Missions to track down invented figures or settings seem bound to end in disappointment-except for the entrepreneurs and marketeers who peddle Sherlock Holmes deerstalkers or guides to Jane Austen’s Bath. In their heads, it is said, everyone is the hero of their own story, but lots of people seem content to be an extra in someone else’s. The yen to see and touch the scenery of books can seem ploddingly literal. Plainly, it is easy to be snooty about literary tourism. In “Confederates in the Attic”, Tony Horwitz described tourists in Georgia searching for Tara, home of Scarlett O’Hara, though the film of “Gone with the Wind” was mostly shot in California, and Margaret Mitchell, the book’s author, made sure her plantation resembled no real ones. More eccentric still are quests to find non-existent places like Tolkien’s Middle-earth. After all, the characters, being made up, never went there nor, sometimes, did the authors. Seeking out the sites of fictional marriage proposals-or ancient myths-is weirder. It is one thing to visit the spots where authors wrote and died, trekking to the Brontë parsonage at Haworth or down the causeways to Hemingway’s bolthole in Key West. Look more closely, and as well as private enthusiasms, these journeys trace the alchemical links between stories and their readers. On the face of it, the urge to follow in imaginary footsteps is odd, even irrational. On June 16th, when the action of “Ulysses” is set, Dubliners will celebrate Bloomsday-named for James Joyce’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom-in the novel’s costumes and pubs.Ī quarter of British travellers stop at bookish attractions on domestic trips, says a survey. From the mortal platforms nearby, devotees can again unravel “The Da Vinci Code” on London-to-Paris tours. Harry Potter fans are again queuing to pose beneath the sign for Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station, whence trains to Hogwarts depart in J.K. Boosted by screen adaptations, literary tourism has since become a mass pursuit, as the post-covid holiday rush attests. But for visitors who suspend disbelief on the path that winds from a derelict chapel to a quiet cove, this is it: the place where Heracles dragged Cerberus, the three-headed guard-dog, snarling into the light, and where Orpheus turned and lost Eurydice to the darkness for ever.Ĭlassical landmarks drew sightseers even before Byron set off a craze for them 200 years ago. Or so classical authors such as Euripides implied others put the gateway farther north in Greece, or near Naples, or on the Turkish coast.
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