's formulation of 'The Land of Counterpane'
1
2 The Literary Tourist
collapses exactly the experience of being relatively confined and yet

imaginatively free, an experience of the dialectic of 'here' and 'there'
that Charlotte Bronte dramatises at the opening of Jane Eyre, in which,
seated in the curtained window-seat, neither quite inside nor outside,
Jane is transported to the snowy reaches of the North Pole via the illus-
trations to Bewick's Birds, yet remains vividly aware of the situation in the
room at the same time. John Masefield's 'box of delights' is not a box but
a book - small on the outside, vast temporally and physically on the
inside - and made available by the suspension of disbelief. 2
Yet much of children's fiction - to consider only one of the legacies of
the nineteenth-century realism with which literary tourism took its
chief inception - is in fact set in verifiable places, although most chil-
dren neither know nor care about this. For who cares when they are
nine to discover from where, exactly, Swallow set sail on that memo-
rable summer holiday? This was vividly demonstrated when I swept my
two ten-year-old daughters one half-term up to the Lake District in
search of the Swallows and the Amazons. On Lake Coniston, we took
the 'Arthur Ransome' lake-steamer and circled in the prevailing drizzle
around the original Wild Cat Island. There was the secret harbour, just
as it is pictured in the book. The children were polite, but essentially
unimpressed; as Elizabeth remarked, why did you need to visit the
island, when you had the real thing, the book.
Why indeed. This visiting of places with literary associations is essen-
tially an adult vice, obscure in its impulses. For Elizabeth, the 'origin' of
place was the book itself, a truth to which I shall be returning. Elizabeth
in this showed herself as more sophisticated than the majority of
grown-up readers (especially grown-up writers of visitors' brochures),
who are inclined to ascribe the origin of the book to place. In this
they reiterate ideologically the founding gesture of Kipling's Puck of
Pook's Hill (1906), by which Puck- accidentally called up by the chance
recitation of part of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in an
English field one Midsummer's Eve - obliges the children under his
guidance to 'take seizin' of the earth as a condition of accessing its (his)
stories; the gesture reiterates the romantic nationalist view of the text as
latent in the soil of the homeland. 3 There is, accordingly, a thriving
tourist industry presenting the place of the book for visitors, a sort of
tourist anthology of the classics, canonical and popular, of English
Literature, conveniently consumed not merely by the Briton but by the
foreigner- whether American, Australian, Japanese or other. These days,
you may visit a dazzling array of places where your favourite author was
born, grew up, courted, lived or died, you may visit where your
Introduction 3
favourite books were written, or places where they are set, and buy the
postcard, too. 4 (The most illicit of such locations is probably the public
loo in Hampstead associated with the amatory adventures of the play-
wright Joe Orton). You may set eyes upon the very table on which
Austen's Emma was written at Chawton, the table on which Milton's
Paradise Regained may have been written in Chalfont St Giles, the attic
in Gough Square, London, in which Dr Johnson laboured at his
Dictionary. You may prefer the out-and-out fiction offered by the muse-
um at what purports to be 221b Baker Street (an address which in Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle's time did not actually exist), with its fantasy of
by-passing the author entirely by dropping in upon Sherlock Holmes
and Dr Watson at a minute reconstruction of their rooms, or to tour
'Inspector Morse Country' and drop into the 'Morse Bar' at the Randolph
Hotel in central Oxford. The experience is perhaps most powerfully
compounded if the place of composition and fictional setting coincide.
You may see the stone by the waterfall upon which Charlotte Bronte is
said to have composed Jane Eyre, and on the same walk explore the path
up the moorland valley to the place said to be the setting for her sister's
Wuthering Heights. You may view the house in Castle Street, Edinburgh,
where the young journalist Lockhart peered in through a window and
witnessed the indefatigable movement across the pages of Walter Scott's
hand, and then step down the street to stand on the plaque that marks
'The Heart of Midlothian'. Alongside the more extreme manifestations
of the desire temporarily to occupy the same space as either the writer
or the characters or both - such as the urge to visit King's Cross Station
in the hopes of locating the point of departure for Hogwarts school in
J.K. Rawling's Harry Potter books, now gratified in part by the provision
of a sign reading 'Platform 9%' garnished with half of a luggage-trolley
apparently disappearing into the solid wall beneath it- visiting Swallows
and Amazons country is almost sensible. The lakes really are there, and
Arthur Ransome really did live and write there. You can, as I have just
remarked, go and see Wild Cat Island (disappointingly small, as my chil-
dren tried hard not to point out to me); you can see Ransome's desk,
piled with books, sketches, a typewriter, a model of Swallow and even
Swallow's flag; you can see the real 'Amazon' and the real 'Scarab', and
even the real boat that was the model for Captain Flint's houseboat, 'the
cabin set out with a feast of goodies for the 'pirates' and ... Captain
Nancy's 'black spot' on the table.' 5 So powerful is the impulse to identify
Ransome's terrain within the topography of the lakes that there is a
map available, identifying the sites of Beckfoot, Swallowdale, Holly
Howe, Kanchenjunga, the Peak of Darien and Rio, the fruit of a lifetime's
work on the part of Roger Wardale, Ransome's illustrator. The Dog's

Home really is there, as Wardale's photographs prove, and so is the
'North Pole'.
Visitors to the Lakes in search of the Swallows and Amazons perform
a variety of experiments in imagination. They see the Lakes at once as
Ransome's home, work-place and inspiration, and as a fictive landscape
awaiting imaginative (re)possession and (re)discovery. Strikingly and
crucially, this form of tourism recapitulates the controlling conceit of
the series of Swallows and Amazons books: as Secret Water (1939) has it,
'You'll start with a blank map, that doesn't do more than show roughly
what's water and what isn't. You'll have your tents, stores, everything
we'd got ready. You'll be just a wee bit better off than Columbus. But
you'll be marooned, fair and square.' 6 The children set off to possess
the land by re-naming it, an act of literary imagination comparable to
those in which they have already been engaged in Swallows and
Amazons, with the naming after Keats's On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer of 'the Peak in Darien', and the children's pervasive determina-
tion to see the lake and its residents as a projection of their reading
of R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island. (Hence the initially hostile man on
the houseboat becomes 'Captain Flint', and so on.) The best extended
example of this is the episode in Swallowdale (1931) in which the
Swallows and Amazons ascend Old Man Coniston, which they have
named 'Kanchenjunga'. When they dig a little hole to bury a box con-
taining a list of their names and the date, they find that their parents
had done just the same, only they, apparently, had ascended the
Matterhorn. In miniature this is a description of the emotional experi-
ence of the literary tourist. It is not simply that so and so was there, but
rather that so and so imagined something there, and it was and was not
the same thing, just as parents are and are not, ever, children, and just as
children are and are not the same thing as their parents. It is a perfect
description of the eruption of the uncanny, the familiar rendered strange.
To tour Ransome country is not merely a recapitulation of the original
act of possession-by-reading performed by Ransome's characters, but a
repossession of that imaginative act, not because the map of the lakes
corresponds in every detail with the world of Swallows and Amazons,
but precisely because it does not. The names in the books are 'wrong'
because they are child-generated names; but the topography, famously,
does not quite work either, collapsing as it does Lake Coniston with
Lake Windermere. Ransome's child characters, engaged in the process of
imaginative transformation and possession of place, thus offer models
for the adult reader-tourist. The text in fact models tourism, as do the
Introduction 5
other texts around which the tourism develops with which I am occu-
pied in this study.
As I have already remarked, nowadays literary tourism is so naturalised
as a cultural phenomenon in the British Isles that one sees literary sites
detailed in guidebooks and marked on the road map, and expects (and
feels expected) to visit the museum shop and to buy the soap, the post-
card and the bookmark. We hardly so much as hesitate, before paying
over our entrance fees, to notice the oddity, indeed the sophistication, of
a practice designed to link text to place by supplementing reading with
travel. Nor do we pause to consider that as a cultural practice it is his-
torically specific and of relatively recent inception. Eighteenth-century
culture saw the rise of this new phenomenon, and the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries its heyday. For the first time travellers devel-
oped a taste for visiting a range of sites of purely literary interest: the
well-established practice among the leisured and cultured of visiting
living writers armed with letters of introduction was amplified by a new
desire to visit the graves, the birthplaces and the carefully preserved
homes of dead poets and men of letters. This fashion extended to the
practice of visiting sites that writers had previously visited and written
in or about. This appetite for seeking out the origins of the author and
the locations of the author's writings led by the end of the nineteenth
century to the habit of reinventing whole regions of the national map
as 'Shakespeare country', 'Wordsworth's Lake District', 'Scott-land',
'Bronte country', 'Dickens's London', 'Hardy's Wessex' and so on, to
which the rival literary Cornwalls of Daphne du Maurier and Winston
Graham would soon be added.? The same period saw other writers
colonize parts of Britain as literary regions that have subsequently van-
ished into thin air, dissolving like the baseless fabric of obsolete visions.
Who now could pinpoint on the map 'Aylwin-land'? Yet you could have
visited it, had you so wished, in 1904. 8
The inception and development of modern literary tourism across the
eighteenth and extended nineteenth centuries is the subject of this
book, the first full-length scholarly study of its kind. 9 If nothing else,
the previous near-invisibility to academic literary history of this topic
and of the body of texts that makes it visible and recuperable suggests
that the phenomenon warrants the serious critical attention that it
has so markedly lacked to date. The embarrassment palpable among
professional literary scholars over the practice of literary pilgrimage
co-exists with a marked willingness to indulge in it as a private or even
communal vice, or so conference programmes ranging from the annual
Wordsworth Conference in Grasmere (providing Wordsworthian walks,
Wordsworthian readings in situ, and tours of Dove Cottage and Rydal

Mount) to the Hardy summer conference in Dorchester (which compa-
rably provides 'Hardy' walks) might suggest. Yet this co-existence of
academic textual studies with tourism is thoroughly uneasy, not to say
almost contraband, in a critical climate still inflected by New Criticism
and its more heavily theorized successor, the version of post-structural-
ism (influenced by the work of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault)
which proclaims the death of the author and the nothingness outside
the text. Purists and professionals should find the literary text in itself
enough, it should not need supplementing or authenticating by refer-
ence to externals, especially to supposedly non-textual external realities,
such as author or place. Only the amateur, only the nai:ve reader, could
suppose that there was anything more, anything left, anything either
originary or residual, let alone anything more legitimate or legitimating,
to be found on the spot marked X. Yet although this modern embar-
rassment has rendered my subject rather disreputable, it has also sug-
gested that this lingering desire to go on reading text in the light of
place marks a threatening fissure in current academic theories of read-
ing; and, as my language suggests, my own exploration of when and
why the need arose to gloss the text by situating it in a landscape in fact
owes a good deal to post-structuralist theory. Even Derrida's famous dic-
tum that there is nothing outside the text, after all, occurs close to an
equally striking assertion that there is nothing except the supplemen-
tary. As Barbara Johnson remarks, introducing deconstruction through
her account of Derrida's reading of Rousseau's Confessions:
It is clear that Derrida is not seeking the "meaning" of Rousseau's text

in any traditional sense. He neither adds the text up into a final set
of themes or affirmations nor looks for the reality of Rousseau's life
outside the text. Indeed, says Derrida, there is no outside of the text:
There is nothing outside of the text [il n'y a pas de hors-texte]. And that
is neither because Jean-Jacques' life, or the existence of Mama or
Therese themselves, is not of prime interest to us, nor because we
have access to their so-called "real" existence only in the text and
we have neither any means of alerting this, nor any right to neg-
lect this limitation. All reasons of this type would already be suf-
ficient, to be sure, but there are more radical reasons. What we
have tried to show by following the guiding line of the "danger-
ous supplement," is that in what one calls the real life of these
existences "of flesh and bone," beyond and behind what one
Introduction 7
believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau's text, there has never

been anything but writing; there have never been anything but
supplements, substitutive significations which could only come
forth in a chain of differential references, the "real" supervening,
and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and
from an invocation of the supplement, etc. And thus to infinity,
for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present, Nature, that
which words like "real mother" name, have always already
escaped, have never existed; that what opens meaning and lan-
guage is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.
Far from being a simple warning against biographical or referential

fallacy, il n'y a pas de hors-texte is a statement derived from Rousseau's
autobiography itself. For what Rousseau's text tells us is that our very
relation to "reality" already functions like a text. Rousseau's account
of his life is not only itself a text, but it is a text that speaks only
about the textuality of life. Rousseau's life does not become a text
through his writing; it always already was one. Nothing, indeed, can
be said to be not a text. 10
The landscape sought by literary tourists, too, is a text, and a 'dan-

gerously supplementary' one at that: to go to a place by the light of a
book is at once to declare the place inadequately meaningful without
the literary signification provided by the book, and to declare the book
inadequate without this specific, anxiously located referent or paratext.
Indeed to go somewhere in order to read or contemplate a particular
book just there may be one of the most direct ways we have of unset-
tling our sense of the real and experiencing precisely Derrida's sense of
the non-existence of 'natural presence'. It is more than coincidence
that, as I shall be showing, two of the first books to inspire this partic-
ular species of supplementary reading - a practice inevitably doomed
merely to focus and foreground the lack at the heart of the realist text -
were Rousseau's pioneering essay in autobiographical verisimilitude,
the Confessions, and his epistolary novel La Nouvelle HelOise. Nor is this
necessarily an undesired experience of a combination of plenitude and
absence in which the real place and the realist text mutually undo and
undercut one another. At one extreme of the practice, tourists actively
seek out the anti-realist experience of being 'haunted', of forcefully real-
izing the presence of an absence, a form of tourist gothic powerfully
characteristic of literary pilgrimage to sites such as Haworth Parsonage,
discussed in chapter three.
It is important to recognize, at the same time, that the embarrassment

often professed by contemporary academics about their own visits to
the places described or implied by literature did not afflict even the
most sophisticated readers from about the 1780s right through to the
1920s. Until really rather recently, texts have been just as much a mat-
ter of place as of print for many of their readers. Charmingly, for
instance, Alfred, Lord Tennyson simply waved a dismissive poet laure-
ate's hand at all the worthy guidebook information offered him on his
visit to Lyme Regis in favour of the pleasures of literary tourism, setting
aside the constitutional history of Britain in favour of the fiction of Jane
Austen: 'Don't talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth ... Show me the
spot where Louisa Musgrove "fell down and was taken up lifeless".' (He
was duly ushered out onto the Cobb). 11 Even so slight a piece of anec-
dotal evidence suggests that if we wish to understand how readers read
texts in the long nineteenth century we would do well to attend to the
remaining traces of literary pilgrimage, because they are, however
imperfect, indicators and records of that otherwise most elusive of
things to pin down, how readers experience and live out their reading.
To attend to the literary pilgrimage is to begin to construct a materialist
history of amateur reading pleasures that continue to be available to
this day. This book, therefore, endeavours to contribute not simply to
the history of travel and tourism but to the wider cultural history of
reading, of how literature is consumed, experienced and projected with-
in the individual reader's life, and within a readership more generally.
To consider the history of the texts, practices and institutions of literary
tourism is to get some limited access to the relations readers have set up
over the last two hundred years with particular authors and texts, and
how they have lived out and extended those relations through travel to
certain places.
The chapters that follow not only provide the first history of literary
tourism in Britain, but, en route and by implication, the beginnings of a
literary history of those literary and sub-literary genres associated with
the phenomenon of literary tourism. Indeed, although inevitably
informed in part by stubbornly material history of tourism - its rela-
tions with increased leisure, mass literacy and the mass-availability of
transport as horse and carriage gave way to the railway - this history
remains focussed through the lenses of a succession of journalistic and
literary texts. To write it, I have drawn together many and various types
of texts, ranging widely across the fully literary out to the marginally
and sub-literary and so to those 'texts' that would conventionally be
considered non-literary. An interest in how place is written and how
Introduction 9
writing is located in place has proved to involve far more than simply
the consideration of the ways in which individual writers have been
connected to place in the first instance via their own writings and then
via subsequent works of criticism and biography, for both writings and
biography are typically mediated extensively through other inter-texts.
In the late eighteenth century these inter-texts are most typically
epitaph, elegy, obituary, tribute-poems and topographical poems; by the
early nineteenth century a new crop of genres has sprung up. There are
guidebooks like Black's, Murray's, and later Baedeker's, which typically
excerpt literary loco-description, hybridizing gazetteer with anthology.
There are published and unpublished travelogues and travel diaries
designed by the traveller for the armchair traveller, such as Byron's
Childe Harold III and IV (1816, 1818), Washington Irving's Sketch Book
(1820) or Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland
A.D. 1803 (which was not published until 1874). There are picture-
books, cheap and comprehensive like Charles Mackenzie's Interesting and
Remarkable Places (1832) which includes a large number of inaccurate
wood-cuts of sites of literary interest, and extremely expensive volumes
of steel-engravings, such as The Land of Bums (1840).
At mid-century there develops an important sub-genre, volumes of
discrete essays devoted to localities of literary interest, of which the first
and arguably most important are the volumes published by William
Howitt, Visits to Remarkable Places (1840, 1842), and Homes and Haunts
of the MostEminent British Poets (1847). Howitt's admixture of biography
and personal memoir of visiting some of the locations he described
would become immensely influential, and a flood of such pilgrimage
books was produced, bearing titles such as Mrs S.C. Hall's Pilgrimages to
English Shrines (1850, 1853), Nathaniel Hawthorne's Our Old Home
(1863), William Winter's Old Shrines and Ivy (1892), Elbert Hubbard's
Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great (1895) and its many
companion volumes, Marion Harland's Where Ghosts Walk: The Haunts
of Familiar Characters in History and Literature (1898), Henry C. Shelley's
Literary Bypaths in Old England (1909) and Christian Tearle's Rambles
with an American (1910). As these titles would suggest, many of these
are by Americans or interested in the American experience of Britain,
intent upon redacting the experience of visiting the old country for
their readers in the new, and especially alive to the act of coalescing
familiar text with the ambiguously familiar and yet foreign landscape to
which they were related so as to include some version of Britain as well
as its literary canon within an amplified Anglophone heritage. As I shall
be discussing at intervals throughout the rest of the book, the act of
superimposing the classic text upon the realities of a nonetheless dubi-

ously real country produced certain habits of writing and memoriali-
sation, habits of appropriation which involve constructing the British
and their landscapes as themselves almost as fictitious as the text the
tourist pursues. In this late Victorian transatlantic sub-genre, the natives,
whether they appear to have stepped briefly out of the text or whether
they are astoundingly ignorant of it (to leave it available for better-
informed appropriation), appear as mere extensions of the located liter-
ary work the tourist is touring. Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did Next
(1886), for example, offering teenaged American girls an account of
how Katy visited 'Story-book England', includes a characteristic vignette
of visiting Austen's tomb in Winchester Cathedral (which famously
declines to mention her novels):
They laid a few rain-washed flowers upon the tomb, and listened
with edification to the verger, who inquired:
'Whatever was it, ma'am, that lady did which brought so many
h' Americans to h'ask about her? Our h'English people don't seem to
take the same h'interest.'
'She wrote such delightful stories,' explained Katy; but the old
verger shook his head.
'I think h'it must be some other party, miss .... It stands to reason,
miss, that we'd have heard of 'em h'over 'ere in England sooner than
you would h'over there in h'America, if the books 'ad been h'any-
thing so h'extraordinary. 112
That twenty-one-year old heroine, with her enthusiasm for London as

a collection of 'places I know about in books' associated with Thackeray,
Scott, Goldsmith, the Lambs, Dickens, Milton, Burney, Carlyle and
George Eliot, is still very much alive today. Some years ago one of my
students at Harvard wrote back from a semester spent in England in
high indignation at how unlike it all was to 'Dickens's London.' (My
reply, as I recall, neglected to commiserate with her on not having been
confined in a blacking factory throughout her visit, though I could have
directed her to the plaque which marks its site).
From the 1880s onwards appeared the first books that sought to lay
out practical literary walking and cycling itineraries in detail, their titles
betraying the dilettante joys of penetrating places where otherwise the
tourist had no business- Rambles 'en zig-zag' round London with Dickens
(1886), Weekends in Dickens-Land: A Bijou Handbook for the Cyclist and
Rambler, with Map (1901), even the incongruously cheerful A Spring-time
Introduction 11
Saunter Round and About Bronte-Land (1904). Finally, the turn of the cen-
tury brought the development of full-blown 'literary geography' and
the concomitant invention of the idea of the literary 'land' or 'country',
in which author and characters from discrete works existed in magical
and documentary simultaneity. Publishers began to bring out editions
of novels elaborately illustrated with photographs of reallocations, such
as the 'Doone-Land' edition of R.D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1908),
or the 'Wessex edition' of Hardy's novels (1912). They also commis-
sioned shelves of books dedicated to searching out and illustrating, usu-
ally with large numbers of expensive photographs, the origins for the
settings featured in novels. Examples of such books include Henry
Snowden Ward and Katherine B. Ward's The Real Dickens Land (1904),
remarkable for its scholarly and visual comprehensiveness. This habit of
mind would continue to mature and become yet more ambitious, man-
ifesting itself finally in the twinned forms of literary atlas and gazette,
of David Daiches and John Flower's Literary Landscapes of the British Isles:
A Narrative Atlas (1979) and The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles
(1977), edited by Dorothy Eagle and Hilary Carnell.
If these are all texts that would be conventionally regarded as 'liter-
ary', they are supplemented and adumbrated in this study by the con-
sideration of all manner of 'non-literary' 'texts', other forms of on-site
quasi-biographical writing which bind writers and texts to place. There
are the graves, tombs, cenotaphs, mausolea, memorials and monuments
erected to writers (and sometimes to their relatives, their characters and
even their pets - Maida the greyhound sits at Scott's feet in Edinburgh,
Byron's Newfoundland sits at his feet in Hamilton Gardens, but Hodge,
Johnson's cat, sits alone in bronze in Gough Square). Most elaborate of
these non-literary 'texts' is the writer's house - whether realised as a
plaque on the site (as is the case of Milton's birthplace, vaporised in the
Great Fire) or on an existing house (like Daphne du Maurier's house in
Readymoney, Fowey), whether collected as a curiosity (which is what
happened to the wooden chalet in which Dickens wrote in the summer
months) or opened as a full-blown commemorative museum, preserved
and captioned. Such museums are stuffed with otherwise dangerously
portable items that nonetheless are referred insistently to place and to
authorial body- the desk of Scott, the pens of Hardy, the pewter ink-pot
gouged with titles by Kipling, the couch of Emily Bronte, the slippers
of Dorothy Wordsworth, the chair of Charles Dickens, and, especially
privileged, those small 'relics' carefully identified with engraved brass
plaques as cherished bits of the bedstead in which Burns died, or as locks
of an author's hair (such as the fragment of that famous hair-fetishist
Milton's appropriately preserved at Chalfont St Giles). Such houses

delight in presenting literary conundrums for the enthusiast- the little
soldier in red in the nursery at Haworth that speaks to the initiate of the
Bronte children's fantasy-lands of Angria and Gondal, or the letter-
blocks that spell out 'blunder' at Chawton in reference to the covert
message that passes between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill in Emma.
Although the practice of preservation and conservation of writers' hous-
es efficiently disguises the fact, most writers' houses as we view them
nowadays are the product of a distinctively early twentieth-century aes-
thetic, typically taking the form in which they are familiar to us around
the 1920s. Somewhere nearby will be the shop selling mass-produced
souvenirs, prints, postcards, small gifts and novelty maps, but it would
be a mistake to think of this aspect of the phenomenon as anything like
as recent- in Stratford-upon-Avon, the first commercially produced lit-
erary souvenirs were available as early as the 1760s.
Although the provenance and pretensions of these genres produced
for and by tourists are so various, considered together they provide a
remarkably coherent account of the expanding emotional territory for
which the nineteenth-century literary tourist took his or her ticket.
These stories told about literary places in the aggregate reveal the
assumptions, desires and emotions shared by their makers and their con-
sumers. For this reason I have not been unduly anxious about allowing
implied (even, in one instance, fictive) tourists to have equal status with
my documented examples of actual tourists. As this conspectus of my
sources indicates, it is a central premise of this book that literary place is
produced by writing mediated by acts of readerly tourism, and in that
sense literary place is itself a 'text'. It is the internal workings of
an author's works, buttressed by a particularised series of inter-texts,
which produce place, not the other way around. Further, it is one of the
core hypotheses of this study that no author or text can be successfully
located to place unless their writings model or cue tourism in one way
or another. (The exception that spectacularly proves this rule is
Shakespeare, as I shall be showing). I suggest that it is the text itself that
invents and solicits tourism, that it is a historically specific kind of text
which converts readers into tourists, and that tourism is, moreover, a his-
torically specific kind of reading. This book therefore tries to re-construct
the 'reader-tourist' or rather, 'reader-tourists', by which I mean the sen-
sibilities implied by texts, be they literary, sub-literary or non-literary,
which readers then endeavour to recapitulate through the protocols of
tourism. As I show in the following chapters, a number of models or
positions emerge for the reader-tourist: but whether recapitulating
Introduction 13
authorial sentiment (as in the instance of Burns) or the emotions

ascribed to characters (as in the case of Rousseau), whether actuated by
a desire to slum it in the footsteps of Dickens, to see the ghosts of the
Bronte girls, or to act as a topographical detective in defiance of Hardy's
authorial smokescreen, it is a position typically defined and constructed
by nostalgic belatedness, and by a constitutive disappointment which
returns the reader-tourist back to the text, albeit now garnished (by the
Victorians) with a bookmark made of the violets from Shelley's grave or
(by the moderns) one that represents in full and tasteful colour a cluster
of Wordsworthian daffodils.
In telling this story of how literary places came into being through
texts, I have found myself considering, if not exactly resolving, three
central questions. The first is the question of to what extent literary
tourism was produced by anxieties on the part of both writers and read-
ers about the erosion of the intimacy of the relationship between the
two in an age of mass readership. The portability and multiplicity of the
published book seems to have induced since the late eighteenth century
a desire to authenticate the reading experience in a more 'personal' way,
to reinforce an incompletely intimate and unsatisfactorily vicarious
reading experience. This results in a desire to re-experience the text by
interpolating the reader's body into an imperfect dialogue with the dead
author. The reader goes to pay homage to the dead, or 'goes to see the
author', or even, goes to be the author- to follow in their footsteps, to
see with their eyes, to inhabit, however briefly, their homes and haunts.
This typically takes the form of a fixation upon the author's body,
which in turn leads to an emphasis upon locality. This desire is fuelled
by the rise in the importance of a newly topographicised biography as
an explanatory mechanism at the end of the eighteenth century (suit-
ably exemplified by the copies of Boswell's Life of Johnson and Journal of
a Tour to the Hebrides for sale in the gift shop at Gough Square) along
with the new 'romantic' sense of the author's subject matter as prima-
rily personal and strongly subjective. Is literary tourism 'romantic' (in
that it apparently subscribes to the idea that the author is in excess of
the text) or 'anti-romantic' (in the sense that it tests the supposed
primacy of the imagination and of art)? The second question is whether
one of the necessary effects of realist strategies in nineteenth-century
narrative, be it biography, poetry or fiction, is tourism - whether once
a text purports to describe a mundane and particularised social and
physical world it immediately tempts its readers to go and check on its
accuracy; or whether, indeed, the habit of literary tourism (and most
of the major writers I deal with were inveterate literary tourists and
tour-guides themselves) actually produces realism, as writers begin to

produce a kind of fiction which anticipates just this set of readerly and
touristiC strategies. The third is the question of how far literary tourism
emerged as a side-effect of cultural nationalism, with the emerging
national literary canon seized upon in order to effect a sort of interi-
orised national mapping, a national mapping eventually to be consumed
both within and beyond the British Isles. Certainly the practice of liter-
ary pilgrimage has allowed travellers to make themselves imaginatively
at home across the nation through the medium of literature: as the
preface to the Doone-Land edition of Lorna Doone put it in 1908: 'The
British Isles are a glorious heritage, to which Britons were strangers until
Scott, Dickens, Blackmore, and others gave to certain parts a new and
delightful population. The Southron penetrated the Highlands as a
lonely wanderer until Rob Roy, Roderick Dhu, Dugald Dalgetty, and
Ellen of the Isle were given him for companions ... 113 (As this remark
would suggest, Walter Scott was the first British writer around whose
works a national literary map was constructed, and he is hence of cen-
tral importance in the study which follows). One of the prime effects of
literary tourism was this expansion of personal intellectual property
within a national landscape - having read the classics and visited the
'homes and haunts', a reader's grip upon national and Anglophone cul-
ture is extended, and so it is not surprising nowadays, for example, to
find generic postcards of 'Scotland' or 'Great Britain' on sale at the
respective souvenir shops at Abbotsford and at Stratford-upon-Avon.
The sense of holding affective property in the nation via texts is still an
important element in literary tourism: as Melvyn Bragg writes in his
'Foreword' to Writers and Their Houses (1993): 'Here the addresses are
given; the rooms are prepared; the keys are handed over. They are all
yours, these homes, as useful a part of our heritage as palaces and manor
houses, and often much more interesting because of the presence of
someone you already know.' 14 Another effect, however, which I have
already touched upon, is the making of England and indeed Scotland as
'literary' and fictive - the consequence being for nineteenth-century
American readers that it is debateable whether England and Scotland are
the supplements which expose the incompleteness of English literature,
or whether it is actually the other way round, so textualised are both.
The book which follows is organised into two inter-related halves.
The first deals with touristic efforts to locate the author, and the second
with efforts to locate the fictive text. Within these halves, the chapters
are arranged in broadly chronological fashion, each organised as a case-
study around the first emergence of a particular type of site of literary
Introduction 15
pilgrimage. The spine of the whole lays out a story of how the eigh-
teenth century's interest in poetic graves was extended in nineteenth-
century culture to a fascination with, in turn, birthplaces, 'homes and
haunts', and eventually the settings, real and fantastic, of fiction. The
thrust of the argument is to identify on the one hand the ways in which
texts solicit readers to locate and re-experience them within the speci-
ficities of place, and, on the other, how place has come to be designed
to accrete and secrete 'memories' of writer and of works. I begin with
the story of the making of poets' graves from the centralised national
pantheon of Poets' Corner to the romantically located loneliness of the
graves of Gray, Keats and Shelley. From there, counter-intuitively,
I move to the development of the concept and actuality of bardic 'birth-
places', most especially at Stratford and at Alloway, considering them as
expressions of the same urge to root the national bard in the land.
Thereafter, I move to a consideration of writers' houses, newly displayed
as workshops of genius. I discuss Abbotsford as the first ever writer's
house to be consciously developed and opened to the public as the
production-line of a national author, and then contrast its masculine
triumphalism with the determined dysphoric regionalism of Haworth
as a gothic description in bricks, mortar and landscape of Victorian
female authorship. I consider both as determined by and determining
the emergent genre of literary essays on the 'homes and haunts' of writ-
ers. The second half of the book is concerned with a different form of
tourist impulse - the desire, arising from realist narrative strategies, to
disavow the author as the source of fiction, and to 'find' fictional char-
acters naturalised within real landscape settings. I turn back in time to
trace the development of English tourist interest in the environs of Lake
Geneva as the setting for Rousseau's novel La Nouvelle HelOise (1761),
identifying it as the precondition for the tourism of Loch Katrine
inspired by Walter Scott's bestselling narrative poem, The Lady of the
Lake (1810). The chapter concludes with some analysis of how R.D.
Blackmore's romanticisation of Exmoor in Lorna Doone (1869) brought
tourists to the region and yet disappointed them by accidentally forcing
them to acknowledge the author's creatively irresponsible transcription
of the region's actual topography into an unavailable landscape of
romance. The final chapter moves from considering tourist terrains
associated with single texts to consider the formation of literary coun-
tries, taking as its core case-study the construction of 'Hardy's Wessex'
because it is a terrain both unique and representative of the problem of
literary geography in being at once almost entirely mappable onto real
topography and yet, through being comprehensively re-named, so
resolutely and completely a 'dream-country'. My epilogue deals with an

impulse that first manifests itself as early as the 1870s, an impulse to
ground the dream-place within the real, to locate the rabbit-hole by
which you could enter Wonderland, or the window in the air by which
you could reach Lyra's Oxford. These then, are the last and most
extreme instances of works and readerships dedicated to reifying mar-
ginal, exotic, perishable or downright lost landscapes. With them,
I arrive at the limit-case of the desire to grapple place to text as a mode
of reading.
None of these chapters, I should stress, is exhaustive - and nor for
that matter is this study as a whole. The subject, so tempting in
prospect as a picturesque byway, has turned out to lead into a vast
uncharted terrain. I do not have enough space here to discuss, or even
to mention, all the texts I have read in the course of researching this
book, and nor, perhaps, would any of my readers want me to. A very
large number of the books I have consulted in the Bodleian and else-
where were virgin territory, their pages, pathetically, uncut and unread.
Nor do I describe every feature of interest of those texts which I do con-
sider, confining myself to some of what is new, telling and distinctive
about them. Most glaringly, I do not attempt to deal comprehensively
with the history of all writers' monuments, graves, birthplaces, houses
or settings as they would appear in a literary gazette of the British Isles:
such a task would not only be impossibly enormous but unhelpful,
obscuring as it would do the story of the genesis of certain types of
literary tourism. Instead, I have restricted myself to identifying emer-
gent models of literary tourism, writing about those sites on which
were inaugurated new forms of tourism and touristic emotion, forms
that are then often back-dated, hybridised with other models, and read
across to other sites. Where space has permitted I have occasionally
indicated something of the subsequent history of these formations;
thus the celebration of Scott's writing-desk and empty writing chair
may be said to be the parent of the fetishisation of most if not all male
writers' desks, governing the framing and presentation not only of
Kipling's desk at his home in Bateman's in Sussex, Shaw's on show at
Shaw's Corner, and Hardy's in the Dorset County Museum, but even
the fictitious desk at which an effigy of Shakespeare is displayed writ-
ing busily that features in the Birthplace entry-display in Stratford.
Nonetheless, despite the constraints of space, the book provides as
broad and various a survey as it can of the particular modes of literary
pilgrimage it discusses; and its value lies, I hope, in just this element of
broad and symptomatic survey. In bringing what research has been
Introduction 17
done around individual authors' posthumous relations with place into

fruitful conjunction, and augmenting it with large-scale and methodi-
cal new research, this book aspires to offer the first connected narrative
of the inception and development of a cultural phenomenon with
which we are still living.
Finally, although in this book I take a dissecting scalpel to a whole
category of literary emotions and practices, I should make it clear that
I do not myself disavow these emotional investments. It has proved
impossible and even undesirable to be entirely clinical and cold-heart-
ed about the fluctuating and inadmissible thrills of literary tourism.
Perhaps it is a measure of how uncharted and unexamined this invest-
ment is that it is hard to write analytically about it without sounding by
turns either sentimental or sarcastic, credulous or incredulous. It is dif-
ficult to suppress a tremor of exasperated hauteur on reading Nathaniel
Hawthorne's super-bland account of being shown the very pew in
which Burns sat and saw the louse on the lady's hat that inspired
'To a Louse', but equally difficult not to be moved by Emily Bronte's
writing-desk, or to be charmed by the idea of following the walking-
route recently devised to trace the route followed in R.L. Stevenson's
Kidnapped (1886: let us hope that present-day pedestrians are allowed to
travel in a more leisurely fashion than were Stevenson's characters), and
I could have cited any number of other examples. The jarring vibration
of tone that I am conscious intermittently marks this book ~ as it does
some of the nineteenth-century exercises in evoking literary pilgrimage
that it explores - derives from and is native to the real-life, real-time,
problematic intensity of the experience of literary pilgrimage from
which this book derives its origins as well as its conclusions. For this
reason I have allowed myself the occasional excursus in this book into
reminiscence of my own exercises in pilgrimage, thereby deliberately
breaking the decorums, rhetorical, scholarly and analytic, of academic
prose. I do this to mark the borders of mutual embarrassment between
the professional and amateur, the analytical and the sentimental, the
textual and the autobiographical, the book and the body; the amateur,
the sentimental, the autobiographical and the bodily are all normally
excluded from academic discourse and yet they are the very origin, stuff
and subject of this book. For this book springs from and is about the
uncanny frisson that oscillated undecidably between absence and pres-
ence as my young daughters ran, clutching Philip Pullman's The Amber
Spyglass open towards the end for its precious directions, through the
side-arch into Oxford's Botanic Gardens to find Lyra's bench, empty
except for a tiny posy of flowers left by an admirer. There, and not there,
full and yet vacant, strung between sentiment and scepticism, the elu-
sive pungency of that reading experience in the garden is instigator,
subject, and driver of this book.
****
This book has been a lot of fun to research and write, and in retro-
spect, it has taken a long time to come to maturity, its seeds perhaps
lying back many years ago when I acted as tourist guide to literary
Oxford to avoid starving as a postgraduate student. I must thank first of
all my current institution, the Open University (OU), who have not
only allowed me to pursue my interest in literary locality to the extent
of foisting it upon OU students in the shape of assorted print material
and radio and television programmes made about Jane Austen's Bath,
Bovary-land, George Eliot's Rome, the Lac Leman of Rousseau, Byron
and Shelley, and du Maurier's 'Manderley', but have been very generous
with leave to finish this book, and with money to pay for the pictures
to illustrate it. Thanks are due too to the British Academy, who kindly
funded most of my travel to literary locations across the British Isles.
A number of librarians, custodians and curators have good-temperedly
spent a good deal of time showing me their collections and answering
questions - among them I should mention Anthony Burton, trustee of
the Dickens House Museum, who spent a considerable amount of time
guiding me among the collections; Jeanette McWhinnie, who talked to
me extensively about the history of tourism to Abbotsford; Aidan
Graham of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (who showed me, among
much else, the Anne Hathaway's Cottage musical box that plays
'English Country Garden'); Rachel Clegg of the National Library of
Scotland; Seamus Allan of the Bodleian; Diana Boston and her assistant
at the Manor, Hemingford Grey; the custodian of Jane Austen's house in
Chawton, and the landlady of the Globe Inn in Dumfries, who allowed
me to sit in Burns's chair and proudly showed me the very bed on which
he impregnated yet another unfortunate servant-maid. I am most grate-
ful to Frank and Denise Cottrell Boyce for allowing me and my family
to camp in their holiday-house while I 'did' Burns (may there be a blue
plaque installed there in due course!), while it is hard to resist the venge-
ful impulse to execrate here the dreadful bed in a b & b on the outskirts
of Callender that rendered part of my trip to the Trossachs so halluci-
natory. I have been lucky enough to give parts of this work in progress
to a series of friendly if slightly startled audiences, variously on
Shakespeare at Wycliffe College, Oxford (2005); on Byron at Exeter
Introduction 19
College, Oxford (2003); and on Keats at Rewley House, Oxford (2002);

to talk in the St Giles' Lecture Series, Oxford, and in the Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust education programme in Stratford, and to give early
versions of the work on Rousseau and Scott at conferences on 'Tourism
and Literature', Harrogate 2004 (where I had the pleasure of meeting
and exchanging thoughts on the subject of literary tourism with another
enthusiast, Alison Booth)/ 5 and at the British Association for Romantic
Studies in Newcastle in 2005. I have been delighted to be invited not
once but twice to be a part of the Shakespeare Birthday Procession, an
event which, if any, should inspire meditation upon the nature of liter-
ary pilgrimage. Suman Gupta and Delia Da Sousa Correa read early
drafts of the material and managed to be tactfully encouraging. Finally,
I am much indebted to the anonymous reader for Palgrave Macmillan,
whose lengthy, thoughtful, informed and generous critique was most
helpful in the early stages of the writing-up of this project.
But my greatest debt is to the friends and family who have faithfully
accompanied me both in spirit and in the flesh in the surprisingly ardu-
ous and intermittently comic business of dedicated literary tourism. My
thanks go to Marilyn Butler for walking Jane Austen's Bath with me; to
Cordelia Hall for bearing me company to Milton's cottage at Chalfont
St Giles and drawing the fire of the well-meaning but inaccurate
and inordinately inquisitive amateur guide; to Kathy Rowe and her
enthusiastic family for insisting on being provided with a Philip
Pullman tour of Oxford; to my parents Liz and Peter Watson for man-
aging to be interested in Austen's house at Chawton, in Hardy's houses
at Upper Bockhampton and Max Gate, and in every place associated
with Wordsworth in the Lake District; and to my stoical father-in-law,
Derek Dobson, who lent me his large collection of works on Hardy
topography (he being an expert in this field) and who got wet through
in a freak rain-storm while showing me the smuggler's path featured in
Moonfleet. My dear children Elizabeth and Rosalind have regularly been
obliged to give over part of their school holidays to literary tourism:
they have accompanied me, largely uncomplaining and sometimes
helpfully fascinated, to Dove Cottage, to Hill Top, to Wild Cat Island, to
Abbotsford, to Melrose and Dryburgh Abbeys, to the Scott Monument
and the Writers' Museum in Edinburgh, to Alloway, Dumfries, and all
Burns plaques in between, to Haworth Parsonage and up to Top
Withens in the snow on the shortest day of the year, to Alice's Treacle
Well and Lyra's Bench, to 221b Baker Street, to Pope's birthplace on
Lombard Street and Keats's at Moorgate, to Poets' Corner and to Platform
9%, to Green Knowe and what can be found of Narnia, on adventures
to find both Pooh's and Puck's bridges, and to picnic on the beach
below 'Manderley'. But my greatest debt, as ever, is to my colleague and
husband Michael Dobson. However alienating literary tourism may
constitutively be, I have never been alone as we walked in Coleridge's
tracks on the Quantocks, visited Sterne's house in Coxwold and
Goethe's and Schiller's wohnhausen in Weimar, Voltaire's house in
Ferney and Byron's houses at Cologny and Newstead; traced John Ridd
up the water-slide into the Doone Valley, and followed him over the
shoulder of the hill and down to his wedding in Oare Church, verified
the Mohun arms in Moonfleet Church, and experimented with the
echoes in the defile of the Trossachs; were soaked to the skin finding
Rob Roy's cave on Loch Lomond and identifying the cliff in Yorkshire
down which Tom of The Water Babies climbed; explored the
Keats-Shelley museum in Rome and the Keats house in Hampstead; and
hunted out the Shakespeare and Chaucer plaques in deepest Southwark.
Without his endless encouragement, our many long conversations over
innumerable bottles of wine provided by him, his ruthlessly searching
questions, and his sternly efficient editorial aid in preparing the manu-
script for submission, this book would never have been finished on
time. To him and to our daughters, therefore, this book is most loving-
ly dedicated, on the strict condition that they continue to agree to
accompany me on these pleasantly enriching and deliciously futile
investigations for some few years to come.
Nicola]. Watson
Upper Wolvercote
April2006
Part I
Placing the Author
1
An Anthology of Corpses
I Poets cornered
Any literary tourist in Britain begins, in imagination at least, at Poets'
Corner in Westminster Abbey. Deep in the heart of the metropolis, close
beside the tombs of saints and kings, this is the national literary canon
sculptured in stone for the benefit of posterity, an architecture of
national literary consciousness, the first and still the most comprehen-
sive attraction for the pilgrim with literary leanings. Although it is so
famous it really is only an out-of-the-way corner cramped up on the
outskirts of the vast royal, aristocratic and ecclesiastical grandeur of the
Abbey, in which the individual monuments are so squashed together
that you cannot help noticing that poets in death, as in life, are gener-
ally forced to travel economy class. There are some 120 writers, poets,
actors, musicians and artists buried or memorialised here. The place is
jammed with pale marbles like solidified ghosts, and with busts and
plaques clinging and crowding like nesting seabirds twenty feet above.
The assemblage gives the impression of some fantastic literary party
worthy of the imagination of a Walter Savage Landor, in which you
should be able to recognise everyone on sight, or at least to recognise
the name when they are introduced, although nowadays few other than
academics will know or even wish to know who were, say, William
Mason, Thomas Campbell, or Matthew Prior (leaseholder of the biggest
tomb in the place). But even the generally unrecognised are all clearly
insiders, and that goes for even shameless gatecrashers like Longfellow,
whose bust 'was placed amongst the memorials of the poets of England
by the English admirers of an American poet' in 1884.
The guests at this literary salon boast very variable levels of personal
presence as they jostle for the best position (nearest the statue of
23
Shakespeare, on the whole). Some, like Shakespeare, come full-length,

life-size and well-captioned, others, like Tennyson, have been unkindly
chopped off at the shoulders, still others, like Jonson, Keats and Shelley,
come as flattened bas-relief profiles, while others still are reduced to
meagre inscriptions in stone or in the glass of the windows. Some are
still writing in defiance of death; Ernst Grabe, the seventeenth-century
oriental scholar, is casually seated on his sarcophagus, dashing off a
few notes as though he could not get into his coffin until he had met
his last publisher's deadline. Shakespeare's statue suggests that he is
showing off a favourite passage from The Tempest by giving a ponderous
lecture about it, though the quotation at which he points has been
grievously mis-transcribed. Some unexpectedly peer down from the
memorial-encrusted walls above, like that consummate show-off David
Garrick, flirtatiously sweeping aside his expensively tasselled stone cur-
tains. There are writers urbane, upright and holding forth like Thomas
Campbell, and writers seated in noble meditation like Wordsworth.
Some are dressed with disconcerting realism in the costume of their day,
some with picturesque historical inaccuracy, some (especially Poets
Laureate) favour instead the severely ahistorical and chilly emblematic
classicism of togas and laurel-wreaths. Milton is puritanically modern,
Shakespeare anachronistically cavalier, Thomson grandly Roman.
Sometimes the pervasive effect of inter-writer animation is deliberate, as
in the way that Thomas Gray's P.A.-like Lyric Muse points up towards
Milton, so connecting the two writers; 1 sometimes it has unintention-
ally comic side-effects, such as Sir Walter Scott's apparently sardonic
benignity as he gazes at the voluptuous bottom of the personified
'History' who is for some reason shoving off the ignoble multitudes
from clambering over the Duke of Argyll's immense tomb next door.
Altogether less animated are those writers gift-wrapped in plain boxes
like Chaucer and Spenser, or apparently potted up like Abraham Cowley
into handsome urns swathed with sashes. Yet even those writers who do
not appear highly realised in statue, bust or portrait medallion form
often make personal and self-dramatising remarks to the visitor, in the
shape of inscriptions. Gay's epitaph, composed by the author himself,
'Life is a jest; and all things show it: I I thought so once, but now I know
it', is a worthy ancestor of the exit-lines (or are they posthumous chat-
up lines?) littered across the more modern floor-stones. The severe dis-
cretion of Dickens's stone, marked by his wish only with his name and
dates of birth and death, is not echoed in the stones that surround him,
eagerly supplied by the writers' executors with posthumously selected
quotations: 'Is all our life, then, but a dream?' (Carroll); 'Now I stretch
An Anthology of Corpses 25
out my hand/and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have
cared to read any among the many words that I have written' (Trollope);
'My subject is war and the pity of war' (as the First World War poets
chant in unison); 'Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my
chains like the sea' (Dylan Thomas). Isaak Walton gets in just as a cheeky
monogram scratched with the date, 1658, on a handy tomb. Well might
an early guidebook to the Abbey suggest that here both Unlearned and
Learned might 'converse with the Monuments of the Dead,' though nei-
ther Unlearned nor Learned would be likely to get a word in edgeways. 2
Well might T. S. Eliot's slab remark that 'the communication of the dead
is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.' The total effort
and effect of both statuary and inscription is to reanimate the dead and
to make them speak to the living.
The disconcertingly miscellaneous, noisy, even incoherent effect of
Poets' Corner that I have been evoking is only in part the result of his-
torical changes in styles of funerary sculpture, from the Renaissance
tombs of Chaucer and Spenser, to the early eighteenth-century classical
bust of Milton which combines portraiture with emblems designed to
epitomise poetic inspiration in general (an urn of divine fire) and
Paradise Lost in particular (a lyre wreathed with a serpent), to the bour-
geois realism of Scheemaker's full-length statue of Shakespeare (elbow
propped on a pile of leather-bound books), to twentieth-century slate
floor-stones which insist by contrast upon the author as pure textuality
through inscription and appropriate incised emblems (D. H. Lawrence's
is a phoenix, for example). And it is only in part the result of simply
running out of space, which is the reason adduced by the current
guidebook for the very recent appearance of the names of Pope, Wilde,
Marlowe, Herrick, Housman, and Burney in the modern window-glass
above Chaucer's tomb. It has much more to do with the ad hoc history
of the place itself. Chaucer's tomb has been the heart of Poets' Corner
since his remains were moved by admirers to a new tomb in 1556, some
one hundred and fifty odd years after his death and original burial in
the Abbey in 1400 as a good civil servant: appropriately, it is the pres-
ence of this creator of literary pilgrims which resulted in the Abbey
becoming the destination of so many others over the ensuing cen-
turies. 3 The location of this tomb was explicitly the reason for burying
'the prince of poets' Edmund Spenser nearby in early 1599, as his Latin
epitaph points out. But two canonical dead English poets did not by
themselves make a Poets' Corner, even bulked up with Francis
Beaumont in 1616, and the laurelled bust of Michael Drayton in 1631,
both pointedly squeezed in next to Chaucer, and Abraham Cowley,
John Denham and Sir William Davenant in the late 1660s. (Despite his
subsequent memorial beside Spenser's, Ben Jonson's actual grave,
captioned '0 Rare Ben Johnson', is located in the nave: it is curiously
small, since Jonson managed to economise on space by arranging to have
himself buried standing up). And considered as a national literary pan-
theon, a reference-guide, even an anthology, of the English (latterly
Anglophone) classics in corpse form, Poets' Corner has always been full
of notable absences and indeed, unwanted presences. Nathaniel
Hawthorne wrote of his visit to Poets' Corner in 1855 that 'even their
own special Corner contains some whom one does not care to meet', 4
referring presumably not merely to the mediocre or the downright unfa-
mous, but also to the riff-raff of actors, artists and musicians that have
mingled in the throng, and perhaps also to the undoubtedly respectable
John Roberts, 'secretary to Henry Pelham under George II', who some-
how snaffled the spot directly above Chaucer. Even among the bona fide
writers buried in the Abbey, some have been felt to be beneath inclusion
in the Corner and some above: the first major professional woman writer
in English, Aphra Behn, is very nearby but still pointedly excluded, con-
fined to the cloister outside, while her contemporary Margaret
Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, is buried as an aristocrat rather than as
a writer, keeping her husband company on the opposite side of the nave.
Another Restoration literary figure is instead buried as an aristocrat's
favourite: William Congreve also cut the company in Poets' Corner, lying
elsewhere in the nave under a grandly expensive heap of marble masks
paid for by his smitten patroness the Duchess of Marlborough in 1728.
In fact, Poets' Corner is something of a retrospective formulation,
deriving from the newly nationalist impulses of early eighteenth-century
culture which itself contributed to the growing popularity of the Abbey
as a tourist attraction. Literary worthies were to be gathered here to rep-
resent British culture, and the site around Chaucer's grave now began to
develop into a national compendium of the greats, an area of the build-
ing where writers could receive public honour as servants of the nation
no less worthy in their way than soldiers or statesmen. One of the
immediate and longstanding effects of this ambition to make the
Corner represent the entire national canon was that, as Joseph Addison
put it in 1711, the 'poetical quarter' was full of anomalies, featuring
'Poets who had no Monuments, and Monuments which had no Poets.'
By this he not only meant the scatter of non-poets, but was referring to
the beginnings of the Abbey's odd mix of graves without elaborate
memorials, and elaborate memorials without corresponding graves. 5
The otherwise unprecedented practice of memorialising the poet in
absentia was inaugurated with the memorial put up in the early 1700s
by the son of Thomas Shadwell, Poet Laureate in the reign of William
and Mary, who was actually buried in Chelsea in 1692. This memorial,
the product of an unstable combination of familial and literary piety,
inaugurated a new establishment practice not merely of encouraging
the burial of recently dead poets (such as Nicholas Rowe, Matthew Prior,
John Gay and James Macpherson) in the Abbey, but the memorialisa-
tion of the recently and not-so-recently dead. Thus, John Philips is
buried in Hereford Cathedral, but his monument, which records that he
was 'second to Milton', was set up in Westminster in the early 1700s;
similarly, James Thomson (d. 1748) is actually buried in Richmond,
Gray (d. 1771), as we will see later in this chapter, in Stoke Pages,
Goldsmith (d. 1774) in Temple Church, and William Mason (d. 1797) in
Aston, but they are all provided with contemporary memorials in the
Abbey. Thanks to the good offices of Alexander Pope, a bust of John
Dryden was put up in 1720, twenty years after his death (replaced in
1731 with something grander), and the statue of Shakespeare, a belated
rival to his actual tomb and portrait bust in Stratford, was commis-
sioned in 17 40. 6 Other benefactors included the Earl of Oxford, who put
up a bas-relief of Jonson in 1723, William Benson, who prodded the
authorities into providing space for a bust of Milton by Rysbrack in
173 7 (despite the poet's radical dissenting beliefs and complicity in regi-
cide), and John Barber, who organised and financed a monument to
Samuel Butler in 1721. Spenser's monument was thoroughly restored in
1778, and Addison was commemorated only in 1808, just under a hun-
dred years after his death/ Thanks to this flurry of activity, by 1733
Addison's 'poetical quarter' was now known as 'Poets' Corner' and was
having grand claims made for it:
Hail, sacred Reliques of the tuneful Train!

Here ever honour'd, ever lov'd remain.
No other Dust of the once Great or Wise,
As each beneath the hallow'd Pavement lies,
To this old Dome a juster Rev'rence brings ... 8
By the 1760s Oliver Goldsmith was referring to the aisles as 'Poets'

Corner' in his Citizen of the World; his Chinese protagonist visits it as an
established tourist attraction, not merely as one corner of a rather grand
church, but as a site celebrating the nationalliterature. 9
Yet there remained many discomforts in melding the sacred and the
secular within the same site, even in the service of the 'literary pilgrimage'
which, as the term suggests and as many scholars have demonstrated,

took over many of the rituals and emotional investment of the practice
of older Catholic pilgrimage. 10 A writer was likely to be insufficiently
'national' if Roman Catholic (although Dryden got in, Hopkins has only
just managed to squeeze onto a window with him), atheist (Shelley and
George Eliot), or downright scandalous (Byron's friends were refused
permission to bury him in the Abbey because of his transgressive life
and views, and after many representations his plaque in Westminster
was only finally put up in that permissive year 1969; Wilkie Collins was
similarly turned away on the grounds of irregularities in his private life,
notably two mistresses and a scatter of illegitimate children). This prac-
tice of exclusion only accentuated the site's slightly unsettling mix of
memorials with actual graves.
On the whole, however, eighteenth-century visitors seem to have
been little troubled by the problem of what, exactly, they were remem-
bering at the Abbey; it seemed to be immaterial (literally) whether what
was being remembered was the body of the author or his books - the
two corpuses were not apparently in a problematic relation with each
other. The eighteenth-century visitor to the Abbey was above all
engaged in a public act of grateful homage to the heroes - whether
politicians, warriors or poets - who had made Albion great. This act was
very much in the spirit (at the top end of the market) of the Temple of
British Worthies at Stowe (erected in 1735, which itself included busts
of Shakespeare, Milton and Pope, among other national heroes), or
(a bit further down the social scale) the practice of buying reproduction
busts with which to embellish private libraries. 11 The clumsy elision of
the celebration of 'the name' of the poet, the location of his actual
remains, and the memorial sculpture in John Dart's opening verses enti-
tled 'Briton's Bards' to his antiquarian catalogue of the Abbey,
Westmonasterium (1742), suggests as much:
The Poet's Name can strike a Pale around,

And where he rests he consecrates the Ground,
Can from rude Hands the sculptur'd Marble save,
And spread a sacred Influence round the Grave. 12
In 1784 the Revd Thomas Maurice was able to write in his Westminster
Abbey: An Elegaic Poem of his pleasure in falling prostrate upon 'the
hallow'd ground I Where Britain's laurell'd progeny repose', also effec-
tively suggesting that a few dead poets might stand (in the impover-
ished Jonson's case, literally) for all. 13 But this model would begin to
decay towards the end of the century. The anonymous poet who wrote
in 1793 that 'Departed genius here exults to find I How little mortal he
has left behind' was behind the times, for homage to the idea of the
poets who together had made a national literature was to be superseded
by a different model of tourism, one that would emphasise a personal,
sentimental relation between the physical remains of the poet and the
literary pilgrim. 14 Although the concept of marking public gratitude to a
writer persisted within the Abbey, the culture became far more invested
in founding statements of public gratitude upon actual corpses, both
within the Abbey and outside it.
Papering-over the epistemological difference between memorial and
remains was very much a nineteenth-century concern. The relation
between authorial body, text, memorial and literary tourist would
become highly charged from about the 1780s throughout the nine-
teenth century, and the question of where those mortal remains were
left behind was to become altogether more pressing. By Victorian times,
there was much more pressure to collect the real thing than there had
been in the eighteenth century. In 1847 a writer on the 'literary and his-
torical memorials of London' wrote deploring the potential sentimental
charlatanism of Poets' Corner: 'That Poets' Corner should have been
selected to hold the memorials of these celebrated men, is in a great
degree to be regretted, inasmuch as we are apt to misplace our senti-
ment by imagining that we are standing on the dust of departed genius,
whereas we are only gazing on their cenotaphs.' 15 The Dean of
Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, writing the history of the Abbey
in 1868, also lamented 'how extremely unequal and uncertain is the
commemoration, or absence of commemoration, of our famous men. It
is this which ... makes the Abbey, after all, but an imperfect monument
of greatness.' 16 Symptomatically, he involves himself in speculation in
order to recruit the embarrassingly absent Shakespeare, or if not
Shakespeare, then at least, rather absurdly, his pen:
[Spenser's] hearse was attended by poets, and mournful elegies and

poems, with the pens that wrote them, were thrown into his tomb.
What a funeral was that at which Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, and,
in all probability, Shakespeare attended! - what a grave in which the
pen of Shakespeare may be mouldering away! 17
If the absence of Shakespeare was thoroughly unsatisfactory, so too

were the various absences of Gray, Wordsworth, Southey, Burns and
Scott, though the Dean comforts himself with a conceit of the spiritual
extension across the national map of the idea of the Abbey: '[E]ven
London is, or ought to be insignificant compared with England; ....
Those quiet graves far away are the Poets' Corners of a yet vaster temple;
or may we put it yet another way, and say that Stratford-upon-Avon and
Dryburgh and Stoke Pogis and Grasmere, are chapels-of-ease united by
invisible cloisters with Westminster Abbey itself?' 18 In this formulation,
Shakespeare's grave, Thomas Gray's grave, William Wordsworth's grave
and, more surprisingly, Sir Walter Scott's grave are especially 'English'
because of their physical distance from the national pantheon. (The
Dean, however, does not include Burns in this list of far-flung 'English'
sites; indeed, the memorial to Burns must be the least convincing of all
in Poets' Corner, and that is because, as my next chapter shows, he is so
explicitly the national poet of Scotland.) I shall be dealing with the way
the localised 'Englishness' of these sites - together with that of the yet
further-flung graves of Keats and Shelley in Rome- undid the centrality
of the Abbey as the site upon which writers were commemorated in the
second part of this chapter and in Chapter 3. In line with the impulse
behind the Dean's cleverly inclusive conceit, as Samantha Matthews
has shown, late Victorian writers were disproportionately represented
amongst the Abbey's interments because there was great insistence,
often in express contradiction of the wishes of the late writer and of his
relatives, on shipping adequately respectable poetic corpses up from the
provinces to the national literary mausoleum, in a process of more or less
compulsory annexation of the bodies of the great for the nation. 19 The
Victorian and Edwardian establishment laboured mightily to make a
corner in the commodity that was poets. Thomas Hardy became the
victim of the most darkly comic version of this passion for authenticat-
ing memorial with actual remains; his heart eventually remained in
Stinsford Churchyard in deference to his known wishes, and consonant
with his status as a regional novelist; but his ashes were compulsorily
installed in the Abbey. He has the dubious honour of being one of the
only two poets who are buried in two places (the other is Shelley, whose
ashes are buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, and whose heart
was returned to his grieving widow, and is now buried in Percy Florence's
grave in Bournemouth alongside her), and the only one whose dismem-
berment was a matter of national pride. His double burial was necessi-
tated by the Abbey's increasingly coercive claims to be a site upon which
acts of official cultural remembrance were staged as well as a site upon
which individual readers could repeat this act of remembrance.
Such coercion was rendered necessary by the increasing tendency
of nineteenth-century culture to turn away from the very idea of a
pantheon realised within the Abbey. For, despite the official grandeur
of the Abbey and its aggressive policy of securing poetical remains, the
nineteenth-century literary tourist increasingly found the experience
of visiting Poets' Corner sentimentally inadequate, indeed, not entirely
'poetic'. This sense of inauthenticity was variously compounded of a
sense that Westminster's official grandeur was overblown or inappro-
priate to individual writers; of a feeling that the site was too public,
too crowded, too comprehensive to foster the reverent intimacies of
sentimental pilgrimage; and, above all, of a growing desire to locate
the author within a place or places conceived of as organically con-
nected both to the physical person and to the literary corpus. It is pos-
sible to calibrate something of this shift in sentiment by comparing
Ben Jonson's remarks in his dedicatory poem to the First Folio (1623)
on Shakespeare's burial far from Westminster Abbey with Washington
Irving's remarks two hundred years later, in his best-selling travel
memoir, The Sketch Book (1820). Elsewhere in the Folio, William Basse's
elegy 'On the Death of William Shakespeare' developed the conceit
of fitting Shakespeare into the Abbey's poetic pantheon, at least in
imagination: 'Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh I To learned
Chaucer; and rare Beaumont, lie I A little nearer Spenser, to make
room I For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb.' 20 Replying,
Jonson excuses Shakespeare's absence from the Abbey by regarding a
'tomb' as an inappropriate memorial - Shakespeare's real memorial is
his work:
My Shakespeare, rise. I will not lodge thee by

Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further to make thee a room.
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live .... 21
By contrast Washington Irving is fixated upon Shakespeare's tomb,

but considers it more appropriately located in Stratford-upon-Avon
than it ever could have been in Westminster. Writing of his visit to
Shakespeare's grave in Holy Trinity Church in 1820 he remarked:
What honour could his name have derived from being mingled in
dusty companionship with the epitaphs and escutcheons, and venal
eulogiums of a titled multitude? What would a crowded corner in
Westminster Abbey have been, compared with this reverend pile,
which seems to stand in beautiful loneliness as his sole mausoleum! 22
The appropriateness of a provincial church as the location of the

grave for the national poet seems to reside in its relative lack of snob-
bery and competition. An early guidebook to Stratford had concurred,
noting that Shakespeare's fate was happier than either Milton's or
Spenser's, buried in the 'bustle and roar of London', adding that 'No
poet, perhaps, rests so happily as Shakspere. This is better than being
buried at Westminster Abbey or St Paul's, to lie at peace among your
own.' 23 Although it must be admitted that a guidebook to Stratford is
hardly disinterested in advocating the superior charms of Holy Trinity
over Westminster Abbey, this claim marks the inauguration of a dis-
tinctively nineteenth-century sensibility in that it no longer considers
Shakespeare's 'own' to be principally his forebears, colleagues and
descendants in the national canon, but, rather, his family, friends and
neighbours. This is the sensibility that would underlie Hardy's double
burial too; for Hardy's body was not merely divided between the rival
claims of nation and of dead wife, but was bisected to dramatise his
paradoxical nature as a writer - a writer of national and hence metro-
politan importance whose work was considered fundamentally provin-
cial. His oeuvre was felt to be rooted so strongly in the metaphorical
heart of Wessex that that was where his literal heart should be buried
too, even if the rest of his remains demanded inclusion in the pantheon
at Poets' Corner. The pursuit of a supposed organic connection between
writer and place would lead nineteenth-century literary tourists to make
pilgrimages to graves well beyond Poets' Corner - in fact, the further
beyond the better. In so doing, they aimed to refer the writer to a
unique authenticity of physical location, to construct a sentimental
experience unique to themselves, and to plot writing across the map of
the nation.
II Grave matters
The object of our pilgrimage is to persuade the reader to accompany
us to the depositories of the distinguished dead ... (T. P. Grinsted,
1867) 24
The practice of visiting poets' graves dates from classical antiquity;

Virgil's tomb in Posillipo just outside Naples was reputedly a tourist
draw from his death in 19 BC- St Paul was supposed to have wept over
his grave. As we have seen, Chaucer's tomb in Westminster Abbey was
from at least the 1550s onwards a place charged with meaning. Beyond
the Abbey, however, there is little evidence for any widespread practice
in Britain of visiting poets' graves and associated monuments before the

mid-eighteenth century. It is conventional to explain this historically
specific upsurge of interest in writers' graves by locating it as a practice
within a general increase of interest in the mid-eighteenth century in
so-called 'necro-tourism' (the practice of visiting graves and graveyards),
and by arguing that literary pilgrimage is modelled upon religious
pilgrimage, and that with the decline of religious sensibility in the
Enlightenment carne the secularisation of pilgrimage and the conse-
quent replacement of the saint and his or her holy and healing places
with the author and his or her native haunts. 25 It is certainly true that
the literary pilgrimage takes over much of the language, protocols and
emotional structures of the religious pilgrimage, as Peter Davidhazi has
shown. 26 Yet this observation does not in itself explain the desire to visit
the physical remains of a writer as a substitute for those of a saint. What
miracle, after all, were the mortal remains of a writer supposed to per-
form that their living books had not?
Jonson's lines to Shakespeare, quoted above- 'Thou art a monument,
without a tomb, I And art alive still, while thy book doth live ... ' -
suggest that the fetishisation of the poet's body was not yet a cultural
commonplace in the seventeenth century, although they point to an
already established mental habit of revivifying the poet by directly
addressing him. It was the development of the biography of writers as
an explanatory supplemental inter-text that began to connect authorial
body and text more intimately. Although this can be said to have
become classic with Dr Johnson's Lives of the English Poets (1779-81), it
was operative earlier in the century; certainly it seems to have been
Nicholas Rowe's life of Shakespeare, published as part of his edition
of the complete plays in 1709, combined with a growing sense of a
national literary canon, that stimulated general interest in Shakespeare's
grave in Stratford-upon-Avon. 27 Although by 1656 the local antiquarian
Sir William Dugdale had thought the stiff, old-fashioned monument of
sufficient interest to include an engraving of it in his book Antiquities
of Warwickshire, and although there are records of a few seventeenth-
century travellers directing their inquisitive steps to the chancel of Holy
Trinity Church, tourist pressure did not build up until about the 1730s,
coinciding neatly with the upsurge of national commemoration at
Westminster Abbey that I have already noted. 28 In 1737, for example,
the artist and antiquary George Vertue made a visit in the company of
the Earl of Oxford, and, in addition to sketching the monument, com-
missioned a local sculptor to make him a cast to display at home, the
first ever souvenir reproduction. 29 He was by no means alone in his
desire to appropriate the piece, for by that time the monument was
already in a poor state of repair, thanks to the vandalism of a growing
number of relic-hunting tourists, necessitating the first restoration of
1748. Tellingly, that restoration was overtaken in 1793 when Edmond
Malone, the age's most influential Shakespeare editor, notoriously per-
suaded the vicar to paint the coloured bust stone-colour, so as to render
it, as he thought, more as it must have been originally. 30 The effect
would also, of course, have been to make it more uniform with the
eighteenth-century poetic memorials in Westminster Abbey.
The touristic impulse to take relics - whether pieces chipped off the
monument, artefacts made from the mulberry tree that Shakespeare
was supposed to have planted with his own hands or from the crab-
apple tree under which he was supposed to have slept off a drinking-
binge, bits of 'Shakespeare's chair', or, a Victorian preference, sprigs of
ivy from the churchyard and elsewhere - marks the emergence of a
new model of tourism driven by a desire on the part of the tourist to
construct a more intimate and exclusive relationship with the writer
than is supposed to be available through mere reading. As succinctly
visualised in William Allan's 'Sir Walter Scott on the occasion of his
visit to Shakespeare's tomb in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-
Avon on 8 April 1828' (cover illustration), a visit to the tomb was the
occasion for a dialogue with the dead, a dialogue literalised at its
simplest in the practice of scrawling a signature upon the bust, first
recorded in 1824 and presumably facilitated by Malone's whitewash,
although Isaak Walton's graffito in the Abbey suggests that this prac-
tice may have begun much earlier. 31 At its extreme, instituting this dia-
logue could involve plundering the grave for physical relics; although
Shakespeare's grave has remained intact (at least in modern times -
scholars have speculated about the odd shortness of the gravestone in
the church floor), the same is not true of, for example, the graves of
Milton, Sterne and Burns. When Milton's body was exhumed at St
Giles's, Cripplegate preparatory to being moved in 1790, there was a
disgraceful scramble for teeth, bones and hair, which the verger sold
('Ill fare the hands that heaved the stones, where Milton's ashes lay! I
That trembled not to grasp his bones, and steal his dust away!', wrote
a horrified William Cowper in 'On the late indecent liberties taken
with the remains of Milton'). Many of these relics were bought back to
be returned to the grave, but some may well have wound up on display
in the cottage dedicated to Milton's memory in Chalfont St Giles, and
a lock of the hair dispersed on this sacrilegious occasion may very well
have later inspired Keats's sonnet on the subject. As is well-known,
Laurence Sterne's body was stolen after burial in 1768, and only
escaped dissection at the last minute through being recognised on the
slab by the surgeon; it is unclear, however, whether his body was stolen
to order as a literary curiosity of interest to the medical profession.
Certainly Burns's body, which has been dug up no fewer than three
times, on two of which the skull was removed for some days to the
local doctor's house, has been intensively interrogated on the slimmest
of pretexts. 32
It is possible to date this desire to converse with dead poets and writ-
ers with some precision. Although, as the fame of Thomas Gray's Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard shows, the culture as a whole was hos-
pitable to the idea of meditating upon the tombs of the dead from at
least the second half of the eighteenth century, the conceit of actually
holding converse with the dead seems to date only from around 1800.
It is expressed forcefully by William Godwin in his Essay on Sepulchres
(1809), in which he proposes 'Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious
Dead in all Ages on the Spot where their Remains have been interred.'
Godwin remarks that he was inspired by a visit to Westminster, not only
by a sense of unwarranted absences and presences, but by the universal
neglect of its monuments, and by his meditations upon the prevalent
practice of erasing memorials in country churchyards. His rationale for
marking the graves of the great is to encourage the practice of visiting
them, arguing that such memorial practice will enlarge the general
national psyche, releasing it from everyday materialism into a more
progressive spirituality and 'strong imagination':
Inestimable benefit will ... flow, from the habit of seeing with the
intellectual eye things not visible to the eye of sense, and our attain-
ing the craft and mystery, by which we may, spiritually, each in his
several sphere,
Compel the earth and ocean to give up
Their dead alive. 33
Godwin argues that the material worthlessness of the dead body,

viewed rationally, is over-ridden by two considerations - a sense of
mourning like that felt by one friend for another, which demands that
the dead be located, and a sense that at these graves the historical
event is, uniquely, still acting, still contemporary: 'the dust that is
covered by his tomb, is simply and literally the great man himself' 34
Indeed, the grave is not merely a grave, it is a home, indeed, more
than that, it is a place to which all comers are invited to the poet's
'at home':
Let us visit their tombs; let us indulge all the reality we can now
have, of a sort of conference with these men, by repairing to the
scene which, as far as they are at all on earth, they still inhabit. 35
Dropping in upon the dead, compelling them to have a quick chat,

these are desires that drive Godwin's prose: imagining visiting Milton's
grave (or rather, the place 'where he now dwells') he all but literalises the
euphemism of 'the last home' or 'last resting-place' or 'last dwelling-
place' - the bonus is that 'Some spirit shall escape his ashes, and whis-
per to me things unfelt before', that it will be possible to 'call his ghost
from the tomb to commune with me, and to satisfy the ardour of my
love.' 36
The Essay on Sepulchres had a lukewarm, even a bemused reception;
amongst the reasons for this was the outre quality of the proposal, which
even the sympathetic Monthly Review considered overly 'sentimental'
and 'romantic' Y They might also have echoed Hotspur's sardonic com-
ment on Glendower's professed practice of calling spirits 'from the vasty
deep', 'But will they come when you do call for them?' (1 Henry IV,
3.1.53). Yet Godwin's essay was to prove prophetic; it recommends the
compilation of both an 'atlas' and a 'catalogue' of important graves as
a form of security against catastrophes of war (very pertinent at a time
of anxiety over Napoleonic invasion), noting also that such would be
'precious' to the man of sentiment, 'and prove to be a Traveller's Guide,
of a very different. measure of utility, from the 'Catalogue of
Gentlemen's Seats,' which is now appended to the 'Book of Post-Roads
through Every Part of Great Britain." It would be around 150 years
before The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles, combining maps and
gazette, and indexing authors to place, would precisely fulfil Godwin's
ambition. 38
Godwin's insistence upon the idea of converse with the dead writer as
friend, too, was prescient. Only ten years later, this impulse towards
grounding the experience of reading within an unmediated one-to-one
spiritual telephone-call with the dead poet was most famously described
by Washington Irving, whose meditations on the subject were to
become commonplaces for the rest of the nineteenth century. Writing
about his visit to Poets' Corner in his Sketch Book (1820), for example,
Irving considered its superior attractions to other tombs in the Abbey,
noting that visitors were actuated by a sense of personal intimacy with
An Anthology of Corpses 3 7
the writer rendered possible by reading, akin to the rituals of private

mourning:
Notwithstanding the simplicity of these memorials, I have always

observed that the visitors to the abbey remain longest about them.
A kinder and fonder feeling takes place of that cold curiosity or vague
admiration with which they gaze on the splendid monuments of the
great and the heroic. They linger about these as about the tombs of
friends and companions; for indeed there is something of compan-
ionship between the author and reader. Other men are known to
posterity only through the medium of history, which is constantly
growing faint and obscure: but the intercourse between the author
and his fellow-men is ever new, active, and immediate. 39
The necro-touristic impulse is to set up not merely a personal rela-

tionship but a physical relationship, as Irving's remarks on visiting
Shakespeare's tomb suggest: 'I trod the sounding pavement, there was
something intense and thrilling in the idea, that, in very truth, the
remains of Shakespeare were mouldering beneath my feet. It was a long
time before I could prevail upon myself to leave the place .. .' 40
Although, as I show below, the sentimental protocols of grave-visiting
change over time, this impulse towards a physical, exclusive relation-
ship remains a constant.
Almost entirely missing from the accounts of grave-visiting provided
by both Godwin and Irving, however, are the texts through which they
as readers came to be intimate with the author in the first place.
Godwin mentions only briefly that the effect of immortality in the case
of writers depends upon writing and reading: 'They are not dead. They
are still with us in their stories, in their words, in their writings.' 41 Irving
vanishes the act of reading into 'intercourse', far closer to their joint
ideal of 'converse.' Indeed, this elision is symptomatic and constitutive
of the practice of grave-visiting. To visit the grave is to supplement and
secure print-culture - as Godwin remarks: 'I regard the place of [the
poet's] burial as one part of his biography, without which all other
records and remains are left in a maimed and imperfect state.' 42 Indeed,
one might say that the practice of grave-visiting arises precisely at the
moment of general anxiety around print-culture, an anxiety which has
been to date largely discussed in terms of the romantic author's anxiety
over the alienation and degradation of his mass-audience, but which
also, by contagion, infected the romantic reader, who similarly became
anxious over the alienation of the author, and the promiscuity of the
text. 43 With the rise of romantic poetics the body of the author became
newly charged as a site of both origin and excess to the text; conversely
the portability and multiplicity of the published book seems to have
induced a desire to authenticate the reading experience in a more 'per-
sonal' way, to reinforce an incompletely intimate reading experience.
Grave-visiting is imagined as a way of by-passing the text in favour of a
more perfect dialogue with the dead author. The grave, therefore,
secures the personal relation between romantic author and romantic
reader, otherwise threatened by mass-literacy and mass-readership, and
this is why books - as such - are rarely mentioned in these early evoca-
tions of grave-visiting.
At first glance, indeed, the grave of an author could be considered anti-
book in the extreme. Whereas a book is by definition mass-produced for
mass-circulation (if the author is lucky), the grave by definition is unique
and non-portable. (This non-portability does not extend to the body
itself, or indeed to the monument, as we will see below, yet ideologically
the grave is supposed to be located rather than mobile.) While the text of
a book is printed, the text of a tomb is inscribed and engraven. One is
impersonal and promiscuous, the other personalised and faithfully
authorised. The writing on a tomb is thus more definitely 'voiced' than
even the most autobiographically voiced piece of print. I consider grave-
visiting practices at more length below, but it is perhaps worth noting
here that the educational habit of memorisation combined with the
desire for 'converse' to develop a practice of reciting aloud or internally
from the author's works upon the spot, so ventriloquising 'whispers' from
the ashes, or so Hardy's strangely autobiographical-sounding account of
the visit of Ethelberta reciting Paradise Lost over Milton's tomb in St
Giles's, Cripplegate would suggest. 44 Yet although the grave appears anti-
thetical to print, and sometimes even claims to be so via its inscription
(as we will see, Keats's epitaph remarks despairingly that his name has
been 'writ on water'), it has been the printed text that has typically deter-
mined the meaning of poets' graves, sometimes even before the head-
stone has been purchased.
That said, not all graves 'mean' the same, or as much. This is because
in the mythos of many poets death is essentially incidental, while in
others it is constitutive. The death of, say, William Blake is not critical
to the popular apprehension of him as a poet, and so his grave in
Bunhill Fields is not a particular draw. On the other hand, the deaths of
Keats and Shelley found the idea of the romantic poet dying young and
unrecognised, in exile, and so their graves are shrines. The deaths - and
therefore graves- of the three Bronte sisters, and more recently of Sylvia
Plath, have become iconic of the fate of the woman writer. In yet other
cases it is the siting of the grave and its mode as memorial which is pow-
erfully iconographical of the poet as locked into a national landscape -
writers whose final resting places have hereby become emblematic
include Thomas Gray, Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. Two sites in
particular usefully dramatise the transformation from the mid-eighteenth
century through the mid-nineteenth century of the understanding of
the relation of mortal remains to poetical remains: the grave of Thomas
Gray at Stoke Poges, and the graves of Keats and Shelley in the Protestant
cemetery at Rome.
In a country churchyard
Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires
At a little distance from Stoke Poges lies the church which boasts
probably the most famous churchyard in Britain. This is 'the country
churchyard' which Thomas Gray made famous in 1751 on the publica-
tion of his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and where he is himself
buried. Here, bypassing a large yew, you come to the wall of the church,
where there is a brick table-tomb, inscribed 'Dorothy Gray, widow; the
tender careful mother of many children, One of whom alone had the
misfortune to survive her'. On the wall of the church is a small plaque,
dated 1799, which reads: 'Opposite to this stone in the same tomb upon
which he has so feelingly recorded his grief at the loss of a beloved par-
ent, are deposited the remains of Thomas Gray, the author of the Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard, etc. He was buried August 6, 1771.'
Beyond the churchyard is a little path marked with a National Trust
sign. If you follow it round though the scrubby bushes and spindly
trees, upon you bursts an enormous, late eighteenth-century monu-
ment, a squared-off column some twenty feet high, upon which rests a
large neo-classical sarcophagus enclosed in cast-iron railings. Each of its
four sides carries an inscription. One side quotes from Ode on a Distant
Prospect of Eton College, two more sides carry lengthy quotations from
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and the fourth announces:
This Monument, in honour of

THOMAS GRAY,
was erected A.D. 1799,
Among the scenery
Celebrated by that great lyric and Elegaic Poet.
He died in 1771,
And lies unnoted in the adjoining church-yard,

Under the Tomb-stone on which he piously
And pathetically recorded the interment
Of his Aunt and lamented Mother.
It was erected in 1799 by John Penn, descendant of the William Penn

who founded Pennsylvania, as part of a general renovation of his prop-
erty which included re-organising the church, demolishing the old manor
house and building a new and imposing domed residence. The vista from
Stoke Park was designedly ornamented by the handsome monument set
in a sheep-dotted parkland and balanced by a view of the church. The
engraving reproduced here, dating from the 1830s, shows not so much
what it must actually have looked like then as the general idea of what it
looked like in the popular imagination: the cenotaph is set in an ideal pas-
toral English landscape, flanked with the church to the left and the old
manor-house in which Gray sometimes stayed to the right (Figure 1.1).
GRAY'S liO~UMBI'IiT, STOK8 l'~UUt.
Figure 1.1 Gray's monument, Stoke Poges, from Charles Mackenzie, Interesting
and Remarkable Places (London, 1832). Writers' Resources, Oxford.
William Penn's 1799 monument to the poet Gray, ornamenting parkland flanked
with the church and the manor house in which Gray was frequently resident.
What this site presents to the visitor, and has done ever since 1799, is
the family grave of a poet otherwise professionally memorialised in
Westminster Abbey made over into a 'Poet's Grave'. At the turn of
the century, the generalised, neo-classical and non-localised 'Poet' of
the Enlightenment was converted into a specific biographicised per-
sona, a proto-Romantic Poet more appropriately memorialised at Stoke
Pages than at the Abbey. The material reality of Gray's grave was pro-
gressively redesigned to correspond with 'the grave of the author of the
Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' Eventually, it would be converted into a
sort of proto-Grasmere churchyard - a place where readers could confi-
dently come to find an English poet at one with the English soil. The
story of how this happens exemplifies both the cultural shift from a
model of literary tourism as public homage to a sentimental exchange,
and the ways in which a text, in this case the Elegy, could be made to
script such tourism.
At the time of its publication in 1751, Gray's Elegy was a latish example
of the then fashion for so-called 'graveyard poetry', which included, for
example, Edward Young's The Complaint, or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death,
and Immortality (1742-5) and Blair's The Grave (1743). Sentimental,
melancholic and proto-Gothic, this school of poetry specialised in per-
sonal meditations over tombs usually in otherwise unspecified, indeed
generalised, locations and usually in the twilight of evening or oncoming
night. The Elegy meditates upon the graves of 'the rude forefathers of the
hamlet', validating their lack of fame marked by the absence of 'trophies'
typical of grand religious edifices such as the Abbey 'Where through the
long-drawn aisle and fretted vault I The pealing anthem swells the note
of praise.' It specifically dismisses the desirability of 'storied urn or ani-
mated bust' while registering the pathos of 'uncouth rhymes and shape-
less sculpture', the simplicity of names, ages and holy texts in place
of full-blown 'elegy'. If the poem celebrates the 'neglected spot' over offi-
cial grandeur, it also personalises the solitary poet from the opening as
speaker/owner of the poetic meditation - 'The curfew tolls the knell of
parting day, I The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, I The ploughman
homeward plods his weary way, I And leaves the world to darkness and
to me.' More startlingly, the final stanzas produce the poet as the object
of some future 'kindred spirit' poet-tourist's 'contemplation' and inquiry:
For thee, who, mindful of th' unhonoured dead,

Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely Contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate ...
The poem imagines such a graveyard tourist engaged in chat about

the fate of the Poet with a local 'hoary-headed swain', a standard trope,
one might remark, of travel literature. Thus prompted, the 'swain' tells
the story of the Poet's death, and acts as tour-guide to his grave, upon
which is engraved an 'epitaph' which marks the youthful Poet as
anonymous and unsuccessful. 45
The Elegy was celebrated from the moment of its publication, indeed,
rather before it, as it was circulated around Gray's friends and admirers.
It potentially scripts all future visits to poets' graves; it certainly scripted
all subsequent visits to Gray's grave. It was, understandably, common-
place to identify Gray with the speaker of the poem even in his lifetime:
Thomas Warton, the Younger addressed his Sonnet to Mr Gray imagining
him in the throes of composition in the churchyard, a fancifully senti-
mental vignette which strategically echoes those famous lines from the
Elegy - 'The curfew tolls the knell of passing day' and 'Beneath those
rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade':
While slowly-pacing thro' the churchyard dew,

At curfeu-time [sic], beneath the dark-green yew,
Thy pensive genius strikes the moral strings ... 46
At the time of Gray's death in 1771, twenty years later, the Elegy was
well on the way to becoming a documentary part of the poet's biogra-
phy, or so the anonymous An Irregular Ode, occasioned by the Death ofMr
Gray (1772) would suggest. This obituary tribute notes especially the
power of the Elegy, identifying Gray unproblematically with the speak-
er of the poem:
But most the music of thy plaintive moan

With lengthen'd note detains the list'ning ear,
As lost in thought thou wanders't all alone
Where spirits hover round their mansions drear.
By contemplation's eye serenely view'd
Each lowly object wears an awful mien:
'Tis our own blindness veils the latent good:
The works of Nature need but to be seen.
Thou saw'st her beaming from the hamlet-sires
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree's shade;
*Where now still faithful to their wonted fires
Thy own dear ashes are for ever laid. 47
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of L'hostal de la
Bolla
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
Title: L'hostal de la Bolla

Costums i llenguatge vulgar de Mallorca
Author: Miquel dels Sants Oliver
Release date: February 10, 2024 [eBook #72925]
Language: Catalan
Original publication: Barcelona: Tip. L'avenç, 1903
Credits: Joan Queralt Gil
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK L'HOSTAL DE LA

BOLLA ***
L’hostal de la Bolla
Costums i llenguatge vulgar de Mallorca
Miquel dels Sants Oliver
1903
Aquest text ha estat digitalitzat i processat per l’Institut

d’Estudis Catalans, com a part del projecte Corpus Textual
Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana.
I
Aquell dematí n’Armando, el barber de la cantonada, s’havia aixecat
de bona hora. Obrí la botiga mentres el mocet, qui ja s’havia posat la
brusa, —la honrada toga del trabajo, com deia l mestre,— agranava
la carrera y la banyava tirant-hi un parell de regadores d’aigua.
N’Armando!… Ja no n’hi ha d’artistes com aquell. S’havia nodrit en

les darreries de l’escola romántica, i no podia, ai!, adondar-se an els
nostres temps positivistes, com diuen els lletruts, o de pa-en-
butxaca, com diem nosaltres ignorants. N’Armando tenia idees
propries sobre una porció de coses: en politica era partidari den Prim
i de l’amortisació; en musica li agradava sobre tot La Traviata per lo
dramatic, i L’Elissir d’amore per lo comic. En quant a lletres
humanes, no deixava mai Los dos sargentos franceses ni La oración
de la tarde, quan la representaven on-se-vulla que fos; i havia llegit
dues centes vegades Maclovia y Federico, Simbad el Marino, La
Inquisición por dentro i Genoveva de Brabante… Però res li feia tant
efecte com el castellà antic de Men Rodríguez de Sanabria, den
Fernández y González. Com se veu, estava fort en historia, encara
que no n’abusava.
Passaria dels vinticinc, però no arribava an els trenta. Era allanguit i

bastant alt, tenia la cara afilada i els ulls descolorits com els grans de
magrana aubà. De per tot el redós li queia damunt el front una
corona de reganyols; i amb això, i els estudis, i esser fadrí, se podrà
veure que no descuidava l seu cap. Gastava punys postiços, amples,
am gemelos de mirallet. Qui l’hagués vist en un retrat, amb el seu
posat melancolic, amb el seu coll escotat, a la marinera, l’hauria pres
per un artista d’òpera o un dilettante de la bona epoca de l’Oliva
Pavani i en Marinozzi. Afegiu a tot això uns calçons de daus
escocesos, que a Mayagüez o a Ponce haurien fet sensació; un jaqué
pait, curt i entallat, i un capellet tirolès xapat en mig, passat de
moda, però que ell duia a manera de protesta contra la prosa del
temps, tombadet com un motllo de flam damunt l’estufera dels
cabells… Oh! Més de tres i més de quatre Violettas de taller sen
recorden encara. Era lo que s va dir, quasi fins llavores, un joven
interesante.
L’interior de la seva botiga —encara no s deia salón per tot arreu—

demostrava que aquell era un home d’aspiracions i no un escanya-
barbes així com així. Hi havia dos portals: un a dins el carrer, quasi
davant l’Hostal de la Bolla; l’altre, a la plaça o placeta o confluencia
de carrers que s’hi abocaven. Les parets de l’establiment, com
llavores s’estilava, estaven cobertes, en lo que no eren miralls o
penjadors, d’estampes, gravats i figures retallades; però no s’hi veien
aquells numeros de periodic am caricatures pintades de groc i
vermell; allà “predominaven, com deia l mestre, els artistes lirics
damunt els toreros”; hi havia qualque savi; un retrat, record, també,
de Lamartine, i un del rei Amadeu, a pesar de que ns trobavem de ple
dins la restauració alfonsina; i litografies en colors, d’aquelles am
que en Planas il·lustrava les noveles sentimentals del temps del
mirinyac i de la “petacada”.
—Ai, Senyor! —solia dir n’Armando quan tenia en el sillón un
parroquià novell o foraster que s prestava.— Què li farem!… Vaig
néixer per qualque cosa més que tot això…
I se girava, descrivint un arc, am la brotxa plena d’ensavonada.
—Vaig néixer artista… Sí, senyor, vaig fer tots els estudis de
vocalisació am l’Uetam. Ah, si no hagués tengut sa desgracia des cop
d’aire, qui m’engolà sa veu!… Jo le hi jur: ara no tendria es gust de
poder-lo servir… I quan es sino l persegueix a un… Es trist això de
trobar-se esclau, fermat com es ca a sa cadena, a una professió
perduda, com sa nostra… Perduda, sí, senyor; perquè, per molt que
sia professió lliberal, què se fa avui?… No res: taiar els cabeis al rape,
feina de segador; a lo més, deixar botxes a quatre infladors
d’escorxador, a quatre ordinaris, qui volen pan i toros… Però, trabais
de fantasia? Ni una mica de gracia ni una mica de deseo veurà en els
pentinats: tot-hom com un quinto.
Seguia una pausa, mirava escampat, i continuava:
—Jo me record de quan era aprenent: es meu mestre servia molts de

senyors des Balear, i en dia de ball no paravem; deixavem uns caps
com una meravella: cabeieres a la romana, rissos, bucles, pomades,
cosmetics dels més fins… Es clar: d’una coua de cavall n’hauriem feta
una troca de seda… Però, ara… Peces de cabeis? Tiñones, bissoñés?
Ningú n demana: tot-hom vol esser calvo… Perruques? No més en du
es virell. Vostè diria que en tot aquest any soliament he posat
paperines una vegada an en Baltasanet des costat, per anar an el
Corpus de Sant Miquel?
Fracassat com a cantant, descontent com a perruquer de vuelos,
n’Armando havia d’apagar de qualque manera aquella set d’ideal que
no l deixava viure. La musica l’encisava. Ell ho deia,
sentenciosament:
—Podré no esser music, però som filarmònic.
La guitarra, aquella guitarra de sempre, era cosa massa ordinaria,

massa sentida. Ell, n’Armando, ¿agafaria una mala capsa de posts
pera tocar, com en Xesc de la taverna, el Jarabe andaluz i bocins de
Marina, o pera acompanyar a na Carme, la brodadora, el Cielo Santo,
yo padezco? No: ell desitjava qualque cosa millor, més fina…
“Necessitava més art.”
Aprengué l’acordeon. El primer que dugueren a Mallorca va esser per

n’Armando. Encara m sembla escoltar aquella peça d’empenyo
estrenada un dissabte de les Verges. Es veritat que no digitava molt,
però la deia amb uns “lánguidos” i “ralentandos” que xapaven les
pedres: Ad-di-o, de-e-el pas-sàa-to!…
II
No puc seguir parlant d’aquestes coses sense que m’espiretgin els
ulls. Jo era atlot, que anava fet un alarbe, i ma mare m solia dir cada
quinze dies: —Hala, a taiâ aquest llanado!— I ja era partit, de cap a
cân Armando l perruquer. Poc a poc mos ferem amics i vaig acabar
per esser un estaló de la casa. Totes les hores que ls estudis i el
colomer me deixaven lliures les passava allà; i les escenes, els
records, l’aspecte i fins les olors d’aquell barri, a pesar d’haver passat
quinze anys anant a lloguer d’un cap a l’altre de ciutat, els tinc dins
l’ànima i mai més ne podran sortir.
El tiralinies i el béc de grua han passat una i altra vegada per aquells
voltants, però no han pogut esborrar la fesomia del paratge… Es com
una d’aquelles escriptures primitives que, per molt que hi grati l
raspador, surten damunt lo que s’hi ha volgut escriure de bell nou.
Tal era la brinada que duien, desde l’antiguea, aquells carrers coberts
de doble filera de voltes i soportals, entrecreuats de carreronets per
on podria passar de travers una persona de mitges carns; aquelles
botigues am soterrani i reixats de ferro; aquells munts de cordes, de
llenderes, de senalles, d’esportins, d’estormies, de sarrions, de
graneretes i tota casta d’obra de pauma.
Aleshores s’hi trobava com una recordança vivent de la Mercaderia

de sigles passats: olors de llonja de queviures, polsim de magatzems i
cortera. Si hi passava el dematí, de cinquanta passes lluny
m’alegraven la vista ls munts, composts i simetrics, de pebre mòlt a
cada banda de taulell; els rosaris d’aigua-cuit; les traginades plenes
de cercols de fil de ferro i les vidrieres cobertes de tota casta d’eines,
a les drogueries. M’agafava de ple una ratxa d’aromes astringents on
se fonien mil ressabis de pintura fresca, d’aigua-ras, d’esperits
medecinals i d’especies fortes. Si era els vespres d’hivern quan hi
passava, anant a casa, pel portelló o pel portal obert de pinta-en-
ample, descobria aquells interiors tebis i abrigats, on s’agombolaven
vells, joves i nins de la familia, entre sacs de bessó i senalles de
llegum. La botiga, coberta fins a mitjans parets de rajoles verniçades,
lluïa com un argent; la pica de l’oli, am sos grans embuts i mesures,
talment pareixia brunyida; damunt el portal, mirant an el carrer,
s’obria, com una estrella de platallons, la bóta d’arengades, amb un
llum d’encrulla penjant.
¿Què vos he de dir, si ho sabeu molt millor que jo, si recordeu

aquelles entrades i sortides de fatxades, aquell envitricollament de
placetes, i la tenda del guitarrer, i el botigó del qui feia bauls, i la
papereria, am sos fulls de minyons i soldats de color?… Idò, passant
per allà i torcent ara a l’esquerra, ara a la dreta, s’arribava a la plaça
que n deien de la Font Vella. Dels cinc carrers que n partien, un, el
més famós, el principal se pot dir, era l de l’Hostal de la Bolla. No l
cerqueu a la guia o en el pla de Ciutat, perquè ha desaparegut; no vos
rompeu el cap per endavinar les semblances d’aquesta historia,
perquè, com aucells de passada, els insignes personatges que hi
trobareu, tots han volat.
Basti dir-vos que desde un observatori tant bo com la perruqueria de

n’Armando vaig veure per més de quatre anys el rebull d’aquell
Hostal, cort de tota casta de miracles, posada de pelegrins i cercadors
de bones i males ventures, despesa de missatgers i traginers, torre de
Babel on se parlaven moltes llengües i s’hi aplegaven els escolims de
cent pobles de la terra. Eren desarrelats del seu terrer, pobrea
volandera, trescadors de món, sense casa ni fogar, corrent per
infortuni o malfaneria, com a condemnats a mudar de llit cada
vespre, am la vida a lloure i sense politxó propria de la Cosmopolis,
sempre a terra extranya, lluny dels seus.
III
Quan n’Armando s’havia aixecat, devallava sempre a la botiga com
aquell dematí, i lo primer que feia era posar-se damunt el portal, am
les mans dins les butxaques, mirant la facecia o l trull del carrer,
pegant una ullada an el cel i una altra a ses chinel·les de canyamaç. A
poc poc s’anaven obrint botigons i escaletes: el taconer del costat
treia l gavió del passarell; les planxadores de devora començaven a
escobletjar; les atlotes de câ la sastressa, en el piset de damunt,
cantaven a chor:
Ai faal-so, ai-faal-soa-mor! Ai-faal-soa-moooor!… el baratillero de

més enfòra arreglava ls pengeringolls de panders i fabiols, el
repussall de mirallets i llibres vells, i posava el cartell d’anunci: Se
venden y compran muebles usados y excremento de palomo… Per la
gran portalada de l’Hostal de la Bolla, just allà davant, s’engolien
carros envelats que anaven arribant de la pagesia; i devers les set i
mitja compareixien, movent avalot, les tres diligencies que s’hi
aturaven, tastanetjant per damunt l’empedregat… El ferro-carril,
com més s’ha anat extenent, ha arreconat aquells bucs pintats de
verd i groc, d’on devallaven, am les cames arronsades, l’estudiant
pagès amb boliquet davall el braç, qualque vicari amb un paraigua,
un argenter amb el caixó de les alhages i una madona plantosa.
L’Hostal era un mare-magnum; estava fet de troços i afegitons.

L’ingrés principal consistia en una gran portaça, i se trobava tot-
d’una una quadra espaiosa com una boal, alta de sòtil, amb el bigam
a la vista. Allà hi quedaven estotjats els bucs de les diligencies i els
carros i carretons. No s’hi veia més que estaques aficades a la paret,
d’on penjaven colleres i guarnicions de bestia, i, a l’enfront del portal,
un retaule de Sant Antoni, amb un llantió. Desde aquesta entrada
s’extenia tot l’edifici; un carreró estret duia fins a la botelleria i
menjador; un portal, a mà esquerra, donava dins un patiet ont els
gitanos i mercaders de bestiar feien la garceta a qualque poltro
renego o a qualque somera vella; un altre passadiç humid donava a la
bugaderia, i tot seguit venia un gran tapial que tancava les corralaces
plenes de gavies d’aviram i conills… Per tot arreu, sacs de bessó i
fardos de sola, coves de pomes emmurtats, odres d’oli, olors de
fruita, pregonaven el trafec que allà s duia. I escaletes de fusta,
llenyams corcats, arrambadors de corda, finestrons, portes plenes de
clivells i retxilleres, donaven a compendre l séns fi de fotumbos,
quartets i lliteres en que s dividia la casa, propris pera donar hostatge
a la distingida parroquia de l’establiment.
Lo que es d’aquesta parroquia un no sab com parlar-ne, perquè era

de lo més curiós i entremaliat que pogueu creure. Ah! Tota quanta
notabilitat artistica venia a Mallorca, de les que fan renou devora les
voltes de la Plaça i en el Mercat, de les que recorren els carrers de la
població am musica davant i amb atlots darrera, per força anava a
posar a l’Hostal de la Bolla. Aquelles cadires descordades i aquelles
taules coixes, si poguessin parlar, vos contarien l’historia dels mil i
mil hostes de campanilles que havien conegut i tractat. Havien
conegut, pel temps de que vos parlo, més de vint panyeros d’Alcoi i
no sé quants venedors de tapetes de hule, cercadors de galones de
plata y oro quién vende, calderers, adobadors de paielles, tocadors
d’orgue, harpistes, passejadors de moneies, emigrats de Polonia o de
Toscana, escolims de la Commune, gent que s’enginyava pera no
acabar-se de morir de fam i anava trescant terres, lluny de la seva,
que per ventura no tornaria a veure. Havien concedit també més
d’una dotzena de niñas colossals, dues o tres cegues que tocaven el
violí amb els peus i hei feien calça, els germans aferrats per
l’esquena, toreros sense cua, ferits de la guerra d’Africa, que s treien
vinticinc canes de floc de dins la boca, una mala fi de jòcs de vistes i
de pájaros sabios, d’aquells que disparen el canó i treuen un bitlletet
am la bona-ventura. I no parlem dels titareros que per allà havien
desfilat, ni dels francesos venedors de gemelos, lentes, tiqueras et
altros instrumants de opticà perquè d’aquests ja n’havien perdut el
compte.
Idò, com deia, aquell dematí n’Armando, damunt el portal, mirava la

facecia. Els primers de tota la companyia sortiren l’aragonès cego,
amb el mocadoret enrevoltat pel cap, i la dòna que l duia de la mà.
Era dissabte i se n’anaven a córrer els carrers amb el feix de
romanços i la guitarra penjada al coll. La barberia era com una
especie de sucursal, com un afegitó de l’Hostal mateix, i n’Armando
el perruquer nato de tots els que s’hi aturaven. Quan el cego passà
per allà davant, li donà l Bon dia, i n’Armando contestà
familiarment:
—Adiós, Bibiano, y buena suerte!
Encara no havien passat un parell de carrers, i en Bibiano ja tenia la

guitarra despenjada, la posava a to i començava l cant:
Santa Lucía les guarde, señoras y caballeros…

En els balcons, les criades s’aturaven d’atupar estorins i d’espolsar
llençols; de tant en tant queia qualque peça de dos; i la cantoria
esquerdada i el renou metalic del guitarró s’anava allunyant i
engolint dins la maror dels carrers atrafegats. En Bibiano era cego
llegitim: ho duia escrit a la cara; i si hagués hagut de contar les seves
vicissituts, n’hi havia per estona. Era de Cariñena i havia trescat tot
quant hi ha per trescar. Coneixia a Espanya la red general de
carreteras com cap enginyer; hauria pogut donar noticia de totes les
posades, hostals, tavernetes, cel·les, porxades i apeaderos; i en els
calçons vells, esfilagaçats i plens de tacos, s’hi trobaria encara pols i
fang de totes les procedencies i de tots els camins. Quan havien fet el
distrito i passat la capta, se solien aturar per devers el carrer den
Cirerol o baix de la costa de cân Berga; i allà extenien, enfilats a una
cordellina, tot el tresor de romanços, cançons, histories, trovos
nuevos para cantar los galanes á sus damas, y horrorosos
sucedidos… Devegades, si l’aconteixement havia estat gros, se
proveïa d’una pintura feta a cân Xesc de la placeta, el pintor de
lletreros i persianes, que tenia la mà trencada en fer un cadalso en un
dos per tres i posar-hi guardies civils, el reo i un estol de caperutxes.
Encara m sembla sentir-li pregonar la Verídica relación del terrible
asesinato de la calle del Conde del Asalto, quan deia:
Concededle, Virgen santa, á mi corazón aliento para contar á la

gente un espantoso suceso. Oigan mis palabras todas y aprendan
de ellas ejemplo, que da principio el relato del conmovedor suceso.
En la calle del Asalto vivía un rico esterero llamado Pedro Batllori,
hombre ya canoso y viejo. De su esposa divorciado, vivía libre y
contento. Una criada tenía para el que hacer doméstico; Gregoria
Foix se llamaba este reptil carnicero…
I què n direm del séns fi d’historias i folletos que li compraven les
criades, els cabos de la guarnició, els fadrinetxos il·lustrats, i qualque
senyor de levita, americano enriquit? Tenia, entre altres obres,
romanços i glosades: Abelardo y Eloísa, La Lámpara de Aladino, La
Cabaña de Tom, El Cura Merino, Diego Corrientes, Felicitaciones
en verso, Manual de los enamorados, Saballs, cabecilla carlista,
Libro de cuentas hechas, Nerón y sus crímenes, Pelayo, Jaime el
Barbudo i mil i mil llibrets, impresos i plaguetes de tota casta, de les
que més han contribuit a donar a Mallorca aquell grau d’il·lustració
que tant la recomana.
IV
Encara no havien passat els cegos, quan començaven a desfilar,
cadascú dirigint-se an els seus quefers, els altres hostes de la casa.
Sortia l Quimet, venedor català a la menuda, qui passejava una
especie de carrereta am tota casta de baratijas… Ell hi feia ls òssos
vells per dins l’Hostal. Que hi havia fira de Sant Tomàs, juguetes del
Ram, dijous bo a Inca? En Quimet estava en dança: un trast, una
caseta de fusta, un plat de bacallà amb aioli i un porró de vi. Que no
hi havia res d’això? En Quimet, amb ajuda del noi, passejava damunt
les parihuelas tot el seu comerç: trobigueres, calcetins am costura,
mocadors d’indiana, llapiç que no senyaven, pastilles de savó de
coco, ampolletes d’essencia de rosa, camisetes d’una rentada,
mirallets rodons pera les criades, tot fals i destenyit, que, quan plovia
i se banyava, feia un regalim de colors.
Darrera l Quimet sortia un esmolador francès, M. Pointu, que de mal

nom li deien n’Egalité, empenyent la mola i cridant desiara:
Amuladú! Duia una cama de calçons dins el bolceguí; nas i galtes
encesos del vermell d’atzerola més pur que pogueu imaginar; i, pera
que no desmeresqués aquell llustre de cirereta de pastor, conten que
solia engolir tantes copes com tisores i ganivets buidava. El senyor
Mandilego, alcalde de barri per aquells dies, assegurava que l tenia
assentat en el llibre de sospechosos, ja que li havien arribat noticies
de que era flam-masó i partidari de la liquidación social.
I darrera n’Egalité se n’anaven el sen Pere de les taperes, i en Tomeu
el cocouer, i D. Nemesi Fernández de Córdoba, castellà, hidalgo,
cobrador de contribucions, executor d’apremis, plantó dels
Ajuntaments endarrerits, qui ja va néixer cesante de Estancadas i
d’aquí no havia passat… I més tard sortia d’un quarto de
“preferencia” enCuanito del Rafal, jove, pagès, agitanat, am tufos,
jugador, blanc de cara, d’un blanc de serena, caner de bou, sapat com
un gra d’all; i més tard que ell, n’Olindo i na Laura, comic tronat el
primer i cantarina la segona, que anaven d’escenari en escenari i de
poble en poble feia vuit anys i pico, donant beneficis para costear el
viaje á dos artistas faltos de recursos. I així tots els altres, perquè
l’Hostal era la Maina i no passava dia que no entressin o sortissin
notabilitats de l’establiment.
Sense anar més lluny, aquell dissabte, que havia arribat vapor de
Barcelona, tingueren renovellada. Quan tornà del Moll en Xerafí,
moço i ganxo de la casa, duia amb ell un turc, i amb el turc un onso
subjecte per una anella passada an el nas; i endemés, havia donat la
direcció a un personatge destinat a fer molt de renou dins la gran
ciutat de Palma: metge, herbolari, “home de ciencia”, qui fins i tot
duia un parell de bauls d’equipatge, am cantoneres de llautó; i que
havia pres un carril per ell tot sol.
Duia aquest senyor trona lluenta; tenia les celles un poc afegides,
molt negres, i les patilles negres també, com de trabucaire. Vestia
guarda-pits escotats am gran cadena. Tenia sobretodo. Quan devallà
a l’Hostal, n’Armando, qui encara estava dret damunt el portal de la
barberia, no pogué contenir un gesto d’admiració. Li pareixia mucho
hombre, aquél. Ja conegué, amb el cop de vista que tenia, que allò
era un home de qui fa fer. Entre sí mateix, n’Armando deia: —Els
diaris en parlaran. —I quedà naturalment curiós i esperant el
moment de que anés a la barberia pera servirse, a fi de poder-ne
treure claricia… Per ell, per n’Armando, tenien un prestigi superior
aquestes figures qui desiara se presenten havent trescat món i
corregut terres… Com anyorava, ell, l’espai que no coneixia, la vida
que no havia tastat, la llibertat andoiadora del qui vaivereja sempre
seguit!
—Es mateix turco qui avui es arribat, —pensava, —am sa poiera

estufada, es fez vermei i s’anell a s’oreia; es mateix onso es més
persona i té motius d’esser més il·lustrat que un servidor. —(El
barber deia sempre un servidor, encara que pensés per ell mateix.)
Allà, a devòra l’Hostal, veient el trafec diari, el moviment, les anades

i vingudes, aquelles ones seguides d’un riu qui venia de lo desconegut
i anava a lo ignorat, n’hi havia pres, com an el pobre guarda-agulles,
fixo a devòra la caseta de fusta, entre dues estacions de molt lluny, en
mig d’un desert: passen volant, dos pams enfòra, trens i més trens,
carregats d’una generació que no coneix, qui va d’unes terres que ell
no ha vistes a unes altres que no ha de veure… I ell, allà, clavat com
un soldat de paper a una fusta, aguantant la bandereta verda… Vía
libre! Vía libre! per tot-hom, manco pel guarda-agulles.
Per això, ja que no podia seguir la corrent, n’Armando n’aprofitava

l’aturada, a un recó de la torrentera. I se pot dir que vivia en comú
am tota aquella forasterada de l’Hostal. Cada dematí, allà a les dotze
i mitja, abans de dinar (sobre tot l’hivern, que feia bon sol), el barber
se n’hi anava a passar l’estona, mentres dins el patiet s’aplegava,
tornant de les seves feines, aquella partida d’estornells. L’amo de
l’Hostal, en Rafel, prenia part a la conversa, fent temps, com se diu a
Mallorca quan se vol expressar que l perdem. L’hostaler, l’hostalera i
sa filla eren una familia model. Sembla mentida que vivint allà, a la
vorera d’un fangal, passant i traspassant per dins la bassa, se
trobessin tant nèts de lletjura i de pecat! I es que anaven a lo seu,
aclucant els ulls pera no veure lo que no volien veure, i
s’agombolaven entre sí mateixos, feiners, atrafegats com a formigues,
tenint al mateix temps negoci d’esperit i aviram. La cambra que
aquell matrimoni tenia reservada era una cosa separada per complert
de lo demés: per un vent anaven els seus hostes, i ells per un altre.
Fos el temps que fos i així s’envencas la terra, no deixaven de passar
el rosari, l’hora-baixa, mentres en el costat, dins la botelleria, hi
cantaven cançons d’aquelles que bofeguen o s’hi tramava qualque
embolic infernal.
Tornant a la rotllada del pati, haurieu passat gust moltes vegades am

les dites, acudits i passos que allà se succeïen… Anavent arribant,
afamegats, els qui menjaven a tant cada mes, mentres els pagesos
marxandos, carreters i altra gent d’un dia, armaven gran xerradiça
allà per les taules. Com la tonada d’una cobla, arribava de lluny la
veu d’en Xerafí, cantant les raccions:
—Dues de fasols… sang am pebres… una de pota…
Assegut a un pedriç, dins el corralet, en Beppo, l’esculptor de santi di

guixi, fumava la pipa, indiferent, resignat, amb aquella mollor
d’italià, quasi fatalista, am les mans dins les butxaques dels calçons
de pana, terrosos. Nas aguilenc, perruca reull i color d’argila, com si
se li hagués aferrat el color de la pasta que manejava, tenia una testa
de gran homo qui no ha arribat a temps… En Beppo conversava molt
poc. Si deia una paraula, era sense llevar la vista de terra, aon mirava
am la fixesa de l’astorament. Pareixia que no escoltava tant sols les
converses armades aprop d’ell. A lo millor, sense moure ls ulls, com
un sonambul, preguntava a l’hostaler, amb un italià arreglat an el
mallorquí:
–Que mo donen avuy, patrone?
—Mongetes…
–Per Dio!… Mongette; sempre mongette! —contestava.
I no tornava a dir res més en tot el sant dia. A tot això, com de
costum, el Quimet les havia am D. Nemesi. Eren com l’oli i l’aigua:
no s podien veure. D. Nemesi, com a funcionario público, i en
Quimet com a defraudador. D. Nemesi li volia sostenir en todos los
terrenos que carecía de patente para ejercer su lucrativa industria.
D. Nemesi tornava de girar una visita, i en Quimet l’emprenia amb
ell, fent-lo cremar com una moneia. L’“investigador” era alt,
malcarat, amb una gran barba, un xic calvo (am calva de sabater), i
se pentinava tirant-se cap endavant tots els cabells de darrera; duia
mocador de seda pel coll, molt enfitadet; un bastó com un as de
bastos i una cadena de plaqué en els guarda-pits, sense rellotge. Per
lo demés, parlava sempre com un llibre. Quan l’escoltaven, no sabien
si era que conversava o que llegia l preambul d’una real ordre. Venia
de les nou, allà a la seva terra, i en quant a noblesa i fortuna, quan
heredés, no s donava per ningú.
—Què hay, D. Nemesio? —li solia dir en Quimet, deixant la carretilla
a un costat del pati.
Qué hay?… Mucha riqueza oculta, —contestava l foraster fent l’ullet,

am més intenció que un brau i mirant la carrereta.
—Digui-ho, —replicava l Quimet, —perquè no l farien pas ric a vostè,

tal com porta les bòtes d’espatllades…
—Si lo dices con retintín, puedo probarte quién soy, á fe de

Fernández de Córdoba…
—Si no se lo niego pas… Vamos, que allà, a la seva terra, era del
Castell dels Tres Dragons… Però, d’allò… ¡qué le vamos á haser! No
es que sigui pobre: es que ha vingut a menos.
—¡Habla en cristiano!
—Vol dir que està mal de roba interiort?… Doncs, miri que l’estació
no està per anar aixís, a la descusida…
—Catalán de los demonios! —remugava.— ¡Habráse visto

mercachifle, más que mercachifle!…
—Ya verá: el negosio… Apa, no s’hi amoïni… Que hi entrem al

restaurant, a veure si ns donen els cigrons?
—Defraudador del Fisco!
—No s’hi enfadi. Quin mal hi veu? Diguin, senyors: se comprèn que
una persona de possibles, com D. Nemesio, vulgui menjar aquí?…
Això no es pas propi d’un funcionari com ell… L’Hisenda no ho ha de
veure am gust… No ho sab que són mongetes avui? D’aquí n sento la
fragancia.
D. Nemesi anava a alçar el garrot; l’hostaler i els altres amigos s’hi

posaven de per mig, i tots entraven a dinar, com a bons germans,
pera continuar la brega i les falconades a la taula, de la mateixa
manera. Tots entraven a dinar, menos n’Olindo el comic i na Laura,
qui no gosaven mirar de cara a l’amo de l’Hostal.
—¿Ustedes no comen? —els deia qualcú.
—Gracias: ya hemos comido.
A vegades, quan acabaven de dir això, se sentia una tós molt

sospitosa, com a comentari. Era n’Egalité:
—Ejem… ejem!
Però res: aquest desfogament de l’esperit gaulois, maligne i faceto,

no podia res contra la dignitat majestuosa d’aquelles dues victimes
de l’art, perseguides per hados fatales. I allà quedaven, dins el patiet,
n’Olindo am jaqué i sabatilles, així com anà pels carrers dos hiverns
seguits, i na Laura, mostiada, com a flor de vuit dies dins un pitxer,
repassant i serzint la ropilla de D. Mendo, que formava part del seu
vestuari gloriós.
V
Tant curiós com va romandre n’Armando, no vos he de dir si s donà
pressa pera sebre qui era l foraster que havia arribat. Dins el mateix
carrer, més avallet de l’Hostal i en comunicació amb ell, hi havia un
cafè que perteneixia an el mateix amo i formava part del mateix
negoci.
El carrer desde allà s’anava estrenyent. Quasi a la fi l tapava una gran

volta de pedra, un arc, i el passadiç que feia donava a un carreró brut
ple de botigons i escaletes. No sé quina ramor de cantories i quins
crits de bordell arribaven desde allà dins i quines ombres de dònes
pintades i vestides de colors se veia traspassar per aquell enfront
sospitós i terbol.
Lo cert es que aquell cafè (anomenat El Recreo Artesano) servia com

a d’enlaç, en certes hores de que no parlen les Ordenances
municipals, entre l barri nèt i el barri empestat. I era cosa de sentir el
renou de les bolles de billar, els gemecs de la guitarra, el dring-dring
de taçons i culleretes; i qualque vegada les mans-balletes i potades de
la concurrencia, acompanyant les notes aiguardenteres, com a
gàrgueres musicals, d’una “flamenca” qui cantava cançons andaluses.
Allà s deixava caure n’Armando, molts vespres, quan no hi havia

funció a la “Casa de ses comedies”. I allà l’haurieu trobat la nit de que
parlem, assegut d’esquena a la paret, forrada de fusta cosa de nou o
dèu pams, a una taula del recó just davant el tacer, enrevoltada per
altres concurrents. Entre ells s’hi comptaven en Núñez, sargent molt
barbián, D. Nemesi, n’Olindo el comic i el famós Dinamita, seudonim
d’un dels col·laboradors d’El Destripador, setmanari que sortia
aleshores i que es la publicació que ha donat més gust al “respetable
público”. En Dinamita era qui proveïa de romanços nous an els cegos
de l’establiment, i com a publicista tenia gran prestigi entre la
concurrencia del Recreo Artesano, qui l’escoltava obrint un pam de
boca.
Era d’aquells que la gent diu que tenen “molta xispa”. Quan se
parlava d’ell en el cafè, haurieu sentit moltes vegades: —Si aquest
homo hagués estodiat!— Vivia d’aquí d’allà, i unes vegades el
trobaven ajegut davall una porxada de la porta de Sant Antoni, altres
passava la nit a l’Hostal a dins un carro, altres podia arribar pels seus
peus an el piset del carrer dels Bous que tenia pera ell i aon vivia,
amb una bona senyora fuita a un titerero. Com en Dinamita no n’hi
havia d’altre pera fer escrits d’aquells que agraden a la gent. Li
abocaven un taçó d’aniçat, i quan se trobava calent d’orella, llavors,
damunt el marmol enfitat de la taula, començava a escriure. Allò era
un home! El ciudadano Nerón de La Marsellesa era un nan al seu
costat. La ploma o l llapiç volaven, i, fulla darrera fulla, s’anava
omplint el periodic am troços d’eloqüencia per l’estil:
Ladrones…
Ladrones y canallas, sí; mil veces ladrones y canallas los vampiros

que chupan la sangre del pueblo.
Ha sonado la hora de tu emancipación, paria herido por el látigo
del capataz. Revuélvete como hiena contra los asesinos de tus hijos
y los viles traficantes de tu honra.
No nos cansaremos de predicarlo; mientras no amanezcan un día

cargados de racimos humanos los faroles de las esquinas, nada
adelantarás, ¡oh pueblo idiota! Los pillos continuarán gozando del
festín i los hombres honrados sufriremos la miseria i el ludibrio.
¡Guerra á los ladrones i canallas! Nunca acumularemos saliva

bastante para arrojarla al rostro asqueroso de nuestros enemigos,
de esos reptiles inmundos que se revuelcan en el fango de los vicios,
de esos bandidos sin entrañas que saquean la Nación, la provincia i
el municipio.
Esos forajidos son los hombres del partido tal (el qui aleshores
governava), y mientras quede uno de su impura ralea no respirarás
ni vivirás libre y honrado.
Pueblo: afila tus garras y húndelas en los estómagos palpitantes de

tus verdugos.
¡Fuera ladrones i canallas!
I se quedava tot satisfet. S’aixecava, ho llegia an els concurrents, i lo

mateix l’agudesa de l’expressió, que la novetat de les idees, que
l’imparcialitat de la crítica, feien un efecte sorprenent.
—Molt bé! Molt bé! —deien.

—Así se escribe, así! —afegia l sargent. I tot-hom escalfat, quedava
satisfet amb aquelles parrafades terribles. Si sels hagués dit que era
lo més inutil i contraproduent, ningú ho hauria cregut.
VI
Encara no havia acabat aquell vespre la lectura de tant hermosa
plana literaria, quan a dins el cafè se va fer un gran silenci i tots els
caps se giraren pera veure entrar un personatge desconegut.
Duia gran sobretodo am coll de pell, imitada, i capell de trona. Era

alt i forçarrut com un bastaix, ample d’esquena, fort de braó i pelut
com un carabiner. A la fi, n’Armando pogué treure-s el gat del sac. Se
tractava del mateix individu que tant li havia cridat l’atenció l
dematí, poc després de l’arribada del vapor. Se dirigí a la taula on se
trobava tota aquella gent, saludà i digué, amb un castellà tèrbol:
–Me han dicho que aquí se reunen los demás huéspedes del hotel… Y
como acabo de llegar, he pensado: “Nada: déjeme usted saludar á
mis compañeros de pupilaje”.
Els compañeros de pupilaje i els altres que allà hi havia se feren

troços pera que segués. Feren servir cafè i copa; encengué mi hombre
un peninsular, i molt prest s’hagué armada una gran conversa.
Al cap de mitja hora tot-hom parlava com si fes anys que s’haguessin
tractat. Nomia Hermes; era herbolari, dentista, oculista; ex-director,
ex-alumne intern, ex-cirurgià d’aquests i aquests hospitals; estava
condecorat am tot un aparador de creus i medalles; duia un floquet
en el trau; tenia opiniones políticas (no digué quines); en quant a
home de ciencia, darwinista acérrimo. Xerrà pels colzes i féu sebre a
tota aquella gent que l’endemà al matí obriria su consulta particular
en la plaza del Mercado, i que després rebria separadament en el
cuarto del Hotel.
I fet i dit: allà a les vuit i mitja del matí (que era diumenge) s’aturà
davant la porta de l’Hostal de la Bolla un gran landó de lloguer, l’unic
que per aquelles fetxes hi havia a la ciutat. Lo mateix servia pera
acompanyar milords a casa l’Arxiduc, que pera passejar la Duquessa
d’Edimburg quan venia, que pera la visita de cárceles, que per casos
com aquell.
Ademés del landó, se situà, esperant, en mig del carrer, una banda de
musica, cadascú am la seva gorreta am ventalla i les inicials L. C. R.
(la Lira del Coll den Rebassa). Un aixam d’atlots i curiosos s’hi aplegà
devora; veinats i veinades sortiren an els portals i balconets, i al cap
darrer se presentà mi hombre i col·locà dins el birlotxo un parell de
caixons, una especie de quadro envidrat ple de dentadures, i un
mapa enrodillat am la calavera humana de dibuix.
Encara no havia pujat majestuosament en el landó, quan la musica

rompé amb un pas doble furiós, am follies de cornetí, un primer
espasa qui tenia la perruqueta arriçada i uns pulmons de manxa de
fornal, capaç de desenrodillar l’instrument i deixar-lo fet una trompa
dels Reis.
Els musics tocant, els cavalls tirant i els atlots fen sóteles, partí la
comitiva, mentres tres o quatre bergantells repartien fulles
d’anuncis, amb un cuc solitari pintat, de l’Antivermífugo y tenicida
Hermes.

The Literary Tourist Readers and Places in Romantic Victorian Britain 1st Edition Nicola J. Watson (Auth.) Download PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Literary Tourist Readers and Places in Romantic Victorian Britain 1st Edition Nicola J. Watson (Auth.) Download PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Literary Tourist Readers and Places in Romantic Victorian Britain 1st Edition Nicola J. Watson (Auth.) Download PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Full download ebook at ebookname.

The Literary Tourist Readers and Places in

Download more ebook from https://ebookname.com

Schubert in the European Imagination 1 The Romantic and

Stolen Daughters Virgin Mothers Anglican Sisterhoods in

Victorian Freaks The Social Context of Freakery in

Managing Tourist Health and Safety in the New

Neuromusculoskeletal Examination and Assessment 2nd

The Politics of Race in Panama Afro Hispanic and West

Communication Yearbook 29 1st Edition Pamela J.

Quantitative Trait Loci Methods and Protocols 1st

THE ANTIQUARY (edited)

REVOLUTION AND THE FORM OF THE BRITISH NOVEL, 1790-1825

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted

The author has asserted her right to be identified as

First published 2006 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave

ISBN 978-0-230-21092-9 ISBN 978-0-230-58456-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Watson, Nicola]., 1958-

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

List of Illustrations vii

Part I Placing the Author 21

Part II Locating the Fictive 129

Chapter 5: Literary Geographies 169

Epilogue: Enchanted Places and Never-Never Lands 201

Cover Cover/Frontispiece: David Roberts (also variously

I Readers and places

collapses exactly the experience of being relatively confined and yet

work on the part of Roger Wardale, Ransome's illustrator. The Dog's

Wordsworthian readings in situ, and tours of Dove Cottage and Rydal

It is clear that Derrida is not seeking the "meaning" of Rousseau's text

believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau's text, there has never

Far from being a simple warning against biographical or referential

The landscape sought by literary tourists, too, is a text, and a 'dan-

It is important to recognize, at the same time, that the embarrassment

superimposing the classic text upon the realities of a nonetheless dubi-

That twenty-one-year old heroine, with her enthusiasm for London as

Milton's appropriately preserved at Chalfont St Giles). Such houses

authorial sentiment (as in the instance of Burns) or the emotions

tour-guides themselves) actually produces realism, as writers begin to

resolutely and completely a 'dream-country'. My epilogue deals with an

done around individual authors' posthumous relations with place into

College, Oxford (2003); and on Keats at Rewley House, Oxford (2002);

Shakespeare, on the whole). Some, like Shakespeare, come full-length,

Hail, sacred Reliques of the tuneful Train!

By the 1760s Oliver Goldsmith was referring to the aisles as 'Poets'

which, as the term suggests and as many scholars have demonstrated,

The Poet's Name can strike a Pale around,

[Spenser's] hearse was attended by poets, and mournful elegies and

If the absence of Shakespeare was thoroughly unsatisfactory, so too

My Shakespeare, rise. I will not lodge thee by

By contrast Washington Irving is fixated upon Shakespeare's tomb,

The appropriateness of a provincial church as the location of the

The practice of visiting poets' graves dates from classical antiquity;

in Britain of visiting poets' graves and associated monuments before the

Godwin argues that the material worthlessness of the dead body,

Dropping in upon the dead, compelling them to have a quick chat,

the writer rendered possible by reading, akin to the rituals of private