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Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic & Victorian Britain (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), viii + 244pp. ISBN 978-4039-9992-9; £45 / $75 (hb); ISBN 978-0-2302-1092-9; £16.99 / $29 (pb).
On 14 September 1814, Samuel Rogers came upon a stone tablet in Geneva marking the birthplace of Rousseau and close by another for Charles Bonnet (1720-93), the Swiss naturalist. 'No such things with us', Rogers recorded in his journal, 'None on Johnson's in Ball Court or Milton's in Jewin Street'. [1] Two years later, Shelley toured Switzerland on the trail of Rousseau, whose Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), Shelley consulted on the spot. This book, Shelley wrote, 'acquires an interest I had not conceived [sic ] it to posess [sic ] when giving & receiving influences from the scenes by which it was inspired'. [2] Such responses to text and place, according to Nicola J. Watson in The Literary Tourist , lead by an inexorable logic to the blue plaques that now dot the literary landscape of Britain and to the popularity of following in the footsteps of authors or of exploring landscapes associated with fiction. Although it gestures towards the transnational scope of literary tourism, represented by British tourists' pursuit of Rousseau in Switzerland and visits to Shelley's grave in Rome, Watson's book is especially focused on places closer to home and the ways in which national identity is revalidated in a process of touristic intertextuality, the layering of text, place, and affective identification between tourist-readers with absent authors.
Were The Literary Tourist a mere historical survey of travel writings that invoke the presence of writers, characters, and fictional works in landscapes, the book would not want for compelling material. But Watson's purpose is also to explore the proposition that nineteenth- (and even twentieth-) century reading habits in Britain are predicated upon literary tourism. Speculatively, Watson considers, first, whether literary tourism redresses 'the erosion of the intimacy of the relationship between [writers and readers] in an age of mass readership' (p. 13) and, second, whether 'realist strategies in nineteenth-century narrative' might grow out of or symbiotically produce readerly habits of comparing texts with the physical world. More convincingly, she demonstrates how literary tourism becomes...