Canterbury has been a literary destination for as long as it has been a pilgrimage one. Chaucer made the city the destination of English literature's first great road trip; T.S. Eliot dramatised its most famous murder; and the cathedral has been a setting for everything from medieval mystery plays to modern crime novels. The list below sticks to fiction and drama — read one of these on the train down and the city reveals itself differently when you arrive.
The Canterbury Tales — Chaucer's late-fourteenth-century frame-story of pilgrims travelling from London to the shrine of Thomas Becket is the foundation of English literature and the reason the journey to Canterbury became the iconic English road trip. The pilgrims tell each other stories along the way — bawdy, devotional, comic, cynical — and what emerges is a rough sociological cross-section of medieval England.
Read in modern English the Tales feel surprisingly contemporary; in the original Middle English they reward an hour of slow reading. Penguin's Nevill Coghill verse translation is the standard popular edition; for the original, the Riverside Chaucer is the scholar's choice.
Doctor Faustus — Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564 and educated at the King's School in the cathedral precincts. Doctor Faustus — the story of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of knowledge and power — is his most enduring play, written shortly before his death in 1593. The verse is faster and more visceral than Shakespeare's; the ending, where Faustus realises the deal is real and tries fruitlessly to repent, is one of the most genuinely frightening scenes in English drama.
Reading it in Canterbury makes the connections legible: the cathedral's medieval certainty, the Renaissance city's emerging doubt, the small grammar school by the cloister where Marlowe first encountered Latin. There are several editions; the New Mermaids paperback is a good introduction with reliable notes.
Murder in the Cathedral — Eliot's 1935 verse drama tells the story of Thomas Becket's last weeks — his return from exile in France, his confrontations with the four tempters who try to dissuade him from the path that will end in his murder, and the killing itself in the cathedral's north-west transept. It was written specifically to be performed in the Canterbury Cathedral chapter house, where it premiered.
Short, stark, and largely in verse, it remains the best literary entry point to understanding why Canterbury became a pilgrimage city. The play is still performed in the cathedral roughly every other year — worth timing a visit around.