Literary tourism

       At BBC News Jenny Scott wonders: 'Why do some writers succeed on the tourism trail while others are left on the wayside ?' in comparing the success of Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon with the relatively dismal showing of George Eliot's nearby ... Nuneaton (Nuneaton ? seriously ?), in Writer tourism: The literary tourist trail hits and misses.
       Some of the differences and problems are obvious:

At the moment, Nuneaton's offering seems fairly limited compared to Stratford's. The town has a George Eliot Hospital and an Eliot Business Park, neither of which are likely to appeal to tourists.

       And, as the University of Warwick's Pablo Mukherjee notes about Eliot:

It is difficult to build a cult of tourism around that spiky kind of writer, with their commitment to difficult ideas.

       Obviously, the older an author is, the more appealing his or her sites are for 'literary tourism' (and so this comparison seems rather unfair to me -- Eliot v. Dickens would seem entirely more appropriate). Anti cult-of-the-personality that I am, to the bone, I'd also suggest: stick to the works, which you can read from the comfort of your home (or on the beach, or anywhere else). Immersion in Middlemarch sounds far preferable to immersion in ... Nuneaton.