Literary Guide and Companion to Northern England — 1995 ·

By Robert M. Cooper

“Part guidebook, part literary history, this book is wholly fascinating…The literary pilgrim will find this book essential and enticing.”

Terry Ann Mood — American Reference Books Annual

The Literary Guide and Companion to Northern England is the third and final guide in Cooper’s light-hearted and informative travel collection.

As Cooper explains in the preface to the first volume: “This book was written for the person who unabashedly loves travel, loves England, and loves English literature. In short, for somebody remarkably like the person I was when I began to plan my first trip to Britain and looked for just such a book.”

Cooper’s writing project grew with his enthusiasm for his task. Soon there were several more trips to England, more months at the British Museum, and not one book manuscript, but three.

Like other Cooper books, this guide to northern England is wonderfully helpful to the visitor, rich in anecdotal detail, and cast with Britain’s finest literary figures — in this case, Johnson, Boswell, Lord Byron, D.H. Lawrence, the Brontë sisters, Tennyson, Shelley, Wordsworth. There are road maps for the motorist, walking tours of towns of particular interest, and clear directions for getting from one place to another — scenes of courtships, weddings, meetings (chance or planned) that made their mark on our literary heritage.

Robert M. Cooper was a professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Born in Manchester, he lived and did research on southern England.