Literary Portsmouth

The city of Portsmouth has a long literary history. It is perhaps best-known as the birthplace of Charles Dickens in 1812, and the house in which he was born is one of the city's many tourist attractions. In the 1880s H. G. Wells spent several years here as an apprentice and his unhappy experiences of this time were brought out in some of his later novels. Around the same time, Arthur Conan Doyle came to Portsmouth and set up a medical practice, while also continuing his budding writing career; his great creation Sherlock Holmes first appears in a novel written here. But the tradition did not end in Victorian times, and local writers have often featured the city in their works right up to today: Graham Hurley's novels, featuring D. I. Joe Faraday, are a recent example. Using both old and new photographs, Steve Wallis takes us on a tour of places in and around Portsmouth that are associated with particular literary figures and locations that appear in literature. In visiting these sites, we also see some of the famous and less well known locations in this historic area.