Mapping Literary Britain

Mapping Literary Britain:  Tourist Guides to Literary Landscapes 1951-2007

 

Deborah Philips

 

Abstract

The Literary Pilgrimage is a form of tourism that seeks out the landscapes and environments that shaped an author and their works.  It can take a range of forms: the houses where great writers (and often their characters) lived, worked or died, the settings of their fictional worlds, the houses and gardens that have been used in film and television adaptatons are all potential sites for literary tourism.  It is the illustrated literary guide book to Britain (and often Ireland)  that defines which authors and places are worthy of pilgrimage, draws these locations together, and points the literary tourist towards them.

'Literary Britain' is an object of the tourist gaze which has been constructed not only by tourist professionals, but also by literary critics and by writers.  This article analyses a range of guidebooks to the literary landscapes of Britain from Bill Brandt's Literary Landscapes published in 1951 to the current edition of the Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Great Britain and Ireland.  The article argues that the heirachy of both sites and authors remains remarkably unchanged; Literary Britain is seen in these collections as a place that turns its back on modernity and change.  The selection of sites and authors is framed by a nostalgia for the nineteenth century, and for a pre-industrial rural world.

Keywords:

Literature/heritage/nostalgia/pilgrimage/guidebooks/Britain

 

Deborah Philips is Professor of Literature and Cultural History at the University of Brighton.  She has written on feminist theory, tourism, television and popular culture; her publications include  Writing Romance:  Women's Fiction 1045-2005 (Continuum, 2006), with Ian Haywood, Brave New Causes (Cassell, 1998) and, with Liz Linington and Debra Penman Writing Well:  Creative Writing and Mental Health (Jessica Kingsley, 1999)

Mapping Literary Britain:  Tourist Guides of Literary Landscapes 1951-2007

 

The literary pilgrimage is a form of tourism that seeks out the landscapes and environments that shaped an author and their works, and it is a form of literary understanding that prioritises the figure of the author.  Literary tourism can take in a range of sites: the houses where great writers (and often their characters) lived, worked or died, the settings of their fictional worlds, the houses and gardens that have been used in film and television adaptations are all potential destinations for the literary pilgrim, and all have been promoted as attractions in regional tourist advertising.  It is the illustrated literary guide book to Britain (and often Ireland) that classifies the authors and places that are deemed worthy of pilgrimage, which draws these locations together, and points the literary tourist towards them.  Robinson and Andersen have argued that:

. . . tourist encounters with literary attractions are mediated by inherent social preferences in respect of what works - or what physical manifestations and associations with those works - are worthy of the tourist gaze and which ones are not.  (Robinson and Andersen,  p.29)

The guide to literary Britain is one such mediator between the reader and the literary tourist destination; it is the guidebooks which determine which spaces and authors are 'worthy of the tourist gaze', those that are not are absent from the guidebook listings. 

Nicola Watson has identified the 'literary atlas and gazette' as a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, when, she explains:

. . . entirely new genres sprang up . . . the personal travelogue, the topographical essay, the literary guidebook as invented by John Murray, the book of text-themed topographical engravings, the literary map, and the book of practical literary walking and cycling itineraries.  This clutter of interrelated modes would eventually mature into the twinned forms of literary atlas and gazette, still flourishing in the form of The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles . . . (Watson, p. 3)

The illustrated literary guide continues to flourish in a range of titles; sold in National Trust and Heritage site bookshops, in souvenir shops and museums, together they shape the landscape of a fictional Literary Britain. 

The text which was to set the standard for the photography of the illustrated literary guide was Bill Brandt's Literary Britain, first published in 1951. Brandt's photographs and John Hayward's text were to cast a long shadow over books that brought together literature and places in the British isles; it did much to define the sites and authors for future 'Literary Britains' and also, the way in which they were (literally) framed and described. Literary Britain was originally conceived as part of the celebrations surrounding the Festival of Britain; it was published as one of two 'Festival' titles published by Cassells.  Peter Conrad has argued that the Festival of Britain, while apparently promoting modernity, actually took place in an atmosphere of nostalgia, of which Brandt's book is an example:  

The photographer Bill Brandt studied the culture's buried past in the graveyards and vacant houses of his compilation Literary Britain.   Though the Festival of Britain confected its architecture from atomic orbitals  . . . the earnest hope of the Fifties was that the future would bring back the past.  (Conrad, quoted in Hewison, pp. 28-29)

 

Literary Britain is dominated by Brandt's photographs, (the British Library copy is marked with the inscription 'Mainly photographs'). Apart from a short introduction by John Hayward, the written text is limited to a photographic title for each image, followed either by short quotations from the writers concerned, or a short biographical nugget.  Each entry also includes their full names (although George Eliot remains George Eliot rather than Mary Anne Evans, while the Brontës are designated by their actual rather than pen names), and the dates and places of each birth and death.  The book is organized around 81 writers; Dickens, with five photographs, Walter Scott with three and Shakespeare with four are the most substantive entries.  The writers go back as far as Chaucer and Bunyan, although the majority are nineteenth century figures. There are no living writers included; the most recent are John Galsworthy, A. E. Houseman, Rudyard Kipling, and George Moore, all of whom had died almost two decades before the publication of Literary Britain and who are writers very much associated with the Edwardian period.  Surprisingly, as the group of writers and artists most directly associated with a mapped geographical space, the members of the Bloomsbury group are absent; with the exception of D.H. Lawrence, who was never entirely embraced by, nor himself identified with, Bloomsbury.

The exclusion of the Bloomsbury group and the inclusion of Lawrence is less surprising when it is recognised that Brandt's collection appeared three years after one of the most  influential texts in the contemporary framing of the term 'Literature' appeared; The Great Tradition.  F.R. Leavis' study of the English novel, published in 1948, was notable at the time for its antipathy towards the Bloomsbury group and in its later championing of Lawrence.  The 'Literary' of Brandt's Literary Britain is in fact that of F.R. Leavis; his Great Tradition of 'English' writers are all present, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence.  The only exception is Joseph Conrad, who is not, unlike the other figures, associated with any particular sites in Britain. Leavis provocatively excluded Dickens and Emily Brontë from full membership of his canon, but did acknowledge Hard Times and Wuthering Heights as appendices to The Great Tradition.  Both do appear (Emily with her sisters, Charlotte and Anne) in Brandt's collection.   

If Brandt's choice of authors was shaped by Leavis' definitions of the Greats of English Literature, his selection demonstrates a somewhat fluid definition of the 'literary'.  Not all the writers are known primarily for their literary work; Benjamin Disraeli, James Boswell, Charles Darwin, Samuel Johnson and Samuel Pepys are all there.  Also included is Vita Sackville's West's ancestor, Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, who left the legacy of Knole House, rather than of any literary works. Vita, who left a literary legacy and that of her garden, is not present except in her short written appreciation of the Earl; her association with Virginia Woolf and with the 'middlebrow' would be enough to exclude her.

John Hayward's introduction to the photographic images unapologetically appeals to a literary élite with a knowledge and understanding of the chosen writers:

These descriptive texts, whether in the form of allusive quotations in verse or prose, or of biographical memoranda, should, I suggest, be used simply as helpful clues to the fullest possible understanding of the pictures.  They will be more or less useful according to the individual reader's knowledge of the facts or allusions they contain about books and authors; and to his capacity for responding, though the association of personal experience of life and literature with the scenes recorded here to the evocative element in each picture.  (Hayward, p. ix)

Literary Britain is, like The Great Tradition, addressed to those with the 'fullest possible understanding'; Hayward suggests that it is:   '. . .  designed essentially for the contemplative man's recreation'.   Hayward is clear in his introduction that the book offers an incomplete selection of British writers, as the well informed reader will know:  'the omissions should be sufficiently obvious . . . to anyone with some general knowledge of literary history.'  Nonetheless, he also claims it as representative of the canon of English Literature: 'it can fairly be claimed that the famous writers commemorated here  . . . do on the whole, adequately represent and recall to mind the panorama of English Literature from Chaucer to the present day'.  The 'present day' however is notable by its absence; every one of the writers included in the collection has both a birth and a death date, none is still living.

The places associated with each writer have no explanation in the text, nor is there any clear rationale for their selection.  The photographs can include sites associated with the life of the author; Henry James is represented by the Reform Club in London, of which he was a member.  Some representations are of the houses in which a writer was born or where they spent their writing lives; Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and John Keats are among those signified by the houses that they inhabited.   Other writers are designated by the subjects of their most familiar works; Matthew Arnold by the title of his most widely known poem, 'Dover Beach' (the entry includes a stanza from the poem), and Rupert Brooke's entry is 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester'.  Authors can also be associated with sites that are central to scenes in their fiction; Hardy is represented by Stonehenge, where his heroine, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, meets her death.

The 'Britain' of Brandt's Literary Britain is, like its selection of authors, a very abridged version of the British Isles.  Hayward invokes 'English' (rather than British) Literature in his introduction, but nonetheless, Scotland is relatively well represented with Robert Burns, James Boswell, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson all present.  The only Irish writers included, however, are George Moore, Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, and each is represented in the accompanying image by an English space; Moore's London house, Shaw's house in Ayot St. Lawrence and Wilde's place of imprisonment, Reading Gaol.   Wales is completely absent, Dylan Thomas, Wales' most notorious literary figure, was not yet dead in 1951.   

The subtext for the selection and organisation of writers and places in Literary Britain is suggested in Hayward's introduction: 

. . . at the end of the book, the time and place of the individual genius become merged in a single timeless setting.  To realise this is to realize how profoundly and permanently the poets and dramatists, the novelists and men of letters commemorated here, have impressed themselves and their achievements upon the face of Britain.  (Hayward, p. xi)

The search for this 'timeless setting' leads to some strains in the selected images; by 1951, the 'face of Britain' had considerably altered since the nineteenth century (the period to which most of the selected writers belong).   London and other British industrial cities had changed irrevocably; any traces of the men (and women) of letters who had lived in Britain's cities were often erased by urban development and, not least, the impact of bombing.  Regularly, a country setting rather than a city dwelling is the preferred location for 'the time and place of the individual genius'.

This can lead to some inventiveness around the choice of sites. So, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is not situated in Wimpole Street, (the town house where she grew up, and met Robert Browning, and which is  the setting for her story in fiction, drama and film) , but at Coxhoe Hall, in rural County Durham, which (the short accompanying text tells us), the family left when she was an infant. In Literary Britain, even those authors whose work is most bound up with the urban environment, are shifted into a rural landscape through some (often tenuous) connection. Elizabeth Gaskell's is represented by her childhood home Knutsford rather than by any scenes of Manchester, the focus of her most important fiction.  Even a writer as inextricably associated with the city as Charles Dickens is relocated to a more scenic rural landscape. Dickens is conjured up not by any image of London but through generic images of a rural forge and a graveyard, designed to evoke the novel Great Expectations. It is easier to promote a panorama of 'timeless' places in rural rather than urban locations.  

Literary Britain offers an unabashed celebration of the literary 'Greats'; literary history becomes here a tribute to the 'individual genius' (including, by implication, Brandt's), eschewing any reference to movement, genre or historical context.  Instead, it promotes an image of a timeless and unchanging Britain, clinging hard to the 'moral' virtues of the Great Tradition.  This may have been shaped by a post-war nostalgia, but Literary Britain established a set of conventions for the illustrated literary guide which would survive well into the next century.  The promotion of the rural over the urban, the emphasis on the past to the exclusion of the present and the championing of the writer as a 'timeless' figure are all characteristic of contemporary guidebooks for the literary pilgrim, and also of British tourist sites associated with writers. 

Fifteen years after the publication of Literary Britain, the 1966 A Traveller's Guide to Literary Europe' was published in three volumes, of which the second was devoted to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.  It includes no photographs or illustrations (there are no maps at all), but it shares many assumptions about the literary and the author with Brandt and Hayward.   Although the 'Traveller's Guide' is more wide ranging in its range of authors, Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad all feature large (each has several locations ascribed to them).  The authors listed are largely Victorian and there are, once again, no living writers; the most recent is Dylan Thomas, who had been dead for 23 years by the time of the guide.  The only reference to any contemporary literary culture is found in an entry in the London section, 'Clubland'. The entry rather regretfully notes that the 'Gentlemen's Clubs' of the 'past':

. . . are no longer the centre of ideas.  . . Their place has to some extent been taken over by the new espresso coffee bars.  There, young poets and playwrights will be found talking from moon to midnight . . . (Braybrooke, p. 52)

The young poets and playwrights of the 'new espresso bars'  were then likely to be of the generation of the Angry Young Men, although  none of those writers feature in the guide; despite the fact that the success of Look Back in Anger had been a decade before the Guide's publication.   The 'Traveller's Guide' shares in Richard Hoggart's distaste for the 'modernistic knick-knacks' (Hoggart, p. 247) in the post-war world of coffee and milk bars.

The 'Traveller's Guide' sees writers as historic monuments, as worthy of pilgrimage as any other form of British antiquity. The Preface notes that the guide is:

. . . intended for those who find writers and the books they wrote as interesting as architects, old churches, village customs, painters or beds that Queen Elizabeth might have slept in.  (Crosland, p. 7)

The guide is organised around the listings of place, with the writers themselves found in an index listing, so that the literary pilgrim can either follow the trail of a favourite writer, or pursue a literary itinerary wherever they might find themselves.  Brief entries reference the writers and works associated with each location, with some idiosyncratic and (often rather charming) commentary from the contributors .  Places with a wealth of literary associations, such as Bath, Dublin, Edinburgh and (unsurprisingly) Oxford and Cambridge, have listings of titles associated with the site, while London commands a section of its own (organised according to writers rather than sites).  The guide is clearly addressed to the motoring pilgrim; the Preface helpfully explains:  'we have indicated road numbers where it seemed necessary towns and villages are listed in alphabetical order . . . '.

The Oxford Literary Guide was first published in 1977, and has never since been out of print.  It is advertised as 'the classic reference work . . . a gazeteer of almost 200 places, villages, towns, cities and landscapes' (Oxford University Press website, accessed November, 2009).  The first edition follows a similar model to that of the 'Traveller's Guide', it too is organised into two alphabeticized lists, one of places in Britain and one of authors. The geographical spread is very close to that of the Crosland guide; it does include Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but these are outstripped by the space given over to Oxford, with 16 pages, Cambridge with 7, and London, with 65.

No contemporary writers are included, as an introductory comment acknowledges in parentheses: '(living writers have been excluded)'.  This policy becomes in later editions a matter of pride and tradition; the 1981 version asserts, without parentheses: 'Living authors are still excluded from the purview of the Guide' (Stephens, p. v).  The editors of the 1980 edition (the first paperback version) continue to see their task as mapping Britain as a series of locations for the literary pilgrim:

There is a fascination about places associated with writers that has often prompted readers to become pilgrims:  to visit a birthplace and contemplate the surroundings of an author's childhood, to see with fresh eyes places that inspired poems or books, to pay homage at a graveside or public memorial.  (Eagle and Carnell, p. v)

The guide's insistent focus on the past means that, as with Brandt's photographs, the forces of history have in some cases demolished the sacred site.  The literary pilgrim may be directed to a site that is no longer there:  'so many buildings have been demolished or replaced that it has been necessary to add the word 'gone' after the description of an author's home or workplace'  (Eagle and Carnell, p. v).

The 1981 version contains more illustrations than earlier editions, in both black and white and in colour, and has become the Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Great Britain and Ireland.  The authors distance themselves from any involvement in the picture research and rather imply that the illustrations are at the publishers' behest rather than their own academic interest: ''The credit for the research goes to Peter Clifford of the Art and Design Department of the Oxford University Press'.  The preface to this illustrated version is largely the same as that of the 1977 edition, but it does add, rather tentatively, some acknowledgement of the images:

. . . . writers are portrayed in cartoons, photographs, and statues; their homes (sometimes long demolished), the scenery that inspired their works, the schools, universities, and libraries where they studied, the streets of the towns and villages where they walked, have all provided subjects for pictures.  Perhaps some of these illustrations may prompt a reader to explore further.  (Eagle and Carnell, 1981, p. v)

There is throughout the Oxford guides an unproblematic alliance of author, place and understanding of the literary work, as though the 'scenery that inspired' the work and the places where a writer lived and work could offer a direct insight into the literature.  After the publication of Barthes' 1968 essay proclaiming 'The Death of the Author',   that relationship could no longer be taken as entirely straightforward.  By 1977 , the year of the first publication of the Oxford Guides, Barthes' concept, if much debated, had come to inform academic literary studies.   It is not however until 2007 that a new Preface comes to concede that:

The writer has for a long time been beneath the notice of many university literature departments:  the text is the thing, and authors - the conditions in which they wrote and the sites upon which their imaginations have fed - were long ago shown the door to their own creations.  Many readers, however, remain cheerfully and untidily oblivious to this austere dispensation.  (Hahn and Robins, p.v)

 

The Oxford Guides continue to remain 'cheerfully oblivious' to developments in literary theory, 'the reader' for the literary guide book is assumed by the editors to have no interest in, or awareness of, literature as it is discussed in the academy.

Literary critic David Daiches published Literary Landscapes of the British Isles:  A Narrative Atlas in 1979.  This is a determinedly literary and scholarly guide; the 'Atlas' eschews photographs and picturesque landscapes, opting instead for historical maps and a few select black and white prints and photographs (including, although it is uncredited, Brandt's image of Top Withers farm, standing in for Wuthering Heights).  By the 1970s, the Modernist writers have been rehabilitated, and Woolf and Joyce take their place among the Great Traditional authors.   Despite its title, the Atlas is not restricted to the British Isles; while it begins from 'Chaucer's World' as located in London, it then uses Chaucer's period in France and Italy to extend into mapping the world of the chivalric romance (a model that Malcolm Bradbury would follow in 1996).

Daiches' guide is unusual in its historical dimension, maps of London in the periods for Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Johnson and Woolf show the changes and growth in the city.  Daiches has expectations of his reader; his introduction, like Hayward's, is addressed to the 'contemplative reader'.   Daiches is careful to distance his Narrative Atlas from any association with popular tourism; he is concerned to distinguish between a 'tourist' pilgrimage and what he sees as a more 'literary' understanding of place and author.   He speaks of the

. . . added excitement that comes from recognition of known places.  This is a very human kind of emotion, akin to the emotion that drives people to make pilgrimages to places where great geniuses have lived and worked, yet at the same time different from that emotion for it is concerned with new perceptions into the life of the literary work rather than with what might be called the tourist's view of literary shrines.  (Daiches, p. 7).

Quite how these pilgrimages differ for the 'tourist' and for the 'contemplative reader' is not discussed, and what the new perceptions of the literary text might be remain obscure. 

The 1980s was a decade in which saw a renewed engagement with 'heritage', a preoccupation that was both a reaction to and encouraged by the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979.   Robert Hewison's argued in his 1987 The Heritage Industry that Britain was then 'a country obsessed with its past, and unable to face its future' 
(Hewison, p. 9).  He cites a renewed attention to Bill Brandt's photographs as one instance of the turn to nostalgia in Thatcher's Britain.  Brandt's photographs for Literary Britain were exhibited at the Victoria and Albert museum in London in 1983, and republished in a new catalogue edition (ed.  Haworth-Booth); the exhibition reignited an interest in both Brandt's work and in his construction of a 'Literary Britain'. 

Michael Stead is a landscape photographer, and his 1989 Literary Landscapes is clearly directly influenced by Brandt's work.  Stead identifies his project as one in which he undertakes to 'allow literature and photography to join successfully in an appreciation of the British landscape' (Stead, p. 6) Stead does not reference Bill Brandt's work at all, despite the similarities of their titles and the formats of their respective books. Stead's photographs of Haworth Moor and Dover Beach bear a remarkable resemblance to Brandt's images for Emily Brontë and Matthew Arnold, and a very similar cemetery is used to illustrate Great Expectations, although Brandt is nowhere acknowledged.   

For Stead, literary Britain is not a place of pilgrimage to the houses and environs of great writers, as it was for Brandt, Daiches and the editors of the Oxford Guide, but rather the settings and landscapes of novels and poems.  Stead's photographs are accompanied by descriptions of the place from the work of each represented author.  Stead's Literary Landscapes, unusually, do draw on popular fiction and 'middle brow' authors; largely because of the opportunities they provide for landscape photography. Bram Stoker is included for the drama of the Whitby setting, Daphne du Maurier allows for images of Cornwall, as does John Betjeman (rather than suburban Metroland, his more familiar location).  A few contemporary writers make it into the listings - but all are best selling authors and titles, whose work had entered into mainstream culture through film; John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman and Richard Adams' Watership Down are representative. Despite this apparently more popular address, Literary Landscapes is nonetheless profoundly shaped by the literary guide books that preceded it.  The selection of sites has already been ratified by their inclusion in the Oxford guide; the choice of writers is for the most part the similarly sanctioned figures, who are again largely drawn from the nineteenth century canon. 

Stead, like Brandt and the Oxford guide, has to confront the problem that the nineteenth century past is no longer there to be photographed, as he (unusually in these guides) acknowledges: 

I had made a decision not to include any urban or city descriptions as the scenes they describe are likely to have been mutilated by bulldozers and replaced with monstrosities from an architect's worst nightmare since the original description was written.  (Stead, p.82)

There is here a visceral antipathy towards modernity (more than half a century after Hoggart's disdain for 'The Newer Mass Art') , and throughout Stead's text, a longing for a past rural idyll.  As with Brandt, the landscapes are consistently of pre-industrial landscapes; writers are shifted into pastoral rather than metropolitan settings, however tenuous the associations between place and author may be.  Mrs (as she is designated here) Gaskell is represented by the Yorkshire Moors (by virtue of her novel Sylvia's Lovers, rather less known than her Manchester fiction).   Dickens is once again represented by a graveyard in Kent. 

Stead claim is that he depicts landscapes empty of people in order to convey the 'literary' qualities of the location.  Even when a site has become a tourist spot, because of its status in the literary guides as a place of pilgrimage - it is still represented as uninhabited and unknown. Stead bewails the flood of tourists to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, but nonetheless sets out to capture an image of 'bleak isolation'.  He has some difficulty in capturing an image of Clovelly (the setting for Charles' Kingsley's Westward Ho!) a depopulated place, which he does achieve with some effort: 

Even in March the streets were quite busy, causing me much frustration as I didn't wish to include a human form in the photograph.  The groups were sufficiently spaced apart to keep me waiting an hour for a deserted street' (Stead, p. 62)

Stead does include a scattering of industrial sites, but these are devoid of any sign of work; they have become 'heritage sites'.  A photograph of a rusting, disused slate mine is used to illustrate George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, an abandoned Lincolnshire mill comes to stand for George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. Industry and workers are present in Stead's landscapes only as ghosts: 

In the stillness of evening . . . I could almost hear the ghostly battalions of long dead workers . . . The rusting carts seemed to amplify their presence, serving as a memorial to a past way of life . . .   (Stead, p. 72).

This 'past way of life' is not only the past of the nineteenth century.   The post industrial world of 1980s Britain haunts Stead's book, the empty mills and mines of his images had more resonance in 1989 than simple nostalgia.

 

The Spirit of Britain, published in 1995, has the cachet of being edited and introduced by a fiction writer, Susan Hill.  Her understanding of the 'spirit' of a literary landscape is in its influence upon the writer:

Landscape, the physical place in which a writer is born, lives and works or even on occasions merely visits, is an inspiration, a mood,  an atmosphere, and even a character, but above all an influence.  Where people are born and those scenes among which they pass the bulk of their lives, unless they are entirely anonymous (new towns, featureless outer suburbs) have always affected them profoundly, influenced behaviour, mood, outlook, prospects; it has always been so and always in the past been more so. (Hill, p. 6)

The emphasis here betrays a contradiction, which is not unique to Hill's perception of 'literary Britain';  while the literary landscape is claimed as universal and timeless, its 'spirit' and influence is 'more so' when it is located in the past.  Just as for Brandt, it is the old that is valued and the 'literary' is seen to reside largely in the rural:  'the nooks, crannies and crevices . . .  where the past presses in upon us . . . (Hill p. 7)'.  A place can only come to have 'Spirit' if it has a dramatic or particularly attractive geography.  There can be no literary landscape deriving from the ordinary; 'new towns' and 'featureless suburbs' will not cut it. 
. 
The Spirit of Britain is less of a photographic album than the volumes by Brandt and Stead, its use of photographic imagery is more that of a conventional guidebook, with small inserts rather than full page photographs.  Hill's introduction however, lists precisely the same tropes that inform the images of Literary Britain and Literary Landscapes: 

Mountains, the sea, windswept bare flatlands, rivers and moors, fens and lakes and  lochs, or slagheaps , roaring furnaces, printing works, cotton mills, blacking the factories and counting houses all had their own character and all exerted a particular influence . . . all breathed their own spirit which affected writers deeply in themselves . . . (Hill, p.6)

 

The emphasis on the past once again means that living writers are few and far between in Hill's collection, and those that are included are there because of their associations with the past.  Peter Ackroyd is included by virtue of his novel Hawksmoor - a novel largely set in the 18th Century, Catherine Cookson and her nineteenth century heroines are representatives for the 'spirit' of South Shields.   There is throughout Hill's text an acknowledgement of historical change (and the damage it has wrought) but also a residual insistence that the 'Spirit of Britain' can somehow remain untouched: '. . . although the farming landscape of Britain has changed out of all recognition since the war and many towns and cities are quite altered, wilder places, the Scottish Highlands, Exmoor, the Welsh mountains, are still remarkably unchanged  . . . (Hill, p. 8)

The 1996 Atlas of Literature is more ambitious than any previous literary guides in its both its geographical and its historical range, which maps the world in literary associations from 'The Middle Ages and the Renaissance' to 'The World Today'.   Edited by the novelist and academic Malcolm Bradbury, the Atlas also boasts an impressive roster of contributors, with an array of academics and literary figures, including: Arthur Miller, Jonathan Coe, Melvyn Bragg and Justin Cartwright.  The 'Atlas' is closest in conception to Daiches' 1979 version; both bear the mark of the literary academic, in that the organisation is based around literary movements and periods rather than individual author and place names.  Bradbury's guide has more acknowledgement of contemporary writers and of the recent past than any other; but the selection of writers and sites remains very selective.  The end covers display a series of portraits of 'great writers' that are reminiscent of the cover of the paperback edition of Leavis' The Great Tradition, although the Atlas does include a broader range of contemporary writers and of writers beyond Europe and America than any other guide to date.

Bradbury's stated aim is to offer 'a novel internationalist history of literature since the medieval period' (Bradbury, p. 9), but that history is largely framed from the perspective of an English Literature education.  For the entire period of 'The Middle Ages and the Renaissance', the world is restricted to Britain, France, Italy and Spain, while 'The Age of Reason' is limited to France, London, Dublin and Edinburgh.  America first makes an appearance in the Eighteenth century, with the work of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and Russia in the Nineteenth century, 'The Age of Industrialism and Empire, with Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky.  'The Modern World' is shared entirely by Europe and America, as is the post-war period, 'After the Second World War'.  It is only in the final section, that the 'rest of the world' comes into any focus, with sections on Bombay, Japan, Australia, Israel, Africa and South Africa and Latin America.  Literary England dominates every section but this last.  And Literary England is populated by a very familiar set of authors and places:  the Brontë's 'Wild Yorkshire', the Lake District and the Romantic poets, 'Thomas Hardy's Wessex'.

 

The photographic compilation of literary landscapes continued to thrive into the twenty first century.  The 2005 Literary Britain and Ireland, by Jane Struthers and Chris Coe is subtitled 'A Guide to the places that inspired poets, playwrights and novelists'.  The introduction assumes an intimate, direct relationship between author and reader: 

It's no wonder that our favourite authors can start to feel like old friends, because we take so much pleasure from being in their company.  We may never meet them, but we feel we know them in some essential way; because we have heard their voices, been touched by their emotions and viewed life from their perspective. (Struthers and Coe, p. 7).

In 2005, this reads almost as a direct affront to Barthes, who had warned against a form of literary criticism that presumed an unmediated relationship between reader and writer:

The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us (Barthes, p. 143)

For Struthers and Coe, literary tourism is a form of pilgrimage, a means of communing with the spirit of a dead author, much as it was for Susan Hill. This Guide is not however, as Brandt's Literary Britain was, '. . .  designed essentially for the contemplative man's recreation'; it is instead addressed to those who will actively seek out the featured sites.   Literary Britain and Ireland functions as a handbook for those equipped with National Trust membership and English Tourist board maps; it helpfully organises the sections into neatly manageable tours of Britain and Ireland.  This guide goes beyond the discreet road names of A Traveller's Guide and the Oxford guides; it includes detailed 'maps, to show where the places can be found so you can visit them yourself.'  (Struthers and Coe, p. 7).  The book is arranged into ten regions, covering England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Eire, the geographical sections are close to those promoted by regional tourist boards. Much of the text and photographs could have come directly from tourist brochures; the introduction to 'Central England' reads: 'Here is a region full of contrasts, from the golden stones of pretty Cotswold villages to the black slag heaps that were produced by Nottingham's coal mining industry.'  (Struthers and Coe, p. 70)

The selected sites are varied; including places where writers grew up, convalesced, holidayed, ate and drank, were born or died.  There is no clear logic to the selection of writers , as the introduction acknowledges, popular,'middlebrow' and 'high' literary figures are all included. The middle brow of the past is particularly well represented, with Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, Jerome K. Jerome and Dorothy Sayers all featured, but contemporary popular writers are notable by their absence.  Edinburgh is associated with Robert Lewis Stevenson rather than the (in 2005) certainly more widely read Ian Rankin, who appears only as a footnote.  Having been published in the nineteenth century and some association with a rural landscape are the main criteria for a writer's inclusion.  The Great Tradition authors continue to dominate: Austen, Conrad, James, Eliot, Lawrence, Dickens and Emily Brontë all command considerably more space than any other writers. 

The 'Literature' of Literary Britain is still framed by a nostalgia for the nineteenth century, and for a pre-industrial rural world. There is no modernity, very little urbanism and no multiculturalism in the mapping of the writers deemed appropriate to the literary pilgrimage. Literary Britain as it is mapped in the guidebooks is a place that eschews foreigners (with the notable exception of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, who, canonised by Leavis, become honorary Englishmen and seem to escape this exclusion).  Literary guides consistently reposition the writer as a creature of the rural rather than the city and which remains locked in the past. Chris Rojek identifies literary tourism as a postmodern form, a mode of tourist promotion which, he argues:

. . . presents a fictional Britain and presents it as reality.  The politics of preservation, on this reading, simply confirm the postmodern tenet that we live in a society in which the 'completely real' is identified with the 'completely fake'. (Rojek, p. 160)

The politics of preservation in the literary guide book is not just the preservation of a certain kind of Britain, but also of a certain kind of English Literature and of a way of understanding literature.  The politics of preservation' can be identified as already there in the post war Britain of Bill Brandt.  'Literary Britain' remains in these guides, as it was in 1951, a space that resolutely refuses the future and which promotes a celebration of a timeless Britain and a timeless canon of Great Authors. 

John Urry has argued that one of the key elements in what he has termed the 'Tourist Gaze' is: 'An array of tourist professionals . . . who attempt to reproduce every new object of the tourist gaze.  These objects are located in a complex and changing heirarchy' (Urry, p. 133).  The heirarchy of sites and authors in the tourist gaze of the literary pilgrimage has been constructed as much by literary critics and writers as it has by tourist professionals.  The editors of literary tourist guides have not allowed for any complexity or change in the classification of Literary Britain, which has remained remarkably unchanged since 1951.  As Robinson and Andersen pointed out in 2002:  'Within the realms of literary tourism we find an emphasis upon the 'great' works and 'great' authors' (Robinson and Andersen, p.27).   This canon of sites and authors is now unquestioned and so often repeated that it is no longer recognised as such.  It has become a naturalised ' tradition', unassailed by any developments in history and literary theory. 

 

Even F. R. Leavis - the architect of the Great Tradition in English Literature - could not have endorsed the Literary Britain of the tourist guides.  He recognised that 'English Literature' is not a static category and, in a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge in 1967, firmly argued against any idea of literature as heritage:

'English Literature' exists at any time as a living reality, and the need, which imposes convinced an resourceful effort of a kind a make it my aim to define, that it should exist as such for us - that it should be in civilization a real and potent force in our time.  This last phrase is an insistence on the fact of change.  Life is growth and change in response to changing conditions . . . (Leavis, 1979, p.2)

 

References

Barthes, Roland.  'The Death of the Author' in trans. Heath, Stephen. Image-Music-Text  New York:  Hill and Wang, pp.142-148

Bradbury, Malcolm (ed.)  The Atlas of Literature London:  De Agostini Editions, 1996

Brandt, Bill.  Literary Britain  London:  Cassell and Company, 1951

Braybrooke, Neville.  'London' in ed.  Crosland, Margaret.  A Traveller's Guide to Literary Europe, Volume Two  London:  Hugh Evelyn, 1966, pp.44-76

ed.  Crosland, Margaret.  A Traveller's Guide to Literary Europe, Volume Two  London:  Hugh Evelyn, 1966

Daiches, David and Flower, John.   Literary Landscapes of the British Isles:  A Narrative Atlas  London:  Paddington Press, 1979

eds.  Eagle, Dorothy and Carnell, Hilary.  The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, first edition, 1980

eds.  Eagle, Dorothy and Carnell, Hilary.  The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the British Isles  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1981

Hahn, Daniel and Robins, Nicholas.  Preface to The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the British Isles , third edition, Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007, p.v

ed.  Haworth-Booth, Bark,  Literary Britain:  Photographed by Bill Brandt  London: Victoria and Albert Museum., 1984

Hayward, John.  'Introduction' to Brandt, Bill,  Literary Britain  London:  Cassell and Company, 1951, pp.ix-xi

Hewison, Robert.  The Heritage Industry:  Britain in a Climate of Decline  London:  Methuen, 1987

ed.  Hill, Susan.  The Spirit of Britain:  An illustrated guide to Literary Britain  Headline Publishing, 1995

Hoggart, Richard.  The Uses of Literacy  Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1976

Leavis, F. R.  English Literature in our Time & the University: The Clark Lectures, 1967  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1979

Leavis, F. R.  The Great Tradition  London:  Chatto & Windus, 1948

Robinson, Mike and Andersen, Hans Christian. 'Literature and the Creation of Touristic Spaces' in Robinson, Mike and Andersen, Hans Christian, eds. Literature and Tourism:  Reading and Writing Tourism Texts  London:  Continuum, 2002, pp.  1-38

Rojek, Chris.  Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel  Basingstoke:  Macmillan Press, 1993

Stead, Michael J.  Literary Landscapes  Oxford:  1989

Stephens, Meic.  'Preface' to The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Great Britain and Ireland , second edition, Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1981

Struthers, Jane and Coe, Chris. Literary Britain and Ireland: A Guide to the Places that inspired poets, playwrights and novelists London:  New Holland Publishers, 2005

Urry, John.  Consuming Places  London:  Routledge, 1995

Watson, Nicola J. 'Introduction' to Watson, Nicola J., ed. Literary Tourism and Nineteenth Century Culture  Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 1-12