If writers define themselves by where they live, then listen to Virginia Woolf extol the inexhaustible energy of London, her muse: "London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets."
As true today as in 1928 when Woolf penned her observations, London is a sensory stimulant, best appreciated on foot. And whose footsteps better to follow than those of London's literary greats?
A walking tour past the homes and hideaways of celebrated writers is a fine way to make London's acquaintance, introducing us to the leafy expanse of verdant Hampstead, the gracious homes of Chelsea, the gritty excitement of Southwark and the tired elegance of Woolf's own Bloomsbury, to list only a sampling of the neighborhoods on London's literary map.
For visitors, a stroll through London's "villages" offers some of fiction's most memorable characters and literature's most luscious language. And the lives of our "guides," the writers themselves?
The tragedy! The romance!
For centuries, this spirited city has inspired the world's great writers, creating a landscape rooted in storytellers who require no first-name introduction: Dickens, Keats, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, among others.
In the hands of its writers, from Shakespeare to Dorothy Sayers, London becomes a city fully realized. Like a good book, it is easy to get lost in (more on that shortly) and difficult to tear yourself away from.
"No sir," pronounced the beloved essayist, Dr. Samuel Johnson. "When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
A few traveling tips: Before setting out, buy a week's pass for the London Underground. It's economical (about $18), and also covers the bus system. Each of the four neighborhoods described here is served by an underground station that will be your starting point.
Take along a map. I am not giving away a national secret here, but the British give terrible directions: "Turn gently," they'll say. "Just go along," they'll say. "Go to the bottom," they'll say. Even my British friends acknowledge their failing. Buy a map. (The London A-Z maps are particularly useful.)
Book lovers will be struck dumb by the number of bookstores in London, which seem to grow on every street corner. The best shop for travel guides: Stanfords, at 156 Regent St., near the Piccadilly Circus underground stop, or 12-14 Long Acre near the Covent Garden station. This shop offers dozens of titles on London, including a few that cover walking tours.
The book shop at the tourist information bureau at Victoria Station also is worth a look.
I suggest buying two guides in particular: "Literary Villages of London," by Luree Miller (1989), and "Slow Walks in London," by Michael Leitch (1992). Used in conjunction, these two softbacks, complete with maps, offer an unbeatable self-guided tour with their nuggets on the city's history, architecture, literature and literati.
Several companies operate guided walking tours, but London Walks Ltd. (call 071-624-3978) is at the top of the heap. Tours last two hours, cost about $6 and are guided by an eclectic cadre of actors, musicians and literary historians.
When to walk?
Henry James had the right idea.
"Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon," he said. "To me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."
Bloomsbury
After the Great Fire of 1666, Londoners rushed to the suburbs, creating villages such as Bloomsbury, which was laid out in tidy, elegant blocks between the late 17th and early 19th centuries. It consists of six grassy squares, encircled by lovely Georgian rowhouses, none more well-known, perhaps, than 50-51 Gordon Square, which housed the Bloomsbury Group.
Many writers have called Bloomsbury home over the years, but it is Virginia Woolf and her circle of literary luminaries with which the neighborhood is most closely linked. The biographer Lytton Strachey, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and Vanessa and Clive Bell comprised the nucleus of this questing coterie, which sought new meaning in life and art.
The neighborhood, the seat of the University of London and a fair number of publishers, is little changed since Virginia Woolf "moved" her legs through its streets, collecting the kernels that would turn up later as books, plays and poems. Her Gordon Square digs now house the university's career advisory service. Woolf doubtless would be horrified to see her name slung across Virginia Woolf's Grills, Burgers & Pasta at nearby Russell Square, where Thackeray's Osborne and Sedley families lived in "Vanity Fair."
Three blocks south of Gordon Square lies the massive British Museum, to which Londoners have assigned the ungracious abbreviation of "The B.M." The original manuscripts in the museum's British Library read like a roll call of English literature's most famous works: "Finnegan's Wake," "Jane Eyre," "Middlemarch," "Pygmalion," "Mrs. Dalloway," "Beowulf," "Canterbury Tales," "Don Juan," "Alice's Adventures Under Ground."
A half-century before the Bloomsbury Group took root, Charles Dickens lived at Tavistock Square in a now-demolished house, where he wrote "Bleak House," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Little Dorrit," "Hard Times" and part of "Great Expectations."
The Dickens House Museum, at 48 Doughty St., is a must-see for Dickens enthusiasts. Distracted by the bells of St. Paul's when ,, he lived there in the 1830s, Dickens complained, "I can hardly hear my own ideas as they come into my head." His powers of concentration couldn't have been that bad: He completed "Pickwick Papers" and wrote "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby" in his study on Doughty Street.
David Parker, the engaging curator of Dickens House, enjoys talking about his favorite author. "Imagine what it would have been like had Dickens met the Bloomsbury Group. The relationship would have been one of mutual hostility, of course. Dickens courted and rejoiced in popular sentiment. They," Mr. Parker sniffed about Woolf and her associates, "rejoiced in elitism."
Mr. Parker would not have gotten an argument from Gertrude Stein, whose contempt for the Bloomsbury Group knew no bounds when she lived at 20 Bloomsbury Square. She dismissed her neighbors as "the Young Men's Christian Association -- with Christ left out, of course." Unlike Woolf, Stein found London's streets "infinitely depressing and dismal."
Other stops: T. S. Eliot worked at 24 Russell Square for Faber & Faber, publishers; W. B. Yeats lived at 5 Woburn Walk, an alley with kicky restaurants and shops; Sicilian Arcade, across from -- Bloomsbury Square, boasts a couple of neat book shops.
Underground stops: Holborn or Tottenham Court Road
Hampstead
Terraces, hills, steps and slopes -- this is Hampstead. " 'Tis so near to Heaven," noted Daniel Defoe in 1724, "that I dare not say it can be a proper situation for any but a race of mountaineers."
It is only four miles from the center of London, but Hampstead, with its rolling heath and country air, seems worlds removed. Even Dr. Johnson, who disliked leaving London, said after a visit:
"The needy traveller, serene and gay, Walks the wild heath and sings his toils away."
If anyone occupies Hampstead's soul, it is the Romantic poet John Keats, who wrote "Ode to a Nightingale" while sitting under a plum tree at his Regency-style cottage here. The Keats House, which has a collection of letters, mementos and manuscripts, is open to the public.
It was in Hampstead that Keats met his beloved Fanny Brawne, to whom he became engaged in 1819. "You will have a pleasant walk today," he wrote Fanny. "I shall see you pass. I shall follow you with my eyes over the heath."
Keats' letters to Fanny are filled with an almost palpable tenderness. "I never knew before, what such a love as you have made me feel, was: I did not believe in it; . . . I love you the more in that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else -- I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel."
In another letter, Keats emptied his heart in passionate prose: "I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days -- three such days with you I could fill with more delight than 50 common years could ever contain."
Theirs was an ill-fated romance, however. Keats died of tuberculosis at 25 in 1821, and Fanny grieved for 12 years before marrying.
"Only one presence, that of Keats, dwells here," Virginia Woolf observed after visiting Hampstead in the 1930s.
A fashionable spa and resort in the 1700s, Hampstead continues to draw writers (including the spy novelist John Le Carre) and artists to its holly-covered hills. It's also a popular weekend destination among joggers, bicyclists and picnickers. Parliament Hill, with its commanding view of London, is well worth the climb.
Vale of Health, an enclave of picture-book cottages and homes surrounded by the heath, should not be missed, if only for the names of its buildings: Holly Cot, Ash Down, Figtree, Lavender, Faircroft and Hill View. Quite a few writers have lived in this spot, including D. H. Lawrence (1 Byron Villas), who watched the first zeppelin attack on London from the heath here.
Other Hampstead residents: Katherine Mansfield, John Galsworthy, Daphne du Maurier, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson and the poet Leigh Hunt.
With its delightful homes, undulating hills and stylish shops, there is much to explore in Hampstead. If I had to choose a single literary walk, it would be this one.
Other points of interest: The historic Kenwood House; Flask Walk's gabled cottages, bushy front gardens and old village shops; the Queen Anne-style Burgh House; Church Row, whose early 18th-century houses have retained many of the original wrought-iron railings, lamps and gates; and the pubs, Jack's Straw Castle, Spaniards Inn and Toll House.
Underground stop: Hampstead Chelsea
London's literary villages are not the sole domain of the British. It was from Chelsea that the quintessential American, Mark Twain, cabled the Associated Press in New York to announce: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
Twain, during his tenancy in the late 1890s at 23 Tedworth Square, walked daily down King's Road to observe what he called "Shakespeare people." King's Road, an important retail corridor, seems to grow more American by the hour. Among its shops: The Gap and a Safeway.
The most important literary lane in Chelsea is Cheyne Walk, overlooking the Thames, which Dr. Johnson likened to "liquid history." Residents have included George Eliot (No. 4); the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (No. 16); and Henry James (No. 21). Other Chelsea residents: A. A. Milne, Dracula-creator Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, and the historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane. The Carlyle House, 24 Cheyne Row, is open April through October.
A classic Chelsea story involves Rossetti, whose front-yard menagerie included a white bull, peacocks, armadillos, a raccoon, a young kangaroo and a wombat that gave Lewis Carroll the idea for the Dormouse that kept falling asleep at the Mad Hatter's tea party. Apparently, Rossetti went quite mad and at one point suspected songbirds in his garden of plotting his downfall.
James Whistler painted the famous picture of his mother while in residence in Chelsea and J. M. W. Turner, considered by many to be Britain's foremost painter, died here in 1851. (Twain had little regard for Turner's paintings, comparing them to "a tortoise shell cat floundering in a plate of tomatoes.")
"Long-haired Chelsea," as E. M. Forster refers to the once-Bohemian neighborhood in "Howards End," makes a pleasant stop if only for its gracious Georgian, Queen Anne and Regency houses, many of which are lovingly tended by window-box gardeners. Also worth seeing: the Royal Hospital, a home for army pensioners designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and the Physic Garden, established in 1673 for botanical research. The seeds used for the first cotton fields in the United States were grown in the gardens, open April through October, Wednesdays and Sundays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Underground stop: Sloane Square Southwark
Inseparable from Shakespeare and Dickens, Southwark (pronounced Sutherk) is the oldest part of London south of the Thames and is reached by crossing the London Bridge.
Standing under a plaque commemorating the original site of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, actress Emily Richard, a London Walks tour guide, proclaimed recently in her deep, smoky voice, "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo? Imagine -- those words were first spoken right here."
When he was a boy, Dickens' family was imprisoned for indebtedness at Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, where, nearly three centuries earlier, the Globe had mounted the first performances of "Hamlet," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "As You Like It" and "King Lear."
The effervescent Emily, who has played Dickens' Kate Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company, cares deeply about Shakespeare and Dickens and the London that gave them to us.
"For a start, Shakespeare is just universal and very relevant to today," she said during a tour that included stops at the Globe Museum, the historic Anchor Inn (which inspired Dr. Johnson to proclaim, "The tavern chair is the throne of human felicity"), and the site of the new Globe Theatre, which is being rebuilt just yards from the original site. "And Dickens? Ah, Dickens! He provides us with some of the finest characters in literature."
Allot some time for Southwark Cathedral, which is of historic and literary interest. Rich in decoration and monuments despite its rather plain facade, the 15th-century cathedral houses a stained-glass Shakespeare memorial; choir stools labeled with the names of past parishioners such as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens; a memorial to John Gower, the first English poet; and Harvard Chapel, named after John Harvard, the son of a Southwark butcher who founded Harvard University.
Visitors may want to end their stroll at the George, rebuilt in 1677 and the only surviving "galleried" inn in London. Shakespeare's plays are performed summers in the cobbled courtyard.
Underground stop: Monument