In the week when a collection of paintings with only the most tenuous connection to the poet TS Eliot sold for £7m, we investigate why readers are so obsessed with the physical traces of their favourite authors.
We hear first from Christie's Gemma Sudlow, who tells us how the artworks collected by Valerie Eliot 20 years after her husband's death still carry some of the poet's aura.
Next we travel to Doughty Street, where we meet literary pilgrims who have come to worship at the Charles Dickens Museum. Curator Fiona Jenkins explains how she recreated the house where Dickens lived from 1837 to 1839, and what a reader can gain by looking out of his study window.
Paula Byrne, who published a biography of Jane Austen earlier this year, tells us why she examined the author's life through the prism of her possessions, and explores how readers can make a connection with their favourite writers through the objects that they leave behind.
The prospect of future readers inspecting his coffee cup or marvelling at his laptop holds little appeal for the novelist Tom McCarthy. He makes a clear dividing line between the nuts and bolts of the writer's life – their manuscripts, their notebooks and their libraries – and the ephemera.
But do all these literary shrines, all these objects just get in the way of the text, or does the stuff of creation bring readers back to the text after all?
Reading list
The Real Jane Austen by Paula Byrne (HarperPress)
Remainder by Tom McCarthy (Alma)
The Charles Dickens Museum is at 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX
