Book marks ... Haworth, West Yorkshire, the former home town of the Bronte sisters.
The English language bequeathed to the world a rich literary heritage, a unique legacy of novels, plays and poems, which in turn inspired romantic myths about the Englishmen and women who wrote them. The enigmatic lives of Byron, Shakespeare, the Brontes, Jane Austen and Dickens have aroused almost as much interest as their works.
Jane Campion's new film, , about the doomed love life of the poet John Keats, is the latest in a long line of movies, books and plays about English writers.
In a country with such a peerless literary history, it is hardly surprising that literary tourism is booming. A niche travel market, English literary tourism appeals to readers keen to see the birthplaces, graves and especially the houses and landscapes where writers' imaginations were formed and blossomed.
Alison Dalby, of the National Trust, which owns and manages the largest number of British writers' houses, says the number of visitors grows annually. Interest in the trust's most recently opened property, Greenway - Agatha Christie's holiday home in Devon - was so great last summer that visitors had to be turned away.
The dwellings of England's most famous writers draw millions of visitors each year. The five houses associated with Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon attract 750,000 tourists annually, the largest number of literary pilgrims. Surprisingly, it is not Jane Austen's house at Chawton in Hampshire (40,000 annual visitors) or the only surviving London home of Charles Dickens in Doughty Street (25,000 a year) that attracts the second-largest group of visitors. It is Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, the home of Vita Sackville-West, novelist and sometime lover of Virginia Woolf (about 160,000 annual visitors).
"It is definitely Vita herself - her own story and her garden - that draws people," the trust's communications officer for the south-east, Michelle Cleverley, says.
But it is London that is most alive with literary history, from Dr Johnson's house near Fleet Street (Johnson was the compiler of the first comprehensive English dictionary and was also famous for declaring "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life") to the beautiful, newly restored Hampstead house of Keats, who wrote Ode to a Nightingale there, inspired by a bird singing in the plum tree outside his window.
Keats was in love with the girl who lived in the adjoining house, 18-year-old Fanny Brawne, and her bedroom is now open to visitors for the first time. Campion's new film has already had an impact on visitor numbers.
An actual landscape as much as an imagined one, London attracts literary tourists like no other city. Dickens made the city his own and his only surviving London house is in a beautiful part of town, near Chancery Lane, which inspired his novel Bleak House. Sherlock Holmes's famous flat in Baker Street is not far away and is now the site of the Sherlock Holmes Museum. It was originally a place inside the head of Holmes's creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, who imagined Holmes and his assistant, Dr Watson, pondering murders there over a crackling fire.
And, of course, there are the railway stations: Paddington, the home of Paddington Bear, and Kings Cross, with its famous Platform 9¾ from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.
What is it about the houses of romantic young poets such as Keats, destined to die at 25, that so intrigues us? Why do so many readers wish to look at the chairs the authors sat in, or at imaginary railway platforms, or at the letters and manuscripts of long-dead authors?
Britain's recently retired poet laureate, Sir Andrew Motion, went some way to explaining the literary pilgrim's desire in a speech about the value of manuscripts he gave to the British Library a few years ago. He spoke of the "primitive, visceral thrill in thinking: 'My god, Keats's hand rested on this piece of paper and as I let my eye travel down it I seem for a moment to be actually inside his mind and linked to his thought processes."'
Juliette Wells, of Manhattanville College, New York, spent last summer doing research at Jane Austen's stone house at Chawton, funded by the Jane Austen Society of North America. She conducted a visitor survey and one of the things she wanted to learn was which particular element of the visit had the most meaning for visitors.
"A lot of people said that seeing a manuscript in Jane Austen's handwriting, in the house where you know she did the real writing, was very meaningful to them," she says. "You can see Jane Austen's manuscripts in a lot of places ... but to see it in her house, to see her writing table and to know she was listening for a creak of the door, well, that really means something."
The director of the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire, Andrew McCarthy, says people visit for many reasons. "Principally, it's the power of the Brontes' writing, the imaginative potency of their fictions, combined with the extraordinary, compelling story of their lives - and the two do tend to get conflated in people's minds - that appeals," he says.
"The museum and the exhibits on display provide a moving physical connection with those stories and their authors. They are the golden thread which give us at least a sense of the Brontes as real, extraordinary but also, like us, ordinary people."
FAST FACTS
There are five Shakespeare houses: Mary Arden's House, Shakespeare's birthplace, Anne Hathaway's Cottage, Hall's Croft and Nash's House and New Place. Entry to the five houses is £16 ($28.50) adult, £10 child, £42 family. See shakespeare.org.uk.
Greenway House, Agatha Christie's house and garden, Greenway Road, Galmpton, Devon. Currently only timed, limited-access visits are allowed and car parks must be booked at least several days in advance. Entry £7.45 adult, £3.75 child, £18.65 family. See nationaltrust.org.uk/greenway.
Jane Austen's House Museum, Chawton, Alton, Hampshire. Entry £7 adult, £2 child. See jane-austens-house-museum.org.uk.
Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst Castle Garden is in Kent. Entry £8.80 adult, £4.40 child, £22 family. See nationaltrust.org.uk/sissinghurst.
Dr Johnson's House, 17 Gough Square, London. Entry £4.50 adult, £1.50 child, £10 family. See drjohnsonshouse.org.
Keats House, Keats Grove, Hampstead. Entry £5 adult, children under 16 free. See keatshouse.cityoflondon.gov.uk.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum, 221b Baker Street, London. Entry £6 adult, £4 child. See sherlock-holmes.co.uk.
The Bronte Parsonage Museum, Church Street, Haworth, Keighley, West Yorkshire. Entry £6.50 adult, £3.50 child (under five free), £15.50 family. See bronte.org.uk.
Sign up for the Traveller Deals newsletter
Get exclusive travel deals delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up now.