More on Literary Tourism

Following on from the Robert McCrum piece in the Observer about George Orwell and Barnhill, Randy Malamud has an article  in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education [original link has now died, download a pdf of the article from here] about literary tourism, commenting on the ‘ownership’ aspect of pilgrimages to writers’ houses but in the end drawing a positive conclusion:

Arriving in London for the first time many years ago, I hadn’t shaken off my jet lag before heading directly to London Bridge, where I walked with the morning crowds (“so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”), and, fixing my eyes before my feet, “flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.” Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot’s dreary commute to his tedious job at Lloyds Bank, a path memorialized in the lines of The Waste Land, I engaged in what has since become a part of all my travels: literary tourism.

[Link (pdf)]