• Charles Dickens's home at 48 Doughty Street (London)
• Sherlock Holmes's home at 221b Baker Street (London)
• Duke of York's Theatre (London)
• Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey (London)
• Blackwells Books (Oxford)
• William Shakespeare's birthplace (Stratford-upon-Avon)
• William Shakespeare's burial site (Stratford-upon-Avon)
• Oscar Wilde's house (Dublin)
• Davy Byrne's Pub (Dublin)
• Abbey Theatre (Dublin)
These are all the ones I can think of right now. Holmes and Dickens have pretty similar row houses, but Dickens's is a little nicer. Dickens completed three novels there, including The Pickwick Papers, much of which I listened to on my iPod on the buses and trains in England and Ireland. It's pretty terrible. As for 221b Baker Street, it wasn't a real address when Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his stories, so Sherlock Holmes's connection to the house that now happens to occupy the address is pretty tenuous, even as far as fictional characters' connections to real places go. It's been turned into a museum, which, before my visit, I assumed would hold some of Doyle's pens, chairs, and first drafts, but instead it's been made to look as if Holmes actually lives there, with memorabilia relating to cases solved by Sherlock. A guy pretending to be Watson hangs out on the second floor.
The Duke of York's Theatre, where we saw a revival of No Man's Land by Harold Pinter, held the premiere of Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up on December 27, 1904. Westminster Abbey is an amazing place, and Thomas Hardy and Robert Browning, among many other writers, are buried there.
According to Wikipedia, the basement at Oxford's Blackwells Books was listed in The Guinness Book of Records as the largest bookselling room in the world. I bought a book there, but I lost it a few days later at a pub in London, which really annoyed me at the time and, come to think of it, is still kind of annoying. While we were at Oxford, we also visited Magdalen College, alma mater of Oscar Wilde and Bertie Wooster.
Shakespeare's family's house is bigger than I thought it would be, given that his father was a glovemaker. He was baptised and buried at the Holy Trinity Church, a short walk from his birthplace.
Oscar Wilde's house on Merrion Square doesn't give tours anymore, as it's now (weirdly) the site of the American University Dublin, but there's a statue of him in the park across the street. He's reclining on a rock in his smoking jacket, and no statue has ever looked so smug.
Leopold Bloom visited Davy Byrne's Pub in Ulysses and ordered a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of wine. I tried my best not to turn the Dublin trip into a James Joyce pilgrimage, since I don't actually care much about James Joyce, but we were taken to Davy Byrne's on a tour called the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl. It was all worth it because we won a T-shirt for answering trivia questions about Irish literature.
The Abbey Theatre was founded by William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and some guy named Edward Martyn in 1904. Just about all of the important Irish plays of the 20th century started there, including The Playboy of the Western World and Juno and the Paycock. The original building burned down in 1951. The auditorium where we saw Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui opened in 1966.
We also looked at a lot of literary artifacts that I didn't have any desire to see three weeks ago but I'm now glad I've seen, like the Rosetta Stone (really old!) at the British Museum, the Magna Carta (small writing!) at Salisbury Cathedral, and the Book of Kells (awesome calligraphy!) at Trinity College. I don't recommend trying to steal any of these, but if one of you feels the need to try for one of them, I think the Magna Carta is your best shot. One of the two lightbulbs above it had gone out, which to me indicated a general lack of concern about the document on the part of Salisbury Cathedral, otherwise a really nice place.
The National Library of Ireland had a good exhibit about W.B. Yeats, with a lot of his letters and handwritten drafts. The Dublin Writers Museum has similar items, and it made me realize how many Irish writers I haven't read. The Chester Beatty Library, also in Dublin, has all sorts of rare books and ancient manuscripts. I can't name any of them, but they made for a pretty nice library.
I didn't want to list Stonehenge as a literary landmark, but I thought a lot about Tess of the d'Urbervilles while I was there.
Maybe I'll post some pictures sometime, when I don't have anything else to blog about!
Comments