Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave

As its title suggests, this is a quirky book. It veers, often in cavalier fashion, from informed opinion to cultivated impression, from gobbets of information to glib reflections that manage to provoke a sense of irritation (in this reader at least). We have one Scott (whose plaid trousers, reverently displayed at Abbotsford, once covered the buttocks of the Wizard of the North) and one Freud (whose couch Goldhill reveres in Hampstead) but at least two Brontës in a vault at Haworth rather than the one tomb the title implies (though Goldhill knows, despite Matthew Arnold’s counter claim, that Charlotte and Emily are not buried in the village churchyard). Goldhill’s short book forms part of a series of ‘Culture Trails’, or ‘Adventures in Travel’, and he sets out to shape his journeys through literary Britain as if he were on a pilgrimage. It is an assertively secular pilgrimage and there is little room for earthly paradises let alone for the symptoms of the Stendhal syndrome, a psychosomatic illness that can result in confusion, dizziness or even hallucinations when a person is confronted with a sight of immense beauty. Goldhill tells us that he was persuaded to make it as part of a ‘party of four Jews’ and that ‘you could guarantee that one of us at least would be depressed and over intellectualize the occasion.’

The four pilgrims arrive, with difficulty, at Abbotsford in the first chapter. They proceed south to the Lake District to pay a lop-sided reverence to Wordsworth, cross the Pennines to Haworth, move south to Stratford-upon-Avon and end up contemplating Freud’s couch and his collection of antiquities at Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. The pilgrims are less interested in seeking out mortal remains than they are in wryly observing the relics on show in house museums and breathing in the atmosphere of once private spaces. Mercifully there is little room for gushing over Scott’s trews or Emily Brontë’s dimity frocks, but there is a good deal of cynicism on the part of Goldhill’s companions. He at least is moved by the recall of his boyhood appreciation of Wordsworth’s poetry but he feels constrained to admit that his memories of the Bard’s lines are entwined with the words of the Joni Mitchell songs he hummed to himself as a 17-year-old hiker. His fellow-pilgrims seem not to share similar pious recollections and we are told that in the Dove Cottage museum the limit to their communal attention span was evidenced by a ‘lugubrious supermarket trudge that means you have been in a museum a bit too long, hoping already that your companions will say, “Let’s have a drink!”’

This happily laid-back approach to cultural tourism can be welcome enough, as are Goldhill’s succinct analyses of the distinctions between the objects of pilgrimage he has selected. He is informative both on the extent to which Stratford-upon-Avon is a Victorian re-creation and on quite how Freud’s consulting room, with its collection of antique knick-knacks, got from Vienna to Hampstead. If the medieval pilgrim lost him or herself in the spiritual ritual of travel, Goldhill’s latterday pilgrims are often given rein to assert their cultivated impatience, an impatience that the author himself seems to welcome as healthy impiety. Caveat peregrinator!

Andrew Sanders is Professor of English at Durham University