British Writers and Literary Places

British literature is very rich. You can always find a city, a town or a piece of country connected with a famous writer.

William Shakespeare, Britain's greatest playwright, was born in 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon. Stratford is now the second most-visited town in Britain. People come to see the house, where he was born, Grammar school, where he went to, his plays, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the theatre named after him, his tomb and other places, connected with his name.

In the early 1590s Shakespeare went to London. He set up his own theatre, the Globe, where his company performed his plays. It was a wooden theatre in London. An exact reconstruction of the Globe is being built and visitors can now experience what it was like to go to the theatre 400 years ago.

Charles Dickens was probably the most popular novelist in the English language in the 19th century. When he was only 12, Charles had to leave school and work in a factory. His novels often tell the stories of young children who work hard to escape a life of poverty. Many of the stories were set in London, and his novels show how the city changed during his lifetime.

London was to Shakespeare and Dickens what Paris was to Balzac. It held them in its thrall, was both their canvas and their inspiration, their workshop and their raw material. Today, despite the ravages of time, traces of their London — shipwrecks of the past — still abound in the City of London.

Jane Austen spent her short life in Hampshire, near the south coast of England. She was born in 1775 and died in 1817. Her novels describe the everyday life of people in the upper-middle class circles she knew best. Her characters spend most of the time in the countryside, doing little or no work. Occasionally they go to London; sometimes they go to Bath, a fashionable town. Today in Bath one can visit Jane Austen Centre. Here, in a Georgian town house in the heart of the city, the visitor can find out more about Bath in Jane Austen's time and the importance of Bath in her life and work. She paid two long visits here towards the end of the 18th century, and from 1801 to 1806 Bath was her home. The city is still very much as Jane Austen knew it, preserving in its streets, public buildings and townscapes the elegant well-ordered world that she portrays so brilliantly in her novels. Her famous novels are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1818) and Persuasion (1818). Her intimate knowledge of Bath is reflected in her two last novels. She never married, died at the age of 42, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Charlotte Bronte was born in 1816 and died in 1855. Her best-known books include Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853). She was the oldest of the famous Bronte sisters. All three were novelists, and they grew up in a remote house (now a museum) at Haworth in Yorkshire. All three sisters died very young, but many visitors come to see the museum, which tells them about sisters' life and work.

If you go to Oxford, you can visit Alice's Shop. The Alice in Wonderland Shop was the Victorian sweet shop frequented by Alice Liddell and immortalized by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass. Writing under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, a young Oxford mathematician and clergyman named Charles Dodgson spent warm summer afternoons recounting his story, Alice in Wonderland, to the young Alice Liddell. This shop provides a fascinating window onto the world of Lewis Carroll and Alice and how this was transformed into the magical world of Alice in Wonderland.

There are a lot of other places in Britain connected with literature. They are everywhere. In Scotland many places are connected with Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns. In London one can visit famous Baker Street and the museum of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. And the British take care of such places and keep up their traditions, which are connected with these memorials.

1. What famous British writers and poets do you know? 2. What are they famous for? 3. Have you read their books? 4. Who is your favourite writer and why? 5. What places in London are connected with Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare? 6. What places in Stratford arc connected with William Shakespeare? 7. What places in Britain are connected with Jane Austen? 8. What places in Britain are connected with Charlotte Bronte? 9. What places in Oxford are connected with Lewis Carroll and his story " Alice in Wonder­land"? 10. How do British people honour their famous writers and poets?