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Sunday, June 28, 2009
Shameless Literary Tourism II
My own recent perambulations around London were not quite as focused as Amardeep’s “Joyce-tinted” day in Dublin, but I thoroughly enjoyed the sites and sights I saw. Top literary-historical experience: Carlyle’s house in Chelsea.
Thomas and Jane lived there for over 40 years (though, I learned, they always rented, never bought). According to the very helpful National Trust staff, 90% of the contents of the house are authentically theirs, and everything is arranged pretty much as they had it, so you get a very vivid sense of what their daily life was like. Carlyle’s “soundproof” attic study was particularly evocative. Among the items on display are a fragment of the original manuscript of The French Revolution (the one famously burnt by John Stuart Mill’s maid), some extremely--surprisingly--sentimental Valentine’s cards from Thomas to Jane, and a wonderful 80th birthday notice signed in 1875 by every living literary luminary including George Eliot. Although the Dickens House Museum also has many fascinating and even moving artefacts, including Dickens’s annotated reading copies of a number of his novels, Dickens did not live on Doughty Street for very long (long enough, mind you, to finish The Pickwick Papers and write Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby) and much of the furniture is “period” but not his (though there’s the “Cruikshank chair,” which is cool). So you don’t get quite the same feeling of stepping back into another life and time as you do at 24 Cheyne Row, where you can stand, as I did, right where Carlyle is posed in Robert Tait’s famous painting “A Chelsea Interior."
On our ramble through Chelsea we paused at George Eliot’s last home, 4 Cheyne Walk, just down the street from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s house (where, apparently, his menagerie caused so many problems for his neighbours that there is still a rule against peacock ownership in the area). We went past Oscar Wilde’s house on Tite Street and paused outside another interesting looking house only to be invited in and shown around by the kind and enthusiastic current owner: it turned out to have been the painter John Collier’s home and studio. Another good place for a Victorianist to wander was down Chancery Lane and around past Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where the shade of Mr Tulkinghorn seemed ominously nearby. And of course there are the shady squares of Bloomsbury, including Tavistock Square, where both Dickens and Viriginia Woolf lived, and Gordon Square.
Recently at The Floating Academy, Eddie Kent raised some interesting questions about the commodification or commercialization of literary sites. I can see that there is something at least potentially discomfiting about the way England’s cultural history is packaged and marketed, but at the same time I think it’s wonderful to come so close to the reality of the past, to be reminded as tangibly as the Carlyles’ house reminds us that, as Carlyle himself said, “the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by ... abstractions of men.”
Addendum: It was very interesting to learn that Carlyle’s house was among the first literary sites established as a tourist destination. On display in his attic study is one of the early guest books, open to the page signed by Vanessa and Virginia Bell.