Literary Places

by Sarah Baxter

  The Pump Room was another must in Austen’s time. The beau monde would visit this colonnaded building by Bath Abbey to take either the curative waters or afternoon tea, to listen to the orchestra and to ‘parade up and down for an hour, looking at everybody and speaking to no one’. It was during preparatory investigations into the construction of the Pump Room that the remains of the Roman complex were rediscovered. Today, part of this grand meeting place is the excellent Roman Baths museum, where you can descend into an underbelly of ancient pools, temples and hypocausts. However, in the Pump Room’s fine main hall, you can still eat cake and finger sandwiches, and you can still sip the medicinal, if foul-tasting, mineral waters from the King’s Spring.

  One of the real beauties of Bath is that so much is so unchanged. And not just the landmark buildings but the layout of the streets themselves. For instance, Austen has her players shopping on lively Milsom Street, still one of the city’s premier retail rows; look up above the modern shop fronts to the tops of the buildings and you’re transported back in time. Austen’s characters also promenade Great Pulteney Street – still the city’s most impressive Georgian avenue – and take carriages up to the ‘lofty, dignified situation’ of Camden Place, a little-touristed terrace affording excellent views if you can bear the stiff walk up.

  Northanger’s Catherine hastens to the Royal Crescent ‘to breathe the fresh air of better company’ (today many go to visit No. 1, now a museum furnished in 18th-century style). Meanwhile, at the close of Persuasion, Anne and her Captain Wentworth reconcile along the tree-lined Gravel Walk, which still connects the Royal Crescent with Queen Square.

  Bath has become synonymous with Austen. Despite the destructive Bath Blitz of April 1942 and the so-called ‘Sack of Bath’ in the 1960s, when ill-thought urban development saw some heritage lost, the Georgian spirit of the city remains. It’s easy to envisage the streets filled with ladies in their white gloves and empire-line dresses, and gents in their tailcoats and cravats. Come during the annual autumn Jane Austen Festival and you don’t even need to imagine, as Catherine Morland and Anne Elliot-alikes really do flood the streets, their slippers and gauze gowns grazing the cobbles – Austen’s creations come to life.

  LONDON

  Which?

  Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (1839)

  What?

  Den of grime and crime, where the tale of an orphan augured British social reform

  THIS CITY is a still labyrinth; a confusion of hither-thither streets, grunge and clamour, too many people. The pea-soup fog and miasma of desperation have largely lifted, but many a corner still conjures up the past. When the constant din was of horse-clatter, cab-rattle and peddler-patter. When the streets were packed with prostitutes, pickpockets, fraudsters, gangsters, ragamuffins and the piteously poor. When crime was so rife, your handkerchief might be pinched at one end of an alley and hawked back to you at the other. A city writ larger than life; wondrous and wretched in equal measure …

  All of London is laced with Charles Dickens. It seems there’s barely a pub he didn’t drink in, a street he didn’t stroll. Moreover, he painted so strong a portrait of the UK capital at the beginning of the Victorian age that, while the city has existed for over 2,000 years, ‘Dickens’ London’ is the incarnation that most vividly endures.

  Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812. When his father was sent to debtors’ prison in 1822, young Charles was sent to work at a boot-polish warehouse on Hungerford Steps (now the site of London’s Charing Cross Station). The experience left a lasting impression, fermenting his views on socioeconomic reform and the heinous labour conditions borne by the underclasses – a situation that got worse when the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act stopped virtually all financial aid to the poverty stricken. At this time, London was the world’s biggest city, an imperial and industrial powerhouse. But it was seething with destitution and class division.

  Into this arena came Oliver Twist. Dickens’ second major work, the novel pulled no punches, describing with ruthless satire the levels of crime and depravity rife in the capital. For fictional Oliver – like so many real Londoners – the city’s streets were full of ‘foul and frowsy dens, where vice is closely packed and lacks the room to turn’. Via the tale of the workhouse orphan who ends up embroiled with Fagin’s gang, Dickens shone a gaslight on the horrors of life on the margins in mid-19th-century Britain.

  Dickens saw the sordidness first-hand. In 1837 he moved to 48 Doughty Street in Holborn, where he wrote Oliver Twist. Dickens was a great wanderer, and the streets he paced seeped into his pages. And the areas around his former home, which is now the Charles Dickens Museum, still whisper of the past.

  A little east of Doughty Street lie the alleyways of Clerkenwell. In the early 19th century this was one of London’s most squalid, crime-ridden neighbourhoods, teeming with thieves and hoodlums. In the 1860s an improvement project cleared the ‘rookeries’ (slums) and Clerkenwell was transformed. However, you can still walk across Clerkenwell Green, where Oliver watches in horror as the Artful Dodger pickpockets Mr Brownlow. And you can still, like Dodger, ‘scud at a rapid pace’ along the nearby alleys towards Saffron Hill. Named for the spice that was grown here in the Middle Ages (to mask the taste of rotten meat), in Dickens’ time this was the site of an infamous rookery beside the sewage-stinking Fleet Ditch. Saffron Hill is now a nondescript sinew of offices and apartments but there’s atmosphere within The One Tun pub. Founded in 1759, but rebuilt in 1875, it’s reputed to be the basis for Dickens’ Three Cripples, the favourite haunt of murderous villain Bill Sikes. Field Lane, the location of Fagin’s lair, was demolished in the clear-up, but probably stood a little south of the pub, near where Saffron Hill meets Charterhouse Street.

  Continue further south and you end up before Lady Justice and the Old Bailey, the country’s Central Criminal Court. Part of it is built on the site of Newgate Prison, a gaol since the 12th century, whose ‘dreadful walls … have hidden so much misery’. Dickens witnessed a public execution here, and sent Fagin to its gallows – in Oliver Twist, the bad ’uns get their comeuppance, the good live happily ever after. For Victorian London’s real working classes, life was seldom so fair. But through his words, Dickens ensured they were not ignored.

  YORKSHIRE MOORS

  Which?

  Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

  What?

  Wild, windswept English landscape, as savage as Heathcliff himself

  THE LANDSCAPE is brooding. A gunmetal sky hangs low over the barren, boundless moor, muting its palette to olive greens, tarnished golds, bruise purples. Its apparent emptiness belies secret treachery. This is nature as obstacle course: a hidden gauntlet of engulfing marshes, dangerous roots, deep hollows and dark swamps. The weather is wild too. A north wind whips over the rise by the old stone ruin, quivering the heather, distorting the lone fir tree, making it cower in fright. Or maybe it’s not wind at all that’s blowing but the spirits that haunt this moor, as tempestuous in death as they were in life …

  When describing Wuthering Heights, painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it ‘a fiend of a book’ where ‘the action is laid in hell’. That ‘hell’ is the Yorkshire Moors, a swathe of rolling hills, dales and heather-cloaked heath in northern England, bleakly beautiful. But the moors are more than the setting for Emily Brontë’s only novel, a strange, savage tale of love and revenge. They are the actor-director – stealing scenes, shaping characters, influencing action, defining mood.

  The moors of Wuthering Heights are far removed from the rest of the world. As well as being geographically isolated, they seem to exist outside of the rules of man. Few niceties are observed here; rather, life is lived at the whim of Mother Nature. At times the moors are nurturing and benign, full of gurgling streams, singing larks, humming bees and harebells. They offer star-crossed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff liberation from domestic violence and social constraints. However, more often the moors are brutal, a Hades howling with gales
and ghosts.

  It was a landscape Emily Brontë knew well. From 1820, the Brontë family (including Emily’s novelist sisters, Charlotte and Anne) lived in the parsonage at Haworth, a hard-working Pennine village producing worsted yarn and cloth. At the time, industrialisation was rebalancing England, from a mainly rural to a mostly urban society. Haworth – not so far from the powerhouses of Leeds and Manchester – was both: a crowded, polluted centre set high on the moors’ edge, open country just beyond. Emily Brontë would often escape into that hinterland, and it suffused her writing; Charlotte called her ‘a nursling of the moors’. Emily found inspiration in the rocks, crags and waterfalls, and understood nature as both a destructive and soothing force.

  The novel’s two main locations, Wuthering Heights (the Earnshaw home) and Thrushcross Grange (home of the well-to-do Lintons), are just 6.5 kilometres (4 miles) apart but distinct in personality – like their fictional owners. The former sits high on the tops, chill and gloomy; the latter nestles in the valley, more civilised and refined.

  Wuthering Heights is believed to be based on Top Withens, a long-abandoned 16th-century farmhouse a few miles southwest of Haworth. Its structure doesn’t match Emily’s creation, but its remote, windswept position fits the bill. Walk across the moor from Haworth parsonage – now the Brontë Museum – to reach the exposed stone ruin and it’s easy to think yourself into the pages of a Gothic romance.

  Architecturally, a more likely candidate for Wuthering Heights is Ponden Hall, a manorial farmhouse near Haworth, which suits in size and style, if not situation. Actually Ponden is more usually cited as the model for Thrushcross Grange. Built largely in 1634, and extensively rebuilt in 1801 (the year in which the novel begins), Ponden did have a long, tree-lined drive like Thrushcross, but it lacks the grandeur and grounds that Emily describes. However, the Brontës visited regularly, and Emily would read in the extensive library.

  Ponden Hall is currently a B&B. Now anyone can book the ‘Earnshaw Room’ to sleep in its 18th-century-style box bed and peep out of the tiny window in the thick stone wall. Though be warned that your dreams might meander the wind-raged moors, and you might hear the ghosts demanding to be let in …

  CAIRO

  Which?

  Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz (1956)

  What?

  Medieval Egyptian labyrinth of mosques, souks and secrets

  PEEK THROUGH the mashrabiya window: what lies beyond? This boxed-in balcony, concealed by a carapace of woodwork and lattice, allows furtive glimpses to the bustle below. Down there is another world – of barbers and bean-sellers, street hawkers, brass workers, stereo blare, human traffic; of lamb kofta on hot coals, bitter-black coffee and sacks of spice; of the sweet smoke of sheesha pipes, wafting like restless jinns (genies). Out there, life ebbs and flows, roars, revolts, moves on. A world whizzing by, oblivious to the eyes peering down from behind the screen …

  Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk is a literary look through the mashrabiya – gazing out and gazing in. Part one of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, it demystifies the rituals, rhythms and ructions present in the Arabic world at the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed, it’s less a novel than a rich carpet, woven with both the story of Egypt at a time of upheaval and the intricacies of urban Muslim family life, with its faith, fears, love and oppression.

  This was a tumultuous period in Egyptian history. Britain had grasped control of the country in the 1880s and, in 1914, it became an official British protectorate. However, when the First World War came to a close, but hoped-for Egyptian independence did not come with it, nationalist fervour began to bubble. All strands of society – educated elite and working-class masses, Cairenes and country dwellers, Muslims and Christians, men and women – were united in a bid to be rid of their colonisers. It was the original Arab Spring.

  Mahfouz witnessed the chaos first-hand. As a child he lived in the al-Gamaliyya area of Islamic Cairo, the city’s oldest neighbourhood, and saw protests outside his window. Later, having learned his literary skills from the storytellers of the ashwa (coffee houses) – then great hubs of cultural debate and exchange – he wove these early experiences into his epic trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street. Palace Walk, which runs from 1917 to the 1919 nationalist revolution, is a story of the sights, sounds and souls of Islamic Cairo at a defining moment.

  The novel was published in 1956 under the Arabic title Bayn al-Qasrayn (Between the Two Palaces), the name of the old city’s chief thoroughfare but also a nod to Egypt’s cultural and political transition. The wider public turmoil is channelled through the personal saga of the al-Jawad family: despotic, philandering patriarch Abd al-Jawad, his subjugated wife Amina and their five children. Since marrying 25 years previously, Amina has been a virtual prisoner in her own home, viewing the world beyond only through the latticework windows. But one day, when her husband is away, she ventures out …

  Amina, face veiled, draped in black cloth and escorted by her younger son, leaves the house on Bayn al-Qasrayn to walk along the backstreets of Islamic Cairo and visit the Al-Hussein Mosque, supposed burial spot of the head of Hussein, Mohammed’s grandson. Here, Amina, so long locked up, proceeds to ‘devour the place with greedy, curious eyes: the walls, ceiling, pillars, carpets, chandeliers, pulpit, and the mihrab niches … How often she had longed to visit this site.’ The mosque is off limits to non-Muslims. But a stroll amid the same timeless alleys is not.

  While the Egyptian capital is now a mega-sprawl – the biggest in the Arabic world – in Islamic Cairo, the streets narrow and modernity melts away; in parts it feels little different from when the Fatimid Caliphate first founded their new city here in AD 969. From the 10th to the 12th centuries the Fatimids constructed a great walled citadel, sliced by the main thoroughfare of Bayn al-Qasrayn. This ‘Palace Walk’ runs north–south linking Bab al-Futah and Bab Zuweila; between these turreted medieval gates lies an open-air museum of dishevelled palaces, dusty caravanserais, adhan-calling minarets, forgotten tombs, underground cisterns and fit-to-burst bazaars. From it, alleyways run off into quiet squares and Aladdin’s caves of tat and treasures.

  Working northwards from Bab Zuweila, you first pass the Al Ghouri wikala, a beautifully restored 16th-century hostel for African merchants where Sufis still gather to do their whirling dance and where artisans sell local crafts. Comprehensive shopping possibilities lie a little further to the east, where, adjacent to the Al-Hussein Mosque is the crazy maze of Khan el-Khalili. Turn two corners in this labyrinthine souk and you’re lost amid an avalanche of bric-a-brac, stuffed into an impossible tangle of alleys. Mahfouz used to write and people-watch in the El-Fishawy Café, Khan el-Khalili’s oldest coffee house, though these days its scuffed wooden chairs and cracked marble-topped tables are more frequented by tourists than Nobel laureates.

  Beyond this is the gold-sellers’ souk, the awesome mausoleum and madrassa (Islamic school) of Qalawun, the 12th-century Al-Aqmar Mosque and the 10th-century Al-Hakim Mosque, the street’s oldest building. And somewhere in the middle is Beshtak Palace. This 14th-century home of a rich amir occupies the site of Mahfouz’s fictional al-Jawad family home. The interior is exquisite, with its marble floors and coloured glass. You won’t, of course, find Amina trapped inside, but you can imagine it: at first-floor level, dark-wood mashrabiya windows project over the street, exactly the sort of secretive boxes from which she might have viewed the comings and goings of a world both unchanged for centuries and in dangerous flux. A world she wasn’t permitted to enter.

  SOWETO

  Which?

  Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer (1979)

  What?

  Turbulent township at the centre of South Africa’s apartheid-era struggles

  SPRAWLING ACROSS the veld, this confusing, suppurating place sits apart from the bright, big city, separated. not just by geography, but by dilapidation and the sharp end of history. Here in the township, rotten roads crawl through ordered ugliness, row upon row of unlovely hou
ses. Tin shacks lean on each other like drunks; drunks sway between old cars and half-crazed chickens; junk piles up down dirty alleys where tramps forage and stray dogs cock a leg. The air smells of urine, offal, liquor, despair. This is the land across the divide; the black backyard. A dumping ground. A crucible for social change …

  In the second half of the 20th century, South Africa was a deplorably fractured nation. The Afrikaner National Party adopted the policy of apartheid (separateness) in 1948, institutionalising existing racial discrimination. People were required to live in areas according to ethnicity; black-only townships were created and millions were forcibly moved. Mixed marriages were prohibited, and schools, buses, even park benches were segregated. Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter was published in 1979, when apartheid – ‘the dirtiest social swindle the world has ever known’ – still wracked the country. Initially banned for being dangerous and indecent, it’s a striking work of historical fiction in which the suffering is all too real.

  The novel centres on Rosa Burger, daughter of prominent white Afrikaner anti-apartheid protesters Lionel and Cathy Burger – both of whom are imprisoned for their beliefs, both of whom die in prison cells. Rosa has been raised in a highly politicised household in Johannesburg, where races splashed together in the pool and shared boerewors (sausages) and ideologies around the braai (barbecue). With her parents gone, Rosa is forced to find her own identity – but, whatever her personal struggles, she can’t escape the political. Racism is an intrinsic part of daily life at this time. And nowhere is this more evident than in the township of Soweto.