Britain by the Book: A Curious Tour of Our Literary Landscape

Books have to be written somewhere other than in authors’ heads. So, readers are keen to know where the author was when he or she wrote what they did: it seems an important part of the biographical context for understanding the work itself. The actual place – Kipling’s Batemans, Hardy’s Max Gate, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Knutsford, Dickens’s London and the Haworth of the Brontës – has a geographical identity, and such associations make literary tours popular – around Scott’s Abbotsford or Priestley’s Bradford or the Lakes countryside of Beatrix Potter and Arthur Ransome. It is as if we get that bit...