9 stops on a literary tour of England and Scotland

Plan a literary tour of Britain to visit the places that shaped the lives of your favorite authors and inspired their stories. It’s a great way to focus your trip to the UK and get off the usual tourist treadmill.

William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, JK Rowling, Jane Austen, and hundreds of others are part of the collective culture of the English-speaking world. Their stories, in all kinds of formats (books, movies, television series and even e-books) entertain generation after generation. And seeing their birthplaces, schools, writing rooms, and final homes is always fascinating.

Most of the writers on this list have stood the test of time. His work has been performed and reinterpreted in movies, television, even radio, over and over again. We read them in school because we had to, and then we enjoyed them simply because we wanted to.

To help you plan a tour that includes at least some of your favorites, follow the links for more information on each location or check out this literary landmark map for more stops on the literary tour.

JK Rowling and Harry Potter in Edinburgh

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A sign in the window of the Elephant House on the George IV Bridge in Edinburgh proclaims that it is the birthplace of Harry Potter. And it’s true. It was in a back room, with windows overlooking the city, that author JK Rowling spent fateful hours completing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone ( called the Philosopher’s Stone in the United States ), the first book in the series. It’s still a cafe and you can still go for a cappuccino and a sandwich, a pizza, or a plate of sausage and mash. But it’s best not to be in a rush, as you can wait in line for medium-sized fans.

When she was writing the last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , Rowling had moved on to the finer things in life. She booked one of the Grand Suites at the Tony Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh. The JK Rowling suite, now named for her, has her desk and a marble bust of Hermes signed by her. The knocker is a bronze owl, in his honor. If you want to splash, you can reserve it, but there is probably a waiting list.

Agatha Christie

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The UK’s ‘Queen of Crime’, Agatha Christie, was born in Torquay, on the English Riviera. Each year the resort celebrates the creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple with a festival featuring talks, walks, banquets, vintage costumes, and plays from the local theater society.

Christie was married to archaeologist Max Mallowan and for much of her married life accompanied him on archaeological excavations as he wrote his novels in English in the Middle East. From 1938 until his death in 1976, he spent most of his summers completing and editing his books at Greenway, his summer home overlooking the River Dart outside Torquay.

The house is now owned by the National Trust. When you visit, you can immerse yourself in Christie’s mystique by exploring her collections and beautiful gardens, dining in her kitchen, and even staying in a self-catering apartment on top of the house.

Charles Dickens

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Born in Portsmouth, where his father was a naval clerk, Dickens spent part of his childhood living near the Chatham shipyards in Kent. Although he lived and wrote for part of his life in London, Kent is the county most associated with the author of A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit and dozens. from other family stories. He spent many holidays in Broadstairs, still a pleasant town on the Kent coast, where the house that inspired Bleak House is now a B&B. He lived the last 14 years of his life at Gads Hill Place in Gravesend, now a private school that can be visited in groups, by arrangement.

• Dickens Birthplace Museum – A modest Portsmouth home, not far from the historic Portsmouth Shipyard.
• Chatham Historic Dockyard offers a glimpse of the world Dickens grew up in.
• Rochester Walk in Dickens’s Footsteps – A worthwhile day trip with dozens of locations for Dicken’s later work.
• The Charles Dickens Museum The author’s only surviving home in London where he lived for two years while writing to Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist. Reopened in late 2012 after extensive renovations.
• Broadstairs in Kent was a favorite for the summer holidays. Dickens wrote to David Copperfield on the house he modeled for Bleak House , now a luxury B&B. Broadstairs has a Dickens festival every June.
• Gads Hill Place Group visits to Dickens’s final home can be arranged through Towncentric, Gravesend Visitor Center, at +44 (0) 1474 337600, [email protected]

Jane Austen

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Although the Georgian city of Bath, with its Roman baths and UNESCO World Heritage status, proudly claims Jane Austen as a favorite resident, Jane was actually unhappy there. One of the most widely read authors in English, she produced virtually nothing while in Bath and, perhaps as a possible means of escape, accepted a marriage proposal, although she declined less than 24 hours later.

Jane, her sister Cassandra, and her mother were happiest at Chawton Cottage, a large cottage on the edge of her brother’s Hampshire estate. He moved in 1809 and published four of his most famous novels while living there: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were also written while she was living there, but were published posthumously.

Chawton Cottage, now known as the Jane Austen House Museum , an hour and a half south of London, is open to the public.

• Find out more about Bath, a city Austen did not like, but looked closely at in many of her novels.
• Visit the Jane Austen Center in Bath
• Visit the Jane Austen House Museum, where the author reviewed her first copies of Pride and Prejudice some 200 years ago.

Famous Oxford literary figures

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Oxford has produced famous blockbusters in virtually every walk of life. A few well-known names in English literature were Oxford students and scholars. JRR Tolkien spent most of his adult life there, first as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College and later as a professor of English literature at Merton College. He wrote The Hobbit while in Pembroke.

CSLewis, who spent time with Tolkien at The Inklings, a group of Oxford writers, also had a strong bond with Oxford. He was a fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford for 29 years and although he moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1954, he maintained a home in Oxford all his life.

Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), Oscar Wilde, Matthew Arnold, WH Auden, John Fowles (author of The French Lieutenants Woman and The Magus ), William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies ), and many more studied, taught, or lived at Oxford.

Most recently, Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones Diary, graduated from St Anne’s College Oxford.

Choose the literary atmosphere in one of Oxford’s literary pubs:

• The Eagle and the Child in St. Giles, called by Tolkien and others “The Bird and the Baby,” was the meeting place of “The Inklings,” the literary discussion group favored by Tolkien and CS Lewis.
• The Lamb & Flag, the inn across the road, dates back to 1695 and counted Graham Green as a regular.

William Shakespeare

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+44 1789 403493

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The most famous writer in the English language, possibly the most famous writer in the world, is better known for his works than for his biographical details. Almost every aspect of his life, from his marriage to Anne Hathaway to the recipient of his sonnets to the actual authorship of his works, is open to discussion and subject to lively debate.

Fans in search of the Bard can visit his hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon, to explore:

• her birthplace
• her daughter’s house, Hall’s Croft
• her mother’s place Mary Arden’s home in nearby Wilmcote
• and Anne Hathaway’s cabin. Shakespeare’s wife’s house is probably the most famous thatched cottage in the world.
• Then see a play or two at the Royal Shakespeare Theater.

Daphne Du Maurier

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Daphne Du Maurier was once the queen of atmospheric thrillers. Alfred Hitchcock turned to her again and again for inspiration, creating films from her novels Rebecca (“Last Night I Dreamed I Was Going to Manderley Again”) and Jamaica Inn, as well as her short story The Birds . Nicholas Roeg created one of the most steamy sex scenes in mainstream cinema in the 1970s movie version of his story Don’t Look Now , with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.

Fowey in Cornwall and the real Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor shaped his fantastic dark imagination. Today, the film versions of her work are more famous than she is. In a sad commentary on the fleeting nature of fame, Fowey, the city where he lived and wrote for 30 years, recently changed the name of its Daphne du Maurier Festival to the Fowey Festival of Words and Music.

William Wordsworth

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If, like the 19th-century romantic poet William Wordsworth, the sight of a field of golden daffodils has ever brightened your lonely hours, you’ll want to visit Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Wordsworth lived there for eight years with his wife Mary and her sister Dorothy. It was on a hike with Dorothy in the nearby Lake District countryside that she saw the famous field of flowers that inspired her poem, Lonely as a Cloud, known to most people simply as The Daffodils. . While at Dove Cottage, Wordsworth was visited by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other figures of the 19th century Romantic movement. The modest cabin, now owned by the Wordsworth Trust, is open to the public for guided tours. It is part of a complex that includes a museum and a research center that contains the archives of the poet.

Learn more about visiting Dove Cottage.

The Brontës

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The Brontë sisters: Charlotte ( Jane Eyre ), Emily ( Wuthering Heights ) and Anne ( The tenant of Wildfell Hall ), her dissolute brother Branwell and her father, the Anglo-Irish clergyman, Patrick, lived and wrote in the Yorkshire West Ridings Parish House Haworth village.

The house, now open to the public as a museum, gives an insight into the lonely and claustrophobic atmosphere that the Brontës inhabited. No wonder his only escape was through the overflowing romance of his feverish imaginations.

Explore the nearby windswept and lonely wastelands to find Top Withins, said to be the inspiration for Heathcliffe’s house, Wuthering Heights, and other landmarks from Emily Brontë’s novel.