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)]
