Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers' Shrines and Countries by Alison Booth (review)

Alison Booth's Homes and Haunts is a complex and rewarding addition to the emerging body of scholarship examining the sites, texts, and practices of literary tourism—or, as Booth often prefers to frame her work, "topo-biography." Booth credits Nicola Watson's The Literary Tourist (2006), the first book-length treatment of the subject, as a seminal text. She also acknowledges Paul Westover's Necromanticism (2012) on the Romantic reader-tourist's fascination with imaginatively reanimating the author; Harald Hendrix on the long history of the literary tour; and Andrea Zemgulys's Modernism and the Locations of Literary Heritage (2008) on the fashioning of the "historic" heritage city at the turn of the twentieth century, and its relation to the work of Woolf, Forster, and Eliot. The study of literary tourism, however, is inevitably interdisciplinary, and Booth ranges far and wide in a work that is not simply a literary history or collective biography, but, above all, a meditation on the many ways the curious space of the "house museum" both shapes and reflects an author's posthumous reception.

Booth, like Watson, structures her book around narratives of her own visits to literary shrines, not shirking from chronicling her own affective responses (or lack thereof) in a variety of droll asides. The book itself, therefore, is—at least in part—a literary ramble, but one that simultaneously partakes in and analyzes literary tourism. As such, one might also compare it with Jeremy Tambling's Going Astray: Dickens and London (2000), where literary and cultural theory share the page with a walking tour of Dickens's London. Booth, however, has a far broader geographical remit. She visits multiple sites of literary pilgrimage that honor various authors in the Anglo-American canon. The book does not follow a rigid chronology, but Booth's earliest substantive subject is Washington Irving, whose lively sketches provided the template for American literary tourists claiming a literary birthright in the UK, and who himself received many a literary tourist at his home (Sunnyside in Tarrytown, NY). The most recent author in Booth's spotlight is Virginia Woolf, who herself was fascinated by literary tourism and literary posterity. Booth discusses Woolf's longstanding interest in Thomas and Jane Carlyle in Cheyne Walk, but also records how Woolf could be acerbically dismissive of topo-biography, particularly in early reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, deriding literary tourism as middlebrow and unimaginative.

Booth, in fact, sees Woolf's ambivalence as presaging twentieth-century literary criticism's focus on the text, excising the typical subject matter of the literary tour from scholarly debate—i.e., biographical, historical, and geographical context—and thus making a prominent and hitherto respectable tradition of amateur scholarship something of an embarrassing irrelevance. She further suggests that the extensive pre-WWI popular literature of "homes and haunts"—a widely used description, drawn from William Howitt's influential 1847 travelogue Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent Poets—actually reflects a period when amateur scholars and literary critics were positively engaged in fruitful cross-pollination and collaboration. There is undoubtedly some truth in this, particularly if one considers the activities of the Dickens Fellowship, founded in 1902, which has always attracted a mix of amateurs and professional scholars. But one could argue that Booth downplays a longstanding history of hostility and mockery directed towards the literary tourist de haut en bas, which continued even as works of topo-biography thrived in the late-Victorian book and magazine market. For example, Thomas Pemberton's Dickens's London (1876), the first published book of Dickensian literary tourism, received only one review from a "serious" paper, which described it as "a reverential, but as far as we can see, useless piece of work" (Saturday Review, 8 Jan. 1876). Throughout the nineteenth century, the creators of literary tourism faced critics who complained it was a reductive, vulgar, mass-market pursuit, i.e., the sort of "anti-tourism" sentiment that James...