Literary Landmarks in England

If one is a true book geek, one regards a literary tour of the British Isles with an earnestness roughly equivalent to the earnestness with which Catholics regard a pilgrimage to Rome.  How could any self-respecting bookgeek not want to visit the places they've come to know and love through the pages of such immortal works as Pride and Prejudice, The Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights, Henry V, Le Morte d'Arthur, Ode to a Nightengale, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, and The Adventures of Robin Hood?  How could any true bibliophile not long for the opportunity to sit in the same pub where Oscar Wilde got his abisinthe on, where Hemingway toasted the RAF over amber inches of whiskey, or where Kit Marlowe met his infamous end, stabbed through the eye in a fight over a bar bill?

It may be years before I am able to actually make this pilgrimage, but as such a tour occupies one of the top ten spots on my bucket list, I am going to attend to this before I die.  And in the meantime, there's no reason I can't console myself by compiling and regularly revising the following list of requisite stops on my ever expanding mental itenerary.

Note that, for the most part, I'm deliberately omitting the houses where authors grew up.  Except in some special circumstances (like the Bronte ___), they're just houses: they have little to do with an author's actual output

NOVEL DESTINATIONS (by author)

1. Jane Austin. How can you read Jane Austen and not long to experience the streets of glamorous, aristocratic Bath, in the footsteps of so many of her most memorable characters?  These days "taking the water" at the Pump Room may not be quite the social ceremony it used to be, but I can dream, can't I?
2. The Bronte Sisters
3. Lord Byron
4. Geoffrey Chaucer
5. Agatha Christie
6. Charles Dickens
7. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I understand they've turned 221B Baker Street into a museum featuring Holmes memorabilia.  Okay, so there is no Holmes memorabilia (there being no actual Holmes), but I'm not going to let that spoil the enjoyment I intend to derive from viewing such relics as an original cypher from The Case of the Dancing Men, the plaster bust Holmes used as a decoy in The Empty House, Watson's medical bag, Holmes's violin, or the picture of Irene Adler they retained as a souvenir of the unforgettable Scandal in Bohemia.
8. Daphne du Maurier
9. James Herriott. Like thousands of other readers, I find I've fallen in love with the rolling green hills of Yorkshire - as well as the good, dour folk who inhabit the farms and byways of the Yorkshire countryside - by way of James Herriot's highly entertaining accounts of his life as a veterinarian in that region.
10. Thomas Malory
11. Alexander Pope
12. Sir Walter Scott
13. William Shakespeare.  The Old Globe Theater.  David Garrick's house.
14. Jonathan Swift
15. J.R.R. Tolkein
16. Oscar Wilde. His monument, to the east of Trafalgar Square, is engraved: "We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars" (from Lady Windermere's Fan)

SHRINES & MEMORIALS

1. Westminster Cathedral (Poet's Corner).  As well as actual burials, Poets' Corner also commemorates the life of literary greats (and quite a few who have faded into obscurity) with memorials: amongst these are the poets John Milton, William Wordsworth, Thomas Gray, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Burns, William Blake, T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Writers such as Samuel Butler, Jane Austen, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Walter Scott, John Ruskin, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, Henry James and Sir John Betjeman have also been given memorials here. Perhaps the greatest English writer, William Shakespeare, also has a memorial here: buried in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, Shakespeare had to wait until 1740 before his monument (designed by William Kent) was placed in the transept. Another late addition was Lord Byron, whose lifestyle caused a scandal although his poetry was much admired: although he died in 1824, he was finally given a memorial only in 1969.Dr Johnson's House [7], 17 Gough Square, just off Fleet Street - this fine Georgian house marks the residence in which Dr Johnson compiled his great Dictionary of the English Language. (James Boswell's house is also somewhere nearby)
2. Bow Street.  was formed about 1637. It has been the residence of many notable men, among whom were: Henry FIELDING (1707-1754), Novelist; Sir John FIELDING (d.1780), Magistrate; Charles SACKVILLE, Earl of Dorset (1638-1706), Poet; and William WYCHERLEY (1640?-1716), Dramatist
3. "xxx Lived Here."  Other famous folks who resided in London and whose homes may/may not be worth a visit (I haven't yet decided):  Ezra Pound, William Makepeace Thackeray, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sir James Barrie, EF Benson, Enid Blynton, Edmund Burke, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Fanny Burney (aka Madame D'Arblay),  Thomas Carlyle, GK Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, C. Day-Lewis, Walter De La Mare, Thomas DeQuincey, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, John Dryden, George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Cross, née Evans),  TS Eliot, Henry Fielding, Ian Fleming, Ford Madox Ford, CS Forester, EM Forester, John Galsworthy, Mrs. Gaskell,  Kenneth Grahame, Robert Graves, Sir Henry Rider Haggard, Radclyffe Hall, Thomas Hardy, Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, James Hilton, Thomas Hood, WH Hudson, Aldous Huxley, Washington Irving, Henry James, James Joyce

The British Isle 

1. Yorkshire (James Herriot).  
2. Yorkshire/The Moors (Wuthering Heights, Hound of the Baskervilles)
3. Sherwood Forest (Robin Hood)
4. Tintagel (King Arthur)
5. Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare)
6. Scotland Yard (innumerable crime novels)
7. Oxford, The Eagle and Child (CS Lewis, Tolkein, Auden, Hogwarts)
8. Dublin (Oscar Wilde, James Joyce)
9. Edinburgh (Burns, Walter Scott)
10. pub where Kit Marlowe died
11. Grasmere/The Lake District
12. Hampstead.  Romantic poets Keats, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge, along with writers Robert Louis Stevenson, D H Lawrence and J B Priestley all lived in Hampstead.
13.