Literary tourism: Why the places we love in books can never quite be found in real life

From the Brontës’ Haworth to Jane Austen’s Bath, Wordsworth’s Lake District and Thomas Hardy’s Dorset, literary places continue to exert a powerful hold over readers.

Literary tourism appears to be enjoying renewed popularity, from visits inspired by classic novels to the TikTok trend of turning books into travel itineraries. But what exactly are literary tourists hoping to find when they get there? The answer is more complicated than it might seem.

Haworth, Bath and Dorset all exist, obviously. They can be found on a map and visited. But the Brontë moors, Austen’s Bath, Wordsworth’s Lakes and Hardy’s Wessex are also literary reimaginings of those places. They may never have existed in quite the form readers imagine.

Our fascination with literary places has a long history. Literary geography, which combines physical geography with literary studies, emerged in the late 19th century as the novel grew in popularity and, in many ways, grew alongside literary tourism.

In 1899, William Lyon Phelps created his Literary Map of England, marking locations associated with authors and literary works. A few years later, William Sharp’s Literary Geography (1904) mapped regions such as “Dickens land”, “the Brontë country” and the literary geography of the English lakes.

These early literary maps invited readers to see where fictional and geographical worlds appeared to overlap. More than...

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