Accounting for taste: Great men, great homes and the forgetten women

The world is full of shrines, not all of them dedicated to Great Men. Some are dedicated to gods, some to goddesses, some to saints and some to warriors, and some to animal avatars of the gods. Some are no more than groups of stones, stained with ochre or bindi, or greasy with butterfat; others are huge and complex edifices, towering over a bone-chip of the Buddha or a thorn from Christ's crown. The very name "shrine" means a container for something precious. Sometimes, when a beloved child meets an untimely death, the bereaved mother makes a shrine of the child's room, keeping it just as it was at the time of the calamity, as if expecting the missing one to return and take on life again. This is what we do with the houses of Great Men. We leave their pens in the ink-stand, their pipes in their ashtrays, their slippers under their beds, as if life were unbearable without the illusion of their presence. Wherever we find shrines we find superstition, self-deception and confabulation. The faithful, who will travel many miles to experience the fantasy nearness of the charismatic dead, are there to be gulled. After the money the pilgrims have spent and the distance they have travelled it would be cruel to jolt them with unvarnished truth.

The impulse to venerate is as old as humanity. When humans had nothing else to venerate they endowed rocks or waterholes or trees with divine power and treated them with reverence. Sacred animals were approached with awe and propitiated with gifts and sacrifices. When holy men and prophets arose among us, we struggled to get close to them, to touch them and to get their blessing. We craved locks of their hair, scraps of their raiment, which we held as lucky charms, if not actually miraculous. Christ is supposed to have left us no fewer than 18 messianic foreskins. The fragments of the true cross eventually became so numerous that the enemies of the Church said you could build a whole navy out of them. After Buddha was cremated, his remains were distributed to 10 centres, each of which is supposed to have erected a stupa over them. All but one of the original stupas has disappeared, while fragments no bigger than crumbs are preserved in jewelled shrines in China, Tibet, Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and India.

In the Cathedral of Bom Jesus in Goa the embalmed body of the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier can be seen dimly through the glass walls of a sarcophagus on top of a side altar, out of reach of the clutching hands of the faithful. When the cadaver was first exposed in Goa in 1556, a female devotee bit off the little toe of the right foot, which is missing to this day. Eventually the papal authorities demanded hard evidence that the saint's body had escaped the usual processes of decay, so part of the right arm was cut off and sent to Rome to be preserved in a reliquary in the Church of the Gesu. A year later, the viscera were removed and distributed to Jesuit foundations all over the world. Every 10 years or so the corpse is exposed to the public who throng in their millions to kiss it, and to buy amulets, rosaries, cards and holy pictures that "have been touched to the body". Piety means profit.

The cult of Francis Xavier is alive and well, though those of us who are not Catholics might think we had grown out of such gross superstition. We do not now venerate saints or expect to be cured of what ails us by hanging fragments chipped from the skeletons of saints about our necks. Catholics may make vast shrines on the scale of Lourdes or Fatima or Knock and flock from all corners of the globe to be blessed or cured or inspired or unutterably depressed by such places. People who fancy themselves more rational make shrines to Great Men. The people who fly to Dublin and make straight for the Martello Tower that is the setting for the beginning of Ulysses, and trudge around the streets of Dublin for days covering every site mentioned in any novel of James Joyce, believe themselves to be behaving sensibly. Joyce meant to eternise his Dublin; nobody would be more amused than he to think that much of his Dublin has been saved from the wrecker's ball to eternise him. Superstition dies hard.

Ever since Chaucer it has been true that as soon as April brings its sweet showers, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Pilgrimages always meant big money for the inn-keepers, victuallers, ostlers, farriers and chandlers who attended the faithful on their way; now they mean big money for tour operators. Lesser mortals make pilgrimages to the places where their favourite movies were shot; being in a movie, any movie, will bump up tourist revenue by more than half. The otherwise obscure town of Matamata (pop. 6,000) in New Zealand has experienced a tourism boom since it was the chosen location for Tolkien's Hobbiton in the film trilogy of The Lord of the Rings and now caters for 300,000 visitors a year. A third of a million people annually visit Salzburg so that they can inhabit the locations of The Sound of Music. J K Rowling fans have swarmed over Gloucester Cathedral, Alnwick Castle and the North Yorkshire Moors Railway in search of Hogwarts.

Older and richer pilgrims prefer to display their level of literary culture by visiting places associated with literary icons, who are, nearly all of them, Great Men. There are a few shrines to Great Women but they are not kept up in the same spirit. For five pounds you can visit the cottage at Chawton where Jane Austen lived from 1809 till her death; eight dollars will get you a glimpse of Emily Dickinson's bedroom. Hill Top Farm has been restored to the condition it was in when Beatrix Potter lived there, but the public is not encouraged to visit. (This situation will probably have to change now she has become a movie.) In these modest dwellings there is nothing designated Jane Austen's chair or Charlotte Brontë's desk, because these women did not have property or even a space of their own. What is unmistakeable about Chawton and Haworth and the Dickinson homestead is that they did not belong to the Great Women who have made them places of pilgrimage. With Great Men it is different; the entire space of even the vastest house is imagined as their own, even rooms they didn't enter from one year's end to another. Winston Churchill is thought to have pervaded Chartwell, so that every bibelot is where it is by his express command. In fact it was Clementine who ran Chartwell as a living, breathing house full of visitors and children and animals, and I wouldn't mind betting that Winston could never find anything without asking her first where it was. But the pilgrimage demands a shrine unencumbered by any but the manes of the Great Man. So Springwood is declared the home of F D Roosevelt, as if Eleanor Roosevelt were not lying in the rose garden beside him.

When a woman takes a camera into a shrine dedicated to a Great Man, she is like a girl-child trespassing in her father's study. Nothing must be moved. Books may not be taken down and read, drawers must not be opened, chairs must not be sat on, finger marks may not be left on highly polished surfaces. Her attention is directed to important objects, but she notices irrelevancies, a splash of sunshine on the Turkey rug, a dust devil under the sofa, a fly buzzing against a windowpane. She doesn't push past through the shoulders of pushier people to get a view of just what the guide is talking about, but gazes at a skirting board instead. The tour guide goes through her patter, but the camera-child does not heed. She is looking at the doorknob and thinking subversive thoughts. Surely Dr Johnson's doorknob is just a doorknob? And is it even the knob that was on the door when Johnson was around to open and close it?

Tetty Johnson died while Johnson lived at 17 Gough Square, and Johnson responded by going into a serious depression, wandering sleeplessly about London for nights on end. The house was run for the most part by the blind poetess Anna Williams who, when she presided over the tea table, could only tell when to stop pouring when the hot fluid touched the black thumbnail she inserted in the cup. No wonder Reynolds preferred to bring his own cup along. Then there was the collapsed prostitute Johnson found in the gutter and brought into the house on his back, and the freed slave who kept running away, and Hodge the cat, all of whom had more to do with the doorknob than Johnson, who hid out most of the time he wasn't up in the garret sweating on the Dictionary at the well-run house of Hester Thrale. Gough Square is meant to feel as if Johnson dwelt there alone, attended by angels who kept everything spotless and in its place. When Johnson lived there, it was more like pandemonium.

Most of the houses in Dr Johnson's Doorknob, a new book of photographs by Liz Workman, were inhabited and run by women, whose influence has been obliterated by history. The bed in Edgar Allen Poe Cottage is the one that Virginia Poe died in, yet here it is, Edgar Allen Poe's bed. Through most of the houses in this book stalk invisible wives, who can claim nothing, be they brilliant Jane Welsh Carlyle, or tipsy Tetty Johnson, or even Maria Bartow Cole whose bachelor uncle's house, Cedar Grove, actually was where she lived with her three sisters before her marriage in 1836 and after her husband's death in 1848. At Mount Vernon and Springwood, the wives are physically present for they are buried within the grounds, but they are no more visible than Jefferson's wife, who died in 1782. Jefferson is then supposed to have taken her slave half-sister as his concubine and had children with her, but nothing at Monticello records their existence. Elizabeth Smith Soane left no mark on Pitshanger Manor, which, though it was intended as a home for her two sons with John Soane and was built with her money, was sold six years after her husband had finished transforming it to his own taste.

At Doughty Street a display case holds a few trifles that belonged to Catherine Hogarth Dickens, two lace handkerchiefs, two rings, a visiting card case and an overmantel she embroidered. Catherine was abandoned. Adele Foucher Hugo ran away, leaving the house in the Place des Vosges to her husband and his whores. Samuel Morse arrived at Locust Grove aged 55 with no wife and three children in 1847; within a year he found a mistress for the house, his 25-year-old deaf second cousin Sarah Griswold Morse, who bore him four more children. She outlived him by nearly 30 years but left no mark upon his shrine, which she rented out after his death. Emma Darwin lived at Down House as a widow for 14 years, but her house is her husband's, not hers. Martha Bernays Freud lived at Maresfield Gardens for 12 years after the death of her husband who was only there for a year before he died. Of all 18 houses featured in the book only four, Sunnyside, Keats House, Leighton House and Water House, are not haunted by the wandering shade of a forgotten home-maker.

'Dr Johnson's Doorknob – And Other Significant Parts of Great Men's Houses' by Liz Workman, foreword by Germaine Greer, is out 4 October (Rizzoli, £13.95). To order a copy at a special price call Independent Books Direct: 08700 798897