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Now for four entrances and one escape-hatch. For a writer, a door is desirable because it shuts (one hopes) everyone out. As Alexander Pope wrote, \u2018Shut, shut the door, good John! Fatigu\u2019d I said,\/Tie up the knocker, say I\u2019m sick, I\u2019m dead\u2019 (Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot).\u00a0 For literary tourists, particular doors to particular writer\u2019s houses have come to celebrate the idea of finding the writer \u2018at home\u2019, and more particularly the idea of being able to encounter the writer in person at home, whether alive, or indeed dead.<\/p>\n
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Dove Cottage, Grasmere<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Originally a pub conjecturally called \u2018The Dove\u2019, Dove Cottage stood on the then high road along the lake of Grasmere. Rydal Mount, Wordsworth\u2019s home in his latter years had been famous for many years; Dove Cottage became celebrated only after the poet\u2019s death.\u00a0 It achieved tourist fame first through the journalism of Wordsworth\u2019s admirer and subsequent lodger, Thomas De Quincey, who described his first visit in his Literary Reminiscences<\/em> (1854) thus: \u2018all at once we came, at an abrupt turn of the road, in sight of a white cottage, with two yew-trees breaking the glare of its white walls. A sudden shock seized me on recognising this cottage\u2026. in less than a minute I should meet Wordsworth face to face.\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Haworth Parsonage, Haworth<\/strong><\/p>\n The home of the Bront\u00eb sisters, which achieved identity and celebrity primarily through the description provided in Elizabeth Gaskell\u2019s Life of Charlotte Bront\u00eb <\/em>(1857), published two years after the death of Charlotte. Gaskell\u2019s opening gambit was to describe her first visit to Haworth, and this would model subsequent visitor experience. Gaskell described the home of the author of the scandalous Jane Eyre <\/em>as particularly genteel and ladylike, and despite the Gothic edge to the cult of the Bront\u00ebs, this image provided by the museum and used on their brochure still features a cat as guarantor of good housekeeping to the prospective guest coming up the path: \u2018Everything about the place\u2019 noted Gaskell, \u2018tells of the most dainty order, the most exquisite cleanliness.\u00a0The door-steps are spotless; the small old-fashioned window-panes glitter like looking-glass.\u2019<\/p>\n Also on Haworth see\u00a0https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=136<\/a><\/p>\n 17, Gough Square, London<\/strong><\/p>\n Here\u2019s the door to the Dr Johnson House in London, famous primarily as the place where Samuel Johnson laboured over ten years in the garret to produce his Dictionary. <\/em>Outside, in the square itself, there is a statue of Johnson\u2019s cat Hodge, installed in 1997. I love this picture, because it correctly identifies the point of this statue. Gazing at the front door seemingly in hopes to be let in, it indicates the door as worthy of note to passers-by, imagines the Doctor into a comforting domesticity. Cats had long been associated with intellectuals (see my upcoming post on Petrarch\u2019s cat) in part because they kept down mice who were inclined to chew up scholarly papers.<\/p>\n Also on Johnson see \u00a0https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=190<\/a><\/p>\n Farmhouse room, Ile St Pierre, Switzerland<\/strong><\/p>\n I took this image in the set of rooms in which the philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau stayed for a summer in 1765 having been forced out of his previous home (see my earlier blog\u00a0https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=162<\/a> ). He gives a famous account of it in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker<\/em> (1782): \u2018I wanted them to make this refuge a perpetual prison for me\u2026to forbid me any kind of communication with the mainland so that being unaware of all that went on in the world I might forget its existence and\u2026it might also forget mine.\u2019 Rousseau was not however forgotten, and would escape unwanted celebrity-hounds by slipping through this trapdoor; after his death these rooms became extremely famous, attracting the likes of Napoleon amongst many others.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/u><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now for four entrances and one escape-hatch. For a writer, a door is desirable because it shuts (one hopes) everyone out. As Alexander Pope wrote, \u2018Shut, shut the door, good John! Fatigu\u2019d I said,\/Tie up the knocker, say … Continue reading