Destination: England : The Literature Lover’s London : A stroll through neighborhoods echoing with some of fiction’s most beloved characters

If writers define themselves by where they live, then listen to Virginia Woolf extol the inexhaustible energy of London, her muse: “London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets.”

As true today as in 1928 when Woolf penned her observations, London is a sensory stimulant, best appreciated on foot. And whose footsteps better to follow than those of London’s literary greats?

A walking tour past the homes and hideaways of celebrated writers is a fine way to make London’s acquaintance, introducing us to the leafy expanse of verdant Hampstead, the gracious homes of Chelsea, the gritty excitement of Southwark and the tired elegance of Woolf’s own Bloomsbury, to list only a sampling of the neighborhoods on London’s literary map.

For visitors, a stroll through London’s neighborhoods echoes with some of fiction’s most memorable characters and literature’s most luscious language. It also reveals much of the real-life stories of our “guides,” the writers themselves.

The tragedy! The romance!

For centuries, this spirited city has inspired the world’s great writers, creating a landscape rooted in storytellers who require no first-name introduction: Dickens, Keats, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth, among others.

A few traveling tips: Before setting out, buy a week’s pass for the London Underground. It’s economical (about $18), and also covers the bus system. Each of the four neighborhoods described here is served by an underground station that will be your starting point. When I was there last year, I wandered the streets at my leisure and recommend that as an appropriate method of exploration. But burdened by time constraints I would suggest that only one or two neighborhoods be approached in a single day.

Take along a map. I am not giving away a national secret here, but the British give terrible directions: “Turn gently,” they’ll say. “Just go along,” they’ll say. “Go to the bottom,” they’ll say. Even my British friends acknowledge their failing. Take a hint: Buy a map. (The London A-Z maps, sold in London and some U.S. travel bookstores, are particularly useful.)

I suggest buying two guides: “Literary Villages of London,” by Luree Miller (Starrhill Press, $8.95) and “Slow Walks in London” by Michael Leitch (HarperCollins, $13). Used in conjunction, these two paperbacks, complete with maps, offer an unbeatable self-guided tour with their nuggets on the city’s history, architecture, literature and literati.

Several companies operate guided walking tours, but London Walks Ltd. is at the top of the heap. Tours last two hours and are guided by an eclectic cadre of actors, musicians and literary historians.

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After the great fire of 1666, Londoners rushed to the suburbs, creating neighborhoods such as Bloomsbury--now central London--which was laid out in tidy, elegant blocks between the late 17th and early 19th centuries. The area consists of six grassy squares, encircled by lovely Georgian row houses, none more well-known, perhaps, than 50-51 Gordon Square, which housed the Bloomsbury Group.

Many writers have called Bloomsbury home over the years, but it is Virginia Woolf and her circle of literary luminaries with which the neighborhood is most closely linked. The biographer Lytton Strachey, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and Vanessa and Clive Bell made up the nucleus of this questing coterie, which sought new meaning in life and art.

The once tony neighborhood, seat of the University of London and a fair number of publishers, is visually little changed since Woolf’s time--when the writer “moved” her legs through its streets, collecting the kernels that would turn up later as books, plays and poems. Her Gordon Square digs now house the university’s career advisory service. Woolf doubtless would be horrified to see her name slung across Virginia Woolf’s Grills, Burgers & Pasta at nearby Russell Square, where Thackeray’s Osborne and Sedley families reside in the novel “Vanity Fair.”

Three blocks south of Gordon Square lies the massive British Museum, to which Londoners have assigned the ungracious abbreviation “The B.M.” The original manuscripts in the museum’s British Library read like a roll call of literature’s most famous works: “Finnegans Wake,” “Jane Eyre,” “Middlemarch,” “Pygmalion,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “Beowulf,” “Canterbury Tales,” “Don Juan,” “Alice’s Adventures Underground.”

A half-century before the Bloomsbury Group took root, Charles Dickens lived a block northeast of Gordon Square at Tavistock Square in a now-demolished house, where he wrote “Bleak House,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Little Dorrit,” “Hard Times” and part of “Great Expectations.”

The Dickens House Museum is a must-see for Dickens enthusiasts. Distracted by the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral, when he lived at Tavistock Square in the 1830s, Dickens complained, “I can hardly hear my own ideas as they come into my head.” His powers of concentration couldn’t have been that bad: He completed “Pickwick Papers” and wrote “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby” in his study on Doughty Street.

David Parker, the engaging curator of Dickens House, enjoys talking about his favorite author. “Imagine what it would have been like had Dickens met the Bloomsbury Group. The relationship would have been one of mutual hostility, of course. Dickens courted and rejoiced in popular sentiment. They ,” Parker sniffed about Woolf and her associates, “rejoiced in elitism.”

Parker would not have gotten an argument from Gertrude Stein, whose contempt for the Bloomsbury Group knew no bounds when she resided at 20 Bloomsbury Square. She dismissed her neighbors as “the Young Men’s Christian Association--with Christ left out, of course.” Unlike Woolf, Stein found London’s streets “infinitely depressing and dismal.”

Other stops: T.S. Eliot worked at 24 Russell Square for Faber & Faber, publishers; W.B. Yeats lived at 5 Woburn Walk, an alley with kicky restaurants and shops; Sicilian Arcade, across from Bloomsbury Square, hosts a couple of neat bookshops.

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Terraces, hills, steps and slopes--this is Hampstead. “ ‘Tis so near to Heaven,” noted Daniel Defoe in 1724, “that I dare not say it can be a proper situation for any but a race of mountaineers.”

It is only four miles north of Westminster Abbey, but Hampstead, with its rolling heath and country air, seems worlds removed. Even Dr. Johnson, who disliked leaving London, said after a visit:

“The needy traveler, serene and gay,

Walks the wild heath and sings his toils away.”

If anyone occupies Hampstead’s soul, it is the Romantic poet John Keats, who wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” while sitting under a plum tree at his Regency-style cottage here. The Keats House, which has a collection of revealing letters, mementos and manuscripts, is open to the public.

It was in Hampstead that Keats met his beloved Fanny Brawne, to whom he became engaged in 1819. “You will have a pleasant walk today,” he wrote Fanny. “I shall see you pass. I shall follow you with my eyes over the heath.”

Theirs was an ill-fated romance, however. Keats died of tuberculosis at 25 in 1821, and Fanny grieved for 12 years before marrying.

“Only one presence, that of Keats, dwells here,” Virginia Woolf observed after visiting Hampstead in the 1930s.

A fashionable spa and resort in the 1700s, Hampstead continues to draw writers (including novelist John Le Carre) and artists to its holly-covered hills. It’s also a popular weekend destination among joggers, bicyclists and picnickers. Parliament Hills, with its commanding view of London, is well worth the climb.

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London’s literary villages are not the sole domain of the British. It was from Chelsea--southwest of the city center--that the quintessential American, Mark Twain, cabled the Associated Press in New York to announce: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

The most important literary lane in Chelsea is Cheyne Walk overlooking the Thames, which Dr. Johnson likened to “liquid history.” Residents have included George Eliot (No. 4); the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (No. 16), and Henry James (No. 21). Other Chelsea residents: A.A. Milne, Dracula-creator Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot and the historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane.

A classic Chelsea story involves Rossetti, whose front yard menagerie included a white bull, peacocks, armadillos, a raccoon, a young kangaroo and a wombat that gave Lewis Carroll the idea for the Dormouse that kept falling asleep at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

James Whistler painted the famous picture of his mother while in residence in Chelsea and J.M.W. Turner, considered by many to be Britain’s foremost painter, died here in 1851. (Twain had little regard for Turner’s paintings, comparing them to “a tortoise-shell cat floundering in a plate of tomatoes.”)

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Inseparable from Shakespeare and Dickens, Southwark (pronounced Sutherk) is the oldest part of London south of the Thames. It is reached by crossing the London Bridge.

Standing under a plaque commemorating the original site of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, actress Emily Richard, a London Walks tour guide, proclaimed recently in her deep, smoky voice, “ ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Imagine--those words were first spoken right here.”

When he was a boy, Dickens’ family was imprisoned for indebtedness at Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, where, nearly three centuries earlier, the Globe had hosted the first performances of “Hamlet,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “As You Like It” and “King Lear.”

The effervescent Emily, who has played Dickens’ Kate Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Co., cares deeply about Shakespeare and Dickens and the London that gave them to us.

“For a start, Shakespeare is just universal and very relevant to today,” she said during a tour that included stops at the Shakespeare Globe Exhibition, the historic Anchor Inn (that inspired Dr. Johnson to proclaim, “The tavern chair is the throne of human felicity”), and the site of the new Globe Theatre, which is being rebuilt and is scheduled to reopen in 1996 just yards from the original site. “And Dickens? Ah Dickens! He provides us with some of the finest characters in literature. I’m sure we should introduce them to our little ones, don’t you?”

GUIDEBOOK

Literary London

Bloomsbury: Holborn or Tottenham Court Road underground stops.

Dickens House Museum, 48 Doughty St.; open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; admission about $5; local telephone 405-2127.

Hampstead: Hampstead underground stop.

Keats House, Wentworth Place; Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m and Sunday 2-6 p.m.; admission free; tel. 435-2062.

Chelsea: Sloane Square underground stop.

Thomas Carlyle’s House, 24 Cheyne Row; open April through October, Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; admission $3.25; tel. 352-7087.

Southwark: Monument underground stop.

Shakespeare Globe Exhibition, corner of New Globe Walk and Bankside; daily 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; admission $6.50; tel. 928-6342.

Bookstores: (two locations) Stanfords, 156 Regent St. near Piccadilly Circus underground stop, and 12-14 Long Acre, near the Covent Garden underground stop.

London Walks Ltd., P.O. Box 1708, London, England NW6 4LW; tel. 624-3978. Walks cost about $6 and also explore areas outside London including Oxford and Canterbury.

For more information: British Tourist Authority, 551 5th Ave., Suite 701, New York, N.Y. 10176; tel. (800) GO2 BRITAIN.