After a start similar to the foregoing, the traveler should begin to make an itinerary of his own.  He will enjoy a trip more if he has a share in planning it.  From Tintern Abbey he might proceed, for instance, to Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare); then to Warwick, Kenilworth, and the George Eliot Country in North Warwickshire and Staffordshire.

Far natural beauty, there is nothing in England that is more delightful than a coaching trip through Wordsworth’s Lake Country (Cumberland and Westmoreland).  From there it is not far to the Carlyle Country (Ecclefechan, Craigenputtock), to the Burns Country (Dumfries, Ayr), and to the Scott Country (Loch Katrine, The Trossachs, Edinburgh, and Abbotsford).  In Edinburgh, William Sharp’s statement about Stevenson should be remembered, “One can, in a word, outline Stevenson’s own country as all the region that on a clear day one may in the heart of Edinburgh descry from the Castle walls.”

If the traveler lands at Southampton, he is on the eastern edge of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Dorchester in Dorsetshire being the center.  The Jane Austen Country (Steventon, Chawton) is in Hampshire.  To the east, in Surrey, is Burford Bridge near Dorking, where Keats wrote part of his Endymion, where George Meredith had his summer home, and where “the country of his poetry” is located.

In London, it is a pleasure to trace some of the greatest literary associations in the world.  We may stand at the corner of Monkwell and Silver streets, on the site of a building in which Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest plays.  Milton lived in the vicinity and is buried not far distant in St. Giles Church.  In Westminster Abbey we find the graves of many of the greatest authors, from Chaucer to Tennyson.  London is not only Dickens Land and Thackeray Land, but also the “Land” of many other writers.  We may still eat in the Old Cheshire Cheese, where Johnson and Goldsmith dined.

Those interested in literary England ought to include the cathedral towns in their itinerary, so that they may visit the wonderful “poems in stone,” some of which, e.g., Canterbury (Chaucer), Winchester (Izaak Walton, Jane Austen), Lichfield (Johnson), have literary associations.  For this reason, all of the cathedral towns in England have been included in the literary map.

REFERENCE LIST FOR LITERARY ENGLAND: 

Baedeker’s Great Britain (includes England and Scotland).

Baedeker’s London and its Environs.

Adcock’s Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London.

Lang’s Literary London.

Hutton’s Literary Landmarks in London.

Lucas’s A Wanderer in London.

Shelley’s Literary By-Paths in Old England.

Baildon’s Homes and Haunts of Famous Authors.

Bates’s From Gretna Green to Land’s End.

Masson’s In the Footsteps of the Poets.