London is the political capital of the United Kingdom, but it is also its literary capital. A proposal for some literary-themed walking tours in London. The literary places in London are hundreds. Let’s try to discover some of the most significant ones with these walking tours through the different districts of London.
William Shakespeare’s London
The beginning of William Shakespeare‘s career is linked to the Shoreditch district. This area, which today is renowned for its nightlife, has housed since the Middle Ages an important monastery dedicated to Saint John the Baptist.
With the dissolution of the religious orders by Henry VIII, in 1536 the monastery was vacated, becoming one of the so-called liberties: monasteries were not subject to normal laws and this practice continued to be applied in their areas even after they were no longer under the jurisdiction of the religious orders. The liberties attracted two categories of people: those living on the edge of the law and artists, who here could not be censored.
Thus, along the current Curtain Road (named after the curtain wall of the Saint John the Baptist monastery), two competing theaters were established: the Curtain Theatre and The Theatre. The Theatre was the home of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the theatrical company in which Shakespeare was a playwright and actor. The owner’s son, Richard Burbage, who was the lead actor, played here the roles of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. When the lease of the area was about to expire, there was a dispute between the owners and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The theater was temporarily closed and the company had to be hosted at the Curtain Theatre.
Burbage, fearing the loss of the theater, organized a nighttime team of men who dismantled it piece by piece and transferred it to Southwark. Thus was born the Globe Theatre.
Globe Theatre
The area was chosen because it was outside the jurisdiction of the City, which banned theaters. Next to the original site of the Globe, in today’s Park Road, stood the competing Rose Theatre, whose foundations can be seen on guided tours. Today you can visit the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, a faithful reconstruction of the seventeenth-century theater, which stands not far from the original, and perhaps relive the atmosphere of Elizabethan theaters by attending one of its summer performances.
Due to this vocation as a theater district, many actors lived in Southwark. Their parish was the Southwark Cathedral, originally the oldest Gothic church in London (9th century AD). Thus, about half of the actors listed in the First Folio, the first printed edition of Shakespeare‘s works, are recorded in the church registers, as is the Bard himself, to whom a monument inside is dedicated. Southwark Cathedral is also the burial place of Edmund Shakespeare, William’s brother, also an actor.
The Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia Districts: Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens
Not far from the British Museum is the Fitzrovia district, historically associated with the group of bohemian artists who lived there at the beginning of the twentieth century. The most famous was Virginia Woolf, who lived between 1907 and 1911 at number 29 Fitzroy Square (where the playwright George Bernard Shaw had previously lived). Virginia Woolf, together with her brothers Thoby and Adrian, founded in this very house the Bloomsbury Group, an association of artists originally from Cambridge University and known for their dissolute lifestyle.
There was a saying that identified this group: couples who live in squares and have triangular relationships. Indeed, the beautiful square plazas characterize this area and Virginia Woolf herself also lived at number 46 Gordon Square and number 52 Tavistock Square. In the latter apartment, she wrote some of her most famous works, including Orlando and The Waves.
The place where the area’s artists used to go for drinks (almost never in moderation) was the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street. This pub was particularly popular between the 1920s and 1940s and counted among its regular patrons George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, and the satanist Aleister Crowley, who also invented a drink for this pub. Towards the late 1930s, some artists preferred to frequent the nearby pub Wheatsheaf, in Rathbone Place. Both the Fitzroy Tavern and the Wheatsheaf are still very popular today, and their bohemian atmospheres continue to be felt there.
In beautiful Doughty Street, at number 48, is the Charles Dickens Museum, set in the only London house that has survived among all those in which the writer lived. Here Dickens wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby and witnessed the death of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, just seventeen years old. This episode, which deeply troubled him, is recounted through the death of Little Nell in the novel The Old Curiosity Shop. In London there are many places linked to the life and works of Dickens, and the museum also organizes thematic walking tours to locations from some of his novels.
The Chelsea Neighborhood: Oscar Wilde
The aristocratic Chelsea neighborhood has welcomed many artists and, of course, among them are also numerous writers. At number 34 Tite Street, between 1884 and 1895, Oscar Wilde lived and here he wrote his masterpieces The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. However, this house also marked the beginning of his downfall: during a dinner held here, Wilde met his future lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The father, the Marquis of Queensberry, disgusted by the relationship, sued Wilde in court on charges of indecency and the writer was convicted and imprisoned and forced to sell the house to pay part of the legal expenses.
The most significant street in Chelsea for its residents is Cheyne Walk. Its row of elegant houses facing the Thames has hosted many celebrities, including the painters Rossetti and Turner and the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Among the writers who lived there are George Eliot (at number 4), Bram Stoker (at 27) and Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who lived with his mother at numbers 118-119 (where once the great painter JMW Turner had lived) and then moved to the Carlyle Mansions, the condominium located between numbers 50 and 60, where the poet TS Eliot and Henry James also lived. In his apartment in the Carlyle Mansions, Fleming wrote the first James Bond story, Casino Royale.
The Carlyle Mansions owe their name to an illustrious character who lived until his death at number 24 Cheyne Walk, Thomas Carlyle, a 19th-century Scottish writer and essayist. The Thomas Carlyle’s House, where Charles Dickens was a regular guest, is open to the public and worth visiting to get an idea of what these beautiful townhouses were like.
The British Library
Finally, a must-visit destination for literature enthusiasts is the British Library, a true temple of knowledge. On the ground floor, there is an exhibition hall with some priceless treasures. Among the literary works, and limiting ourselves to the writers mentioned in this article, stands the First Folio of Shakespeare, the first collection of all his works curated by some friends and colleagues of the Bard immediately after his death. Without this edition, eighteen theatrical works would have been lost, including Macbeth and The Tempest. The prestigious format (Folio) was reserved for theological and historical works and is used here for the first time for a literary work.
You can also admire manuscripts by Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Ian Fleming, and a notebook with a draft of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, with an ending different from the published work.
The exhibition at the British Library spans many fields of knowledge. Alongside literature, there are autograph scores by great composers (including Handel, Mozart, and Mahler) up to the Beatles; there are maps, illuminated sacred texts, scientific and historical treatises, anatomical drawings by Michelangelo and Durer, and stage machine drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. There are also codes of law, including two of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta.
