I’ve made (quite a few) literary pilgrimages before.

I’ve been to Transylvania because of Dracula. I’ve been to Whitby because of Dracula. I’ve been to Dublin because of Dracula (incidentally, the Bram Stoker museum was the creepiest of the three locations, and in Whitby, you can very easily stand at the exact spot where the Demeter ran aground).

This may say something slightly worrying about my reading habits. And perhaps my holidaying ones, too.

But on Monday I made a literary pilgrimage without meaning to.

I went to Wightwick Manor, a stunningly beautiful Victorian house near Wolverhampton, expecting to spend a pleasant few hours looking at the building and its gardens. What I hadn’t realised was quite how deeply the house is connected with the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

So there was Rossetti. Lots of Rossetti, including a family tree. Suddenly, I discovered that John Polidori, subject of a recent Almanac entry, was the maternal uncle of these four talented children. It’s a tantalising addition to what I know about them and how they all fit together. 

And then there was The Germ.

Published in 1850, The Germ was the short-lived magazine of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, bringing together poetry, literature and art. There it was, behind glass: no longer something I had encountered in books about Victorian literature, but an actual physical object made by people who were trying to change what literature and art might be. Small, and surprisingly ordinary.

Then I encountered The Kelmscott Chaucer.

Conversely, I think it may be the most beautiful book I’ve ever seen.

William Morris‘s Kelmscott Press published it in 1896, with illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones, and everything about it seems to insist that a book is more than the words printed inside it. The typography, illustrations, borders, paper and binding are all part of the experience. In a gloomy spot on a landing, the nearest volunteer told me that visitors often walk straight past it … astonishing!

But perhaps my favourite discovery was something quite a bit less grand.

A drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti of his sister Christina.

Except this wasn’t the melancholy, devotional Christina Rossetti I have carried around in my head for years.

This Christina is having a tantrum. Apparently because her poetry had received a bad review!

She’s wielding a hammer and smashing up the contents of a room.

I have occasionally suggested to classes — usually to expressions of considerable alarm, followed by giggles — that there might be something ‘attention-seeking’ about Christina Rossetti’s fascination with suffering, renunciation and death.

It turns out that her brother had little reverence for the Poet Christina, too.

He drew the woman.

What a brilliant find.

We are too fond of putting writers on pedestals. We turn them into portraits, movements, dates, themes and quotations, until the person can almost disappear behind the literature.

Literary pilgrimage has a way of re-humanising authors.

You stand in the places they inhabited, or wrote about. You see the books they made, and their tiny, so-neat handwriting. You encounter objects connected to their lives. And occasionally you discover that the solemn Victorian poet was also perfectly capable of having a spectacular strop with a hammer.

I’ve learned something from all my deliberate literary pilgrimages. Haworth, for instance, was surprisingly gloomy: damp, bleak, and right next to a graveyard. Standing there got me thinking about the dismal Yorkshire landscapes of Jane Eyre and, of course, Wuthering Heights.

But perhaps the best pilgrimages are the unexpected ones.

You go somewhere intending to look at a house.

And you come home having met a few writers.

Over to you: tell me about your favourite ‘literary pilgrimage’ destinations.

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