A delightful read on authors and the places they lived in. It was enlightening and genuinely interesting to read about Wordsworth and Bronte's houses, especially in the way they so deeply contrasted each other. Shakespeare's house was an exercise in "packaged heritage" and how "tacky" and commercialized the whole institution can be. Meanwhile, Sir Walter Scott's place was a great way of showing how a house can be manufactured around an author's identity and presence in the world. Finally, the author meditates on Freud's fascination in maintaining the same office in both Vienna and London. I felt this chapter was more personal for the author, and the analysis was good.

It's a quick read that explores how author's shape their houses and how their houses also shape their identity and their works. ( )

Armchair travelers will enjoy this account of visits to the homes of five authors in Great Britain — Shakespeare, Scott, Wordsworth, Brontë, Freud — but this book offers more. Simon Goldhill, a Cambridge scholar who straddles the ancient classics and Victorian literature, has an overarching theme. In the 19th century, it was common to hail literature as a branch of religion, indeed, the only branch with a future. If one grants that, then it follows that poets are its prophets. Goldhill sees a connection between this and the rise of visits to writers’s homes at the time: A new form of pilgrimage. His book is an exploration of some top Victorian destinations (well, calling Freud a Victorian might seem a stretch, but the author makes a plausible case for finishing in Hampstead).
He starts out, though, as an anti-pilgrim. In preparing his itinerary and researching the writers whose haunts he was to visit, he felt no emotional pull. He is fully at home in the books: “Why would you want to shut the door on such a greater landscape,” he asks, “to fixate on some merely real place or object?”
Yet there are discoveries. In various ways, the visits reveal aspects of identity. His first stop, Abbotsford, revealed more about Sir Walter Scott the manipulator of his own image, than Scott the writer. Wordsworth’s two homes in the Lake District, meanwhile, evoke the poet’s “journey into the self through memory, self-exploration, and friendship.” “Shakespeare’s birthplace was invented to give voice to a national identity, a truly English selfhood,” writes Goldhill, whereas the parsonage in Haworth that housed the Brontë family seemed to him “a physical expression of the interiority of the self.”
In describing his visit to Stratford-on-Avon the author seems to savor his disgust. It was, he writes, “the hardest place on our pilgrimage . . . to feel any aura of genius, to sense the presence.” Yet the author brings to it a clever eye for the incongruous, telling detail, such as the small glimpse of wattle and daub under plate glass in the wall, or the assurance that the furniture on display are “authentically crafted, accurate replicas.”
In earlier times, one embarked on a pilgrimage not to learn about the places visited, but about one’s self. On this point, Goldhill is coy, in fact, his syntax when he touches on this point became garbled so that it was hard for this reader to follow exactly what he was saying. Despite his initial scepticism — surely the book matters, not the life of the author — as he transfers his reading skills to a different kind of text, namely, author’s houses, these yield insights as well. Still, what does he learn about himself? Whatever it was, it may also be true that he is under no obligation to share it with the reader. What he does share is sufficient encouragement to undertake one’s own quests and make one’s own discoveries.
This book is written in the learned and witty manner of the best of British academics. It is a good read.
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There is a chapter on the author's visit to Stratford and the tourist industry focussed on the bard.

Simon Goldhill visits various places in the UK associated with writers, specifically Scott, Wordsworth, Brontë, Shakespeare, and Freud, in the hope of finding why they became places of pilgrimage for the Victorians (except Freud obviously) and now for us.

Interesting and enjoyable nuggets of information and musings but no profound insights. ( )

The author decides to go on a "pilgrimage" to several author's homes in Great Britain. This is a somewhat random, over-digressive work, but it is nevertheless pretty interesting.The author is pretty cynical and rightly points out some of the shortcomings of the various tourist attractions created around the author's living spaces, particularly Shakespeare's "home" in Stratford-on-Avon. But he does find the church where Shakespeare is buried to be a little more worthy of a visit. Of the homes, Walter Scott's and Sigmund Freud's come out far in the lead, although one would have to be very interested in psychoanalysis or know a lot of analysts (as the author apparently does) to get the fullest out of it. Scott's home, on the other hand, seems to be a surprising treat, as were Scott's works when the author actually got around to reading them. If there is a takeaway from the book, it is that I might consider reading Scott.

There is a totally unnecessary section at the end of the book giving directions to get to each place. Perhaps they were trying to pad out what is already a short volume. ( )