Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation (The Nineteenth Century Series)

WORDSWORTH AND THE WRITING OF THE NATION

This page intentionally left blank

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

JAMES M. GARRETT California State University, USA

© James M. Garrett 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. James M. Garrett has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Garrett, James M. Wordsworth and the writing of the nation. – (The nineteenth century series) 1. Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850 – Criticism and interpretation 2. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Knowledge – Great Britain 3. National characteristics, British, in literature 4. Nationalism in literature 5. Census – Political aspects – Great Britain – History – 19th century 6. Surveys – Political aspects – Great Britain – History – 19th century 7. Museums – Political aspects – Great Britain – History – 19th century 8. Cultural property – Protection – Great Britain – History – 19th century 9. Great Britain – In literature I. Title 821.7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garrett, James M., 1960Wordsworth and the writing of the nation / by James M. Garrett. p. cm.—(Nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-5783-5 (alk. paper) 1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Knowledge—Great Britain. 3. National characteristics, British, in literature. 4. Great Britain—In literature. 5. Nationalism in literature. 6. Census— Political aspects—Great Britain—History—19th century. 7. Surveys—Political aspects— Great Britain—History—19th century. 8. Museum-—Political aspects—Great Britain— History—19th century. 9. Cultural property—Protection—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. PR5892.G63G37 2008 821’.7—dc22 2007038166 ISBN: 978-0-7546-5783-5 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Table of Contents

General Editors’ Preface List of Tables Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction

vi vii viii x 1

1 Counting the People

13

2 Classifying the People

43

3 Surveying and Writing the Nation

69

4 The Wreck of Is and Was

95

5 A Detailed Local Survey

125

6 A National Property

149

7 A Service to the Nation

177

Bibliography Index

199 211

The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

List of Tables Table 1 Printed Order Compared to Intended Order in 1807 Poems

31

Table 2 Distribution of Earlier Volumes in 1815 Categories

49

Table 3 “No Occupation” Distribution by Gender and Age in 1841 Census

57

Acknowledgements Hard task to point at a portion of this book and say that it came from this or that fountain, and yet some provisional origins can be identified. From the very beginning of our discussions, Ann Donahue and the editorial staff of Ashgate Publishing have been models of conscientiousness and professionalism. I have also benefited immensely from the perceptive comments and helpful suggestions of Brian Goldberg, the reader for Ashgate, who saw through my compromises and helped me to reinvigorate this book. Other fountains can be found in the previously published portions of this book. Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in substantially similar form in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 40.4 (Autumn 2000):603–620. The argument of that essay and ultimately that of the entire book benefited from the effective observations of anonymous readers. I am grateful to the editors for the permission to republish these materials in revised form. Portions of the third chapter benefited from the generous comments of Brook Thomas and Albert Wlecke when published as part of a paper, “Surveying and Writing the Nation: Wordsworth’s Black Comb and 1816 Commemorative Poems,” in the 1998 “Literature and the Nation” issue of REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. If further backward I cast my eyes, I see other beginnings. An essentially incoherent paper written for a graduate seminar with Hilary Schor contained the inchoate stirrings of the interest in negotiating place and identity that became part of the central argument of this book. Present from before the beginning, Hilary has remained steadfastly supportive of this work and tenacious in insisting that it not be abandoned. Without her teaching, conversation, and friendship I would not only be immeasurably poorer but this book would probably not exist. Another beginning can be seen in portions of the first chapter that were originally part of a student paper written for Margaret Russett, making her arguably the earliest reader of this book and unquestionably one of its most demanding. Her conversation helped give this project shape, and her comments on drafts simultaneously focused its arguments and exposed its uncritical assumptions. Equally important were the contributions of Peter J. Manning, who along with Meg, read countless drafts of the early version of this book and has always been unfailingly generous with his time, knowledge, and encouragement. If I were to offer an accounting, à la Wordsworth, of the specific words and sentences that originated with Peter’s comments, even he would probably be surprised. Even in the absence of such an accounting, I hope he knows how much of this book belongs to him. What merit this book has is owed to them and to family and friends, with none more important than John and Eleanor, who daily inspire and humble me, and Laura, my partner and my guide, whose editorial comments, sympathetic conversation, and unending confidence have made this project possible. To her I owe all that is good, useful, and just about not merely this book but me as well.

Acknowledgements

ix

Ultimately, Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation can be said to have come out of my own census anxieties, which stem from my inability to locate a checkbox to represent my particular ethnicity inherited from a Japanese mother and an English-Mexican-Native American father. My mother will not be able to read this book, but hopefully she will recognize that her skeptical intelligence is the fountain of its genealogizing of power and its critical questioning of official narratives. Enough if she knows that something from her hands has power to live and act and serve the future hour.

Abbreviations EY

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt; 2nd ed. revised by Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

Guide

Guide to the Lakes, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

LB

Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).

LY

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, Part 1 1821–1828, Part 2 1829–1834, Part 3 1835–1839, Part 4 1840–1853, revised by Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970–1988).

MY

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1806–1820, Part I 1806–1811, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. revised by Mary Moorman; Part II 1812–1820, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. revised by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–1970).

PB

Peter Bell, ed. John E. Jordan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

PrW

The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and JaneWorthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).

PW

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952–1959).

P2V

Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).

SP

Shorter poems, 1807-1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).

Introduction Born in the first year of the century, Thomas Larcom typified the confluence of science, technology, statistics, and politics that was so characteristic of the British governing bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. Following a brilliant career at the Royal Military Academy, Larcom was assigned to the corps of Royal Engineers and in 1824 was selected by Colonel Thomas Colby, then head of the Ordnance Survey, for work on the survey of England and Wales. In 1828 Colby appointed Larcom as his chief assistant for the Irish survey, a position that, because of Colby’s commitments in London, effectively left Larcom in charge of the ordnance survey of Ireland. Given a free hand in the conduct of the Irish survey, Larcom transformed the survey’s headquarters at Mountjoy into a center of scientific research and education, introducing into the production of maps such innovations as the electrotype printing process and the use of contour lines to depict relief. But Larcom’s ideas for the survey went far beyond the technical and mechanical. As Colby noted, Larcom “conceived the idea that with such opportunities a small additional cost would enable him, without retarding the execution of the maps, to draw together a work embracing every description of local information relating to Ireland.”1 Larcom employed ethnologists, linguists, and antiquarians to collect local history and folklore, delve into the origin of place-names and local customs, and collect, classify and preserve local artifacts, archaeological materials and monuments. The result was inevitable. Within a few years the materials collected by Larcom’s “surveyors” threatened to overwhelm the staff at Mountjoy and progress on the mapping of Ireland slowed noticeably. Larcom was ordered to terminate the ethnological “survey” and focus exclusively on the cartographic survey. Only one account of local information was published—that of Templemore, a parish in Londonderry, in 1837—yet despite orders to the contrary Larcom’s agents continued to collect local information. The result was a rich store of historical, linguistic, cultural, and antiquarian information on Ireland, for which he was praised by the President of the Royal Irish Academy. Larcom put the information to more immediate use, though, in his work with the then undersecretary for Ireland, Thomas Drummond. He prepared plans for carrying out the changes required by the Irish Reform Bill and later prepared the topographical portion of the “Report on Irish Municipal Reform.” This work led to his appointment as the census commissioner for Ireland in 1841, where he initiated the first systematic classification of occupations and general conditions of the Irish population and formed a permanent branch of the registrar-general’s office for the collection of agricultural statistics. His work on the Irish census was so successful that the general plan of the Irish census was subsequently adopted for use in England, 1 Quoted in the Dictionary of National Biography, 64 vols, edited by Leslie Stephen (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885), 32:144.

2

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

and Larcom was offered a series of increasingly important government posts, culminating in 1853 with his appointment as undersecretary for Ireland, a position that made him effectively the bureaucratic viceroy of Ireland. Like in most colonial governments, power depended as much upon the possession of knowledge as upon the ability to use force. The bureaucracy of governance required data. The population was counted and classified by the census. The land was surveyed and constructed by the map. The culture was collected and preserved by the museum. That such work was a service to the nation is clear by Larcom’s honors: He was knighted in 1860 and made a baronet and Irish Privy Councilor upon his retirement in 1868. Bluff empirical men like Thomas Larcom fanned out across Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century to construct empirical representations of the nation. Counting, classifying, surveying, mapping, collecting, and preserving— funded for the first time by the government—was carried out on a national scale, and the national institutions of the census, the map, and the museum helped to consolidate the available representations of the nation and reduce the nation and its people to abstract empirical constructs. It probably requires no justification to talk of nations as representations, constructs, or, as E.J. Hobsbawm calls them, “inventions” that shift and change over time (11). As Ernest Gellner argues, “Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men ... are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality” (48–9). If national identity is a kind of representation or self-representation, what is the source of our tropes, the figures of speech we use to describe ourselves? Benedict Anderson, in an appendix to the second edition of Imagined Communities, identifies the census, the map, and the museum as three “institutions of power” that provided a colonial government with the mechanisms to define the people, territory, and culture that it ruled, mechanisms that ironically, or dialectically and necessarily, “engendered the grammar of the nationalisms that eventually arose to combat [colonial power]” (xiv). For Anderson, the census provided a classificatory grid of the colonial state’s “feverish imagining” of the colonized people, a counting and classifying that both contained the dangerous multiplicity of the population and created identities through which that population could imagine itself. The map demarcated regions (often arbitrarily) into colonized nation-states and thus created the geographical and political entities it supposedly recorded, putting “space under the same surveillance which the census-makers were trying to impose on persons” (173). The museum provided a legitimacy, first for the presence of the colonizers and later for the claim to rule of nationalists and separatists, through historical narratives constructed out of monuments and artifacts that performed a “profane genealogizing” of power (xiv). Anderson concludes that: the census, the map and the museum illuminate the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain. The ‘warp’ of this thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate, and therefore—in principle— countable ... The ‘weft’ was what one could call serialization: the assumption that the

Introduction

3

world was made up of replicable plurals. The particular always stood as a provisional representative of a series. (184)

Without diminishing the power of this Foucauldian classificatory grid, the history of colonizers and colonized has never quite matched this picture of disciplinary mechanisms and docile bodies. What it does provide, though, as in the seemingly endless series of memoranda supplied to lords-lieutenant and ministers, is the discursive control of “official returns,” those neatly arranged tables of data demonstrating in the rhetoric of bureaucracy increased agricultural yields, higher manufacturing production rates, decreased crime, improved conditions of life, greater numbers of people—the whole ceaseless narrative of colonial beneficence and capitalistic progress. The grid made identity visible through the categories of its imagining and substituted for the particular and local bodies the abstract particular indexed by a series of coordinates in a multidimensional matrix. If the “particular always stood as a provisional representative of a series,” it was a “particular” created by the grid itself, a new kind of abstraction made particular by the increasing number of dimensions in the matrix. The particular was representative of the series because the series brought the particular into existence. Marc Redfield subjects the universalizing potency of nationalism to a powerful de Manian reading. In The Politics of Aesthetics, Redfield links Anderson’s “imagined community,” which relies on a “homogeneous empty time ... [that] corrodes the identities it enables” to Derrida’s notion of writing, which relies on difference, itself a corrosive. The result: The nation is a hallucinated limit to iterability. Made possible by difference, deferral, and technological shock, the nation homogenizes time and space, draws and polices borders, historicizes itself as the continuous arc of an unfolding identity ... Originating in an anonymity ‘prior’ to any identity—an anonymity constitutive of the possibility of imagining an identity—the nation imagines anonymity as identity, as an essentialized formal abstraction. (53–4)

Redfield’s analysis helps us unravel two important and related facts about nationalism: the very high personal psychic stakes involved in the construction of national identity, and how such constructions are inevitable in any imagined community. So while Anderson is primarily concerned with how the colonial state imagines the “other,” the institutions of power he identifies were first used not on the peripheries of empire but at its center. As Redfield’s argument predicts, the first object of the census, the map, and the museum was not an imagined “them,” but an imagined “us,” the citizens, land, culture, and history of the British “nation.” Before exporting this machinery to the colonies, it was tested at home—the British census originating in 1801, the Ordnance Survey in 1791, and the state-sponsored British Museum in 1757. To generate the abstract British nation, the local particulars first had to be collected, sifted, classified, and reconstructed into a narrative descriptive of the British character, the sceptered isle and the legitimacy of its “history.” Anderson’s model, however, does not simply record the existence of colonial hegemony; it is a dialectic model that locates in the attempts by colonial power to write their own legitimacy the spark that ignites competing nationalist discourses. This dialectic is

4

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

key to Katie Trumpener’s argument in Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. For Trumpener, the attempts emanating from London to coerce the British Isles into a nation generate a counterdiscourse of local legends, customs, discourses, and language. Trumpener’s work in some ways parallels my project. She also begins with the bureaucratic efforts to control the discourse of the nation, efforts related to the political fortunes of Britain’s “others”: Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. She also identifies counterdiscourses that circulate in opposition to the dominant discourse of the nation emanating from London. She even relates the anecdote about the failure of the Irish survey, though she does not identify Thomas Larcom as the head of the survey. My study, however, does not attempt to write a history of nationalism’s counterdiscourses. Instead, my goal is to examine the complicities and resistances registered in the single yet central figure of William Wordsworth, and to use Wordsworth’s response to the nation as a way of understanding his public actions, especially after 1807. At the center of this study is Wordsworth’s self-conscious attempt at midcareer to define and control his poetic identity and position himself as the national poet. Sharing the common heritage of an Enlightenment episteme of measurement, classification, and control, the institutions of the census, the map, the museum, and the literary institution named Wordsworth demonstrate dialectically how the attempt to consolidate available representations—of the nation, the poet, or the national poet—calls counterrepresentations into existence. The categories of social reality that underlie much recent and excellent work on Britain in the early nineteenth century and Wordsworth in particular—occupation, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, dwelling, locale, regional characteristics (urban, rural, arable, forested, mountainous, monumental, archaeological), and local variations (folklore, history, customs, practices)—found their empirical and institutional manifestations in the act of governance, whether it be that of the state or of the poet. These categories, like all categories, were and are both descriptive and prescriptive, reflective of what were and are perceived to be the particulars of social reality and formative of that social reality. Like all structure, as Foucault notes, some particulars were made visible and others invisible. That the categories frequently required supplementation in the form of more categories, unclassifiable categories (the ubiquitous census category of “Other”), and apologetic or defensive narratives justifying the categories, while signaling the impossibility of ever “getting it right,” also are testaments to the undying belief that one can “get it right.” The census, the map, and the museum all represent attempts to create the totalizing classificatory grid that is desirable (for governments as well as poets and critics) and possible, as Anderson notes, “in principle.” And while the grid has proven incapable of containing the proliferation of data, we have retained in our own critical practices a remarkable faith in our own ability to identify and adjust the coordinates of that grid. From the census, the map, and the museum, we have inherited the categories of social reality that we hold up to texts as if these categories were themselves social reality and not the products, with a history of their own, of some prior attempt to classify social reality. The grid, while ostensibly posing the threat of the totalization of all detail, actually creates the details that it purports to subsume. As we conduct our own censuses, draw our own maps, create our own curiosity cabinets, we deploy

Introduction

5

those procedures that, despite their failings, provide a systematic way of dealing with aggregates through abstraction. It would be simplistic, however, to see the relationship between these institutions of nationalism and the career of the poet, between the poetics of the nation and the national poet, as moving in only one direction, from the discursive formations that make the nation imaginable to how these same formations make the national poet imaginable. Wordsworth’s classification of his poems in 1815 was not an overt attempt to conduct his own census but was his use of a mechanism that had proven itself useful on a wide range of seemingly inassimilable elements. Wordsworth was not influenced by the census; the census and Wordsworth utilized the methodologies of counting (unifying) and classifying (redispersing) to represent abstractly the body or the self, methodologies that had proven “successful” in other disciplines. In this procedure I appear to be treading dangerously close to what Alan Liu has called the “embarrassment of the New Historicism,” the holding up “to view a historical context on one side, a literary text on the other, and, in between, a connection of pure nothing” (“Power” 740, 743). Where embarrassment is forestalled (or at least temporarily removed to a higher level of abstraction) is in my focus on the abstract modalities of power and the institutional methodologies reified by that power as well as on actions of agents, such as Wordsworth, who both participate in and are subtly resistant to such modalities. Unlike Anderson’s apocalyptic humanistic vision of government’s success in implementing these mechanisms of control, my narrative attempts to recover both the paranoia of the classified object as well as the anxiety of the classifying subject. The context enacted repeatedly by census officials, cartographers, curators, and literary critics is that between the particular and the universal, the global and the local, the sum and the dispersed bodies, the map and the physical land, the exhibition and the archive, the neatly contained Great Decade revolutionary turned Tory hireling poet and the complex, contradictory historical phenomenon named Wordsworth. But this study is not an argument for the local and the particular, what Liu elsewhere calls the “overdetermination” that “goes under the name of ‘particularity’” (Review 177), nor is it an attempt to replace, as David Simpson suggests, “every use of the word culture with the word subculture” (“Return” 741). Rather, my argument is that culture and subcultures are themselves categories defined principally by the definitional power of the unified sign of the normative employed by the state, the poet, and the literary critic. Further, the pointedness given to this opposition arises during this period, and the valorization of the particular emerges out of the threat of subsumption of all particulars under the unified signs represented and propagated by institutional structures like the census, the map, the museum, and the poet. David Aram Kaiser has suggested that this essentially philosophical opposition between the particular and the universal helps explain the competing models of culture and of the nation-state that emerged in the nineteenth century. In Kaiser’s analysis, the competing models were liberalism, specifically the very English liberalism of “doing what one likes” and cultural nationalism, and they received in England their synthesis in Coleridge’s concept of the symbol, which provides “a dialectical reconciliation between universal idea and particular instantiation” (31). Wordsworth’s relationship to both the particular and the universal, though,

6

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

cannot be neatly resolved, dialectically or otherwise, and, as the brief biography of Thomas Larcom shows, historical figures do not line up on one or the other side of this or any other debate. Larcom was instrumental in conducting the triangulation survey of Ireland—the reduction of land to abstract geometric space—as well as the census, and yet he was also responsible for generating reams of local information and was credited with saving culture from the abyss of forgetting. While all these activities suggest the archiving mentality of the modern bureaucrat, what remains unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable, is the incompatibility of these two tendencies of the archiving mind—more and more abstractions to contain more and more particulars—the unified and empty sign and the unaccountable and unclassifiable particular. Wordsworth is both the classifier of poems, readers, and the objects of his poetic vision, and the celebrant of the unclassifiable particular object or experience— the one lone tree, the blasted hedge, the beetling rock, the blinded mountain summit, the echoing vale, the lonely prospect dim—that we identify as the literary sublime. Some contemporary critics (as well as modern ones) accuse him of being too abstract, and some accuse him of being too local, parochial, and particular. I want to suggest that he is both, and I take as a working assumption of this project Alison Hickey’s claim that this “conflict between an incorporating or systematizing impulse and the resistance to it manifests itself as a fundamental aspect of Wordsworth’s thought” (131). Wordsworth’s self-presentation and self-preservation and our subsequent reimaginings and reclassifications of him are testament to the unending dialectic of detail, category, inassimilable detail, and proliferating categories. The dominant narratives in Wordsworthian scholarship testify to this ongoing dialectic. From Arnold’s Great Decade to Hartman’s akedah and apocalypse, our narratives about Wordsworth have subdivided and reclassified his unwieldy six-decade poetic career by centering that career on such critical constructions as the lyric poet of 1798–1807 or the poet of The Prelude. Even Thomas Pfau’s sophisticated rethinking of Wordsworth’s self-representation in Wordsworth’s Profession narrowly focuses on the early career of Wordsworth, aligning the construction of that career with attempts at middle class legitimation, and Kenneth Johnston’s work while offering a new center for that career—the unfinished long poem The Recluse, which has the utility of extending Wordsworth’s career—shares with the earlier narratives a quintessentially Romantic narrative of lost opportunities, failed projects, and waning power, and his massive biography of Wordsworth makes no attempt to go beyond 1807. Hickey’s book-length study of The Excursion and Peter J. Manning’s essays on the later Wordsworth are remarkable not merely for their critical perspicacity but for their audacious claim that Wordsworth after 1807 might be of interest to scholars and readers.2 Marc Redfield’s semiserious summary of Romanticism could serve 2 Hickey offers a more detailed overview of the “Wordsworth’s anti-climax” narrative in Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1–7. Manning’s growing body of work on the later Wordsworth includes “Wordsworth at St. Bees: Scandals, Sisterhoods, and the Later Wordsworth,” ELH 52 (1985): 33–58, “Cleansing the Image: Wordsworth, Rome, and the Rise of Historicism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 271–326, “Wordsworth in the Keepsake” in Literature in the Marketplace, edited by John L. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge:

Introduction

7

equally well as a summary of critical narratives about Wordsworth: “It is, after all, a movement destined to die young or end badly, bequeathing only its promise to us as our own utopian possibility” (32). I would like to recenter Wordsworth’s career not on a particular work or poetic project but on a particular goal, that of the writing of the nation. The effect of this recentering is a decentering, shifting attention away from a particular work or project to the larger and more diffuse production of texts for public consumption that occupied Wordsworth throughout his career and can be said to define that career. As Jerome Christensen has remarked on Coleridge’s own attempt at controlling his literary representation in his Biographia Literaria, those texts do not constitute “a Shandean fiction nor an organic development but a writer’s career” (20–21). Building on Christensen’s insight into the rhetorical nature of Coleridge’s and Byron’s public representation of their literary careers, I examine Wordsworth’s publication of individual volumes of poetry and prose as well as the republication of his collected works as public acts of self-representation and self-definition, attempts by the poet himself to contain the proliferation of detail that marks his poetic output and poetic reputation. Always solicitous of his reputation and demanding in the presentation of his work, Wordsworth sought continually to control his public identity as a poet, an attempt at control that contemporary and subsequent criticism has shown to be futile. Just as Anderson’s apocalyptic vision of national consolidation proves inadequate to the proliferation of detail it seeks to contain, Wordsworth’s similar attempt at consolidation fails because of his own willingness to entertain the intractability of the local and the particular. That Wordsworth succeeded in becoming the national poet through his embracing of the local points to the need for a complex reimagining of the nation as both abstract and particular, as both generalized and specific, or more accurately as a particularized abstraction and a generalizable specific. Marlon Ross sees Wordsworth’s apologetics for nationalism as starting at what he calls Wordsworth’s center—the attachment to the local native soil. From this center, however, it “spreads itself wide,” finding “[i]n every nook ... its destined fulfillment” (64). Ross’s triumphal characterization, though, is possible only when some significant portion of Wordsworth’s career is excluded from consideration. Extending Wordsworth’s career beyond the conventional parameters of 1805 or 1807 (or at the latest 1814) enables us to read the ironies and difficulties of the writing the nation. For example, Anne Janowicz persuasively argues for Wordsworth’s centrality to the formation of national identity. In England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape, she persuasively argues that Wordsworth’s writing of the self is the necessary epic structure underlying the writing of the nation. She concludes her discussion of The Prelude with a ringing claim of Wordsworth’s triumph: The mutual making of nation and self is the climax of the poem. The reparative action of the Imagination and of its nationalist function are inseparable: here in native geography, Cambridge University Press, 1995), “Touring Scotland at the Time of the Reform Bill: William Wordsworth and William Cobbett,” The Wordsworth Circle 31:2 (2000): 80–3, and “The Other Scene of Travel: Wordsworth’s ‘Musings Near Aquapendente’,” in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading, edited by Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2005), 191–211.

8

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation the country answers the poets, for here “had Nature lodged / The soul, the imagination of the whole” (1805, XIII, 64–5). To speak of nature is to speak of the nation: the fragments cohere into a whole, the ruin is repaired, and as the nation moves through each person, so each person moves through the nation. (144)

Like many discussions of Wordsworth’s development, stopping in 1805 is not merely conducive but necessary to make claims about Wordsworth’s triumph or psychic wholeness or integration. To move beyond 1805 is to encounter that time after the moment of vision, the time of doubt, uncertainty, failure. Unlike Ross’s narrative that moves from the center outward, or Janowicz’s, which builds to the Snowdon climax, the narrative that I want to trace focuses less on a movement from the center outward and more on the tension between the center and the periphery, between the abstract and the particular, between the local and the national. The narrative of Wordsworth’s career that emerges is, like that identified by William Galperin’s consideration of Wordsworth’s revisions, essentially ironic—the normative census identity diffusing into multiple authorial identities, the abstract map of imperial dominion disappearing under the pressure of local sublimity, and the narrative of national identity and centralized power being challenged by a narrative of local idiosyncrasy. This book is about Wordsworth’s stories about himself as well as our stories about Wordsworth, about representations of the nation and the poet who would write the nation, and how such representations were challenged by the local variations both sought to contain. Wordsworth’s “service to the nation”—a phrase that appears frequently in tributes to and eulogies of him—was the construction of a theory of the particular and an abstract representation of the local. This book is divided into three parts, “Census,” “Map,” and “Museum,” and is structured mostly along the chronology of Wordsworth’s career. While some texts published prior to 1815 receive extended treatments (especially in Part I), greater attention than is usual in book-length studies of Wordsworth is given to poetry published after 1815. This should not be read as a call for greater appreciation of the later Wordsworth, though such attention is necessary if we are to address the idea of our construction of Wordsworth, but is necessitated by my argument, which sees Wordsworth as active in the creation of his own self-image. Because of my emphasis on Wordsworth’s “actions” as a public figure, the volumes he set before the public, especially during what I identify as the crucial period between 1814 and 1820, are read as rhetorical gestures requiring careful attention to the revision history of individual poems as well as to the placement of the poems in the individual volumes. What emerges from this examination of the purportedly quiescent middle-aged poet is a figure solicitous not just for his public identity as a poet but also for the purported identity of the nation. To counteract the increasing abstractions of commercial and governmental London, Wordsworth offered his own idealized particulars—the sheltered vale, the independent statesman, the republic of shepherds, the local river, the landscape of tower, hamlet, and church spire, the local tales, superstitions and idiosyncratic names, what Anne Janowicz calls Wordsworth’s “naturalized nationalism” (133). These particulars were not in opposition to the totalizing classificatory grid; they were created or made visible by it. The celebration of local variation always presupposed that the “true” national character could be

Introduction

9

abstracted from the local. The particular was still representative of the series, only Wordsworth posited a different set of particulars to produce a different series. In Chapter 1, “Counting the People,” I examine the origins of the British census in the late eighteenth century and how the perception of the census shifted from being seen as an attempt by the government to impose order and restraint on specific physical bodies to the demands of abstract physical bodies that imposed duties and responsibilities on the government. Counting the people served as a mechanism of control, and for Wordsworth counting became a discipline that exemplified both the power to control the material and—as legitimated in Book XIII of the 1805 Prelude—the power to control the representation of the material. The sum produced by enumeration is the totalized and empty sign of unity and is produced by a procedure that Wordsworth identifies as a key component in his definition of imagination. Counting is a form of data coercion, the aesthetic counterpart of which is the “abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination.” But like the census, which sought and failed to contain the dangerous multitudes, so Wordsworth encountered repeated resistance to his egotistical sublime. This desire to make the world accountable paradoxically also makes Wordsworth so open to the unaccountable, or the sublime. Wordsworth’s “Gipsies” articulates a national preoccupation with the uncounted and seemingly unaccountable, the racial otherness of a “knot” of people that is both contained by the knot and yet seemingly opaque and unavailable for inspection. If counting is containment, not being counted is dangerous and requires a further form of control. The Kantian aesthetic sublime represents such an attempt to place the unknowable within structure. The sublime is an aesthetic means of containing unaccountable difference, and it is striking that Wordsworth invokes the machinery of the entire cosmos to address the purported idleness of a band of gypsies. This containment of the “other” accounts for the unaccountable and renders it safe. In Wordsworth’s encounter with a “knot of gypsies,” the reduction of human presence to a knot and a not is the inevitable outcome of an encounter between the powerless and the poet’s power of abstraction. This desire for control recurs in Wordsworth’s classification of poems and readers in 1815, which is the subject of Chapter 2. Wordsworth’s procedure mirrors the statistical classification of the people of Britain in that both processes aim at exploring, breaking down and rearranging the body in order to subject it to ever more rigorous control and discipline. But what these processes actually reveal is the diffusion and multiplicity of the poems, readers, and people that must be defined as abnormal or accounted for by ever-proliferating categories and ever-increasing justifications. Wordsworth’s purpose was absolute control over the conditions under which he was read, or rather the conditions under which his textual self was read. The national census was a similar attempt at control; but, like all classificatory schemes, what came to count and what counted as difference could be read only through the categories themselves. The inevitable result was a taxonomy that erased the material object and replaced it with an object of inquiry visible only through the structure that purported to describe it. Perversely for Wordsworth, the classification of the poems became the writing of a life and the assertion of a subject that was constituted by writing, while the classification of the readers became the reading of a life and the assertion of a subject that somehow remained immune to reading.

10

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Surveying and the “prospect-view” or grand imperial vision it afforded provided Wordsworth with a way of writing the nation as if it were an abstract unified whole, the self-contained and self-similar island nation united in purpose by the war with France. In Chapter 3, “Surveying and Writing the Nation,” I demonstrate how the Thanksgiving Ode and its accompanying poems can be read as Wordsworth’s most overt attempt to write the nation, to assume the bardic voice and explain to the people the meaning of great national events. Wordsworth’s flurry of publication activity in the years between 1814 and 1820 marked his self-conscious emergence as poet of the nation and demonstrated his varied and evolving strategies for writing a national poetry, activities that call into question our narratives of the inactive middle-aged poet. Yet, as the dominant critical position holds, it was at this time that Wordsworth retreated from the cares of the nation into the seclusion of his native hills and dales to brood over his failures and rejections and endlessly revise the great poetry of his youth. The pressing reality of dissension and disunity that marked post-Waterloo Britain and the uncomfortable linkage between imperial ambition and Napoleon’s lawless reign rendered the prospect-view both inadequate and suspect; and Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode poems of 1816, while seeking to celebrate the abstract notion of the nation, instead recount the story of the poet’s own frustration over his failure to write the nation. What is clear about this episode is that when Wordsworth attempted to write the nation he was himself caught between opposing visions that he could neither unify nor resolve. In Chapters 4 and 5, I examine how after the Thanksgiving Ode debacle, Wordsworth’s view of the nation shifted increasingly toward the local landscape, people, and manners of his native Westmoreland. Like the local surveyors who sought to contain the proliferating survey data they were collecting, Wordsworth felt that a great deal went unrecorded on the national map and sought to repopulate the landscape with the monuments and meaning of the locally understood landscape. In short, the abstract vision required the subsumption of local details, congruous and incongruous, but as the mapmakers to Britain were discovering at this time, it was the delineation of local detail—not the impossible mountaintop vision—that proved the accuracy, utility, and beauty of the finished map. For Wordsworth, the unending prospect of imperial Britain was only one possible vision of Britain, and clearly what was needed in the tempestuous years following Waterloo was an explication of the British national character from the local details of the imagined British landscape, a character formed by and responsive to the local. That landscape was his native Westmoreland. Wordsworth’s turn or return to the local was not a retreat from the politics of the nation, but a conscious attempt to redefine the nation along the lines of the local. In what might be called an abstract vision of the particular, Wordsworth holds up local idiosyncrasy as the true exemplar of the national character, and a local river, the Duddon, as the true representative of the progress narrative of the British nation. In Peter Bell, The Waggoner, and The River Duddon, all published between April 1819 and May 1820, Wordsworth presented his rethinking of the nation not as monolithic totality but as regional ideal. Local identity provided both an idealized national identity to counterbalance what Wordsworth saw as a troubled nation forgetful of its past and a cautionary tale of what was to come when local

Introduction

11

idiosyncrasies were subsumed within the national identity emanating from the metropole. For Wordsworth, this return to local traditions recovered the meaning of the landscape by investing it with human transit and human purposes. Unlike the unpeopled and impossibly abstract imperial landscape, the local landscape is marked everywhere by a history that reconnects the present with the past. Imperial dominion is replaced by historical contingency, as the abstract map is filled in with local detail. The local landscape is not simply background or picturesque attraction but is revealing in the associations built up over immemorial time of the ways in which people have observed and interpreted that landscape. Increasingly for Wordsworth, local identity was found to rely on local customs, folklore, and history, and so the depiction of the local landscape was itself an act of preservation, an artifact for the national museum. As early as 1820, Wordsworth had called for the preservation of the Lake District as “a sort of national property,” marking a curious point where the landscape itself becomes an artifact worthy of preservation. In Chapter 6, “A National Property,” I examine how Wordsworth’s poetry both enacts a type of museum presentation and becomes one of the bases for the later Victorian preservation movement. The local geography, traditions, and people of the Lakes, marked by idiosyncrasy and a narrative of rugged resistance, stood in a synecdochic relationship to an idealized vision of the nation. This landscape was both commonplace and exotic, representative and rare, representative of the nation paradoxically because it was becoming increasingly rare. As an object of study, isolated yet threatened, as a site of pilgrimage and promised transformation, as a ritual space set apart from everyday life by geography and the imagination, the landscape of the Lakes can be likened to a vast national museum space dedicated, like the contemporary British Museum and National Gallery, to the education of the modern citizen, the construction of national identity, and the demonstration of state power. This construction of the landscape as a museum creates what Svetlana Alpers refers to as “the museum effect,” the transformation of all objects into objects of aesthetic interest. This aestheticizing gaze, so frequently the subject of recent Wordsworth scholarship, finds its parallel ironically in Wordsworth’s transformation of the British landscape into a kind of museum space and the debate surrounding a planned railway connecting a large manufacturing town with the Lake District. While both Wordsworth’s poetry and the railway seemed dedicated to the common goal of providing widespread access to the improving influence of aesthetic contemplation, both also threatened to destroy the objects of contemplation they purported to make available. This irony, known in conservation circles as the problem of balancing preservation and access, cannot be attributed solely to Wordsworth’s narrow selfinterest but must be seen as revealing commonly held ideas concerning who the “people” were and who constituted the nation. Ironically, the landscape celebrated and the ancient manners preserved by Wordsworth had already vanished from the land. For the local surveyors attempting to represent the local landscape, for the antiquarians attempting to preserve the local history, and for Wordsworth who sought to do both, the preservation of the customs, folklore, history, and artifacts was a national imperative. National heritage based on local idiosyncrasy became the basis of national identity. In Chapter 7, “Service to the Nation,” I demonstrate how by the second half of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth

12

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

himself and the local landscape he celebrated were themselves subsumed into that heritage, the poet transformed by Victorian editors and scholars into the “Great Decade” poet of Nature and the landscape he celebrated combed for and inscribed by its relation to his poems. This Victorian construction of the consummate Romantic poet polished and preserved a version of Wordsworth suitable for display in the museum of national heritage. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, out of the plenitude of Wordsworths available, two primary versions emerged: that of the poet of the Lakes so essential to the British tourist industry and that of the global competitor in the international competition of world literatures. Both were nostalgic visions of the past, of the nation, the land, poetry, and the power of poetry itself. While seeking to preserve the nation and the poet, both Matthew Arnold’s version of Wordsworth and the preservation movement’s version of Wordsworth preserve a nostalgia for the possibility of nostalgia itself, for a time when poetry or nature or history could be seen as salvific. While Wordsworth sought to preserve a landscape of speaking monuments that would speak the “ancient manners” so needed by a forgetful nation, the landscape increasingly came to speak only a single word: Wordsworth. In the poem Eighteen Hundred Eleven, Anna Laetitia Barbauld uses an imagined end of the British Empire to critique her nation’s travails. In this dark and somber poem, she prophetically sees the future of Britain. American tourists, she imagines, “with duteous zeal their pilgrimage shall take” to Britain, and there, “With fond, adoring steps,” they will “press the sod / By statesmen, sages, poets, heroes, trod” (129–31). The landscape, the poet, and his poems had become artifacts in a national museum that has come to encompass virtually every part of the nation itself. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of the National Trust under Wordsworth scholar and celebrant H.D. Rawnsley, the great national museum was no longer the repository of the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles but the land itself and its ruins, castles, churches, houses, prospects, farmlands, moors, and coastline. While the museum had always been the nation, as Barbauld foresaw, the nation would become the museum.

Chapter 1

Counting the People The Census, Wordsworth, and the Discipline of the Imagination

“—Stoop from those heights, and soberly declare What error is; and, of our errors, which Doth most debase the mind; the genuine seats Of power, where are they? Who shall regulate, With truth, the scale of intellectual rank?” —The Solitary in The Excursion, IV.774–8

As Frances Ferguson points out in Solitude and the Sublime, the encounter between the man and the little girl in Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” dramatizes the pitfalls of the ostensive nature of counting. Both the man and the little girl insist on counting what is there, what can be pointed to; yet because they differ on what they determine to be ostensive they arrive at different sums. As Ferguson notes, the little girl’s “ability to count her siblings first merely involves her ability to place them despite their physical absence from this place” (165), and in fact her dead siblings and the proximity of their graves are more available for ostensiveness than her two other siblings who have “gone to sea.” The man attempts to explain to her that when counting people the dead do not count. Acting like a census enumerator, the man insists on counting only those siblings who meet his own “pre-established codes of decision,”1 and while his set criterion of living versus dead seems unexceptionable, her set criterion of near versus far seems equally unexceptionable. While Ferguson is undoubtedly correct in deriding those readings of the text that see it as an attempt by the man “to impose his hegemonic system upon an innocent victim” (165), it is nonetheless important to recall that Wordsworth himself characterized the poem as showing “the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion.”2 This encounter ends in a stalemate, but the prefatory gloss and the introductory stanza make clear that while different opinions of what is to count may make for good drama, ultimately somebody determines what counts, just as the census enumerator records his count and moves on to the next village.3 1 This phrase occurs in the “Advertisement” to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, edited by James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 739. 2 “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800” in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, 745. 3 I am aware that in this formulation I am granting the writer of the Preface a certain and likely unjustifiable authority over the reading of the poem. One of the rhetorical purposes of the Preface is to answer those critics who saw Lyrical Ballads as silly and the poems

14

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

The enumerated sum eradicates all difference, and as the encounter dramatized in “We Are Seven” shows, that difference also involves different criteria for what is to count. Ferguson states that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, numbering “had come to be just another version of naming” (168), but the number as name is only an intermediate step. When the numbering ends, when the objects have been counted, when the enumerator closes his book, the number and name are replaced by the sum and the relationship between the sum and the parts is eradicated until difference is reinscribed on the parts through the imposition of categories that ex post facto define and organize what was counted. In place of name and number we have location, occupation, age, and myriad other categories that serve to reindividuate the part of the whole and render it readable only through the relationships established by those categories. In this chapter, I examine the debates surrounding the attempts in 1753 and in 1800 to institute a census in Britain to suggest that the taking of a census is part of the general movement toward what Michel Foucault calls discipline, in this case a discipline founded on a mastery derived from the ability to enumerate. I further suggest that the same coercion that makes abstract counting possible is identified by Wordsworth as one of the primary processes of the imagination. In this way, Wordsworth’s conception of the imagination is the aesthetic counterpart to the increasing hegemony of disciplinary control, but Wordsworth only occasionally adhered to his own model. From the category of the sublime to the classification of his poems, Wordsworth sought containers for the diffuse particularity of his experiences and his poems. While never abandoning the abstract vision, he grew increasingly distrustful of his own ability to record it and increasingly unsure of his own relationship to the nation he sought to write. In 1753, Thomas Potter, MP for St. Germans in Cornwall, submitted a bill “for taking and registering an annual account of the total number of people, and of the total number of marriages, births, and deaths, and also of the total number of the poor receiving alms from every Parish and Extra-parochial Place in Great Britain.”4 Not surprisingly, the debate over the bill revolved around the issue of government knowledge, of how much the government (or any government) needed to know about its people. At issue in this debate was the larger principle of laissez-faire, supporters of the bill arguing that government intervention was useful only when that government was equipped with timely information, and opponents of the bill arguing that government intervention itself was almost always inappropriate. Supporters of the bill focused exclusively on the information that a census would supply to the government, information that would aid the government in exerting increased disciplinary control over the population: That it would ascertain the collective strength of the nation, and shew where the inhabitants are too numerous, and where they are too few ... It would appear what number of men as inane or “babyish.” However, while we or his 1800 readers may not be willing to grant Wordsworth control over the interpretation of his poems, our reluctance does not change the fact that Wordsworth sought to exercise such control. 4 Quoted in Guide to Census Reports, Great Britain 1801–1966 (London: HMSO, 1977), 11.

Counting the People

15

might, upon a sudden emergency, be levied for the army, and whether we gain or lose by sending our natives to settle colonies and plantations abroad ... That by pursuing this measure, we should gain a police, or a local administration of civil government, upon certain and known principles, the want of which has been long a reproach peculiar to this nation, the discouragement of industry, and the support of idleness.5

In language that seems strikingly bald by modern standards, the supporters of the census contended that an enumeration and registration of the people were needed for increased government control of population movement, army conscription, and law enforcement. Of these, the issue that occasioned the greatest debate was the applicability of the census to the restraint or encouragement of population movement. To further the cause of the census, one supporter, George Grenville, focused on the frightening prospect of depopulation brought about by a perceived increase in emigration: [A census], it is said, can answer no purpose but that of an insignificant and vain curiosity, as if it were no consequence for the legislature to know when to encourage and when to discourage or restrain the people of this island, or of some particular part of it, from going to settle in our American Colonies. Do gentlemen think, that it can be of no use to this society, or indeed to any society; to know when the number of its people increases or decreases; and when the latter appears to be the case, to enquire into the cause of it and to endeavor to employ a proper remedy ... Even here at home do we not know, that both manufactures and the number of people have in late years decreased in some parts of the Kingdom? Would it not be of advantage to us to know, whether this affects the whole, or if it be only a removal from one part of the island to another?6

Supporters of the census sought to direct the population debate toward matters of social policy and away from the “insignificant and vain curiosity” that opponents sought to attach to the census, some seeing it as serving only to “decide a wager at White’s” or to satisfy “the curiousity of those gentlemen who love to deal in political 5 Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, vol. 15 (London: T.C. Hansard, 1813), col. 1317. Hereafter, this series will be referred to as Cobbett’s in the text and notes. 6 Cobbett’s 15:1350–51. The prominence of Potter and Grenville in the arguments for the bill could not have helped its chances. Glass points out that Potter “was apparently known as one of the profligate twelve who called themselves Franciscans, and held their orgies at Medmenham Abbey” and that he at times “behaved rather arrogantly in the House” (Numbering the People, 18–19). The Dictionary of National Biography offers this description of George Grenville: “Stern, formal, and exact, with a temper which could not brook opposition, and an ambition which knew no bounds, Grenville neither courted nor obtained popularity. Utterly destitute of tact, obstinate to a degree, and without any generous sympathies, he possessed few of the qualities of a successful statesman” (Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen [London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885], vol. 23, 116). The Grenvilles were extremely important Whigs who stayed at the head of the party for years, and if Potter was at Medmenham. he was an associate of John Wilkes. That means that it was the wing of the Whigs characterized by progressive notions, by “Wilkes and Liberty”—also tied to the City and to trade—that pushed for the census. We can see from the beginning of the census debate a tension between a kind of democratizing impulse (as opposed to a Tory static landed aristocracy) and the abolition or erasure of the individual in government legislation.

16

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

arithmetic” (Cobbett’s 15:1326, 15:1330). However, this redirection was not without its costs. Grenville focuses on the census as a means of restraining the people, of providing the state with the statistical information that would allow control over the movement of bodies. This unaccountable movement of bodies is threatening because it currently takes place outside the observation of the state. In addition, these unaccounted bodies are directly related by Grenville to the unaccountable decrease of manufactures in some parts of the country, implying that economic stability relies on fixed and stable human bodies and that it was the responsibility of government to assess and if necessary intervene in the labor market.7 The primary opposition to the census focused on its cost, impracticality, and pointlessness. Matthew Ridley spoke of the people’s “superstitious” fear of a census arising out of the biblical injunction against attempting to count the people.8 There were also concerns that “this new law must be designed as a foundation for some new tax, or for increasing the burden of some of those we have already” (Cobbett’s 15:1347). However, opponents of the census also recognized the subtler implications of the bill. Seizing on Grenville’s ill-advised use of the word restrain, William Thornton, MP for the City of York, uses the census debate to attack government attempts to control population movement: It has been said, Sir, that an authentic knowledge of the number of our people, and of their annual increase or decrease, will instruct us when to encourage, and when to restrain people from going to settle in our American Colonies. Sir, our going or not going to America does not depend upon the public encouragement or restraint, but upon the circumstances they are in at the time. (Cobbett’s 15:1355)

Earlier, Thornton had responded to the bill by asking what purpose would be served by knowing “where the kingdom is crowded, and where it is thin, except we are to be driven from place to place as graziers do their cattle?” (Cobbett’s 15:1320). Such attempts at control were seen as nothing less than attempts to control the physical body, an aspect of the census that was implied or openly stated by Grenville and his supporters, and fully exploited by Thornton, when he stated that he did not believe:

7 This perceived need for government intervention in the movement of bodies is stated clearly by another supporter of the bill, the Earl of Hillsborough: “if we knew the numbers of people, and their annual increase or decrease, no one can say that it would not sometimes be for the public good, to lay a restraint upon poor people leaving the place of their birth without leave from the magistrates of the place ... and to such people it would be doing them a service to lay them under some restraint” (Hansard’s 15:1363). Hillsborough’s paternalistic language calls attention to the class basis of this need for government control. The “service” that government supplied was “restraint” of movement, though such service was only intended for the poor. For Hillsborough, government intervention in matters of population movement was not only necessary but sanctioned by the existing laws governing parish relief. By accounting for the location and controlling the dispersion of persons, government could regulate the supply and demand of labor, acting on the needs of production and not on the needs of the laboring population. 8 The foundation of this injunction is King David’s taking of a census described in II Samuel 24 and in I Chronicles 21.

Counting the People

17

that there was any set of men, or, indeed, any individual of the human species so presumptuous and so abandoned as to make the proposal we have just heard ... I hold this project to be totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty ... the addition of a very few words will make it the most effectual engine of rapacity and oppression that was ever used against an injured people. (Cobbett’s 15:1318–20, 1323)

Thornton characterizes the census as threatening a vulnerable human body, “an injured people,” or possibly toward the shell of a human body, its “last remains.” The census is seen as the harbinger of an “engine of rapacity and oppression,” the first mechanism of increasing state control. To supporters of the census, such an accounting would relieve the anxiety of not knowing, while to its opponents such an accounting was the source of anxiety. And although the bill passed through each of the committee stages, debates and divisions took place over every clause (Drake 7–8).9 At its second reading in the House of Lords, the bill was referred to committee, but since this occurred at the end of the parliamentary session the bill lapsed and was not brought up again.10 9 See also D.V. Glass, Numbering the People (Farnborough, England: D.C. Heath Ltd., 1973), 17–20. 10 Glass, Numbering the People, 20. While the attempt to initiate the census had failed, the controversy over population continued through the remainder of the century. In articles in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in pamphlets, in books on trade, medicine, and economics, the debate continued unabated. Political economists, actuaries, doctors, and amateur demographers all sought to calculate the present population of Great Britain using methods ranging from detailed studies of selected parish registers to detailed calculations based on the total number of houses or the quantity of bread produced in a given region. Whether the argument was for population increase or decrease, all these attempts maintained the direct link between population and prosperity. Richard Price, the prominent actuary who maintained that population was declining, blamed the “great towns” as “nurseries of debauchery and voluptuousness” (quoted in Glass, Numbering the People, 54–5) and the enclosure laws which had led to a decline in agricultural production and the depopulation of the countryside. Arthur Young, who maintained that population was increasing, held that “employment creates population, that employment was acting more powerfully than ever and that, consequently, there could not be depopulation” but just the reverse, a significant increase in population (quoted in Glass, 56). Adam Smith maintained this link between population and prosperity, going so far as to assert that “What encourages the progress of population and improvement, encourages that of real wealth and greatness” (vol. I, book IV, Chapter IV, pp. 145–6). However, for Smith the question of population increase or decrease was not so much a moral question as it was a market question, and thus the size of the laboring population (which was the bulk of Great Britain’s population) was regulated by the law of supply and demand. An understocked labor market led to higher wages, which led to larger families, which ultimately produced an overstock of labor, which led to lower wages and eventually a correction of the labor market. Smith states that “It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men; quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast” (vol. I, book I, Chapter VIII, p. 84). How this correction of the labor market occurs and the potential for suffering that Smith’s clinical analysis erases are questions that would be taken up by T.R. Malthus two decades later. Ostensibly, Malthus wrote his essay in response to Godwin’s claim that the advancement of education and the

18

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

It would be 47 years before a census would be proposed again, and this second bill passed both Commons and Lords without opposition and received Royal Assent on 31 December 1800 (Great Britain Office of Population Censuses and Surveys 11). It is generally held that the establishment of the census of 1800 was directly connected with the anxiety occasioned by the publication of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798,11 and while the timely publication of Malthus’s essay certainly had an effect on the establishment of the census, other developments contributed to its ready passage. For one, other countries had recognized the need for a census. Norway and Denmark each conducted a census in 1769, and the United States had instituted decennial counts in 1790. Spain conducted a census in 1798, and France had already approved the procedure, though the actual census did not occur until 1801 (Westergaard 85–7; Scott 23–4). Another development, according to D.V. Glass, was “concern with the increasing burden of the poor, and the need to import elimination of private property would lead to the extensive and infinite diffusion of happiness, a discursive context treated by Tim Fulford in “Apocalyptic Economics and Prophetic Politics: Radical and Romantic Responses to Malthus and Burke” (Studies in Romanticism 40:3 [2001 Fall], 345–68). It is important to note that Godwin’s claim was based on his assumption that the world’s population had declined precipitously, and even as late as 1820—despite two censuses that had shown dramatic population increases—he still contended that “it is in this wreck of a world, almost as desolate as if a comet from the orbit of Saturn had come too near us, that Mr. Malthus issues his solemn denunciations, warning us on no consideration to increase the numbers of mankind” (quoted in Ferguson, Solitude 117). In the early decades of the nineteenth century, population increased at the rate of 1.5 per cent per annum. This is contrasted with an estimated rate of increase of 0.5 per cent per annum for the period from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century (Habbakuk, “Economic History” 147–58). This astounding and unparalleled population increase did not go unnoticed by Malthus, and while he did not contend that the world was overpopulated, his theories about population and sustenance foretold such a day. Indeed, though he had no empirical data to back up his contention (in fact, he dramatically underestimated the population of Great Britain), Malthus did accurately gauge the increase in population that was taking place in his time (Wrigley, “Malthus’ Model” 114). In 1798 Malthus estimated the population of Great Britain to be about seven million. The 1801 census set the population of Great Britain at 10.9 million, which means that Malthus underestimated the population of Great Britain by 56 per cent. Even with this very large error, Malthus’s estimated population was higher than the figures offered by others. For this reason, he disagreed with Godwin’s optimism and with recurrent Enlightenment notions of progress and perfectibility. It was his opinion that there were fundamental natural laws that would ultimately check progress, of which the most important was that of the relationship between population and sustenance. He famously claimed: “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio,” which meant that simple arithmetic foretold a day of reckoning, or as he called it “misery and vice” (Malthus 20). 11 In a certain sense, this is the “official” position since it is incorporated into the brief history of the census presented in the Guide to Census Reports, Great Britain 1801–1966 produced by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (11). In addition, the importance of Malthus is stressed by A.J. Taylor in one of the first histories of the census, “The Taking of the Census, 1801–1951,” British Medical Journal 1 (1951), 715, and subsequently by H.J. Habbakuk in Population Growth and Economic Development since 1750 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1971).

Counting the People

19

food,” which “began to erode the earlier mercantilist belief in the advantages of a large and increasing population.” Because Glass emphasizes this shift, he concludes that “it is doubtful if Malthus’s Essay was important in persuading Parliament to accept the idea of censuses.”12 More important than Malthus’s doomsday scenario was the emergence of a nationalist rhetoric, which placed less emphasis on the dangerous dispersion of individuals and more on abstractions such as the nation and the people. This abstract nationalist rhetoric is exemplified by John Rickman, who Glass suggests was primarily responsible for the establishment of the census. Longtime friend of Southey and Lamb and later instrumental in Coleridge’s travels to Malta, the then 25-year-old Rickman published an essay in 1796 on the need for “a general enumeration of the people of the British Empire.” At that time, the bad harvests of 1793–1795 and the steadily increasing animosities with France, coupled with growing awareness of both population growth and an increasing dependence on grain imports, had created a climate of great anxiety. Rickman argued that more accurate information would enable the government to form more effective policies, especially concerning recruitment for the armed forces. In addition, he felt that the census would show a substantial population increase, thus demonstrating the nation’s growing prosperity and allaying domestic discontent. Echoing Adam Smith, Rickman maintained that “an industrious population is the first and most necessary requisite to the prosperity of nations,” but Rickman’s chief claims for the utility of a census center on appeals to national pride and the characterization of a benevolent government “anxious for the good of its subjects” (108). Quite simply, rather than speaking of restraining individuals, Rickman speaks of providing for the people. Rickman’s language was picked up and used nearly verbatim by Charles Abbot when he presented the census bill to Parliament in 1800. The domestic anxiety occasioned by a series of bad harvests and the escalating war with France was probably exacerbated by Malthus’s scenario of too many people and too little food. Animosities with France continued to escalate, the harvests of 1798–1799 were bad, and the harvest of 1800 was disastrous. Rickman’s essay was republished in 1800, and he was given a position of importance under Charles Abbot.13 On 19 November 1800, a bill for the taking of a census was introduced by Abbot during a special session of Parliament called to address “the present high price of provisions” (Cobbett’s 35:495–6) brought on by the bad harvests and the

12 Glass, Numbering the People, 90. While it is true that Malthus or the subject of overpopulation never comes up in the debates on the Census Bill or in press coverage of the debates, Malthus’s Essay did create something of a sensation upon its publication. Though Glass argues for the important contribution of John Rickman in establishing the census, Rickman subscribed to the mercantilist population philosophy that Glass claims was eroding, and Malthus’s work marks a complete break with these earlier mercantilist views. 13 Abbot had already distinguished himself by his work on creating tables of expiring temporary laws and his chairmanship of a committee inquiring into the condition of the national records. He was later Speaker of the House from 1802 to 1816 (Dictionary of National Biography, 1.4–5).

20

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

suspension of trade with the Continent. It was in this environment of wartime, food scarcity, and overpopulation fears, that the census was established.14 The economic and political situation of Great Britain in 1800 provided an environment conducive to the establishment of the census. But do these external conditions alone explain why the census proposal of 1753 was heatedly debated and ultimately rejected while that of 1800 was approved without a single recorded word of opposition? In the 1753 debate, both sides seemed well aware that a census was a counting of people, or more specifically of particular human bodies, and that this act of counting was somehow related to issues of restraint and control. Because the census of 1800 was likewise a counting of particular human bodies, it is tempting to conclude that the association between counting and control had vanished during those intervening years. Instead, what I want to suggest is that the association remained, and it was the representation of restraint and control that had changed. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault examines the emergence of restraint and control as a mechanism of governance and as a discursive system that naturalizes governance. He states that during the eighteenth century, the state “discovered the body as object and target of power” (136). This power is the domination of relentless discipline, of a breaking down and subsequent remaking of the body of the subject. Foucault identifies the first discipline as that which controls the distribution of individuals in space, and fundamental to this discipline are the ideas of enclosure and partition. To exert proper control over human bodies, those bodies must be located and fixed in physical space, such that, in language later echoed by Benedict Anderson on the census, “Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual.” In addition: One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation; it was a tactic of anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, and anti-concentration. Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of the individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space. (143)

In the 1753 debate, Grenville raised many of these same concerns. He explicitly complained of the uncontrolled disappearances of individuals, of the perceived depopulation of Great Britain by emigration to the American Colonies. Or was it, for he did not know for sure, because these unaccounted for bodies may simply have moved “from one part of the island to another”? The anxiety is not an anxiety of decline but an anxiety of not knowing. To Grenville, the disturbing fact was not that 14 That this was a time of extraordinary anxiety in Britain is made clear by the other issues debated during this special session of Parliament, the most prominent being an attempt to establish a separate peace with France, a move to increase penalties for mutiny and dereliction of duty, a renewal of the suspension of habeas corpus, a call to evacuate British troops from Egypt (following a series of devastating losses), and the establishment of a special committee to address the high price of provisions.

Counting the People

21

people had emigrated, but that their movements were unknown; they were diffusely circulating out of the control of the state. It was this anxiety that the census was intended to alleviate. For Grenville and others, a counting of the people would locate where those people were and would serve as the initial mechanism of a state apparatus of control. And because a census is a counting of physical bodies, both sides of this debate recognized that there was no way of avoiding this form of control short of eliminating the body. One can see the difficulty of disobedience in Thornton’s response to Grenville: As to myself, I hold this project to be totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty, and therefore, though it should pass into law, I should think myself under the highest of all obligations to oppose its execution. If any officer, by whatever authority should demand of me an account of the number and circumstances of my family, I would refuse it; and if he persisted in the affront, I would order my servants to give him the discipline of the horse-pond. (Cobbett’s 15:1320)

Beneath the bravado of this imagined act of civil disobedience that would render one invisible to the census is the visibility of some (and invisibility of others) that the act makes available. As the speaker in “We are Seven” insists, a body is either present and counted or it is absent and not counted. The very exercise of disobedience renders Thornton visible and thus countable. By defying the enumerator, he participates in the census, and it is for this reason that he saw the census as potentially “the most effectual engine of rapacity and oppression.” Of course, visibility was a problem for Thornton because he belonged to the class, race, and gender that counted and therefore was visible. The census is, of course, a representation and noncompliance would lessen its correspondence value and potentially render the data useless, undercounting not overcounting has been the charge leveled at virtually every census conducted since 1800. As the problem of undercounting encountered by every census ever undertaken shows, the problem for many others was not visibility but invisibility. This “problem” is the opportunity exploited by the child in “We are Seven,” where the speaker’s categories prove inadequate to the presence or absence of bodies. Opponents of the 1753 census saw it as the forerunner of increasing control of the state over the bodies of individuals. Foucault suggests that the ability to enumerate and locate the body in order to “transform the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities” is the “first of the great operations of discipline” (148). The taking of a census is the drawing up of a table, the imposition of an order and structure on dangerously diffuse multitudes. In this way, the census is part of that great movement of the eighteenth century associated by Foucault with the “drawing up of ‘tables,’” the systematic distribution and analysis which produced supervision and intelligibility.15 One possible explanation for the lack of opposition to the 1800 census is that the ongoing and systematic diffusion of disciplinary power into social 15 “In the eighteenth century, the table was both a technique of power and a procedure of knowledge. It was a question of organizing the multiple, of providing oneself with an instrument to cover it and master it; it was a question of imposing upon it an ‘order’” (Foucault, Discipline 148).

22

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

life had rendered this additional encroachment inoffensive. While this is perhaps true, it cannot be proven here. Another possible explanation lies in a changed attitude toward the knowledge and mastery represented by the census, where mastery came to be represented not as oppression but protection, not as restraint of individuals but service to a collective. When Abbot introduced his bill to Parliament, the central issue of the day was the availability of food. A few days after the bill was first introduced, the first report of a commission appointed to consider the high price of provisions was published. This commission recommended increased frugality and voluntary rationing (“Parliamentary Intelligence”). In this environment, Abbot spoke of the utility of a census in providing the government with information concerning the state of its population: the knowledge of which must be serviceable for so many important purposes of wise legislation and good government, and without which no country can avail itself of the full extent of its resources, or effectually and permanently provide for its wants. (Cobbett’s 35:598)

Abbot does not speak of restraining individuals, but of providing for the needs of the people, and in this he is merely repeating Rickman’s belief that “No society can confidently pretend to provide the requisite quantity of food, till they know the number of consumers” (Rickman 108). The specific and potentially resistant bodies envisioned by Thornton in 1753 have been replaced by the abstract and docile bodies that government supposedly serves. In addition, nowhere does Abbot evince any concern over population movement, and yet the preceding two decades had seen the most dramatic shift of population distribution in English history.16 Despite these concerns, the question of emigration never arises in the 1800 debate. No mention is made of the possible military use of census data, despite the very real need occasioned by the ongoing hostilities with France and despite the importance attached to this purpose by John Rickman, who was by this time employed as Abbot’s secretary. The only important purpose mentioned by Abbot that a census would serve is letting the government know “the extent of the demand for which we are to provide a supply” (quoted in Glass, Numbering 108). In 1800, the census is represented not as Thornton saw it, a possible “engine of rapacity and oppression,” but as a sign of government concern, an act of protection and the future instrument of state benevolence, taken by a government that was, in Rickman’s words, “anxious for the good of its subjects.” In 1753, William Thornton complained that through a census “all distinction is destroyed by universal coercion” (Cobbett’s 15:1324). By 1800, the universal coercion of the census promised the containment of the dangerous multitudes by the ordered multiplicities, and such a containment was seen as necessary for the better

16 C.A. Bayly notes that the Board of Agriculture was established in 1793 by the Pitt administration and exemplified the principle that “true patriotism and enlightened policy should be directed towards the ‘wastes which disgrace this country,’” and that emigration was regarded at this time as a “dangerous diminution of the human resources of the country” (Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 121–2).

Counting the People

23

serving of the people. In the contest between the particular and the universal, the universal in the form of the census enumeration would appear to have won. At the most abstract level, the people enumerated by the census are classified under a new sign, that of national identity. But from the very beginning the census was never simply an enumeration of the people, for every census has made use of classificatory schemes that provide categories into which information is sorted. For example, an enumeration of the people that asks for occupational information creates the numeric relationships between occupational groups and confers on occupations a group identity. Such enumerations do not necessarily reflect the natural division of labor (whatever that might be) but create the categories by which the division of labor can be quantified and thus read.17 These categories are abstractions of human activity that become containers for that activity, the different occupations coerced into sameness and subsumed under a totalizing sign. When in “Resolution and Independence” the poet repeatedly asks of the Leech-Gatherer, “How is it that you live, and what is it you do?” the drama enacted sets the poet’s power of abstraction against the particular and individual object that resists categorization and in this way is reminiscent of the confrontation between the poet and the little girl in “We are Seven.” Ultimately it is this emphasis on abstraction, coercion, and “creation” that connects the census with its disciplinary movement of counting to Wordsworth’s conception of the imagination. In the “Preface” to the 1815 edition of his poems, Wordsworth states that the “processes of imagination are carried on either by conferring additional properties upon an object or abstracting from it some of those which it actually possesses,” so as to produce a recognition of resemblance between objects or to so modify the object that it becomes a “new existence” (PrW 3:32). Later in the same essay, following a passage taken from “Resolution and Independence,” Wordsworth points to the “conferring, the abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination” in his comparison of the old man to a stone, and of the stone to a sea-beast: The stone is endowed with something of the power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure and condition of the aged Man; who is divested of so much of the indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point where the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison (PrW 3:33–4).

17 The 1801 census provided three categories for “Personal Occupation”: Agriculture; Trade, Manufacture, Handicraft; and Other. When the returns showed nearly half the population as “Other,” changes were instituted for the next census. In 1811 and in 1821, “Family Occupation,” was used instead of “Personal Occupation,” though the same categories were used. In 1831, “Personal Occupation” was again collected, though only for males who were twenty years of age and older. Ten categories were provided, and one of the categories (persons employed in retail trade or in handicraft) listed 100 subcategories and a blank space for those trades not listed. Because of this, in London some 426 different trades were enumerated (Drake 44–5). The collection of occupational statistics and the use of the “Family Occupation” category are further discussed in Chapter 2.

24

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Here the simile drawn between the stone, the sea-beast, and the old man is presented as an exemplar of the creative imagination. The imagination adds some qualities to the stone and subtracts some qualities from the sea-beast to coerce these two objects into the same category. The stone and sea-beast are coerced into sameness for the purpose of a subsequent coercion of the stone and the old man into sameness. In this way, stone, sea-beast, and old man are all made objects available for manipulation by the imagination, a manipulation that proceeds under the tacit assumption of a privilege conferred by the occupation of poet. Like those counted by the census, the objects of Wordsworth’s landscape are available for his idiosyncratic reading and writing, a reading that strips the old man of that which makes him human and rewrites him as an object under the totalizing sign of a “just” (or should I say, accurate and well-measured) “comparison.” In this example, the unity that Wordsworth continually sought is achieved only through a reading that coerces difference into sameness and a writing that contains that sameness with its own categories of difference, a perfect example of what Hazlitt will later call Wordsworth’s egotistical sublime. The exchange between the man and the little girl in “We are Seven” playfully dramatizes such an attempt at idiosyncratic reading and writing. The conflict arises because the two speakers insist on the correctness of their criteria for counting, but as mentioned before, Wordsworth’s comment on the poem in the preface and the introductory stanza attempt to impose on the readers of the poem the criteria that really count. It is not surprising that Wordsworth even contemplated changing the title of the poem to “We Are Seven, or Death” (LB 73n) because such a change would have made very clear the source of the disagreement. The question is one of attribution and classification, a battle of competing egotistical sublimes made pointed by the odd note to the poem Wordsworth dictated to Isabella Fenwick in 1843. After commenting on the origins of the poem, Wordsworth embarks on a long digression detailing how the Lyrical Ballads project originated. Even after the lapse of nearly 50 years, Wordsworth is quite specific and very scrupulous about detailing the ideas and even individual lines that he supplied for Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. These detailed attributions designate what is to count as Wordworth’s and what is to count as Coleridge’s. Wordsworth also notes that the introductory stanza to “We are Seven” was actually supplied by Coleridge, though based on Wordsworth’s ideas. That this digression occurs in this note implies that “We are Seven” is also about determining where things belong or rather to whom they belong. The attribution of characteristics to people or poems marks their inclusion in sets, and whether the criteria is living or dead, far or near, Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s, to belong to a set is to be marked for ownership. Ownership is the implied privilege of the nation over its people and the implied privilege of the poet over his materials.18 As Ferguson has pointed out, another form that this privilege often takes is that of a figurative depopulation. In examining the relationship between the 18 For more on the question of attribution and property in Wordsworth, see Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69–120, and Susan Eilenberg, Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Literary Possession (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Counting the People

25

population debate and aspects of Romantic ideology, she relates the pressure of an increasing number of physical bodies to an anxiety over an increasing number of consciousnesses. In this way, the cultivation of solitude is in essence a symbolic depopulation of the landscape, which occurs in response to the increased demands of other consciousnesses. Her discussion of “Tintern Abbey” identifies the ways in which Wordsworth empties the landscape so as to create a space for himself where he is the “only one who views the scene in this particular way.” For Ferguson the turn to Dorothy near the conclusion is “a function of the territorial imperialism of Wordsworth’s ego, which incorporates people and things as it pleases” (125–7). These acts of depopulation seem to stem from an anxiety over the dangerous multitudes and a constant attempt to organize them so that they may be eliminated. This anxiety is related to the problem of the Kantian mathematical sublime, which I will examine later in this chapter. For my purposes now, it is enough to point to the juxtaposition between the London found in Book VII of The 1805 Prelude, and the country fair that opens Book VIII. Many critics have commented on how London’s dangerous multitudes threaten to overwhelm Wordsworth. Hertz’s discussion of this episode in relation to the sublime most directly relates to the anxiety of the unnumbered and innumerable multitude that I am associating with Wordsworth’s larger containment strategies.19 Against this chaotic jumble of signs and faces, none of which can be read, and none of which can be numbered, Wordsworth sets the idyllic and eminently readable country fair with its “solitary Hill,” its “gay green Field,” and its safely numbered crowd of “twice twenty” (VIII.5–8). And even that small crowd is immediately turned into narratives, each man, woman, and child representing some larger narrative, like the many exemplary narratives told by the Pastor in The Excursion. The dangers of the uncontained multitude are also discussed by Wordsworth in a letter to Lady Beaumont, written following the publication of Poems in Two Volumes (1807): ... who is there that has not felt that the mind can have no rest among a multitude of objects, of which it either cannot make one whole, or from which it cannot single out one individual, whereupon may be concentrated the attention divided among or distracted by a multitude? After a certain time we must either select one image or object, which must put out of view the rest wholly, or must subordinate them to itself while it stands forth … (MY 1:148)

For Wordsworth, a multitude that is not already subjugated to some totalizing or synecdochic structure and thus subordinated to the observer generates anxiety. It is clear to him that to avoid being “distracted,” such dangerous multitudes must be subjected to the discipline of the imagination, a discipline that in this particular instance takes the form of depopulation. The occasion for Wordsworth’s declaration is the sonnet “With Ships the Sea was sprinkl’d far and nigh.” The poem begins 19 Hertz invokes the Kantian mathematical sublime, which I discuss in greater detail later in this chapter, to discuss Wordsworth’s encounter with London in Book 7 of The Prelude. See Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia, 1985), 40–59.

26

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

with a multitude of ships moving through the water, “one knew not why” (line 4). In the letter, Wordsworth describes his state as dreamy and listless as he looks upon this multitude. Like the stars in the sky, there is the appearance of a jumble only of things, a multitude seemingly without order or structure. Then the mind fixes on one of the ships, though as Wordsworth states in the letter: it is merely a lordly Ship, nothing more: This ship was nought to me, nor I to her, Yet I pursued her with a lover’s look (MY 1: 148)

For Wordsworth, it is a matter of indifference why this one ship was selected and not the others, but the benign language of selection masks the very real acts of inclusion or exclusion that comprise the determination of what counts and what does not count. It is after all a “lordly” ship, and so it is marked off from the others as belonging to a class that counts. This seemingly arbitrary act of the imagination is similar to the appropriation of the old man in “Resolution and Independence” in that the imagination asserts a privilege to take anything as an object of its manipulation. It is quite telling that the old man was divested of life and motion, while the “wanton” exercise of power confers “life and body” on the ship. It would be interesting, though somewhat facetious, to ask whether a “lordly” man could be divested of life and motion or a beggarly ship imbued with life and body. What is more important now is how in both instances the objects are rendered accountable by a structure imposed by the discipline of the imagination. Wordsworth’s reading of this scene eliminates the dangerous multitude of ships by replacing the multitude with a single body that is available for inscription. The single ship becomes the synecdochic sign under which the innumerable are numbered and ultimately subsumed. As stated earlier, for Wordsworth the imagination is responsible for the breaking down and remaking of the material world, a remaking that is based on numerability and accountability. Imagination is domination, a power derived from the ability to control how the material is inscribed, how the body is written; but as with the government’s desire to count the people in 1800, that power is represented not as an attempt at domination and control but as a sign of concern and consideration. Such a remarkable claim to power requires an equally remarkable legitimation, which Wordsworth attempts in The Prelude. Book XIII of The 1805 Prelude contains one of Wordsworth’s most extraordinary abstractions, that which unites Nature and the imagination. Nature is seen to be like the imagination (or more accurately the imagination is recognized as like a power of Nature) in: That domination which she oftentimes Exerts upon the outward face of things, So moulds them, endues, abstracts, combines, Or by abrupt and unhabitual influence Doth make one object so impress itself Upon all others, and pervade them so That even the grossest minds must see and hear And cannot chuse but feel. (XIII.77–84)

Counting the People

27

The scene witnessed by Wordsworth on the top of Mount Snowdon becomes a metaphor for the imagination because in this scene Nature has given a physical manifestation of those processes by which the imagination creates perception, through abstraction, modification, and reinscription. As Alan Liu has suggested, this scene represents one side of Wordsworth’s ambivalent relationship with the imperial imagination.20 Here Wordsworth characterizes the process of the imagination as a “domination,” which can be seen as a coercion of the material into the categorical. Here the coercive powers of the imagination are naturalized by their reinscription in Nature and legitimated by such a naturalization. However, while there is nothing necessarily unsettling about the natural world possessing powers such as these, when these same activities are associated with the imagination of a single individual, the idea of “domination” becomes much more unsettling. That an anxiety accompanies this assumption of power is made clear by Wordsworth’s elitist assertion that “even the grossest minds must see or hear/ And cannot chuse but feel.” Who are these people characterized as “the grossest minds”? As Wordsworth makes clear a few lines later, “the grossest minds” are those unfortunate many who lack the “glorious faculty” of imagination “Which higher minds bear with them as their own” (XIII.89–90). The “higher minds” possess this power to break down and remake the world, to abstract, modify, and recreate the world so that it is a new existence. For Wordsworth there is a clear distinction between those passive many who must see and cannot choose but feel and those gifted few who will instruct and teach them. There is a clear distinction between those subject to domination and discipline and those empowered to dominate and master.21 For Clifford Siskin, Wordsworth’s project is nothing less than the making of a new kind of self, one “rewritten to occupy the center of power.” This procedure effectively “masks the newly drawn inequities of class by emphasizing not what everyone has passively in common, but rather what each person can accomplish actively on his or her own” (78). As Siskin further notes, one accomplished this development by looking steadily at oneself, “a penetrating gaze revealing, actually making, the depths within” (92). Of course, what each person can accomplish on his or her own is the question, especially when this myth of development masks what Wordsworth makes very clear, that there is a hierarchy of developing selves: those singled out to teach and those obligated to be taught; those who determine what counted and those 20 See Liu’s Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 23–32, 445–52. 21 Many critics have noted the undemocratic quality of what Alison Hickey has aptly called the “imperial imagination.” One of the earliest recognitions, though, belongs to Hazlitt, whose review of The Excursion included the famous objection to Wordsworth’s egotistical sublime, and who in a later essay on Coriolanus referred to imagination as “a monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion.” See Hickey, Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s Excursion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 131ff. See also Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, edited by P.P. Howe (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930), 4:214. I am indebted to James Mulvihill’s “Consuming Nature: Wordsworth and the Kendal and Windermere Railway Controversy” in Modern Language Quarterly 56:3 (1995 Sept), 305– 26, for the reference to Hazlitt’s essay on Coriolanus.

28

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

who were counted. Domination is both the power to control the material as well as the power to control the representation of the material, and here the legislator of the aesthetic, like the legislator of the state, is complicit in the establishment of those structures of discipline necessary to make the world accountable. That this episode immediately follows Wordsworth’s vision on Salisbury Plain of “Our dim ancestral Past” as the Druidic figure of a “single Briton in his wolf-skin vest” (XII, 322) further connects the totalizing Imagination celebrated in Book XIII with the project of imagining the nation.22 In fact, Anne Janowicz sees in the Salisbury Plain episode of Book XII a key moment of Wordsworth’s discovery of his national vocation: “Wordsworth locates his poetic calling in the geographical space of British antiquity: Stonehenge is now an emblem of not simply national coherence, but also of the inextricable links between poetic vocation and national destiny” (143). Of course, Wordsworth’s “triumph” of 1805 must be measured back against the remaining 45 years of his life and so to linger too long over this picture of the elitist poet celebrating the Imagination and the Mind, which is lord and master, would be to fall victim to the paranoia of the classified object and forget the anxiety of the classifying subject. Whereas at times he welcomed this dominating Imagination, at other times, as commentators since Percy Shelley, but more recently Geoffrey Hartman and Alan Liu, have pointed out, he feared it as well. For every Snowdon there is at least one Simplon Pass or Salisbury Plain where the poetry records not the triumph of the Imagination but the bare blank resistance of the world that will not be transformed.23 The “Preface” to the 1815 Poems might define Imagination by the powers of the counting and classifying mind, but the poem from which Wordsworth draws his example records not the triumph of the Mind, but its failure to classify adequately the phenomena of the world. While this demonstration of the imagination reveals the power of the mind to shape and create the perception, it also demonstrates the pitfalls inherent in its schematizing activities. In “Resolution and Independence,” the “dim sadness” of the poet and the “lonely place” of their meeting conspire to present a particular configuration of the scene, a configuration that will prove to be false. Despite that initial perception of the old man as something less than human, and the poet’s continued attempts to make the old man an object of sympathy, the old man will not stay within the categories of the poet’s imagination. Finally, realizing that the old man will not be subsumed under his interpretive schema, the poet figuratively laughs at his own folly. Old man, stone, or sea-beast, the Leechgatherer ultimately proves resistant to the classifications of the poet. In attempting to understand how it is the old man lives and what it is the old man does, the poem not only demonstrates the process of enumeration and classification, it demonstrates the failure of it as well—abstractions inadequate to the particulars they would contain. The Leech-gatherer is one object of Wordsworth’s imagination that refuses to become wholly objectified and contained by the poet’s strategy of enumeration and 22 See also Janowicz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 92–102, for more on Wordsworth’s struggle to accommodate competing versions of the nation to the poet’s coercive imagination. 23 Paul Fry suggests that this encounter with blankness that resists reading is central to Wordsworth and ought to be given the name of “imagination” rather than the abstracting and conferring powers discussed earlier. See A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 95–101.

Counting the People

29

abstraction, a refusal that earns from the poet a cosmic laugh at himself. But an escape from the counting, whether it be that of the census-taker or the poet, is not available to everyone. To be counted in the census is to be someone who counts, someone who matters. Contrary to William Thornton’s hyperbolic vow to avoid the census, cooperation with the census was rarely a problem except among those classes of people who historically have not counted: women, minorities, the poor, the homeless. Michael Drake notes that only 15 of the 125 London registrars requested police escorts during the 1841 census, and The Times reported that “in most of the parishes in and around the metropolis very little difficulty was experienced by the enumerators in obtaining popular returns, with the exception of certain portions inhabited by the lower orders” (quoted in Drake 22). There were of course no reports of prominent citizens or wealthy landowners instructing their servants to pitch the enumerator into the local horse pond, but there were also few reports or complaints of undercounting affecting any segment of the population. As recent litigation surrounding national censuses makes clear, there exists the perception that in the eyes of the government certain people do not count, that some segments of the population could become or remain opaque knots of humanity, whether it be the faceless slum-dwellers of a modern American city or the undifferentiated “knot” of gypsies found in Wordsworth’s poem “Gipsies.” However, while not being counted is tantamount to not counting in the social or political sense, not being counted also renders one unaccountable, unknown, and in a certain sense unknowable, a source of power or of panic. Written within a few years of the first British national census, the “Gipsies” described by Wordsworth are just such a segment of the population, differentiated from the mainstream by the color of their skin and reduced to a “knot” that is both inconsequential and dangerous. Contained and yet ultimately unknowable, these “tawny wanderers” (as Coleridge called them) occasion a kind of epistemological panic in Wordsworth, who seeks to account for the unknowable through specificity and measurement and yet simultaneously courts the unknowable as a source of his power as a poet. As potent as the universalizing discipline of the imagination is, these experiences, which threaten to overset the domination of the egotistical sublime and overwhelm its containers, prove more frequent and ultimately more interesting to Wordsworth. David Simpson, who has written at length on the poem, states that “Gipsies” has been “judged a terrible poem by a great poet,” “an embarrassment,” a poem that most critics “might wish had never been written by Wordsworth” (Historical Imagination 25). The encounter between the gypsies and the poet occasions a surprisingly elevated meditation on the idleness of vagrants set against the vast active machinery of the cosmos. While everything that loves the sun is out of doors and working, while even “the stars have tasks,” the gypsies “have none.” It is this emphasis on the division between productive labor, unproductive labor, and outright idleness that Simpson unpacks in a marvelously dense reading of the poem that identifies its hyperbolic tone and extravagant diction as fractures in the surface of the poem through which one can examine Wordsworth’s underlying anxieties. In Simpson’s first analysis, these anxieties center on questions of labor and property. In a subsequent examination, Simpson points to questions of gender and sexuality as another source of anxiety. In both cases the anxiety marks the location where sociohistorical circumstances have been displaced.

30

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Pointing to echoes of Paradise Lost, Simpson recasts the poem as a Luciferic speech, the poet’s own anxieties displaced into the convenient form of satanic outsider. The speaker’s relationship to the gypsy community is uncomfortably ambivalent in that the seemingly unproductive life of the gypsies, the life of idleness and wandering that the gypsies represent, approximates the life of the speaker himself. The gypsies are outside the conventions of normal society and seem not to share the values of that society. This subjects them to the “self-righteous bombast” of the Wordsworthian speaker, the very ferocity of which marks a moment of displacement. Simpson unpacks this moment by reading the “unbroken knot” used to describe the gypsy community as a figuration for a “self-contained, integrated, paradisal” society (33). Simpson attributes this mixture of fear and desire to Wordsworth’s anxieties over his “labor” as a poet and the “property” represented either by his labor or his poems. In short, a poem like “Gipsies” expresses Wordsworth’s uncertainty as to whether he is laboring man and thus by contemporary standards a virtuous man, or whether he is, as Hazlitt called him, “the prince of poetic idlers.” Thus Simpson attributes the overheated rhetoric of “Gipsies” to Wordsworth’s liminality, his occupation of the precarious territory between the working community and the idle gypsies, and his fear of being associated with the latter.24 Now, whereas Simpson is undoubtedly correct in identifying vocational concerns in Wordsworth, his reading of “Gipsies” relies on reading a knot as a solution to a problem and not as the problem itself. Only by undoing the knot and making it knowable can Simpson unravel the mystery and opacity of the “Gipsies.” What I want to examine here is the effect of leaving the knot as a knot, an opaque undifferentiated tangle that marks the not of an unassimilable otherness and particularity that resists the universalizing discipline of the imagination. “Gipsies” was originally published in Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes, and a careful examination of the placement of the poem reveals that it is possible that Wordsworth was aware of some of the problems that readers of “Gipsies” would face and that he hoped to solve some of these problems through attention to the poem’s context. “Gipsies” was placed in the subsection titled “Moods of My Own Mind” in Poems, in Two Volumes. As printed in 1807, this subsection consisted of 13 poems. In the introduction to the Cornell Wordsworth edition of the 1807 Poems, Jared Curtis points out that the “Moods of My Own Mind” subsection initially consisted of only ten poems, and the later addition of three poems into this subsection caused problems in the ordering of the poems. The order of the poems as printed in 1807 did not agree with the order intended by Wordsworth, at least as far as that intent 24 In a subsequent essay, Simpson attempts to incorporate the issue of gender into his analysis of the poem. The structure of the analysis remains the same, with Wordsworth ambivalently occupying a liminal space between a desired and feared community. The difference is that questions of sexuality instead of economy serve to distinguish the two communities. This study of the impact of gender focuses almost exclusively on the subject of sexuality, and its primarily masculine figurations. See “Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender: What Is the Subject of Wordsworth’s ‘Gipsies’?” in Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, edited by Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 154–72 (first published in South Atlantic Quarterly 88:3 (1989), 541–67). Alan Liu provides a broader reading of Wordsworth’s class and vocational anxieties in Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 311–58.

Counting the People

31

was recorded. The three added poems were “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” “Who fancied what a pretty sight,” and “Gipsies.” The following shows the order of the poems as intended by Wordsworth and the actual order of the poems as printed in 1807: Table 1 Printed Order Compared to Intended Order in 1807 Poems Intended by Wordsworth

Printed in 1807

1.

To a Butterfly

To a Butterfly

2.

[The Sun has long been set]

[The Sun has long been set]

3.

[O Nightingale! thou surely art]

[O Nightingale! thou surely art]

4.

[My heart leaps up when I behold]

[My heart leaps up when I behold]

5.

Written in March

Written in March

6.

[I wandered lonely as a Cloud]

The Small Celandine

7.

[Who fancied what a pretty sight]

[I wandered lonely as a Cloud]

8.

The Small Celandine

[Who fancied what a pretty sight]

9.

Gipsies

The Sparrow’s Nest

10.

The Sparrow’s Nest

Gipsies

11.

To the Cuckoo

To the Cuckoo

12.

To a Butterfly

To a Butterfly

13.

[It is no Spirit who from Heaven]

[It is no Spirit who from Heaven]

32

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

One interesting result of this error is that in the printed version, “Gipsies” follows “The Sparrow’s Nest” instead of “The Small Celandine.” While this change appears minor, the effect of these different contexts on the reading of the poems is quite startling. The shift in tone between “The Sparrow’s Nest” and “Gipsies” is abrupt, even unsettling, and could not have worked in favor of the latter. Like most of the “Moods of My Own Mind” poems, “The Sparrow’s Nest” begins with a very specific perception, “five blue eggs are gleaming there,” specific in number, color, substance, quality, and location. The location receives further specification when we learn that “there” refers to: The home and shelter’d bed, The Sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by My Father’s House, in wet or dry, My Sister Emmeline and I Together visited. (6–10)

The close conjunction of the sparrow’s nest and “My Father’s House” implies that this is a poem about domestic arrangements, a remembrance of a past domestic idyll that would soon be shattered by the death of Wordsworth’s father and the dispersal of the Wordsworth children. The specificity of the description points to a need for establishing particulars, as if particular details of location could establish a place as fixed and rooted.25 However, the poem does not end there. The second stanza records Emmeline’s reaction to the sparrow’s nest, a reaction that mixes desire and fear. Emmeline “look’d at it as if she fear’d it; / Still wishing, dreading to be near it” (11–12), and this response recalls to the poet the fragility of domestic arrangements. Instead of closing with a reiteration of the joys of domestic bliss, the poem concludes with a recognition of the child’s power to be moved by lack of certainty, by the charms of mystery itself. This theme is picked up in “To the Cuckoo,” the poem that was supposed to follow “The Sparrow’s Nest,” which praises the cuckoo as an “invisible Thing, /A voice, a mystery” (15–16) and blesses the bird for making “the earth we pace” appear to be “An unsubstantial, faery place” (29–31). Despite what Wordsworth intended, the published volume of 1807 was quite different. As the manuscript evidence makes clear, Emmeline was Dorothy Wordsworth, and “The Sparrow’s Nest” closes with one of Wordsworth’s sweetest acknowledgments of his sister’s care expressed in simple, almost childlike language: She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; And humble cares, and delicate fears; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; And love, and thought, and joy. (17–20)

25 Theresa Kelley examines the different receptions these orderings might have produced for “Gipsies” and also discusses Wordsworth’s later reclassification of this poem as a “Poem of the Imagination” in Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 160–62.

Counting the People

33

Here Dorothy’s responses are figured as gifts to her brother, the gifts of childlike responsiveness and of sympathy. In the 1807 printed text, this passage is followed by the terse and self-righteous opening lines of “Gipsies,” creating a disquieting shift of language and tone that accentuates the underlying nastiness of “Gipsies”: Yet are they here?—the same unbroken knot Of human Beings, in the self-same spot! Men, Women, Children, yea the frame Of the whole Spectacle the same! Only their fire seems bolder, yielding light: Now deep and red, the colouring of night; That on their Gipsy-faces falls, Their bed of straw and blanket-walls. —Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours, are gone while I Have been a Traveller under open sky, Much witnessing of change and chear, Yet as I left I find them here! (1–12)

Instead of the specificity of the “five blue eggs” we have an undifferentiated “knot / Of human Beings,” and in place of the “home and shelter’d bed,” we have “their bed of straw and blanket-walls.” There is here no meditation on the fragility of domestic arrangements to soften the speaker’s disgust at the gypsy life. The order of these poems as printed in 1807 serves to isolate and highlight the harshness of the speaker’s judgment by seeming to contradict the gifts he has received from his sister, the gifts of humility and sympathy, the gift of “A heart, the fountain of sweet tears.” Perhaps Emmeline should have accompanied her brother on this particular excursion. When the printed order of these poems is compared with Wordsworth’s intended order, the importance of these contexts becomes clear. Wordsworth had intended that “The Small Celandine” precede “Gipsies.” In “The Small Celandine,” the focus is on the unusual behavior of the celandine or pilewort and the equally unusual reaction of the poet. After observing that the pilewort is subject to age, the poet concludes: And, in my spleen, I smiled that it was grey. To be a Prodigal’s Favorite—then, worse truth, A Miser’s Pensioner—behold our lot! Man! that from thy fair and shining youth Age might but take the things Youth needed not! (20–24)

Apparently, Wordsworth has forgotten his promise to “think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor,” for the mood at the end of this poem is surprisingly like the “dim sadness” and the recurring “fear that kills” that troubles the speaker in “Resolution and Independence.” The poet is splenetic and fatalistic. In addition, the last stanza is set off from the rest of the poem by a sudden elevation in diction and a shift to a more complex syntactical structure. The stilted imperative “behold our lot! / O Man!” echoes the impassioned language of many of the 1807 sonnets, particularly the “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty,” and approaches bathos when one recalls that

34

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

this exclamation was brought forth by a consideration of the pilewort. There is also a peculiar economy at work here. In the poem “To the Small Celandine,” which appears earlier in the collection, the celandine is praised as “a careless Prodigal” (30), ready to tell “tales about the sun, / When we’ve little warmth, or none” (31–2). While in that earlier poem the celandine’s prodigality is depicted as generosity and thus the subject of praise, in “The Small Celandine” age and time eventually reduce the prodigal to scarcity, the lot of the “Miser’s Pensioner.” The celandine becomes an emblem of a boom and bust economy, and careless giving leads not to praise but censure when abundance turns to scarcity. From this rather perverse enjoyment of the sufferings of the pilewort, it is a very short step to the petulant uneasiness that marks the beginning of “Gipsies”: Yet are they here?—the same unbroken knot Of human Beings, in the self-same spot! Men, Women, Children, yea the frame Of the whole Spectacle the same! (1–4)

The negation “not” that closed “The Small Celandine” is picked up in the homonymous “knot” of gypsies. I will examine this negation in greater detail later. For now, it is enough to notice the consistency of style and tone between the last stanza of “The Small Celandine” and “Gipsies,” a consistency which implies that both poems represent a similar “mood” of the poet’s mind. In addition, both poems reflect the anxiety occasioned by the economy of prodigality and scarcity. One possible source of the speaker’s petulance toward the gypsies is that the common perception of gypsies was that they were both prodigals and pensioners. David Mayall summarizes the early nineteenth-century conception of gypsies as “alleging they did not perform ‘real’ work but rather occupied themselves with as little toil as was compatible with survival.” Mayall concludes that gypsies “were thought to be idle, parasitical, and beggarly, with no belief in the value of work” (46). As I mentioned earlier, it is this disgust at, fear of being associated with, and secret envy of the gypsies that Simpson identifies as the source of the harsh and hyperbolic language that marks the poet’s anxieties. Also, that the speaker has been active for “twelve bounteous hours” while the gypsies have been idle echoes the fear of waste expressed in the conclusion of “The Small Celandine.” When I refer to the harshness of “Gipsies,” I am referring both to the unfeeling and self-righteous attitude of the speaker and to the incongruity between the poem’s language and subject. Coleridge in Biographia Literaria notes both of these characteristics in his criticism of “Gipsies”: the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing and healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries. (2:137)

Counting the People

35

This latter characteristic was called “mental bombast” by Coleridge, and not surprisingly “Gipsies” was one of the examples he selected from Wordsworth’s poetry.26 What troubles Coleridge about this poem is the quantitative mismatch between the rhetorical machinery of the second stanza and the trivial subject of the poem, a disproportion that Simpson designates as a sign of displacement. However, the emphasis on the “mental bombast” of the second stanza has obscured some of the interesting assumptions that underlie the first stanza, assumptions concerning what is available for poetic manipulation and appropriation. In addition, the charge of “mental bombast” has meaning only when the subject matter is trivial, an assumption that appears to apply to “Gipsies” but which, as Simpson has shown, can be made problematic by closer examination. In a letter to Lady Beaumont dated 21 May 1807, Wordsworth attempted to combat the charge of triviality that had been leveled at Poems, in Two Volumes by insisting that the various subdivisions of poems be read as integrated units. Of “Moods of My Own Mind,” he thought that “taken collectively” the poems fixed “attention upon a subject eminently poetical, viz., the interest which objects in nature derive from the predominance of certain affections more or less permanent, more or less capable of salutary renewal in the mind of the being contemplating these objects?” (MY 1:147). Wordsworth’s emphasis on collectivity over individuality actually runs counter to the emphasis on numerability that characterizes the individual poems. What is striking about this description is the focus on “objects in nature” and the implied opposition established between such objects and the “mind of the being contemplating” those objects. Clearly, the object in nature is passive and subject to observation and appropriation, and in fact exists only for the “salutary renewal” of the contemplating mind. When that object in nature is a butterfly (or two), or a small celandine, or a rainbow, or a nightingale, or a cuckoo, or some daffodils (these are some of the occasioning objects of the “Moods” poems), this process of observation and appropriation seems altogether natural and benign. However, when the object of nature turns out to be human, the process of observation and appropriation takes on an insidious quality, as with Wordsworth’s willful manipulation of the leechgatherer. In addition, this emphasis on objects in nature calls attention to the depopulated landscape of the thirteen “Moods of My Own Mind” poems. With the exception of two brief appearances by “Emmeline” (the Dorothy figure) and the appearance of laborers in “Written in March,” the only human presence in this sequence of poems is the poet himself and the gypsies. This encounter between the contemplating mind and the gypsies points up the essentially disciplinary nature of contemplation and observation and the anxiety occasioned by the recognition of the limitations of observation. What makes this disciplinary nature suddenly seem present (it always was present) is the application of the poet’s gaze to other human beings. To get at this anxiety, we can begin by asking quite simply, How does the poet know that the 26 It is interesting that Coleridge’s two other examples of Wordsworth’s “mental bombast” are rarely cited by critics. They are “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” and the eighth stanza (“Thou best philosopher”) of the “Intimations Ode.” See Biographia Literaria, 2:136–41.

36

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

gypsies have been idle for “twelve bounteous hours”? For the past 12 hours, the poet has been “a Traveller under open sky” and has not been observing the gypsies, and unlike a pilewort a gypsy is not necessarily sedentary. Indeed, the accusation is more often the opposite, as Mayall points out when he states that antipathy toward the gypsies “was rooted in a long-standing conflict between the traveling and sedentary ways of life” (3). Part of the anxiety registered in “Gipsies” is the recognition that observation requires the continued presence of the observer and the observed. Although this appears to be a trivial objection, it does point out an assumption underlying the question that opens the poem, “Yet are they here?” This question has meaning only if this encounter is a repetition of an earlier encounter, an encounter that has been elided by its repetition. To put it simply, how does the poet know that these are the same gypsies that he saw earlier? His evidence is given in the first four lines: Yet are they here?—the same unbroken knot Of human Beings, in the self-same spot! Men, Women, Children, yea the frame Of the whole Spectacle the same!

Identity is established between the two different encounters by the sameness of the physical configuration of people (“same unbroken knot”), the sameness of the location (“self-same spot”), and the sameness of “the frame.” In each case the identity is explicitly marked as the “same,” and this insistence on sameness calls that very sameness into question, or at least renders it as an experience of the uncanny. And what does it mean that the “frame” is the same? Does “frame” refer to the delimiting margins of this observation? the structure of this experience? the cognitive schema? the state of mind of the observer? It is unclear, though it seems that “frame” refers to the observer and not to the observed, so that any sameness attributed to this observation might be due to the identity of the observer and not to a repetition of the observation. The intent of this line of inquiry has been to focus on what cannot be known about the gypsies. If while “a Traveller under open sky” the poet has witnessed a great deal of “change and chear,” why must the gypsies have remained static, why must they have remained an unbroken knot? One reason is that they are cognizable only as an unbroken knot, only as a multitude abstracted into a unity, or perhaps a collectivity like that represented by the Moods poems, which eradicates the individual members of the multitude. The knot is the sign of an unreadable distinction between plural and singular or an absence of form. In other words, when I asked how we know these to be the same gypsies, I could ask the question only because the poem fails to differentiate adequately this unbroken knot of gypsies from any other unbroken knot of gypsies. This might be a subtle form of racism or an overt case of egotism. What is clear is that by collapsing the “Men, Women, Children” into an unbroken knot, there is no longer any need to note the number of men, women and children, nor is there any need to mark their individual “gipsy-faces.” The totalizing sign of the image so completely subsumes the identities of the individuals that we need to be reminded that they are “human Beings.”

Counting the People

37

We need to be reminded that this is a knot of human beings because gypsies were commonly depicted as not human at all. Mayall notes that in racist discourse gypsies were deemed “nearer to animals” than any other race in Europe (80), and Wordsworth’s image of this knot of people with their bold fire and their beds of straw does nothing to contradict this perception. Questions of economy and of productive and unproductive labor certainly figure in this depiction, but Wordsworth’s poems are full of beggars who are not made the subject of a lecture on idleness. The story of “The Female Vagrant,” her inability to frame her tongue to “the Beggar’s language” (189), and the dismal picture of charity “Now coldly given, now utterly refused” (256), is in many ways a call for greater charity, as are the stories of Goody Blake and Alice Fell. “The Old Cumberland Beggar” becomes the occasion for the quintessential Wordsworthian assertion that “man is dear to man” (140) because “we have all of us one human heart” (146). “The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale” is celebrated as both prodigal and pensioner, who in good times gave to the poor “the best that he had” (19) and in bad times, when forced to beg for himself, found others ready to give. Clearly the problem is not the beggarly life, nor is it a question of honest or dishonest begging. Indeed, despite the fact that the farmer of Tilsbury Vale acquired a great deal of charity and then “Turn’d his back on his country” (36), Wordsworth admonishes the reader who would say of the farmer “O the merciless Jew!” (37).27 The farmer escapes this epithet because, as Wordsworth warns his readers, the farmer “was never more cruel than you” (38). This warning calls attention not to how these beggars differ from Wordsworth and his readers, but to how they are the same, their shared possession of English faults and English values, and their shared inclusion in the English race.28 The “poor tawny wanderers” that Coleridge attempts to sympathize with and the “Gipsy-faces” given the “colouring of night” by their bold fires are unremarkable in their difference from one another and their difference from other travelers. The 27 This phrase appeared in the first version of the poem published in The Morning Post (21 July 1800) but was deleted in all subsequent versions. Kenneth Johnston hints at the ubiquity of antisemitism by juxtaposing two passages from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal of the Wordsworth party’s tour of Germany in 1828. Following a lengthy passage describing how moved the Wordsworths and Coleridge were by the oppression of the Jews by the Germans, Dorothy remarked casually in her journal how they passed through a “nest of Jews.” See Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 622. For more on the Wordsworth’s complex attitude toward Jews, see Judith W. Page, “‘Nor Yet Redeemed from Scorn’: Wordsworth and the Jews” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 99 (2000 Oct), 537–54. 28 Peter Garside observes that early nineteenth-century representations of gypsies drew on wide range of exotic Central European, Middle Eastern, Asian, and even British characteristics. See “Picturesque figure and landscape: Meg Merrilies and the gypsies” in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770, edited by Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 145–74. Toby R. Benis extends Garside’s observation by suggesting that the “indeterminate origins and affiliation of gypsies are one manifestation of the vagrant’s unsettling power.” See Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth’s Homeless (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1999), 49.

38

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

darkness of their skin marks them as gypsies and differentiates them from the English vagrants that people Wordsworth’s poems. As this brief survey shows, each of these English beggars is differentiated from the others by their stories, the histories of woe that render them fit objects of sympathy and charity. However, when gypsies speak, they lie. The regal gypsy woman with face “of Egyptian brown” who confronts the poet in “The Beggars,” pours out “sorrows like the sea; / Grief after grief:—on English Land / Such woes I knew could never be” (14–6). What marks this beggar is her otherness, her inability to frame her tongue to a proper tale of woe fit for an English beggar on English land. Unable to be properly English, this gypsy beggar is cast out, though it is also clear that no matter how she might properly fit her tongue to the appropriate “Beggar’s language,” she would remain outside because of her race. As Wordsworth makes clear in the new conclusion to “Gipsies,” which he added in 1820, gypsies “are what their birth / And breeding suffers them to be; / Wild outcasts of society!” (26–8). The gypsies depicted in “Gipsies” have no story to tell, and it is just such a silence that Coleridge attempts to fill with his explanation of the idleness of the gypsies. In their silence and “colouring of night” they have no existence other than as a knot, an undifferentiated mass of human beings. Lacking individuation they are not available for the type of government inspection exemplified by the taking of a national census.29 But as the plaintiffs in the recent spate of lawsuits against the United States government allege, undercounting can also be a government strategy for under-representing or even denying the existence of certain types of people. If only a cursory attempt is made to count the homeless population of a large American city, the resulting statistics could end up “proving” that homelessness really is not as much of a problem as people believe it is. If very little effort is made to count the gypsy or the migrant or the slum-dwelling or the “unproductive” poor population, the resulting statistics could end up “proving” that such populations are not really as large as people perceive them to be, or perhaps that such populations do not exist at all. As sociologist Harvey Choldin says of recent U.S. censuses, if an alleged 29 In fact, like most people who avoid or are missed by the census, gypsies had every reason to avoid contact with the government. The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1596 had declared gypsies as a race to be rogues and vagabonds and thus subject to prosecution. The Justices Commitment Act of 1743 had extended this prosecution to anyone living the gypsy life. While the Egyptians Act of 1783 repealed many of the more draconian aspects of this persecution, the gypsies and their vagrant life remained the subject of many local prosecutions, and the Vagrancy Acts of 1822 and 1824 reinstated many of the harsh restrictions repealed in 1783. One such local prosecution shows clearly why gypsies would want to remain invisible to the government. In 1799, the Sussex General Quarter Sessions of the Peace, in response to “the great number of Gypsies and other Vagrants of different descriptions infesting this County,” ordered “that if any Gypsies or other Vagrants of whatever description, should be found therein ... they will be punished as the Law directs.” The order further specified that “if any Constables, or other Peace Officers after this Notice shall neglect or refuse so to do, they will be immediately preceded against and punished with the utmost vigour that may be by Law for such neglect or refusal” (quoted in Mayall 151). Since to be identified as a gypsy was to risk being fined or imprisoned, it seems likely that the gypsy population would want to remain a mysterious and unknown entity despite the government’s attempt to count the people.

Counting the People

39

undercount “refers to people who were not counted, how does anyone know that they exist, let alone their numbers?” (42). Whether undercounting is produced by the desire of certain classes of people to avoid being counted or by the desire of governments or certain other classes of people to deny that some people exist at all, the net result is that a certain segment of the population is denied an empirical existence. Whereas the 1753 debate on a proposed census raised concerns over the powerlessness of the people to avoid being counted, not being counted or not being worthy enough to be counted has come to be the true mark of powerlessness. But despite their lack of political power, those uncounted multitudes lay claim to a certain sublime power in that their physical presence (and statistical absence) produces a space of unknowability on the margins of epistemological certainty. If ontological presence maps to epistemological certainty and numerability maps to accountability, the possibility of numerical instability produced by the presence of that which is not or cannot be counted could produce a kind of epistemological panic. This panic, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson, shows the census for what it is, a fiction, and exposes the discipline of the census and the discipline of the imagination to its greatest threat, the anxiety of not knowing. If the fiction of the census is that it organizes an analytical space and enables “knowing, mastering and using,” the uncounted gypsies represent that which remains unstructured—diffuse, dangerous, unknown, and perhaps even sublime. The poet’s encounter with gypsies, while seemingly no subject for the sublime, calls forth the machinery of the sublime, or more specifically what Kant calls the mathematical sublime, to defuse the dangerous coagulation and contain the diffuse circulation of a knot of gypsies. While Foucault’s disciplines focus on the paranoid (or ecstatic) fantasies of totalization, Kant’s aesthetic sublime attempts to contain those experiences that defy totalization, those experiences that lead to a conflict between the Imagination’s attempt “to progress toward infinity” and the Reason’s demand for “absolute totality as a real idea” (106). The Kantian category of the sublime gives structure to the unstructured experience, names and locates the “abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself” (115), and makes the unaccountable accountable, if only to the idea of unaccountability. The desire awakened in Wordsworth by the gypsies is the desire for pattern and order, for knowability through accountability. Most of the poems in “Moods of My Own Mind” deal with singular entities such as a particular butterfly or cuckoo bird or rainbow. These singular entities are knowable because they are countable and thus fixed and locatable. Even when the poems deal with multitudes, they are fixed multitudes such as the “five blue eggs” found in “The Sparrow’s Nest,” or they are countable multitudes such as the daffodils found in the most famous “Moods of My Own Mind” poem. In “Gipsies” we have no such movement toward increased specificity. The “knot” of gypsies remains opaque and unavailable for individuation or counting of its members. It is an absolute totality that contains a multitude, but the cost is that they remain uncounted and unaccountable. The knot of gypsies is also always—to return finally to the homonymous last word of the poem which was supposed to precede “Gipsies”—the “not” of gypsies, the otherness of a community that is outside of community, and outside of the epistemological control of the poet. It is the “not” of the “knot” that occasions epistemological panic, as in the ninth book

40

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

of The Prelude, where Wordsworth, the newly arrived tourist, encounters a world his understanding cannot pierce: I star’d and listen’d with a stranger’s ears To Hawkers and Haranguers, hubbub wild! And hissing Factionalists with ardent-eyes, In knots, or pairs, or single, ant-like swarms Of Builders and Subverters, every face That hope or apprehension could put on, Joy, anger, and vexation in the midst Of gaiety and dissolute idleness. (1805, 9:55–62)

The social rifts produced by and producing Revolutionary ferment give rise to the language of “knots” as negation and confused seemingly undifferentiated difference. While these faces are differentiated, they remain curiously opaque in that the differences don’t appear to provide any clue to anyone’s motive, politics or position. The desire is for increased specificity as Wordsworth notices “pairs” and then “single” people, but this immediately degenerates back into the undifferentiated mass of the “ant-like swarm.” The knots of people seem only capable of marking what cannot be known, the knowledge that remains outside of what the English tourist can understand. If the “knot” is also the “not,” which cannot be known, perhaps the epistemological panic produced by the “knot of gipsies” accounts for the elaborate cosmological machinery of the second stanza, which is devoted to demonstrating the presence of pattern, order, and purpose in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, movements that are carefully coordinated and fixed in time. First the sun sets, then the evening star rises, then one hour later the moon rises, and then the dangerous multitude of stars is rendered safe by the imposition of identities and tasks. If we assume that the idleness of a band of gypsies is the only occasioning force behind all this, Coleridge seems justified in his remark that the elaborate rhetoric “would have been rather above, than below the mark, had [it] been applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries.” If, however, the gypsies occasion both the subtle racism of undifferentiated “gipsy-faces” and a recognition of the cost in knowability that such totalizing signs produce, the elaborate rhetoric can be seen as necessary to contain the otherness that has been invoked, the otherness of the potential innumerability of the “knot.” Kant’s description of how one contains such experiences through the use of increasing scales of reference mirrors Wordsworth’s strategy in the second stanza of “Gipsies”: Now when we judge such an immense whole aesthetically, the sublime lies not so much in the magnitude of the number as in the fact that the farther we progress, the larger are the unities we reach. This is partly due to the systematic division in the structure of the world edifice; for this division always presents to us whatever is large in nature as being small in turn, though what it actually presents to us is our imagination, in all of its unboundedness, and along with it nature, as vanishing[ly small] in contrast to the ideas of reason, if the imagination is to provide an exhibition adequate to them. (113–14)

Counting the People

41

The invocation of the vast cosmos, the movement of the sun, moon, and stars, is just such an attempt to increase the scale and reduce the infinite potential for multiplicity represented by the knot of gypsies. Like the categories of the census enumerator, these increasing scales of reference are ever larger and more abstract containers to hold the proliferation of particulars. If Wordsworth believed “Gipsies” to be a poem of the imagination (and so it was classed from 1815 onward), it is because imagination provides the mechanism by which the potentially infinite multiplicity and the unaccountable otherness of the gypsies are contained and made “vanishing[ly small]” by the progression toward ever larger unities, a progression that does not end until we reach the workings of the cosmos itself. The increased scale virtually eliminates the gypsies, and the extent of this increased scale, which Coleridge termed bombast, merely points up the danger and the subsequent need for containment occasioned by this experience. This containment and control account for the unaccountable and render it safe. The reduction of human presence to a knot and a not is seemingly the inevitable outcome of an encounter between the powerless and the power of abstraction.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2

Classifying the People Classifying poems and readers: Poems, 1815 and the early British census

But who shall parcel out His intellect, by geometric rules, Split, like a province, into round and square? —The Prelude (1805), II.208–10

Both counting and not counting can function as strategies of containment. Counting begins with the recognition of difference and concludes with the eradication of difference. Not counting also begins with the recognition of difference but marks difference as error and discards it. When William Thornton, MP for York, spoke out against the attempt to initiate a census in 1753, he expressed disbelief that there existed “any set of men, or, indeed, any individual of the human species so presumptuous and so abandoned as to make” such a proposal as a census (Cobbett’s 15:1318–19). This is a curious charge in that the only “set” criterion used for a census is whether the counted subject is an “individual of the human species,” a seemingly self-evident category that, as discussed in Chapter 1, has proven to be not so self-evident after all. While a census would appear to be a democratic act, fulfilling Thornton’s hyperbolic fear that “all distinction” would be “destroyed by universal coercion” (Cobbett’s 15:1324), in actuality some distinction was produced by the failure to count some segments of the population. Of much greater importance to the production of distinction was the fact that the census was never simply an enumeration of the people, but it was also simultaneously a classification of the people sorted and arranged in massive tables under ever-proliferating and ever more specific headings. Classification produces the modern phenomenon of the abstract statistical person and makes difference readable only through the categories themselves. If, however, the procedure of counting and classification were always successful at rewriting difference into safe and neatly delineated differential structures, the story of the deployment of government-initiated statistical inquiries would be just another paranoid fantasy of increasing state hegemony. In this chapter I focus not on Thornton’s anxiety of the counted and classified object, but on the anxiety of the counting and classifying subject and the ways in which enumeration and classification, instead of containing the dangerous multitudes, produce their own dangerous multitudes through an ever-proliferating demand for supplementation in the form of new categories for difference, fresh justifications for procedures, and silent revision or outright obfuscation of the data. Both the classification of the people and Wordsworth’s classification of his poems reinscribes categorical difference on counted empirical objects. These attempts at classification, besides setting in motion

44

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

the need for ever-proliferating categories and ever-vigilant justification, also create an abstract object of inquiry that comes to assume a subject presence of its own, which is for Wordsworth a textual self that is perversely immune to reading that is for the national census a political self that appears readable only through the multidimensional matrix of abstract categorical relationships. My question then is: What does it mean to classify and catalog, to parcel out a body or a body of work into round and square? In the preface to the 1814 edition of The Excursion, Wordsworth hinted at his plans to offer a collected edition of his work. This collected edition would contain his “minor Pieces” “properly arranged” so that they might be said to constitute a new work (PW 5:2). This proper arrangement turned out to be 14 categories of poems with the Intimations Ode placed in its own category. By 1850, the scheme had grown to 31 categories with six different full-length works in their own categories. While it is easy to agree with an early editor of Wordsworth who found the classification “pedantic, certainly only half-scientific, often irritating and confusing to the memory,”1 such agreement masks the need to ask certain questions. Rather than bemoan Wordsworth’s folly, or fix his categories, or praise his method, perhaps it would be interesting to think about what sort of assumptions are necessary to such a project in the first place. One initial assumption is the quantitative label of the collected poems as “minor Pieces,” a label that makes sense only when these poems are placed in the context of Wordsworth’s massive conception of the never-completed epic poem The Recluse, of which by 1815 only The Excursion had appeared. But equally interesting is the synecdochic relationship implied. “Minor” marks one for classification, while “major” marks one as unclassifiable, and yet as early as 1820, major unclassifiable works were folded into the collected Poems in a tacit and belated recognition that the collected Poems itself was the major work. It was the gothic church and not “the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses” (PW 5:2) to some other major work that had ceased to be something evermore about to be. While the 1815 edition of Wordsworth’s Poems began as a supplement to the great body of work the poet intended to produce, by 1820 and 1827, it had become that body of work capable of taking everything into itself. From 1815 on, classification was not simply a sorting and sifting critical act for Wordsworth, but a profoundly creative one as well. To many, Wordsworth’s publishing activity has seemed like so much old wine in new bottles, but it nonetheless raises the question as to what was wrong with the old bottles and why new ones were needed. While Wordsworth does not concern himself with the problems of the old bottles, he does offer lengthy justifications for his new ones in the prose supplements to the 1815 edition of his Poems. In the preface and the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” included in the 1815 edition, Wordsworth shows an almost obsessive concern with establishing and maintaining his classificatory scheme. The preface opens with enumerated lists of the 1 Nowell C. Smith, “Preface” to The Poems of William Wordsworth, 3 vols (London: Methuen and Co., 1908), x. David Duff sums up two centuries of reader reactions by referring to Wordsworth’s “Preface” as “a notorious text, an unloved text, but not a neglected one” (86). See “Wordsworth and the Language of Forms: The Collected Poems of 1815.” Wordsworth Circle 34.2 (2003 Spring): 86–90.

Classifying the People

45

“powers requisite for the production of poetry” and of the “moulds” or “forms” taken by these poetic productions (PrW 3:26–7). What is interesting about this particular subdivision between poetic faculty and poetic form is that it almost immediately requires supplementation in the form of another category, and this is followed almost immediately by still more supplementation. This pattern is repeated in the supplement itself, the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” where Wordsworth’s initial classification of readers must be supplemented first with further subdivision and then with the weight of his own construction of literary history. These two prose pieces appear as sentries at opposite ends of the first volume charged with the task of containing the proliferating categories that the process of classification sets in motion. Wordsworth identifies six “powers” necessary for the production of poetry: Observation and Description, Sensibility, Reflection, Imagination and Fancy, Invention, and Judgment. From these six powers, Wordsworth forms three classifications: “Poems Proceeding from Sentiment and Reflection,” “Poems of the Imagination,” and “Poems of the Fancy.” What is immediately clear is that three of the initial powers—observation and description, invention, and judgment— are not represented in any of the 1815 classifications.2 In addition, Wordsworth has combined two of the powers (Sensibility and Reflection) to form one of his classifications and subdivided one of the powers (Imagination and Fancy) to form two separate classifications. What this makes obvious is that there is no clear and necessary correlation between the poetic powers identified by Wordsworth and his classifications. This strange fit between the purported criteria for classification and the classifications themselves becomes increasingly clear in Wordsworth’s next move. Wordsworth divides poetic forms into six classes: narrative, dramatic, lyrical, idyllium, didactic, and philosophical satire. Oddly enough, the only class that can be said to be represented among the 1815 classifications is the “lyrical” class, though this is by no means clear. Possibly, the “Epitaphs and Elegiac Poems” classification taken with the “Intimations Ode” (in its own classification) can be taken as the “lyrical” class, a class Wordsworth has defined as “containing the Hymn, the Ode, the Elegy, the Song, and the Ballad” (PrW 3:27), but even the most cursory examination of the arrangement of poems shows hymns, odes, elegies, songs, and ballads distributed among many other classifications besides “Epitaphs and Elegiac Poems.” Not content with the six poetic powers and the six poetic forms, Wordsworth turns to subject matter to supplement his classificatory schemes. In a matter of a few pages, Wordsworth has presented three classificatory schemes, the first based on the poetic faculty predominant in the production of the poem, the second based on the form of the poem, and the third based on the subject matter of the poem. While such 2 In “Poems ‘Bound Each to Each’ in the 1815 Edition of Wordsworth” (The Wordsworth Circle 12:2 [Spring 1981], 133–40), Donald Ross, Jr, attempts to account for the omission of some of these categories and the unmarked presence of others. However, even if his argument succeeds in partially rescuing Wordsworth’s classification by “powers,” the fact remains that Wordsworth did not in 1815 or at any other time choose explicitly to designate a class of “invention” or “judgment” poems, choosing instead other labels which made no reference to these “powers.”

46

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

an elaborate machinery for discriminating, sorting, and arranging would seem to be sufficient, even this must be further supplemented by further arrangement so that the classes themselves can be restructured into a different order. For this overarching order, Wordsworth uses a particular notion of time, one associated with human life: From each of these considerations, the following Poems have been divided into classes; which, that the work may more obviously correspond with the course of human life, and for the sake of exhibiting in it the three requisites of a legitimate whole, a beginning, a middle, and an end, have been also arranged, as far as it was possible, according to an order of time, commencing with Childhood, and terminating with Old Age, Death, and Immortality. (PrW, 3:28)

It is at this point that we can begin to see what is at stake in this classification project, for what is being constructed is not simply a body of work, but a body, a singular autonomous textual individual who is both origin and subject of a discourse that calls itself into existence. The textual or discursive self that is created by an arrangement based on “the course of human life” is tautologically legitimated by its obvious correspondence to itself. The textual self is taken to be a biological self, and thus the tale told by the 1815 classification is yet another version of what Clifford Siskin calls the “tale of individual development,” which here is naturalized by its association with the “biologically inevitable” course of human life (39). Now any project of classification requires breaking down what once was whole into a collection of base units and evaluating and arranging these units into groups or sets. These sets have criteria for inclusion and implicitly for exclusion as well, and while the criteria may have been formed following the most painstaking investigation and evaluation, as Foucault notes, the criteria nonetheless remain essentially arbitrary marks of difference adopted solely for the purpose of facilitating classification.3 Wordsworth’s classificatory project for the 1815 edition of his poems began with the breaking down of the wholes (in this case the previously published volumes of 1793, 1798, 1800, and 1807) into a collection of individual poems. Added to this are a number of other poems published elsewhere or previously unpublished. These poems were then sorted into a number of categories (and perhaps called certain categories into existence) based on the “most striking characteristics of each piece” (PrW 3:29). These categories, or classes, were then assembled into a sequence so as to form a new whole. That new whole is the life of the poet and the growth of the poet’s mind “commencing with Childhood, and terminating with Old Age, Death, and Immortality.” All this is done so as to make the work “more obviously correspond with the course of human life,” the underlying assumption being that the work, the poet’s life work, should more obviously correspond with the course of human life. Every minor piece written during Wordsworth’s life can be subsumed within a structure that is itself the writing of a life. The textual life provides both proof of and supplement for the biological life, and the biological life that is figured as the origin and center of textual production provides both proof of and supplement 3 See especially The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), 125–165, and The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 21–70, for Foucault’s meditations on the relationships between naming, classification, structure, and knowledge.

Classifying the People

47

for the textual life. This “natural” arrangement of the poems confers on the corpus a certain inevitability and becomes nothing less than the writing of an autonomous and self-referential subject. In this way the very possibility of personhood is proved by the writing of the self as text, and the very possibility of a unified text is proved by the writing of the text as a self. As Mark Schoenfield suggests, Wordsworth produces “a wholeness which could be named the Poet,” a being that was “a particular abstraction and systemization of the self (of ‘Man’) that not only characterized human nature but enacted and reproduced it without the disruption of individual particularity” (75). Wordsworth’s emphasis on the unity and integrity of this new arrangement of the poems and his association of this arrangement with the material facts of a human life led to what Terry Eagleton refers to as the “curious idea of the work of art as a kind of subject” (4). The use of seemingly natural classifications naturalizes the process of classification itself to such an extent that breaking up of the whole becomes an impossibility. Because this body of work has become something of a real body, given a natural life, autonomous existence, and organic integrity, the act of selecting out some poems for separate publication becomes an act of mutilation. In an 1825 response to a suggestion from Samuel Rogers to produce a volume of selected poems, Wordsworth writes: “As to your considerate proposal of making a Selection of the most admired, or the most popular, even were there not insuperable objections to it in my own feelings, I should be utterly at a loss how to proceed in that selection” (LY 1:328–9). What is finally insuperable to Wordsworth about selection is that to admit the very possibility of selection that is not mutilation or dissection is to deny the integrity and necessity of the collected poems. If, as Stephen Gill remarks, the collected poems had come to represent for Wordsworth his “whole identity as a poet” (Life 366), the possibility of producing multiple and potentially overlapping subsets of poems not only denied the organic unity and integrity of the collected poems but raised the possibility of multiple and potentially overlapping textual identities. Unlike Coleridge, who according to Christensen feared the loss of self when authorship led to the sense that “one’s own body is indistinguishable from the body of the text” (164), Wordsworth seems to promote the confusion between life and book to protect his textual self. The monolithic, totally integrated textual identity of the poet of the collected poems was threatened by the various historically situated identities of the poet of Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes, and other publications, and by the various self-inscribed identities of the poet of Nature, of the language of common men, of political sonnets, and so forth. The historically situated identities were folded into the ever-evolving schema represented initially by the 1815 classification. The youthful Augustan topographical poetry of Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk was truncated and classed as “Juvenile.” The seemingly radical poetry of Lyrical Ballads was contained by depoliticizing contexts and the overtly radical poetical theories of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads were explicitly written off as “slight and imperfect” and displaced to the end of the second volume “to be attended to or not, at the pleasure of the reader” (PrW 3:26n). The “trivial” poetry of Poems, in Two Volumes was aggrandized by new contexts and folded into a vision of continuous development. The wide dispersal of the poems from Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes assimilated these two publications to a single story of development. Except for the 1807 sonnet sequences,

48

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

virtually every poem in these two earlier collections was moved to a new context. In 1800, Wordsworth had reshuffled the 1798 Lyrical Ballads to provide particular contexts for each poem, and the 1807 poems were arranged into classes, though these were somewhat miscellaneous classes. In 1815, virtually all of these contexts were rewritten, and the scope and determination of this reshuffling are best shown from how very few poems remained in the same order in which they had appeared in the earlier collections. Shown below are the sequences (two or more poems that were originally published in sequence) retained from either Lyrical Ballads (LB) or Poems, in Two Volumes (P2V) (excluding the two 1807 sonnet sequences): “We Are Seven”—“Anecdote for Fathers” (LB) “Ellen Irwin”—“Strange fits of passion”—“She dwelt among the untrodd’n ways” (LB) “To the Daisy (“With little here to do or see”)”— “To the same Flower (“Bright Flower”)” (P2V) “Stepping Westward”—“Glen-Almain” (P2V) “Expostulation and Reply”—“The Tables Turned” (LB) “Lines written on a Tablet”—“The Two April Mornings”—“The Fountain” (LB) “Lines written in a Boat at Evening”—“Lines written near Richmond” (LB) “I am not one of those”—“Incident Characteristic of a Favorite Dog”—“Tribute to the Memory of the same Dog” (P2V) “It was an April morning”—“To Joanna”—“There is an Eminence”—“A narrow girdle of rough stones”—“To M. H.” (LB)

If I were to conduct my own census of the 1815 poems, what would be most striking is how widely dispersed are the poems from previous publications. The fact that only nine sequences affecting a total of 25 poems were retained from earlier publications shows quite clearly how diligently Wordsworth recontextualized his previously published poetry. This wide dispersal is also clear from a rudimentary inventory showing the publication source of the poems in each of the 1815 classifications (Table 2). By eliminating the previous contextual setting of the poems, Wordsworth succeeded in writing over the existence of his earlier collections. Without detailed knowledge of the contents of those earlier collections, it would have been difficult to determine which poem belonged to Lyrical Ballads, or Poems, in Two Volumes, or to no previous collection. Because the 1815 edition eschewed information on the date of composition or publication for each of the poems, it would have been difficult to reconstruct the historical Wordsworth or fit the poems to a story of the historical development of Wordsworth. Lacking these cues, readers were left with Wordsworth’s textualized story of development, the “course of human life” revealed by the classifications. Even the seemingly innocuous biographical information conveyed by the title “Poems Composed During a Tour, Chiefly on Foot” given to a group of five poems in 1807 or the title “Poems Written During a Tour in Scotland” given to a group of nine poems in 1807 was eliminated in 1815, and the poems in these sequences were distributed among other classes.4 4 The 1803 Scotland poems were reassembled in 1827 and given the title “Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803.”

Table 2 Distribution of Earlier Volumes in 1815 Categories (Numbers in parentheses refer to poems that were published in more than one publication prior to 1815.) 1815 Classification

Lyrical Ballads

Poems, in Two Volumes

Other

New

Poems Referring to the Period of Childhood Juvenile Pieces

6

6

1

1

1

0

2

1

Poems Founded on the Affections

11

7

0

3

Poems of the Fancy

6

13(1)

(1)

1

Poems of the Imagination

9

18

1

4

Poems Proceeding from Sentiment and Reflection

14

9(1)

(1)

2

Miscellaneous Sonnets

0

23

2

10

0

25(8)

(8)

0

0

2

6

24

Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty. First Part. Published in 1807 Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty. Second Part. From the Year 1807 to 1813 Poems on the Naming of Places

5

0

0

1

Inscriptions Poems Referring to the Period of Old Age

2

0

0

5

4

3

1

0

Epitaphs and Elegiac Poems

0

2

6

2

Ode—Intimations, &c.

0

1

0

0

50

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Besides superseding any previous (and historically situated) Wordsworth collection, the rearrangement of the poems and the elimination of “personal” groupings was an attempt to eliminate the historically situated Wordsworth. “To the Daisy (“In youth from rock to rock I went”)” was the first poem in Poems, in Two Volumes, and served as a sort of introduction to the collection. With its theme of dissatisfied and restless youth learning humility, the poem appears to announce a similar sense of contrition on Wordsworth’s part. Given his earlier denunciation of poetic diction, the use of personification for the seasons in the second stanza allies the 1807 Wordsworth with a more traditional attitude toward poetic language, and the rejection of “stately passions” in favor of “lowlier pleasure” is a decided softening of the polemical language found in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. However in 1815, this poem is placed at the beginning of the “Poems of the Fancy” class, a move that eliminates the role of rhetorical introduction that the poem played in 1807. Instead of announcing a change of heart, the poem is refashioned to take its place in what Judith Herman calls “an established line of Fancy” (83). As Herman shows, in 1815, the poem was further placed in a tradition of poems of the fancy through the addition of an epigraph from the seventeenth-century poet George Withers and the subtle revision of a few lines to connect this poem both “to future men” and to the “old time” (87). Another sense of contrition that is lost by the revision and relocation of “To the Daisy” is the renouncing of radical politics that the poem seemed to signal in 1807. Before the poem was placed in “an established line of Fancy,” the rejection of youthful “discontent” in favor of “A wisdom fitted to the needs/Of hearts at leisure” (55–6) could be read as a rejection of the “turbulent” and “uneasy” pictures of economic suffering and political discontent depicted in many of the Lyrical Ballads poems. Early on, Francis Jeffrey had pointed to the Lake poets in general and the poems in Lyrical Ballads in particular as dangerous because they were marked by “A splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society” (Reiman 2:419), and Charles Burney in his poem-by-poem review of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads criticized what he thought to be the radical politics found in many of the poems (Reiman 2:713–17). Whereas there is undoubtedly some truth in Herman’s contention that Wordsworth’s 1815 arrangement “suggested that the real interest of the poems [was] not political or anthropological but psychological” (83), what is revealed by an examination of the shifting contexts is not so much the erasure of politics, but their rewriting and containment. Wordsworth attempted to depoliticize the poems using two overlapping strategies: omission and recontextualization. The seemingly benign An Evening Walk is depoliticized by the omission of the description of the beggar and her children, despite the fact that this description was almost universally singled out for praise by that poem’s early reviewers.5 The poem is further contained by its inclusion in the class “Juvenile Pieces,” a class of which Wordsworth obviously thought very 5 The Critical Review noted that “The beggar, whose babes are starved to death with cold, is affecting” (Reiman 1:298), and the European Magazine and London Review thought the “description of the fate of the Beggar and her Children” was “very pathetically delineated” (Reiman 2:501).

Classifying the People

51

little because it is the only 1815 class title not to contain a specific reference to poetry (through use of the words “Poems” or “Sonnets”). Inclusion in “Juvenile Pieces” also serves to contain the radical politics of “The Female Vagrant” through this association of the poem’s sentiments with youthful discontent, an association that effectively neuters the poem’s indictment of the existing economic institutions of society. “The Last of the Flock” is similarly affected by classification and repositioning. Wordsworth placed the poem in “Poems Founded on the Affections,” a class that Gene Ruoff characterizes as concentrating on “the cleaving emotions,” with the “passions of this section” being “fundamentally possessive” (79). Herman offers a similar characterization, noting that the poems “may be said to have for their subject ‘the strength of love,’ whether for a little nook (‘Farewell, thou little nook’), a flock of sheep (‘The Last of the Flock’), a brother (‘The Brothers’), or a child” (84). However, while “The Last of the Flock” is undoubtedly a poem about possessiveness and love (even of sheep), it is also a stark look at economic policies requiring that a person be abjectly poor and without possessions to be eligible for any sort of relief regardless of whatever extenuating circumstances (number of children, bad harvests, high price of provisions) that person might have faced. Indeed, the entire question of poverty is subtly elided by Wordsworth in the poem which Wordsworth placed after “The Last of the Flock” in 1815. In “A Complaint,” the speaker echoes the condition of the shepherd in “The Last of the Flock,” lamenting that now “There is a change—and I am poor,” but here the change is “a change in the manner of a friend”6 and the resulting poverty is spiritual and not material. While the speaker is undoubtedly poorer for the loss of a friendship, his poverty is clearly of a different order from that experienced by the shepherd, and yet the conjunction of these poems in 1815 implies that one form of loss is not significantly different from another. Perhaps the most striking depoliticization is brought about by the placement of “Michael” in 1815. In 1800, Wordsworth thought enough of this poem to insist on its placement at the end of Volume 2 of Lyrical Ballads, and in letters written to prominent individuals to promote sales, he stressed the importance of the poem’s politics. In a letter to Charles James Fox, Wordsworth lamented the rapid disappearance of the “statesmen,” the “small independent proprietors of land,” and implied that the legal attachment to property fostered an independent spirit, which he believed to be absolutely necessary to strengthening the domestic affections that served as the foundation of the strength of the state. As rootedness to place was being replaced by the rootlessness of “hired labourers” and “the manufacturing Poor,” the country was at risk of severing the domestic ties that fostered love of nation (EY 313–15). While Wordsworth never abandoned these political ideas, he did downplay them in 1815, when “Michael” was placed in “Poems Founded on the Affections,” a class, which as seen in the case of “The Last of the Flock,” shifts the focus to the issue of love and loss. More important than this is the fact that “Michael” lost its prominent placement, for in 1815 it is not even the last poem in its section, let alone the last poem of the collection. In 1815 “Michael” is the second to last poem in the class, and “Laodamia,” the last poem in the class, obliquely suggests a telling critique of the 6

This is taken from the Fenwick note on “A Complaint,” reprinted in P2V, 423.

52

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

independence and possessiveness of the brothers, mothers, shepherds, and statesmen who are the subject of so many of the “Poems Founded on the Affections.”7 “Laodamia” tells the story of the brief reunion the gods permit between Laodamia and her husband Protesiláus, who despite the oracle’s warning that “the first Greek who touched the Trojan strand/Should die” (44–5) sought to be first, succeeded, and was immediately slain by Hector. During their brief reunion, Protesiláus attempts to comfort his wife by convincing her of the righteousness of the cause and the nobility and necessity of self-sacrifice at a time of great national need. Laodamia clings to the distant hope that Protesiláus may be spared death and allowed to return to the living, but her hopes are in vain, and when Hermes returns to lead Protesiláus back, she falls to the floor and is “Delivered from the galling yoke of time” (161). Written and published at a time of great national sacrifice, the poem attempts to account for and contain personal suffering within a narrative of the “generous cause” (46) and the “lofty thought” (137). Protesiláus counsels Laodamia to subject her passions to control and to moderate her grief: ‘Be taught, O faithful Consort, to control Rebellious passion: for the Gods approve The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul; A fervent, not ungovernable, love. Thy transports moderate; and meekly mourn When I depart, for brief is my sojourn— ’ (73–8)

He instructs her that recognition of the higher cause and the greater sacrifice that supersedes personal suffering teaches moderation and control and replaces “Rebellious passion” with governable love. It is his own recognition of the higher cause that enables Protesiláus to overcome his own doubts, doubts that are specifically located in his too-fond thoughts of the wife he would be leaving behind and the remembered associations of specific places, “The paths which we had trod—These fountains, flowers; / My new-planned cities, and unfinished towers” (131–2). In short, what Protesiláus must overcome is the independence and possessiveness that were celebrated in “Michael.” While “Michael” lamented the economic changes that were breaking the strong associations between people and the places they possessed, “Laodamia” preaches the need to overcome such associations for a greater national good. While Michael’s unfinished sheepfold marks the location of an interrupted line of inheritance, Protesiláus’ unfinished towers mark the location of a personal sacrifice subsumed within the need for national sacrifice. “Michael” suggests the possibility of the individual surviving through the legible marks left on the landscape, while “Laodamia” suggests that pursuit of “a higher object” (146) is necessary for achieving the most desired goal, “That self might be annulled” (149) in the cause of the greater good.

7 This elevation of “Laodamia” over “Michael” might also be part of the common educational experience of the ruling elite and the educated readers. Colley points out that in English public schools the “emphasis on Greek and Roman authors and ancient history meant a constant diet of stories of war, empire, bravery and sacrifice for the state” (167–8).

Classifying the People

53

While these new contexts given to old poems do not eliminate the ability to read these poems in the old ways, they do suggest the often-subtle ways in which Wordsworth complicated those old readings. The placement of “Laodamia” after “Michael” or “A Complaint” after “The Last of the Flock” does not cancel the message of one poem with the message of another but instead complicates them both. Ultimately, I am not as concerned with whether Wordsworth is successful in eliding the presence of other historically situated identities as with the very fact that such an attempt was made. The attempt is similar to Byron’s construction of Byronism detailed by Jerome Christensen in Lord Byron’s Strength, his effort to overcome self-difference and to posit in place of potentially conflicting public identities a self-similarity where variation was seen as evolutionary seriality and not revolutionary fracture. Thomas Pfau argues in Wordsworth’s Profession for the importance of Wordsworth’s self-construction and self-representation to the mutual legitimization of poet and middle-class readers, which given Wordsworth’s simultaneous creation and evacuation of self suggests an irony at the heart of Romantic interiority. Wordsworth’s classificatory scheme aims at eradicating self-difference and healing self-division through the imposition of a totalizing and seemingly natural unity, and as he makes clear, one of his key goals in classifying his poetry is the elimination of the historical Wordsworth. According to H.C. Robinson, Charles Lamb felt there was “only one good order—And that is the order in which they were written—That is a history of the poet’s mind.” Wordsworth’s arrangement made it virtually impossible to reconstruct such a history, though Crabb Robinson points out that the “dates given in the table of contents [added in 1820] will be sufficient to inform the inquisitive reader how the poet’s mind was successively engaged” (Correspondence 1:151). Beginning with the following edition of the Collected Works, that of 1827, Wordsworth removed the dates from the contents page, rendering such reconstructive strategies as Crabb Robinson’s difficult for future readers. This willful and anxious suppression of the composition and publication history of the poems was necessary to detach the poems from the specific life of a specific poet and to support the replacement of this specificity with the abstract and generalized “course of human life.” Autobiography, to paraphrase Alan Liu, becomes again the crowning denial of history (31). While Wordsworth was able to protect his body of work through exacting control over its presentation, such protection could not extend beyond the grave, or at least beyond the term of copyright. Matthew Arnold’s edition of Wordsworth for Macmillan’s Golden Treasury series was the most influential of the many later repackagings of Wordsworth’s poems. Arnold also saw selection as a mutilation, but it was a procedure necessary to afford the patient relief. It was Arnold’s contention that “To be recognised far and wide as a great poet, to be possible and receivable as a classic, Wordsworth needs to be relieved of a great deal of the poetical baggage which now encumbers him,” and to “administer this relief is indispensable” (“Introduction” 336). The bloated and distended Wordsworth required the judicious hand of a skilled critic such as Arnold to cut away the gross protuberances and rancorous growths to reveal the “great and ample body of powerful work which remains” (337). As Clifford Siskin notes, Arnold’s language of disease and cure casts the critic in the role of healer, and his “surgical lyricization of Wordsworth into the Great Decade

54

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

cured the poet and institutionally authorized the ongoing production of doctors of literature” (8). Wordsworth’s transformation of a body of work into a body makes that body available for ongoing diagnoses and cures, cures that often take the form of dismemberment or mutilation. Strangely enough, while this mutilation is necessary to reveal Wordsworth’s “ampler body of powerful work,” it is Wordsworth’s ability to survive such mutilation that makes him worthy of Arnold’s admiration. “Altogether, it is,” writes Arnold, “by the great body of powerful and significant work which remains to him, after every reduction and deduction has been made, that Wordsworth’s superiority is proved” (337). The near pathological insistence on the healthiness of the mutilated body underscores the persistence of Wordsworth’s model of the text as a writing of a unitary self. Despite Wordsworth’s very clear anxiety concerning the presentation of this textual self, it is a textual self that has been continually rewritten, first by Arnold and subsequently by a host of editors, anthologizers, compilers, and collectors. Generally, this rewriting has followed Arnold in discarding the classificatory scheme and limiting the selections to poems written during the so-called “Great Decade.” John L. Mahoney’s survey of Wordsworth’s critical reception provides a compelling picture of the persistence of Arnold’s Great Decade and the narratives of anticlimax and decline from Willard Sperry’s 1935 Wordsworth’s Anti-Climax to recent critical work that, while not openly advocating the Great Decade construction, ignore Wordsworth’s career after 1807 or at the latest 1815. When Siskin points to one critic who has “suggested that the Wordsworth who produced the 1815 system was not really the Wordsworth we all know and love” (114), he is merely remarking on one episode in the long tradition of Wordsworth scholarship which Gene Ruoff has compared with “the art of gem-cutting,” which produces two stones “one which may be a trifle small but has perfect finish and clarity and another which is substantial but deeply flawed” (75). Wordsworth’s fear of selection proved both prophetic and ironic because selection produces a new textual self and yet works from the same initial assumptions that rendered the reclassification of the poems possible in the first place: the breaking down of wholes into base units, which are then sorted using some evaluative criteria and subsequently recombined. With his denial of historical context and his desire for a justified enumerative classificatory scheme, Wordsworth provided the precedent and justification necessary to enable the subsequent reclassification and reinscription of his body of work. As seen with Wordsworth’s classificatory scheme, which purported to “correspond with the course of human life,” the naturalness of the analytical categories tends to naturalize the process of classification itself. However, as Foucault has shown, classification cannot be the unmediated empirical investigation that it purports to be but is instead a structure that allows certain information to become visible and renders other information invisible. It is here that the classification of the people comes to resemble the classification of the poems in how they both exemplify Foucault’s discussion in The Order of Things of the function of structure: By limiting and filtering the visible, structure enables it to be transcribed into language ... [Structure] reduces the whole area of the visible to a system of variables all of whose values can be designated, if not by a quantity, at least by a perfectly clear and always finite description. (135–6)

Classifying the People

55

Classification does not merely organize data, it produces meaning, and perhaps more importantly makes other meanings impossible. Wordsworth’s classification of his poems and the British government’s classification of the people are similar epistemic formations in how they attempt to control the visible. But classification is also something of a fantasy, a paranoid one for some and an ecstatic one for others. The classified world described by Foucault is ultimately something of a dream state, an ideal utopia (or dystopia) of information. This is at least the dream of Wordsworth and the dream of the demographer, the fiction of the census. The census categories purportedly assigned people one clear place, but that one clear place frequently proved susceptible to the problems of classification itself. One of the clear places assigned to everyone enumerated in a census is that of national identity. National identity is the unifying sign under which the multitude is counted. In the first four British censuses (1801–1831), the enumerated totals were assumed to represent a count of all the people of Great Britain. In 1841, the census designers hoped to gain more exact information about the nationalities that constituted this citizenry and so added two columns to the census form under the heading “Where Born.”8 The first column asked the question “Whether Born in same County,” and the second column asked the question “Whether Born in Scotland, Ireland, or Foreign Parts.” The instructions given to the enumerators made explicit the distinction established by these two questions: “Whether Born in same County.”—Write opposite to each name (except those of Irish, Scotch, or Foreigners,) “Y.” or “N.” for Yes or No, as the case may be. Whether in Scotland, Ireland, or Foreign Parts—Write in this column “S.” for those who were born in Scotland; “I.” for those born in Ireland; and “F.” for Foreigners.

The association of the “Irish” and the “Scotch” with “Foreigners” calls attention to the perceived difference of the Irish and the Scotch from some unstated and undefined normative identity. This normative identity is “English,” a term conspicuously absent from this list of nationalities. Also absent from this list is “Welsh” as something different from “English,” there being no differential category available for those born in Wales.9 While the Welsh are denied a national identity by the absence of a category to define them, the Scotch and Irish are marked for difference from the normative national identity. This mark takes the overt form of the writing of an “S” or an “I” in the column labeled “Whether Born in Scotland, Ireland, or Foreign Parts” and thus becomes on the householder’s census form a physical mark of difference. Because the mark is only required to mark difference, a blank space denotes the normative national identity, an identity that of course cannot be marked because it is the standard from which difference is derived. 8 The householder’s census form for 1841 is reproduced in a note to the “Enumeration Abstract” by Edmund Phipps and Thomas Vardon, reprinted in British Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 3 (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1971), 72. 9 This sense of an independent national identity for Ireland and Scotland remained an assumption of the census (despite changes in the actual form of the questions) until 1951. See Guide to Census Reports, 160–72.

56

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

To be marked is to be distinguished from the rest. In the case of nationality, such a distinction is pejorative in that what is being marked is one’s foreignness. In this sense, the blank that denotes Englishness marks the absence of nationality where nationality is considered to be something foreign to the nation. Conversely, when the category is one like occupation, which confers a socially important distinction, the blank space functions not as the absence of difference but as the absence of value. The enumerators were given strict instructions concerning the completion of the column headed “Profession, Trade, Employment, or of Independent Means.” The importance of this category is made clear by the additional instructions provided to the enumerators for the 1851 census: It is desirable not only that the Return of the Rank, Profession, or Occupation of every person in Great Britain should be complete and accurate, but also that the particulars should be entered on a uniform plan. To assist the Enumerator, the following detailed instructions, with numerous examples, have been drawn up. He is requested to see in every case, before leaving the house, that the column for rank and occupation, as well as the rest of the Householder’s Schedule, is correctly filled in conformity with the instructions. (British Parliamentary Papers: Population, vol. 6, 44–5)

As these instructions make clear, the census designers placed a great deal of emphasis on occupational information and assumed that an occupation would be assigned to each person listed on the Householder’s schedule and that the absence of an occupation was simply a mistake that needed to be remedied by the enumerator. These instructions are followed by numerous examples of categories and subcategories of ranks, professions, and occupations that would be valid for this column. The last category is one titled “Women and Children” and contains this explanatory note: The rules which have been laid down for the return of the rank and profession of men, apply generally to all women in business, or following specific occupations. The occupations of the mistresses of families and ladies engaged in domestic duties are not expressed—as they are well understood. (46)

In this category the blank space denotes the absence of rank, profession, and occupation, and the blank space is a valid response only for women and children. As the instructions and numerous examples and categories and subcategories make clear, a blank space in this column next to a man’s name is not a valid response and would undoubtedly be treated as an error. The numbers from 1841 reflect this. Blank entries were placed in a category suggestively called “Residue of Population.” Table 2.2 lists the gross numbers and percentages of totals for the four “demographic” classes of people counted by the census.

Table 3 “No Occupation” Distribution by Gender and Age in 1841 Census

Demographic Class

Total

Returned with no occupation

Pct of Class Total

Pct of Total without occupation

Males 20 years of age and older

4,961,045

276,526

5.5%

2.5%

Males under 20

4,301,081

3,434,456

79.9%

31.2%

Females 20 years of age and older

5,280,742

3,594,366

68.1%

32.7%

Females under 20

4,301,556

3,692,517

85.8%

33.6%

18,844,424

10,997,865

100.00%

58

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

These numbers make it quite clear that when a man is listed with no occupation, the Householder’s schedule was considered to be in error. And even though only 5.5 per cent of men over 20 were listed without occupations, and this group constituted only 2.5 per cent of the nearly 19 million people counted, there was still the perceived need to account for these few. In the census abstract, the blank space in the occupation column of an adult man is explained as arising from “sons who continue to reside with their parents, and perhaps to assist in their business, without being returned as carrying on the same trades” (Phipps and Vardon 9) or, in other words, as arising from enumerator error. Quite simply, the instructions for the completion of this column required that every man be categorized, that every man be assigned a rank or profession or occupation, because in many respects this designation was fundamental to a man’s public identity. The census was designed always to confer the public identity of an occupation on a man, even to require such an identity, while simultaneously denying such an identity to a woman. In this case the blank space marked the absence of identity and allowed for the erasure of certain types of women’s work. Of course, even though the blank space might have designated domestic duties, which were not considered employment, it could also have been a mark of class anxiety. Sonya Rose speculates that the head of the household, “usually a man,” might have left blank the space reserved for his wife’s occupation because in “communities where it was generally a mark of shame for a married woman to have to earn wages” for a married woman to have an occupation “signified that her husband was unable to provide for her” (81). In addition, work performed at home by women and children, a traditionally invisible occupation, was explicitly excluded from the 1841 census with the instruction that “The profession, &c., of wives, or of sons or daughters living with their husbands or parents, and assisting them, but not apprenticed or receiving wages, need not be set down.”10 This instruction merely perpetuated the elimination of women from occupational statistics, which was achieved in the 1811, 1821, and 1831 censuses through the use of the “Family Occupation” category. The 1801 census attempted to collect information on “Personal Occupation,” but this failed largely “from the impossibility of deciding whether females of the family, children, and servants were to be classed as if of no occupation or of the occupation of the adult males of the family.”11 From its inception, the design of the census restricted women either to the occupation of their husbands, fathers, or brothers or to no occupation at all. The censuses of 1811 and 1821 “remedied” this situation by changing “Personal Occupation” to “Family Occupation,” thus categorically defining a woman’s occupation as the occupation of the “adult males of the family.” In 1831, “Family Occupation” was collected and 10 “Enumeration Abstract” in British Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 3 (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1971), 73. See also Edward Higgs, “Women, occupations and work in the nineteenth century censuses,” History Workshop Journal, 23 (1987): 59–80. 11 John Rickman, “Comparative Account of the Population of Great Britain in the Years 1801, 1811, 1821, 1831,” originally published in 1831, reprinted in British Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 1 (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1968).

Classifying the People

59

“Personal Occupation” was again collected, though only for males who were 20 years of age and older. The 1841 census collected occupational information for men and women, adults and children, but subject to the limitations discussed earlier. Despite these attempts to elide the presence of women in the workforce, that presence is undeniable in the occupational statistics gathered in 1841. In the “Preface” to the Occupation Abstract for 1841, the presence of women in the workforce is mentioned only three times by the census compilers. Two of these references attempt to redomesticate the work done by women, and the third attempts to obfuscate the statistical evidence itself. The first comment refers to the large number of women employed as domestic servants, a fact that “must be matter for congratulation” because such employment “in a class in which habits of sober industry, of economy, and of attention to the maintenance of good character are so necessary” both provides excellent domestic training and effectively utilizes women’s natural domesticity (Phipps and Vardon 27). A similar attempt to naturalize a gendered division of labor, this time in lace manufacture, leads to the conclusion that “no one can be surprised at finding that the touch of a female hand is preferred in a material so fragile and delicate” (29), a conclusion that hides the fact that most lace was manufactured by machinery run by “skilled” men and then clipped and finished by “unskilled” women.12 At one point in the “Preface” to the 1841 Occupation Abstract, the census compilers attempt to obfuscate their own statistical evidence. Following the presentation of tables showing the number of persons employed in the various textile industries subdivided by gender and age (over and under 20 years of age), the compilers offer this analysis of the data: It is gratifying to see that the returns as to sex and age will afford consolation to those who have regretted the supposed preponderance of the weaker sex and of more tender youth in the number of persons employed in these manufactures. Under the head of cotton manufacture (all branches), comprehending, as we have already mentioned, 302,376 persons, the males above 20 years of age are more than double the number under 20, and considerably exceed the total number of females above 20 years of age, who, in their turn, exceed by a third the females under 20. (Phipps and Vardon 28)

The torturous comparison of the four demographic classes of workers hides what the statistics actually show: a “preponderance of the weaker sex and of more tender youth” in the manufacturing workforce. While it is true that in cotton manufacture “males above 20 years of age are more than double the number under 20, and considerably exceed the number of females above 20,” the number of males over 20 years of age actually constitutes only 36.6 per cent of the cotton-manufacturing workforce. Women and males under 20 years of age account for 63.4 per cent, a figure that would seem to represent a preponderance, and women alone account for 47.8 per cent, a figure all the more remarkable when one considers the various

12 Rose, Limited Livelihoods, 24–6, 83–93. Rose draws the further conclusion that the “skill” required to perform a task was used as both a determinant of wage and a bar to women’s employment.

60

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

ways in which women’s work went unrecorded.13 While cotton manufacturing was a particularly bad example to prove the ascendancy of the adult male in the workforce, the adult male accounted for more than half of the workforce in only two textile industries, hose (64.5 per cent) and wool (56.6 per cent), and accounted for only 43 per cent of the workforce for the entire textile industry.14 These figures occasion so much anxiety because they actually contradict the model household that they are supposed to prove, and this despite the manifold efforts to elide women from the representation of the workforce provided by the census. As Sonya Rose has suggested, the introduction in 1841 of the household schedule shifted the representational burden from the enumerators to the heads of household, who were almost always men. This assumption was made clear with the addition of the “Relation to Head of Family” category in 1851, which included the instruction “State whether Wife, Son, Daughter, or other Relative, Visitor, or Servant” (British Parliamentary Papers: Population, vol. 6, 44). The enumerator would leave the household schedule with the head of the family, who was responsible for completing the form. While this implies that the head of the household was responsible for defining the household itself, the definition of a household was clearly implied by the census categories themselves. As Edward Higgs points out: The nineteenth-century census authorities plainly had a clear picture of what they thought a household ought to look like. It was made up of a husband and wife, their relations by birth or marriage, servants and apprentices. The family had exclusive possession of a house or apartment which they owned or rented from a landlord. (Making Sense 80)

Many households, especially in urban areas, probably did not meet this definition, and yet this definition—with its emphasis on a particular family structure with its gendered roles and its assumptions about class and status—through such constructions as the census becomes virtually the only representation of the household available.15 While the census cannot be said to call the mid-Victorian family household into being, it can be said to circumscribe the possible forms such a construction could take. 13 Edward Higgs believed the reporting of female factory workers to be “fairly reliable” (Making Sense of the Census, 82), while Rose cites oral histories compiled by Elizabeth Roberts as showing that “the census underrepresented the number of women who were wage earners” (Limited Livelihoods, 230n.25). 14 What is actually most interesting about these workforce statistics and what is also ignored by the census compilers is the large percentage of females under 20 years of age employed in the textile industry. The ratio of males over 20 to males under 20 is as much as 6 to 1 in some industries and over 3 to 1 for the entire textile industry. The ratio of females over 20 to females under 20 is 3:2, and the ratio of females under 20 to males under 20 is 4 to 3 for the entire textile industry. 15 This mutual reinforcement of classificatory schemes and perceived differences is noted by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in relation to the academic construction of “distinction”: “The official differences produced by academic classifications tend to produce (or reinforce) real differences by inducing in the classified individuals a collectively recognized and supported belief in the differences, thus producing behaviours that are intended to bring real being into line with official being.” Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 25.

Classifying the People

61

The household schedule provided space for the entry of names, ages, genders, occupations, and birthplace information. Through the combination of these and other categories, the countable subject becomes accountable to various structures of responsibility and defined by his or her location within this multidimensional matrix of relationships. The perception of one person’s difference from another comes to rely on their different locations within this multidimensional matrix, and difference itself becomes perceptible only when elaborated through this matrix. While it is tempting to view the census as yet another in a series of state mechanisms, the purpose of which was the eradication of difference, such a view fails to account for the curious way in which the census simultaneously breaks down and reconstructs the subject. The census actually constructs a self that can be counted and categorized, generalized to the merely human and then reconstructed based on the necessary attributes of a citizen of the modern industrial state: nationality (assumed English), gender (assumed male), occupation (assumed to have one). Part of the irony was that to be counted as a subject and constructed as a citizen was not the same as being a citizen and possessing the rights of a citizen. The census was part of both the increasing disciplinary structure required to control bodies and selves and part of the ongoing discourse that created bodies and selves that required discipline. Once accounted for and located within a matrix of relationships, the political subject was now accountable for fulfilling the responsibilities entailed by those relationships. At least this is the fiction of the census, that everyone is in it and that everyone has one and only one very clear location. If this is true, it is true only because any classification works in this way and that which proves resistant to classification is treated as error and discarded. Women with occupations and men without occupations represent aberrations that require statistical “analysis” and narrative obfuscation. The “Family Occupation” category of the 1811–1831 censuses made it impossible for women to have any occupation outside that of the “family” where “family” was taken to be the male head of household. Despite the change to the householder’s form in 1841, this view of women’s work remained in force in the many ways in which male heads of households could choose not to assign occupations to the women in the households. It is just such attitudes that allow William Wordsworth to include a handful of Dorothy Wordsworth’s poems in his 1815 Poems with only the nominal, below the title, attribution “By my Sister.” The name on the title page, the head of this household collection of poems, was always “William Wordsworth.” When earlier in his career Wordsworth had published the poems of a male poet who at that time was essentially a member of his household, the collection was initially issued anonymously, and when “William Wordsworth” was placed on the title page of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth was very specific in noting the contributions of a “Friend” in the Preface. Dorothy Wordsworth’s contributions to the 1815 edition of the Poems received no mention in the Preface to that collection. Acknowledgment of her contribution consisted only of “By my Sister” placed below the title of each of her poems, her only public identity available being her “Relation to the Head of Family,” and the attribution seems no stronger than if Wordsworth had subtitled “The Thorn” as “By a prolix and Adhesive-minded Sea Captain (Retired).” In essence, the peculiar cottage industry of William and his “three wives” (as Crabb Robinson referred to Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson),

62

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

its erasure of the labor and produce of these domestic contributors, amanuenses, critics, and scribes, was perhaps not so peculiar after all when measured against the statistical mechanisms used by the government to measure (and mismeasure) women’s work. This household was in many ways a normative census household in that many bodies were required to produce a single occupation, which in this case was that of the male poet.16 The national census provided the means of constructing a national populace whose differences from one another could be read through their differential positions within a matrix formed by a superimposed grid of categorization. However, this construction often required supplementation in the form of changing categories, changing values, and outright obfuscation. Wordsworth’s classification of his poems was a similar attempt at producing a unified textual subject whose self-divisions could be read only through the superimposed grid of such categories as “Poems of the Fancy,” or “Poems Referring to the Period of Old Age.” In 1815 the justification of the proliferating and overlapping categories required the supplementary explanation of the preface. In addition, the preface required its own supplement, in the form of an essay appended to the first volume of the collection. While the preface attempted to construct through classification a textual self that corresponded with “the course of human life,” the supplement to the preface attempted to construct through classification a reader capable of reading that textual self. Just as one of the ironies of the 1801–1831 British censuses was the mismatch between being counted as a citizen and actually being a citizen with full voting rights, Wordsworth’s classification of his readers produces an essentially null “normal” set. In both cases, the small size of the “normal” population has little effect on the definition of the normative subject. In the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” Wordsworth attempts to account for his literary life as represented both by the volumes of his collected works and by the nexus of historical events named Wordsworth. What Wordsworth attempts to account for is his lack of popularity, and once again his initial response is to create classifications. Wordsworth begins by describing two classes of readers. For the first class of readers, poetry begins as a passion but later gives way to other concerns as thoughts are “occupied in domestic cares, or the time engrossed by business.” For these readers, poetry eventually becomes a secondary concern that provides either “occasional recreation” or “luxurious amusement.” However, for the second class of readers poetry begins in passion as well but in maturity is “comprehended as a study” (PrW 3:62). The distinction Wordsworth makes here is between readers for whom reading is a luxury or recreation outside occupation and readers for whom reading is an occupation. The first class of readers is essentially the same as the normative census subject, the mature man engrossed in family and occupation. In many ways, this first class of readers consists primarily of middle-class readers who have probably taken up a book “after an escape from the burden of business, and with a wish to forget the world, and all its vexations and anxieties” (PrW 3:64). Wordsworth characterizes their relationship to serious literature as entirely frivolous, literature serving them as recreation, luxury, or amusement. In each of these classes 16 Interestingly, in the 1841 census Wordsworth listed his occupation not as poet or writer but “Distributor Stamps.”

Classifying the People

63

of readers, “critics abound,” but only from those critics who are found in the second class of readers “can opinions be collected of absolute value” (PrW 3:62). As soon as these classes of casual readers and serious readers are distinguished, the class of serious readers is further subdivided: At the same time it must be observed—that, as this Class comprehends the only judgments which are trust-worthy, so does it include the most erroneous and perverse. For to be mistaught is worse than to be untaught; and no perverseness equals that which is supported by system, no errors are so difficult to root out as those which the understanding has pledged its credit to uphold. (PrW 3:66)

The purpose behind Wordsworth’s initial distinction between casual and serious readers of poetry was to limit whose opinions were considered legitimate. However, the classification of serious reader does little to support Wordsworth’s argument because it is undeniable that serious readers of poetry disagree with his opinions (as well as in the estimate of his worth as a poet). Wordsworth’s solution is to create further subclassifications within his classifications. Serious readers are further divided into those whose opinions are “trust-worthy” and those whose opinions are “erroneous and perverse.” According to Wordsworth, this further subdivision leaves a very small group of readers whose opinions are “trust-worthy,” a small and exclusive cadre of distinguished readers. This process of subdivision and reclassification reproduces what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the distinction between pure taste and barbarous taste, between “two ‘antagonistic castes’, those who understand and those who do not”(31).17 The caste of “pure taste” consists of those trust-worthy serious readers, a small set, perhaps even a null set, which for Wordsworth stands for his normative reader. Such a distinction enables the continued control of access to the cultural capital represented by pure taste and represented here specifically by Wordsworth’s poetry. Now, if such has been the case, literary history should be a story of initial neglect for the finest works and undue praise for the most popular. In short, Wordsworth’s argument is that contemporary popularity must be the overt sign of inadequacy and contemporary neglect must be a necessary condition of genius. Such a figuration would be in line with John Guillory’s description of the “High Canonical works” (of which Wordsworth would certainly include his own), which are characterized by the fact that their prestige “as cultural capital is assessed according to the limit of their dissemination, their relative exclusivity” (133). Not

17 Interestingly, Wordsworth follows Bourdieu’s example, Ortega y Gasset, very closely: “One only has to read Ortega y Gasset to see the reinforcement the charismatic ideology derives from art, which is ‘essentially unpopular, indeed, anti-popular’ and from the ‘curious sociological effect’ it produces by dividing the public into two ‘antagonistic castes’, those who understand and those who do not’. ‘This implies’, Ortega goes on, ‘that some possess an organ of understanding which others have been denied; that these are two distinct varieties of the human species. The new art is not for everyone, like Romantic art, but destined for an especially gifted minority.’ ” As discussed later, Wordsworth is “anti-popular” and clearly believes that this “destined for an especially gifted minority,” which implies that y Gasset’s conception of “Romantic art” is decidedly more Romantic than that possessed by Wordsworth.

64

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

surprisingly, this is the story Wordsworth proceeds to tell. Of interest here is how he is forced to deal with Shakespeare, one of the cases of acknowledged merit that he raises. Wordsworth admits Shakespeare’s popularity among his contemporaries but implies that Shakespeare was not as popular or at least as subject to popular opinion as some other writers. Yet even this marvellous skill appears not to have been enough to prevent his rivals from having some advantage over him in public estimation; else how can we account for passages and scenes that exist in his works, unless upon a supposition that some of the grossest of them, a fact which in my mind I have no doubt of, were foisted in by the Players, for the gratification of the many? (PrW 3:68)

Like a census classification that elides difference as error, Wordsworth locates the “error” in Shakespeare in the adulteration, which he attributes to Shakespeare’s domestic laborers, the players, the many bodies whose silent (and inferior) work has been mostly elided by the autonomous genius. Wordsworth uses popularity as the cause of some perceived lapses in Shakespeare. In this way, popularity remains the corrupting term that has contaminated even the genius of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s popularity is figured as actually leading to his further adulteration, which subdivides Shakespeare’s texts into two classes, the pure and perhaps unpopular authentic Shakespeare and the adulterated popular inauthentic Shakespeare. Just as Arnold was forced to cure Wordsworth by cutting away the inauthentic to reveal the authentic Wordsworth, Wordsworth is forced to eliminate surgically the inauthentic parts of Shakespeare to reveal the authentic Shakespeare. While this division enables Wordsworth to maintain his argument and explain Shakespeare’s popularity, his strategy has forced him to create two Shakespeares. He attempts to remedy this division later when he complains of the characterization of Shakespeare as the “wild irregular genius.” Wordsworth looks forward to the day when “it becomes universally acknowledged that the judgment of Shakespeare in the selection of his materials, and in the manner in which he has made them, heterogeneous as they often are, constitute a unity of their own, and contribute all to one great end” (PrW 3:69). Earlier, Wordsworth invoked the presence of authentic and inauthentic Shakespeares to make his point that Shakespeare was not as popular as he could have been and is thus exempt from Wordsworth’s null set of popular and meritorious writers. Here Wordsworth abandons the two Shakespeares in favor of the self-similar Shakespeare. This is a curious rhetorical move in that it undoes the subdivision and reclassification of Shakespeare that only a few paragraphs before enabled part of Shakespeare to be isolated and ultimately cast out. However, it is also a necessary move because Wordsworth must return to the assertion of a unified textual self, an assertion that is fundamental to the entire project of the collected poems. In Wordsworth’s version of literary history, popularity is equivalent to inadequacy and neglect is a condition of genius. Reader resistance is both necessary because without it there would be no mark of distinction and ultimately futile because in this model true merit eventually rises above the rest. What makes this figuration

Classifying the People

65

curious is the manner in which Wordsworth concludes his argument. Working from the assumption that he possesses a fit audience though few, Wordsworth sets out to prove first that few readers are qualified to judge poetry and that literary history is nothing less than a continual repetition of this fact. Presumably, Wordsworth has proven his point, and yet he embarks on a discussion of how “every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” (PrW 3:80). Part of this task is in establishing “dominion over the spirits of readers,” and necessary to this task is the possession of genius, which Wordsworth defines as “the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown.” From this unsurprising definition of genius, Wordsworth proceeds to this unusual figuration of the relationship between poet and reader: What is all this but an advance, or a conquest, made by the soul of the poet? Is it to be supposed that the reader can make progress of this kind, like an Indian prince or general— stretched on his palanquin, and borne by his slaves? No; he is invigorated and inspirited by his leader, in order that he may exert himself; for he cannot proceed in quiescence, he cannot be carried like a dead weight. (PrW 3:82)

The creation of the taste by which a poet is judged is represented as a conflict, a battle, an “advance, or a conquest.” Given Wordsworth’s construction of literary history, the continued success of a poet, the increasing number of conquests made, if made immediately, would eventually invalidate the claim of the poet to genius. Because originality and genius are set in opposition to popularity, the original poet’s attempt to create the taste by which he is judged must by definition fail at first. To cultivate successfully the appropriate taste without a long battle and thus achieve immediate popularity is to invalidate one’s claims to genius and originality. But the poet as Napoleon quickly gives way to the poet as slave, and the reader as conquered foe is recast as an idle and luxurious figure carried in triumph. This figuration is immediately replaced by one that again casts the poet as “leader,” the powerful exhorting figure who is now no longer the reader’s foe. The relationship between poet and reader has moved from that of conqueror and vanquished to slave and master to leader and follower in such a quick succession that the mobility of the terms challenges the very stability of the opposition itself. And what is most prominent in this series of images is the idle and seemingly lifeless body of the reader, “stretched” like a corpse on a palanquin or “carried like a dead weight.” Like the specter of Wordsworth’s mutilated body that haunts Arnold, this lifeless body of the reader haunts the landscape of the poet’s triumphal conquest and reinforces Wordsworth’s notion that the poet’s campaign must be initially marked by failure if it is to prove ultimately successful. At the center of this campaign is the body of the “Indian prince or general,” a symbol of luxury and idleness that links contemporary racist ideas of the “habitual dissipation and corruption of the people of India” (quoted in Bayly 115) with the class biases against the men of business who comprise Wordsworth’s first class of readers, those who sought in poetry only “luxurious amusement.” The “advance,

66

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

or conquest” made by the soul of the poet is a colonization of the mind, a conquest that frees slaves so that they may be set to work. Wordsworth rewrites the whole of literary history to supplement his contention that the class of serious readers consists of very few members. With each case of neglected literary merit or misplaced praise, the class is divided between those privileged few whose opinions are “trust-worthy,” and the unfortunate many whose opinions are “erroneous and perverse.” Like that of the national census, Wordsworth’s project of 1815 was a project of abstraction. The national census produced abstract statistical subjects marked by differences inscribed by the very analytical categories used to measure them. The classification of the poems produced an abstract poet and erased the historical poet, while the supplementation required to justify the classification produced an abstract reader and virtually erased the possibility of any actual readers. When near the end of the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” Wordsworth asks the rhetorical question: “Is it the result of the whole, that, in the opinion of the Writer, the judgment of the People is not to be respected?” (PrW 3:84), despite his objection the only answer available is “Yes.” The invocation of the abstraction “the People” only calls attention to the systematic exclusion of people from his category of serious and trustworthy readers and is the equivalent of the movement traced earlier in the census debates from the specific and particular citizens who would resist the census takers to the abstract subjects that government supposedly served. When Wordsworth ends his essay by invoking the “Vox Populi,” it is a vox curiously empty of voices. Wordsworth warns that one must be foolish to “mistake for [the Vox Populi] a local acclamation, or a transitory outcry—transitory though it be for years, local though from a Nation” (PrW 3:84). The extension of the meaning of “transitory” to encompass years and “local” to encompass the nation broadens the terms so much that they become meaningless. Both the “vox” and the “populi” have been rendered so abstract that they are empty of meaning and content. Instead of shared “simultaneity across homogenous, empty time” that Benedict Anderson imagines in the “eerie splendor” of the national contemplation of a war memorial, the “unisonance” that unites the nation in fellow feeling, we get silence. While Pfau argues persuasively that Wordsworth in the 1800 “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads sought to create the possibility of a middle-class audience attuned to the response appropriate to his poetry, by 1815 Wordsworth appears to have turned on that same audience (237–59). The nation that Wordsworth invokes is “trust-worthy” only after it has been symbolically depopulated.18 18 Julie Carlson locates an interesting parallel in Coleridge’s ideas about theatre and citizenship. She writes, “Not only theatre’s conventional status as a ‘feminized’ form but the thematics of his later plays put Coleridge in the uncomfortable position of accentuating women’s presence in the nation ... Put in terms of his categories of citizenship, it is one unintended consequence of theatre’s ability to restore individuals to their moral status as ‘potential men’ ... The problem is not with the potentiality Coleridge ascribes to theatre but with the ‘actual citizens’ he seeks to educe through it. That category excludes precisely those types of people whose social power is threatening to become all too real in his day. As a consequence, potentiality is reserved for a certain class, color, sexuality, even poetics, of men.” See In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Wordsworth’s narrowing of the “trust-worthy” is not, of

Classifying the People

67

Wordsworth’s “readers” and Wordsworth’s “Nation” are both classifications that verge on nullity and come close to fulfilling what Benedict Anderson calls the “fiction of the census.” The demographer’s dream is the accounting, which both counts and accounts for everyone, all-inclusive and yet capable of such fine-grained analysis that every individual can be located in a multidimensional matrix through specification of enough coordinates. Wordsworth’s classification of poems and readers mirrors the process of the statistical classification of the people of Britain in that both processes aim at implementing, exploring, breaking down, and rearranging the body in order to subject it to ever more rigorous control and discipline,19 but what these processes actually reveal is the diffusion and multiplicity of the poems, readers, and people that must be defined as abnormal or accounted for by ever-proliferating categories and ever-increasing justifications. If Wordsworth’s ambition was, as David Duff claims, “to be the exemplary poet of his time” (86), then his purpose in the Collected Poems of 1815 was to control the conditions under which he was read, or rather the conditions under which his textual self was read. This control extended beyond the artifact of the book itself to the refashioning of literary history and the construction of the reader and the Nation itself, constructs that turned out to be curiously empty of material content. The national census was a similar attempt at absolute control, though in this case the object being read was the Nation itself and the political subject, the normative and deviant possibilities of both being restricted to the categories of difference made available by the census classifications. As with all classificatory schemes, what came to count and what counted as difference could be read only through the categories themselves, and the inevitable result was a taxonomy that erased the material object and replaced it with an object of enquiry visible only through the structure that purported to describe it. The abstracting power of Wordsworth’s mind produced such an abstract series of distinctions and classifications that the “course of human life,” which formed the basis of the arrangement of the poems, bore little resemblance to any human life and came dangerously close to fulfilling Protesiláus’s desire to lose himself in the abstract cause so “That self might be annulled.” The “Cathedral of St. William,” as James Heffernan refers to Wordsworth’s vision of his body of work as a gothic church (107), is eerily sepulchral, haunted by the very possibility of the individual vanishing into the abstract classification and thus annulling the self. It is a curious paradox that the abstract statistical man created by the census and so despised by Wordsworth should find a parallel form in the abstract life of the poet constructed by the 1815 Poems. It is equally paradoxical, though strangely inevitable, that the abstracting power of his mind produced such an abstract classification for the reader that it ran the risk of being a null set and thus, despite protestations, was a mechanism for invoking the Nation while excluding the People. Perversely, the classification of the poems became the writing of a life and the assertion of a subject that was constituted by writing while the classification of the readers became the reading of a life and the assertion of a subject that somehow remained immune to reading. course, without precedent, as Marc Redfield ironically summarizes the long history of taste as “Someday, humanity will achieve itself as a national, and in the end, global subject; in the meantime, an acculturated minority speaks for the collective” (12). 19 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 135–41.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 3

Surveying and Writing the Nation The Black Comb and 1816 commemorative poems

Know, if thou grudge not to prolong thy rest, That, on the summit whither thou art bound, A geographic Labourer pitched his tent, With books supplied and instruments of art, To measure height and distance; lonely task, Week after week pursued! —Wordsworth, “Written with a Slate-pencil, on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb”

While some versions of Wordsworth’s career place the 1815 publication of the Collected Poems outside of Wordsworth’s “productive” period, that publication, along with the previous year’s arrival of The Excursion, marks the beginning of the most prolific publishing phase of his career. In the more than 20 years between his first publication and 1814, Wordsworth placed before the public four volumes of poetry: Descriptive Sketches, An Evening Walk, Lyrical Ballads (though arguably the first and second editions should be considered separate publications), and Poems, in Two Volumes. In the nine years following 1814, Wordsworth published ten volumes of poetry: The Excursion, The White Doe of Rylstone, Collected Poems (1815), Thanksgiving Ode and Other Poems, Peter Bell, The Waggoner, The River Duddon and Other Poems, Miscellaneous Poems, Memorials of a Tour of the Continent, and Ecclesiastical Sketches. Various critical representations of Wordsworth’s career claim that his creativity came to an end in 1802 or 1804 or 1807 or possibly 1814, and yet to much of the literary culture and reading public of post-Waterloo Britain, The Excursion marked not the end of Wordsworth’s career, but the beginning of its most public phase. This public phase was not accidental, but Wordsworth’s deliberate and self-conscious effort to write a national poetry and become the national poet. Just what a national poetry was and how one became a national poet were not selfevident, and these publications from 1814 to 1822 record Wordsworth’s struggle to write the nation. He began with what might be called the overt nationalism of the “prospect view,” that vision of the world where everything and everyone is reduced to abstraction, where the particulars of the local landscape, people, and manners are coerced into a national sameness like that produced by the census or the map or the museum. He ended by attempting to write the nation by turning to the local, not in retreat from the politics of the nation but in a conscious attempt to reform the national character by exposing it to a Westmorland landscape of local idiosyncrasy. The attractions and limitations of the prospect view that Wordsworth encountered in his attempts to write the nation are best demonstrated by a careful examination

70

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

of the two poems written about the view from a peak and the volume of poetry he published after the Napoleonic Wars. The Black Comb poems originated in a seaside journey Wordsworth made in the summer of 1811, when surrounded by failure and the specter of loss he surveyed the nation from the summit and sought to impose order on the personal, social, and political chaos forming around him. Like contemporaries involved in the national mapping project, he sought to create a map of the nation that transcended local differences by subjecting the landscape to the “prospect view,” the abstract imperial gaze available from the mountain summit. The “prospect view,” like the novel and the newspaper, marks what Benedict Anderson refers to as a shifting mode of “apprehending the world, which, more than anything else, made it possible to ‘think’ the nation” (22). The “prospect view,” the novel, and the newspaper participate in the project of national formation by creating the sense of space and time needed to imagine a coherent community that transcends the local—that is, that transcends a community that an individual can see. On two occasions, in the midst and aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Wordsworth tries to imagine such a community. In the Black Comb poems written between 1811 and 1813 and published in 1815, surveying, and the “prospect view” or grand imperial vision it affords, provides Wordsworth with a way of writing the nation as if it were an abstract unified whole, the self-contained and self-similar island nation united in purpose by the war with France. In the Thanksgiving Ode poems written and published after the war, Wordsworth made his most overt attempt to write the nation, to assume the bardic voice and explain the meaning of great national events. As national poetry, both the Black Comb and the Thanksgiving Ode poems are failures, though it is precisely their failure that makes them interesting. What emerges from an examination of these attempts at national poetry is Wordsworth’s inability to fuse the idealized abstract nation with the press of discordant local details. As a result of this failure, Wordsworth retreats from a totalized vision of the nation that would risk loss of perception of the local. Through Wordsworth’s “failure,” we sense the dangers of a nationalistic vision precisely as Wordsworth aspires to it. Similarly, it is the failure of national vision in the Black Comb poems that allows us to see the similarity between the “prospect view” and the “lawless reign” of Napoleon. In their failures, Wordsworth’s national poems do not give us the “homogeneous, empty time” that Anderson associates with narratives of nationalism, but instead a temporality full of pregnant moments. The Black Comb poems emerge out of a particularly difficult period in Wordsworth’s life. In August 1811, William and Mary Wordsworth took two of their younger children, Thomas and Catharine, on a seaside excursion, which ended with a prolonged stay in an unfinished house at Bootle on the Cumberland coast. The choice of Bootle was necessitated by two worries pressing on the Wordsworth family: the health of Thomas and Catharine and diminishing financial resources (Harper 197). The Wordsworth family descended on Bootle in search of the restorative waters of the sea. In a personal sense, this was a fateful grouping in that by the end of the following year both of the children who were to benefit from this trip would be dead—Catharine in June, Thomas in December 1812. In a letter written at Bootle but never sent, Wordsworth tells his friend Sir George Beaumont that “We cannot say that the Child for whose sake we came down to the sea-side has derived much

Surveying and Writing the Nation

71

benefit from the Bathing” (MY 1:507), a painful admission for a parent to make, perhaps painful enough to account for the letter remaining unposted. This admission was suppressed in a later letter sent to Sara Hutchinson, where Wordsworth writes: “Everybody thinks Catharine greatly improved; all cry out how much she is grown during her less than six weeks absence, and Dorothy and everybody else says confidently that her lameness is very much relieved. Mary and I think so too” (MY 1:509). Surely differences would exist between statements made in an unsent letter to a friend and statements made to a family member, but it is interesting that in reporting Catharine’s improvement Wordsworth focuses first on other people’s comments and adds his own and his wife’s concurrence almost as an afterthought. On this very personal issue of his daughter’s health, Wordsworth is torn between a clear-eyed vision of a desperate truth and the hope, seemingly against all hope, of restoration and recovery—between total revelation and the press of conflicting details. The letters from Bootle continually evince this tension between idealized vision and observable fact, whether the subject be the hoped-for recovery of his children or the moral implications of the surrounding landscape. In the same unsent letter to Sir George Beaumont, Wordsworth’s account of a walk he and Mary took to see the estate of Sir John Pennington, a prominent local landowner, reveals irresolvable tensions between an idealized vision of the nation and the observable facts of class division and economic power. The Wordsworths had hoped to see the Pennington estate at Muncaster, “but the noble Proprietor has contrived to shut himself up so with Plantations and chained gates and locks, that whatever prospects he may command from his stately Prison, or rather Fortification, can only be guessed at by the passing Traveller” (MY 1:507). No artistic vision can soften the stately prison or fortification the wealthy estate holder has self-defeatingly created for himself and himself only. As Wordsworth goes on to suggest, what Pennington has succeeded in doing is nothing less than a selfish usurpation of the land itself as well as the ability to see the land. He recounts how he and Mary were “compelled” to pursue their way in a “state of blindness and unprofitable peeping.” After quoting the poet, Thomson’s defiant words to Fortune, that she “cannot shut the windows of the sky,” Wordsworth concedes, “The windows of the sky were not shut, indeed, but the business was done more thoroughly; for the sky was nearly shut out altogether” (MY, 1:507). Pennington, the “Hibernian Peer,” had succeeded in securing not merely possession of property, but also the ability to see the property and all the views such a property affords. If the larger symbolic practice of the picturesque is, as Thomas Pfau states, “its transfiguration of spatial vistas into cultural and communal prospects,” Wordsworth appears to have encountered the antipicturesque reality of property ownership (28). Because no amount of imaginative representation can reclaim what cannot be seen, dogmatic assurance gives way to petulant irritation, and the vision of a “Happy England,” with its endless prospects, dissolves into a vision of a divided and enclosed England where a noble proprietor, and notably not an English one, can contrive to build his private fortification and shut out the very sky. The picturesque landscape, so important to the imaginative representation of the British nation, was not one of free Nature’s graces, but private property to which

72

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

access could be controlled and even denied.1 The precariousness of the picturesque, its dependence on the availability of a physical landscape, partially accounts for the emergence of the sublime, which does not require and in fact is defeated by, objective correlatives. Wordsworth wanted to believe in the power of the artist to shape the landscape imaginatively, yet he was also aware that wealth and power could more profoundly alter the land, even to the point of taking it out of circulation. The discordance between the vision of “Happy England” and the often unpalatable reality of a divided and heterogeneous England was not a new concern for Wordsworth. Many of the Lyrical Ballads and most of the political sonnets of 1801–1802 explore the divergence between idealized versions of the nation and its people and the often unpleasant reality of that nation and those people. However, by the summer of 1811, in the midst of a long and costly war, such criticisms of the nation or its people no longer seemed acceptable. Given the conflicting demands and tensions in his own life and the life of the nation, it is not surprising that the task that occupied Wordsworth’s thoughts was how to reconcile in a new national poetry the tension between the idealized unified nation and the evidences of division. In the two poems on Black Comb, which Wordsworth began probably in late August or early September 1811, this tension between idealized vision of the nation and the reality of a nation that seemed to resist imaginative unification finds expression in two very different views from the top of the mountain.2 One is a vision of the unending prospect of the nation, the imperial British Isles, laid out before the observer like a surveyor’s map; the other is a dark prophecy of the limitations of vision and the potential failure of the map to represent anything at all. “View from the Top of Black Comb” is a celebration of a unified vision of Britain. Contrary to the blindness and unprofitable peeping that the Wordsworths encountered around Pennington’s estate, from the top of Black Comb, “the amplest range / Of unobstructed prospect may be seen / That British ground commands” (3–5). What one sees from this clear and sun-drenched height is a prospect of united Britain: England, Wales, and Scotland: low dusky tracts, Where Trent is nursed, far southward! Cambrian Hills To the south-west, a multitudinous show; And, in a line of eye-sight linked with these, The hoary Peaks of Scotland that give birth To Tiviot’s Stream, to Annan, Tweed, and Clyde (5–10)

Like a surveyor perched upon the peak, the observer sees in the directions of the compass the unified landscape of Britain, and “in a line of eye-sight,” like that afforded by the mounted telescope on a surveyor’s theodolite, the Scottish highlands. 1 On the picturesque as a kind of visual enclosure, see Ann Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 61–137 and passim. 2 See also Michael Wiley’s excellent contrasting discussion of these two poems in Romantic Geography: Wordworth and Anglo-European Spaces (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1998).

Surveying and Writing the Nation

73

Black Comb itself is called “the imperial Station” (12), and when the poet looks to the ocean “visibly engirding” the Isle of Anglesey, the ascent up the mountain is figured as an act of colonization with Anglesey as the conquered realm: And ... Mona’s Isle That, as we left the Plain, before our sight Stood like a lofty Mount, uplifting slowly, (Above the convex of the watery globe) Into clear view the cultured fields that streak Its habitable shores; but now appears A dwindled object, and submits to lie At the Spectator’s feet. (16–23)

By choosing to refer to Anglesey as “Mona’s Isle,” its name under Roman occupation, Wordsworth invokes an earlier time of forced subjugation. In the first century CE, when the Romans occupied virtually all of Wales, Anglesey was one of the last strongholds of the Celts and their druidic priests. Because the Druids were successful in maintaining native resistance against the Romans, the imperial governor of Britain decided that it was vital to invade Anglesey and destroy the Druids. In 60 CE, the Romans crossed the Menai Straits and conquered and garrisoned the island. The Roman historian Tacitus notes that one of the first actions of the imperial governor was the destruction of the “groves devoted to Mona’s barbarous superstitions” (327). It is this destruction of the Druids’ sacred groves that makes possible the “cultured fields that streak” Anglesey’s now “habitable shores.” However, if this reference to Anglesey’s colonial past describes a movement from barbarous ritual to civilized culture, the ascent up the mountain contains this movement within a recurring pattern of imperial domination. From the plain Anglesey appeared to be a “lofty Mount,” which, like Imagination in Book VI of The Prelude or the Celestial City in Book II of The Excursion, is imbued with a kind of agency, “uplifting” itself. But, unlike Imagination or the Celestial City, the agency attributed to the lofty Mount passes quickly to the spectator. From the summit Anglesey is merely a “dwindled object,” the movement up the mountain corresponding to an increased sense of the spectator’s dominion. The landscape marked by human presence and activity, by culture and habitation, is reduced to an “object” that “submits” to the spectator’s imperial vision. Anglesey is a site of colonization, first by the Romans, then by the British, and finally by the gaze of the poet.3 3 A.L. Owen traces the emergence of the Druid as sage in his 1962 study The Famous Druids: A Survey of Three Centuries of English Literature on the Druids (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Prys Morgan describes the “sea-change” that the figure of the Druid underwent in the eighteenth century, transformed “from the arcane obscurantist, who indulged in human sacrifice, to the sage or intellectual defending his people’s faith and honour.” The Druid reappears in Chapter 5, used as a symbol of an unknown and potentially untoward native past by Wordsworth. See Prys Morgan, “From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period” in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For more on Druids and the druidic in Wordsworth, see Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

74

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

In an earlier version of this poem, another colonial entity, Ireland, is mostly absent from this vision, but in the published version of 1815, it too is brought, though not without problems, within the vision of unified Britain: Yon azure Ridge, Is it a perishable cloud? Or there Do we behold Erin’s Coast? Land sometimes by the roving shepherd swain, Like the bright confines of another world Not doubtfully perceived. (23–8)

Here the Wordsworthian surmise transforms a doubtful perception into an actual vision, though the transformation is marked by the equivocation of a perception “not doubtfully” perceived, and the romantic view of Ireland remains like that of “another world.” This sense of otherness, that Ireland is another world distinct from the English one of Black Comb, is reinforced by the immediate injunction to the observer to “Look homeward now!” away from Ireland back to the known prospect of England, Wales, and Scotland. The phrase “Look homeward now,” an allusion to Milton’s “Lycidas,” links Wordsworth’s vision of the nation with that of the consummate English poet who nearly two centuries earlier had looked across this same sea, which had claimed the life of his friend, Edward King. The Ireland available to the poet’s imagination is not Ireland itself, but the pastoral invention of Milton. This is an Ireland mediated through books, through the “works / Of mighty Poets” (Prelude, V.594–5), and the sudden appearance of the drowned young Englishman, like the bloated body of the drowned man of Esthwaite (also described in Book V of The Prelude), is reminiscent of what Hartman calls Wordsworth’s fear of engulfment (Wordsworth’s Poetry 232). Just at the moment when Wordsworth moves toward the grand gesture of presenting the nation unified by a single spectator, the nation itself, or perhaps the danger inherent in the totalized nation, surfaces and threatens to engulf the poet. Despite the somewhat problematic inclusion of Ireland in the imperial vision, the poem’s conclusion passes over these difficulties in a paean to British power: Look homeward now! In depth, in height, in circuit, how serene The Spectacle, how pure!—Of Nature’s works, In earth, and air, and earth-embracing sea, A Revelation infinite it seems; Display august of man’s inheritance, Of Britain’s calm felicity and power. (28–34)

The spectacle here is virtually subject to a measurement of “depth,” “height” and “circuit,” and that measurement is nothing less than “man’s inheritance” the land itself, a distinctively Burkean view of the British landscape.4 The view from the top of Black Comb is a view of the British nation and the geography that “seems” 4 Theresa Kelley notes many of the same details of the poem to support her reading of Wordsworth’s strategy of containment, how the writing and rewriting of the poems as well as

Surveying and Writing the Nation

75

to represent the very strength and power of the nation. As John Barrell has noted, these “prospect” views, with their open and unending panorama, are not available to everyone; the prospect and the capability to see all that the prospect allows are clearly tied to questions of political power: Those who can comprehend the order of society and nature are the observers of a prospect, in which others are merely objects. Some comprehend, others are comprehended; some are fit to survey the extensive panorama, some are confined within one or other of the micro-prospects which, to the comprehensive observer, are parts of a wider landscape, but which, to those confined within them, are all they see. (“Public Prospect” 23–4)5

As Sir Philip Sidney wrote in New Arcadia, “a pretty height ... gives the eye lordship over a good large circuit” (quoted in Cosgrove 193). Like the map drawn from the imperial height, the prospect view reveals no boundaries that are not attached to the land—England, Wales, Scotland, and (somewhat problematically) Ireland—all subsumed into a totalized vision of the British nation-state. “View from the Top of Black Comb” attempts to write that nation as if it were something designed for its destiny, as if it could be mapped in all directions and unified by that map. But the problems raised by the problematic placement of Ireland in both the observer’s vision and on the surveyor’s map, while elided by the poem’s conclusion, return in full force in the other poem written at this time, “Written with a Slate-pencil, on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb,” intended as an inscription to the passing traveler. “Written with a Slate-pencil” details what may be seen from the summit of Black Comb but concludes with a curious cautionary tale. Wordsworth relates the story, told to him while at Bootle, of the experience of one of the surveyors employed by the Trigonometric Survey.6 While taking triangulation data on the summit, the surveyor—usually identified as Colonel William Mudge, then head of the Survey—had been suddenly overcome by darkness and clouds so thick that even the map in his hands disappeared from his sight. In the drafts leading up to the first published version of the poem, Wordsworth reworked its dramatic structure. In the first published version, the inscription is for a spot below the summit of the mountain, while in earlier drafts the inscription is intended for the mountain’s summit. In the first published version, the inscription serves as a cautionary word to some future action, but in the earlier drafts the action is completed, the mountain already conquered. One subtle change reveals the importance of this shift. In the earlier drafts, the poem begins: their classification and reclassification served Wordsworth’s larger shift from a rhetoric of the sublime to a rhetoric of the beautiful. See Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, 158–9. 5 For a related discussion of the prospect view and its relation to history, see Stephen Bann, “’Views of the past’: reflections on the treatment of historical objects and museums of history” in The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 6 “The circumstance alluded to at the conclusion of these verses was told me by Dr. Satterthwaite, who was Incumbent of Boodle, a small town at the foot of Black Comb. He had the particulars from one of the engineers, who was employed in making trigonometrical surveys of that region” (Fenwick note quoted in SP 518).

76

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation Glad welcome, bold Adventurer, who hast clomb This speculative Mount, from blackness named (“Reading Text 1” 1–2)

In the first published version, the poem begins: Stay, bold Adventurer; rest awhile thy limbs On this commodious Seat! for much remains Of hard ascent before thou reach the top Of this huge Eminence—from blackness named (1–4)

The shift from “Glad welcome” to “Stay” points to an important shift in the tone of the poem, from that of a communal sense of mutual endeavor to that of epitaphic confrontation. While a glad welcome might be given to a fellow traveler, the forceful injunction to halt given in the first published version makes the reader a passing traveler seized for a moment by an epitaphic other-worldly voice. This is more in keeping with the form of address that follows in which the traveler is called “bold Adventurer,” a designation that Wordsworth had earlier used to describe a very different climber: Napoleon. In the sonnet “Look now on that Adventurer who hath paid,” written a year or two earlier and published along with the Black Comb poems in 1815, Wordsworth referred to Napoleon as “that Adventurer” and in the opening octave likened Napoleon to a mountain-climber who, led by his “blind Goddess” (5), has gained the peak, ambition overriding any pretense to comprehension. From this “prosperous Height” (6), Napoleon sees and possesses all that lies within sight, “the Elements of worldly might” (7), just as the observer in “View from the Top of Black Comb” saw all of “Nature’s works / In earth, and air, and earth-embracing sea.” To see is to control. But obviously to be likened to Napoleon in 1811 Britain was not without its critical edge, and the literary association Wordsworth makes here links Napoleon with Milton’s Satan, who is described in Paradise Lost as “the great adventurer” (X.440). It is therefore fitting that in the concluding sestet to this sonnet, Wordsworth invokes the historical precedent of divine wrath to right the chaotic order that Napoleon has inaugurated. Wordsworth calls down on Napoleon an “ignominious death” (14) and envisions “internal darkness” (11) as overcoming Napoleon, just as Mudge was blinded on the peak by darkness and storms. The caution here is not that Mudge or any surveyor or even any mountain-climber is akin to Napoleon, but rather that the ambition to conquer the mountain and survey the world is not distinct from Napoleon’s imperial ambition. The literal prospect required by the surveyor’s task is directly mapped to the figurative prospect assumed by the imperial conqueror. Both represent the desire for absolute control and possession.7 7 We might also link both the literal prospect of the surveyor and the figurative prospect of the imperial conqueror to the abstractions associated with French systems of thought and revolutionary theories. Tim Fulford, in discussing Uvedale Price’s criticisms of eighteenth century landscape designers such as Capability Brown, writes, “For Price distant prospects unbalanced by close views represented a despotism which might be exercised by revolutionary theorists or by the landed interest” (121). For more on abstraction and its relation to system, see David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) and Alison Hickey, Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s Excursion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

Surveying and Writing the Nation

77

Wordsworth describes Mudge, however, not as an adventurer but as a “geographical Labourer” (14) attempting “To measure height and distance” (16). Through his studies, Mudge is given “Full many a glimpse (but sparingly bestowed / On timid man) of Nature’s processes / On the exalted hills” (18–20), insight which allies him closely with the Wordsworthian poet. The ambition necessary to be granted these insights, however, is the same ambition that makes one susceptible to future chastisement, for though he is able to see and map what he sees, once while he worked: Within that canvas Dwelling, suddenly The many-coloured map before his eyes Became invisible: for all around Had darkness fallen—unthreatened, unproclaimed— As if the golden day itself had been Extinguished in a moment; total gloom, In which he sate with unclosed eyes Upon the blinded mountain’s silent top! (22–9)

Just as Sir John Pennington had succeeded in limiting what could be seen to the point of shutting out the sky itself, the darkness that descends on Mudge succeeds in limiting what the surveyor can see. Like the allusion to “Lycidas” in “The View from the Top of Black Comb,” the image of engulfment emerges just at the moment of total vision, darkness engulfing Mudge and making the visible world invisible. But what makes this darkness even more curious is the fact that Mudge is in his tent and the darkness renders the map invisible. It is the representation of the land that disappears: The measuring of height and distance, the lonely task pursued week after week, is canceled in a moment by the vagaries of the weather. The “grand terraqueous spectacle” seen in the “View from the Top of Black Comb” is the ideal picture of the land that the map is supposed to represent, yet as Mudge’s experience makes clear, it is a remarkably frail picture purchased at the expense of other representations that would try to account for and include the darkness. As the Wordsworths discovered after being reduced to “unprofitable peeping,” no amount of imaginative activity could represent landscapes that had been taken out of circulation. But the caution goes further, for in many ways the map is Britain, certainly at least one of the few representations of a unified Britain available to the imagination. The map is a record of the vision of Britain presented in “View from the Top of Black Comb,” but here it is subject to total obliteration by sudden darkness, a darkness like that of Napoleon’s rise to power. The darkness that threatens the map of Britain is the darkness that has already enclosed continental Europe.8 Napoleon is in that darkness, but so too are the imperial British, the bold Adventurers who have climbed the peak to survey the world and seek to possess the land by measuring it. The caution is not 8 For more on the importance of the figure of Napoleon to the nineteenth century imagination and Wordsworth’s conception of the imagination, see Theresa M. Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Alan Liu, The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 3–31 and passim.

78

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

simply against the weather, but also against the darkness that threatens the nation from without as well as the darkness that threatens from within. If the “View from the Top of Black Comb” is the imperial gaze of the complacent Briton or that of the noble proprietor of Muncaster, the inscription warns of the cost of complacency and cautions of the “blinded mountain’s silent top” where Britain may be led by its own blind goddess. These two poems on Black Comb reenact a very old contest over the imaginative meaning of the mountain summit, whether it be the top of Black Comb, Snowdon, Mont Blanc or Mont Ventoux. In the ancient and medieval imagination, the mountaintop wreathed in clouds was a trial chamber of the spirit, an intersection of the physical and spiritual domains, a place of terror and epiphany. It was the height of human ambition and the depth of worldly denial, favored spot for monasteries, retreats, and hermit cells. When Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux in April 1336, he was purportedly the first person to climb a mountain simply for the sake of doing it, “to see what so great an elevation had to offer” (quoted in Schama 419). In a letter describing the ascent, Petrarch recounts his struggles to gain the mountain peak and how he is driven still further in his ascent by his own desire for knowledge. When he reaches the peak he surveys the grand spectacle that lies all around him, drinking in the landscape and feeling filled with the sense of power which his ambition has gained for him. He then takes out and opens at random his copy of Augustine’s Confessions, alighting on this suspiciously apt passage: “And men go about to wonder at the heights of mountains and the mighty waves of the sea and the wide sweep of rivers and the circuit of the ocean and the revolution of the stars but themselves they consider not” (quoted in Schama 421). Rebuked by his own false ambition and chastised for his imperial desires, Petrarch’s experience provides a model for the contested meaning of the mountaintop. But imperial desires and the potential for knowledge exerted a powerful attraction to later generations and, although at the beginning of the nineteenth century Shelley could write of his fears of self-annihilation upon seeing Mont Blanc, such attitudes were all but replaced by the muscular, quasimilitary determination of soldiers, “Adventurers,” and the curious to conquer the mountain. It was this shift that John Ruskin lamented later in the nineteenth century when he addressed the mountaineers in Sesame and Lilies: “You have despised nature, that is to say, all the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery ... The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a beer-garden” (89–90). Wordsworth, earlier in the century, was more ambivalent about the potential for comprehension the mountaintop affords. Desirous of the grand imperial vision, he nonetheless remained confused about what the vision might mean or whether it could have any meaning at all. If the subjugation of the mountain yields the potential for comprehensive vision, what might that vision obliterate to gain comprehensiveness? Wordsworth felt that a great deal would be erased and sought to repopulate the landscape with the monuments and meanings that the map of the landscape ignored. In the years surrounding Waterloo, he continued to seek the comprehensive vision, although he never forgot the darkness that had overcome the geographic laborer on the summit of Black Comb.

Surveying and Writing the Nation

79

During the period when the Black Comb poems were being written and revised (1811–1813), the map had already assumed a place of prominence in the national imagination. Primitive woodcut maps could be found in virtually every magazine that treated national and international affairs, showing military actions on the continent or fortification efforts in the south of England.9 The systematic mapping of Britain, which officially began in 1791, was slowly progressing, and by 1811 most of the Trigonometric or by then Ordnance Survey maps of the south had been published. The detailed 1-inch scale maps were part of a larger effort to create a uniform and unified representation of the nation. Based on a network of triangulation data gathered from throughout Britain, the Ordnance Survey maps represented the application of rigorous scientific methods to the measurement of the land. As has been true of virtually all national mapping enterprises, from its inception the Trigonometric Survey was essentially a military operation. William Roy, generally credited with having founded the Trigonometric Survey (though it was not officially funded and named until after his death), began as a military cartographer attached to the British Army in Scotland. Following the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, Roy, himself a Scot, was appointed to head a survey needed for an extensive program of fort building and road construction to aid the further pacification of the Scottish Highlands (Seymour 4). But colonial war in North America shifted the focus of mapping away from Scotland, and Roy’s later work on coastal surveys was also superseded by another colonial war in 1775. Roy repeatedly advocated a national survey, complaining about the deficiencies of the many privately created county maps, which could not be accurately fitted together and which failed to cover all of Great Britain (Harley, “Re-mapping” 56). Whereas his petitions to Parliament and the King focused on the military advantages that such maps would afford, his own interest was primarily scientific. This compromise between military and scientific purposes would plague the Trigonometric Survey until well after Waterloo. When William Mudge, Wordsworth’s geographic laborer, was appointed director of the survey in 1798, he inherited a military operation that functioned under the Board of Ordnance, was staffed by military personnel, and was primarily responsible for producing military maps of the south of England for defensive purposes. As the threat of invasion increased, Mudge was pressured to sacrifice scientific accuracy and certain features (such as field boundaries) thought inessential for military purposes (Seymour 47). Despite the ostensibly benign purpose of the survey, not everyone found the presence of surveyors comforting. Simon Woolcot, a field surveyor working in South Malton, wrote to Mudge in 1804 to complain about the lack of the armed military escort that had been supplied to other surveying teams: 9 E.A. Reitan identifies 1739 as the approximate date when maps began to be commonly used in English periodicals. For more information see his “Expanding Horizons: Maps in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731–1754,” Imago Mundi 37 (1985), 54–62. Mark Monmonier argues that accurate and timely maps did not become common until the development of photoengraving in the later part of the nineteenth century. See his “The Rise of Map Use by Elite Newspapers in England, Canada, and the United States,” Imago Mundi 38 (1986), 46–60, for a qualitative study of map use in the late nineteenth century.

80

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation I must say, I feel a considerable degree of uneasiness, as I have not received the favour of a similar indulgence [protection by warrant officers], since the authority of a warrant is now become necessary to guard me, particularly on the coast, from those insults and interruptions, in the execution of my business, which I have so frequently and so lately experienced. (quoted in Arden-Close 50)

While the government pursued the survey for the supposed protection of the people, the survey itself needed protection from those same people. The presence of armed military personnel reconnoitering English soil was taken as an affront in the countryside remote from the Tower of London Drawing Room (where the Trigonometric Survey had its offices), and popular fears of an armed occupation by the nation’s own army and the increased taxation that many thought was the real purpose of the survey brought the surveyors into confrontation with the local people. The meliorist justifications of the survey, that it would provide scientific accuracy for future mapping, that it would benefit transportation and commerce, and that it would aid in the protection of the nation against invasion, seemed to be lost on the local populations, who suspected the military surveyors were involved in a government plan to levy higher taxes or an even more insidious effort to pacify and subjugate the British people. These fears were not completely unfounded because, up to the end of the eighteenth century, detailed systematic surveying had been either a local county undertaking or a colonial enterprise. The Down Survey of Ireland, administered by William Petty at the end of the seventeenth century, had been used for taxation and pacification, as were the surveys of North America in the middle of the eighteenth century and that of India in the 1770s. The only real model of a national survey was that undertaken by the French government in the eighteenth century and used by the Revolutionary Council and later Napoleon to reconfigure local administrative boundaries along “rational” lines (Konvitz 43).10 This was hardly a comforting precedent to the British people during the Napoleonic Wars. Although the unified mapping of Britain seemed to promise much, it undoubtedly struck others as an unnecessary intrusion into local affairs and, like the contemporaneous national census, seemed to provide central government with more information than was either necessary or desirable. And because it was administered entirely by the military, the survey was free (at least until after the war) from Parliamentary intervention or local control. The national Ordnance Survey map promised a grand overview of the nation like that seen in “View from the Top of Black Comb,” but as “Written with a Slate-pencil, on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb” suggests, such aspirations bore an uncomfortable proximity to those of that “Adventurer” Napoleon and his imperial ambitions and centralizing tendencies. The darkness that envelops Mudge and his map might be seen as something of a fantasy of local and natural resistance to the abstractions of the mapmaker. Whereas the engulfment that Hartman associates with infinite revelation threatens the perception of the particular, the engulfment imagined by 10 J.B. Harley notes that as early as 1756 there were calls from commercial interests for a systematic survey of Britain, and the national cartographic projects of France were held up as models (“Society of Arts” 112).

Surveying and Writing the Nation

81

Wordsworth serves to protect the particular and the local from eradication at the hands of the totalizing map. Although it was an error for Wordsworth to place in Mudge’s hands a “many-colour’d map”—for Mudge was collecting triangulation data so his map would have been merely a series of interconnected triangles with heights and distances marked—such a map, the topographical map, the political map, the military map, was the true representative of the loss of local differentiation.11 In 1815, however, Wordsworth was uncertain of his own loyalties in this tension between the imperial prospect view with its “grand terraqueous vision” and the detailed local survey with its careful attention to local difference. In the 1815 classification of his poems, the clear-sighted view of a unified Britain depicted in “View from the Top of Black Comb” was separated from its companion poem and placed in the prominent classification “Poems of the Imagination,” while the dark prophecy of limited vision and chastisement of imperial ambition was placed in the less prominent and more prosaic classification “Inscriptions.” The year 1815 was prominent for other reasons, and at the end of the year Wordsworth turned his attention to trying to understand the meaning of the victory at Waterloo and the tumultuous decades that had preceded it. He sought to write the nation from a vantage point like that of the “View from the Top of Black Comb,” but this attempt to write an explicit nationalist poetry, the “Ode on the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving” and its accompanying poems is not so much a celebration of the British nation as it is a record of Wordsworth’s failure to write such poetry. In a March 1816 letter to his brother Christopher, Wordsworth revealed his own anxieties about the soon-to-be-published volume of poems containing the Thanksgiving Ode, stating that “The state of the public Mind is at present little adapted to relish any part of my poetical effusion on this occasion ... I write chiefly for Posterity” (MY 2:292). Wordsworth’s concerns proved prophetic, for the volume was virtually ignored by the reviews, and those few reviews it did receive were, at best, mixed. Posterity has been even less kind. The title poem and its companion pieces have been virtually ignored and, when referred to at all, usually held up as the nadir of Wordsworth’s career, ample proof of the poet’s declining power: unoriginal, derivative, or as Carl Woodring calls them, “mismanaged” pieces that “parallel, in allegorical trappings and static positioning, the monuments to military glory that crowd the aisles of Westminster Abbey” (140). Indeed, if we take Wordsworth at his word that these poems owe their existence “to a patriotism, anxious to exert itself in commemorating that course of action, by which Great Britain, has, for some time past, distinguished herself above all other nations,”12 the volume must be deemed a total failure, for a close examination of the contents of Thanksgiving Ode, January 18, 1816, With Other Short Pieces, Chiefly Referring to Recent Public Events reveals not a commemoration, but a vacillation between celebration and chastisement and an imaginative struggle between the pressure of contemporary events and the ability 11 Ron Broglio examines how “the very means surveyors and tourists use to represent the land transform the physical land into an abstract object” (71). See “Mapping British Earth and Sky,” Wordsworth Circle 33.2 (2002 Spring): 70–76. 12 Wordsworth expresses these sentiments in the “Advertisement” prefixed to the Thanksgiving Ode volume and reprinted in Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 177.

82

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

of the poet to transform those events into poetry.13 A careful examination of these commemorative poems of 1816 reveals a poet intent on writing the nation but unable to overcome the internal divisions and “downright party fury” (MY 2:292) that everywhere fractures the nation. Ultimately the victor proves to be Nature, an abstraction as well, but one capable of annihilating the grids of the mapmakers and the identity of nations, and it is clearly no accident that the volume opens with a paean to the sun and closes in “darkness infinite.” The title poem of the volume, the “Ode: The Morning of the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving, January 18, 1816,” is supposed to commemorate the national day of thanksgiving set aside by Parliament to mark the end of the continental wars. It opens with a high impassioned tribute to the sun, “Hail, universal Source of pure delight,” where “Hail” personifies the Sun, and the repetition of absolutes in the first line—“universal,” “Source,” “pure,”—initially sets the tone of the poem as an impassioned through curiously abstract celebration of the Thanksgiving Day. Yet amid this celebration, there is already the hint of a darker tone, for the bliss offered by the sun is only a possibility, not an actuality. The sun “canst” (2) but does not necessarily “shed” its light on the people, and those people are oddly qualified as “hearts howe’er insensible or rude” (3). If this is intended as a tribute to the British people and their triumph, it is a decidedly ambivalent one. Later, this opening apostrophe to the sun is further qualified by the recognition that the sun itself is in subjugation to a higher power, “Framed in subjection to the chains / That bind thee to the path which God ordains” (16–7). Early in the poem Wordsworth prepares us for the shifts and odic reversals that will characterize the complex response that this poem seeks to articulate. The poem quickly shifts to an attempt to understand the war, and Ketchum is undoubtedly correct when he refers to this passage as “leading [Wordsworth’s] complacent readers up the garden path” (15). The passage begins with a question followed by a response, “Have we not conquered?—By the vengeful sword? / Ah no, by dint of Magnanimity” (57–8) and paints a chivalric picture of the “loyal band” following “their liege Lord” whose actions “Shall live enrolled above the starry spheres” (66). We are then presented with the possibility of a bardic voice that will tell a commonplace tale of martial struggle and triumph, the conventionality of the tale revealed by the long string of clichés celebrating those “whose spirit no reversal could quell” (70), who “mid the failing never failed” (71), who “struggled and prevailed” (72), who “clothed with strength and skill” (75) stood “Firm as a rock in stationary fight” (77) and who were “In motion rapid as the lightning’s gleam” (78). The passage concludes with an impassioned, bloodthirsty celebration of British 13 J.R. Watson offers this assessment of Wordsworth’s 1816 performance: “Wordsworth was celebrating his own idealised self here: he saw the battle as calling for the loftiest poet to record it ... Wordsworth was giving expression to the very powerful feeling that the events from 1808 to 1815 would go down to posterity as major contributions to the sense of national identity and European history” (175, 181). While agreeing with Watson’s assessment, the following argument attempts to offer a sympathetic reading of Wordsworth’s investment in the war and Britain’s victory. See J. R. Watson, Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars (Basingstroke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Surveying and Writing the Nation

83

martial skill—“Woe, woe to all that face her in the field! / Appalled she may not be, and cannot yield” (81–2)—that actively plays on popular jingoistic assertions of British fortitude and perseverance. Immediately following this exhortation, the poem takes a sudden and unexpected turn. In a letter to Southey, Wordsworth specified this turn as being “the passage which I most suspect of being misunderstood” (MY 2:324). The previous lines had built up to a nationalist, martial frenzy, but that frenzy may blind others as to what Wordsworth considers the true meaning of the war: And thus is missed the sole true glory That can belong to human story! At which they only shall arrive Who through the abyss of weakness dive: The very humblest are too proud of heart: And one brief day is rightly set apart To him who lifteth up and layeth low; For that Almighty God to whom we owe, Say not that we have vanquished—but that we survive. (83–91)

Thus is the question “Have we not conquered?—By the vengeful sword?” answered. It is the very emphasis on the glory of victory that leads many to miss the “sole true glory,” the lesson of deep humility that even victory in war teaches. If we had read with pleasure the chivalric, romanticized depiction of war, we might be unprepared for the trap Wordsworth has set. The invocation of the chivalrous past, the romanticizing of war, prepares the unpleasant lesson of humility, which is curiously figured as a “dive” through an “abyss,” a Dantean surrender to what amounts to annihilation. That this is a difficult lesson unavailable to everyone is made clear by the italicization of they, which places the emphasis on those undergoing what amounts to ritual baptism in order to understand the meaning of the war. That Wordsworth continued to worry that his meaning might be lost is made clear by his subsequent revision: on republication in 1836, the typography was changed so that “they” was no longer italicized and the first line was set as “And thus is missed the sole true glory.” This subtle modification marks Wordsworth’s surrender to the judgment of history, his belated recognition that they, the British people, would never make that dive into the abyss and that both then and in 1836 they had missed the lesson. Humility is the lesson because the British nation has not so much triumphed over the French as it has outlasted them: a realistic appraisal, though a curious one in a poem ostensibly written to commemorate “that course of action, by which Great Britain ... has distinguished herself above all other nations.” For Wordsworth, humility is necessary because the British triumph came only after a long and costly war that devastated Europe and threatened at times the very shores of Britain. To celebrate the triumph and ignore the 22 years of war that preceded it is to miss the point. Surely God was in the triumph, but as Wordsworth reminds his readers, the “impure” had their “dominion” too (93). The war was not simply the chivalric triumph of good over evil, but a painful, lengthy process characterized by “— Wide-wasted regions—cities wrapped in flames—” (98) that made “the foundation of our nature” shake (101). If this were simply a battle between good and evil, why

84

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

did it take so long and cost so much? How does one see a purpose in the growth of such unrepentant and unchecked evil? The answer is one that Wordsworth had rehearsed many times before, dating back to his essay on the Convention of Cintra and presented here in the Thanksgiving Ode in a 14-line passage that is nearly an embedded sonnet: A crouching purpose—a distracted will— Opposed to hopes that battened upon scorn, And to desires whose ever-waxing horn Not all the light of earthly power could fill; Opposed to dark, deep plots of patient skill, And celerities of lawless force Which, spurning God, had flung away remorse— What could they gain but shadows of redress? —So bad proceeded propagating worse; And discipline was passion’s dire excess. Widens the fatal web—its lines extend, And deadlier poisons in the chalice blend— When will your trials teach you to be wise? —O prostrate Lands, consult your agonies! (111–24)

For Wordsworth, the growth of Napoleon’s power, the widening of the “fatal web,” like the widening of France’s boundaries across the face of a map, was made possible by the lack of purpose and the distracted will of Britain and its allies. Wordsworth directly attributes the length and cost of the war to the partisan opposition politics that sought appeasement with France instead of rigorous prosecution of the war. However, though he is quick to blame the opposition for being taken in by the seductiveness of Napoleon’s power, the beginning of this passage reenacts that seduction. Britain’s passive and conciliatory “crouching purpose” is opposed to France’s active and defiant “hopes” that grow fat feeding on Britain’s scorn. France’s ambition, which earlier in the poem Wordsworth had characterized as “insane,” is here presented in the generic terms of gothic allurement—the seemingly benign image of the “everwaxing” moon. This initial, almost seductive, characterization of Napoleon’s power explains, if not justifies, the conciliatory stance of Britain’s crouching purpose. The second characterization tears away the veil and casts Napoleon as a Miltonic Satan, executing his “dark, deep plots of patient skill,” triumphing through “lawless force,” and ultimately “spurning God.” The “lawless force” of Napoleon is the same bemoaned by Wordsworth in the sonnet “Look now on that Adventurer,” and the sense that European governments contributed to their own woes can be found in virtually all the political sonnets of 1808–1811. In the Thanksgiving Ode, Wordsworth brings that guilt closer to home and suggests that the long war was punishment for a “crouching purpose” and “distracted will” in the face of unrepentant evil. Opposition to the war lengthened the war, increased its cost, and allowed Napoleon’s “fatal web” to extend across all of Europe. These are the “deadlier poisons” awaiting the British people. What is difficult to understand, however, is why Wordsworth refers to “poisons” in a “chalice.” Whereas the use of the word chalice could be attributed to the high

Surveying and Writing the Nation

85

diction that is used throughout the ode, it is difficult not to associate chalice with its specialized liturgical meaning. In an early poem, Coleridge had made use of the liturgical meanings attached to chalice when he wrote in “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” of the doomed young poet foolishly seeking his salvation and redemption in his own death. In that 1794 poem, the poet warned Chatterton to “dash the poisoned chalice from thy hand!” (93), the poisoned chalice of self-love and self-pity. Perhaps Wordsworth intended to invoke a similar irony: Appeasement of Napoleon was perceived by some to hold the promise of salvation, but that promise was always a false one, poisoned from the start. Such irony may have been intended, but the ultimate irony and the ultimate heresy are that the liturgical chalice could be poisoned, that the most significant symbol of the promise of human redemption could be the means of massive human destruction. With diligence the seductions of Napoleon’s power could have been resisted, but there is no way to differentiate the poisoned chalice from the cup of salvation. In addition, the chalice reminds us of what is missing in the poem. Just as the liturgical function of the chalice is to enable the “physical” manifestation of the missing God, so the chalice in the ode invokes the missing Christ and the missing message of redemption and salvation. Perhaps the chalice is poisoned because the possibility of redemption no longer exists, the relationship between God and his people, especially the British people, inexorably altered by the conduct of the nation during the war. In struggling to find meaning in the war, Wordsworth finds that the only God he can invoke is not the New Testament Christ but the Old Testament Jehovah. Though logical, the conclusion the poet reaches is to say the very least challenging, if not—as the Eclectic Review put it—“strange and revolting” (Reiman 1:380). If God is in the victory, God is in the defeat as well. If God is with the vanquisher, God is with the vanquished as well. “He guides the Pestilence” (262), controls the rains, “Springs the hushed Volcano’s mine” (266), and rules the earthquake, flood, tornado, and sun. And why does God exact such violence on the earth? For Thou art angry with thine enemies! For these, and for our errors, And sins (274–6)

For the poet, Napoleonic France is God’s enemy, but God is also angry for “our” errors and sins, the long war just punishment for Britain’s uncertain execution of the war. If Napoleon’s ascendancy shakes the “foundation of our nature,” it is only because we cannot understand how God “cloth’st the wicked in their dazzling mail, / And by [his] just permission they prevail” (283–4). Just as Britain is made the instrument of God’s vengeance on France, so is France the instrument of God’s vengeance on Britain: But thy most dreaded instrument, In working out a pure intent, Is Man—arrayed for mutual slaughter,— Yea, Carnage is thy daughter! (279 82)

86

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

This is a logical if abhorrent way of working out the questions raised by the long war. How else can one explain God’s “pure intent” in “mutual slaughter” other than as punishment and retribution? It is also unclear whether “pure intent” refers to God’s beneficent plan or to the sheer instrumentality of God’s unknowable will. Of course, God’s most important “instrument” in “working out a pure intent” was, for Christians, not “Man,” but the Son of Man. Whereas in this passage, “Man” may be the sacrificial offering, there is no hint that sacrifice will lead to redemption or salvation or anything, except perhaps appeasement of an angry God. The relationship between God and the British people has reverted to the Old Testament’s prenational model: that between God and the Israelites before the founding of the Hebrew nation. The implication is that the British nation is not yet fully a nation, but a wandering tribe beset by conflicting interests, crouching and distracted, sinning and erring, struggling toward nationhood. This rebuke challenges the righteous patriotism that national victories tend to unleash by suggesting that Napoleon’s victories as much as Britain’s were part of God’s “working out a pure intent.” To Wordsworth, these “ghastly sight[s]” (292) of war are, to this Old Testament God, merely “Links in the chain of [his] tranquillity” (299). The “soft cadence of the church-tower bells” (316) breaks the odic revelry and recalls the poet to the present. The poet imagines some of the zealous commemoration services that will mark this day but turns away from them to “humbler ceremonies” (330). The sound of the church bells also reminds us of the singular and yet communal nature of the thanksgiving day commemoration—the bells tolling together all across Britain at nine o’clock on the morning of 16 January 1816. This state-mandated ritual creates a powerful sense of an imagined community, and Wordsworth’s movement from public commemoration to private prayer parallels Anderson’s description of the function served by one of the necessary rituals of the nation-state—the reading of the modern newspaper: It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. (35)

Like Anderson’s newspaper readers, Wordsworth’s contrite citizens will perform actions in silent privacy that will be replicated simultaneously by millions of others across the nation. The imagined community of the nation is realized in that moment of independent and simultaneous action. The moment of simultaneous and shared endeavor created by government proclamation forces both the nation and the poem to resolve temporarily the conflict between the real and the idealized nation. However, the sudden and frequent reversals of the Thanksgiving Ode accentuate the powerful, almost irresolvable tension between the ghastly sights of war and the wished-for vision of England “dearer far than life is dear” found by the poet in his volume of “gallant chivalry” held in youth upon his “sleepless bed” (139–40). The poem essays two such attempts to write a chivalrous history of the war, but both efforts founder when the loyal band gives way to the dead “conducted home in single state” (256), and although

Surveying and Writing the Nation

87

these attempts seem to be failures, perhaps failure is the intent. Like the abstract triangles of the surveyor that fail to contain the proliferating detail of the land itself, the commemoration that the ode attempts to enact in language continually proves resistant to abstractions, as the poem repeatedly returns to the physical realities of the war. This tension between abstract commemoration and actual cost recurs in the Thanksgiving Ode when the poet considers the question of raising a monument in commemoration of the battle, a monument that is first immediately rejected and then considered necessary to preserve the memory of the war’s cost. We are conducted into Westminster Abbey, where are laid “Kings, warriors, high-souled poets, saint-like sages, / England’s illustrious sons of long, long ages” (234-5), and presented with an imagined “Commemoration holy” (239) in honor of “the valiant of this land” (230). According to Anderson, such abstract commemorations are central to modern nationalism, as he makes clear in his discussion of the various “cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers”: The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them has no true precedents in earlier times. To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busybody who “discovered” the Unknown Soldier’s name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. (9)

Wordsworth begins with a scene of abstract national commemoration, but the scene shifts gradually from the empty national sepulcher of Westminster Abbey to the crowded country churchyard to which many returned from war. The commemoration then is: For them who bravely stood unhurt—or bled With medicable wounds, or found their graves Upon the battle field—or under ocean’s waves; Or were conducted home in single state, And long procession—there to lie, Where their son’s sons, and all posterity, Unheard by them, their deeds shall celebrate! (253–9)

The celebration of national victory is drawn morbidly and inexorably back to the recognition of the cost of that victory. The abstract nature of a national commemorative service in Westminster Abbey proves strangely hollow and requires the presence of the actual dead, the individuals “conducted home in single state.” This shift from abstract to particular effaces the nation that the abstract monument is supposed to commemorate. As Marc Redfield notes of Anderson’s discussion of the tombs of the Unknown Soldier, “The Tomb’s scene of interpellation can have very powerful effects, for it permits the mourning subject to transform a particular loss—real or imagined—into the general loss suffered by the nation” (57). But Wordsworth’s repeated return to the cost of victory revives the questions about the meaning of the victory and the long struggle that led to it: the humility demanded by one’s belief in God’s presence in all, and the abhorrent logic necessary to attribute to God such

88

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

calamity and destruction. The comprehensive vision proves to be uncomprehending and leads one to miss “the sole true glory.” The abstract monument—“saturated,” as Anderson puts it, “with ghostly national imaginings” precisely because it is abstract— finds its fitting, if disturbing, counterpart in the named and solitary grave.14 Surely Wordsworth had reason to fear that these sudden and frequent reversals would lose his readers. The British Review praised the “awful strain of piety that pervades the whole” (Reiman 1:149), but the Eclectic Review probably came closest to identifying the underlying cause of the difficulties of this poem in particular and the poems of the 1816 volume in general: Mr. Wordsworth, always metaphysical, loses himself perpetually in the depths of abstraction on the simplest subject ... It is only at intervals that he comes within reach of the sympathy of ordinary readers. We never think of claiming kindred with Mr. Wordsworth as a man of the same nerve and texture and heart’s blood with ourselves. He looks on nature with other than human senses. (Reiman 1:378)

The underlying logic and dramatic structure of the poem are abstract, as is much of the content. But the poem also oscillates between the abstract and the particular, between an apostrophe to the sun and the “deep quiet of this morning hour” (36) where the poet’s “Apt language” comes to him “ready as the tuneful notes” of “birds in leafy bower” (39, 41). The problem is not simply that Wordsworth loses himself in abstraction but that the abstractions and the particulars are frequently opposed to one another. In fact, it is only in abstraction that he can celebrate the nation and its victory, for the particular details of that nation reveal not a unity but wandering and disparate tribes, and the particular details of that victory reveal not righteous triumph but tolerated survival. As with the Black Comb poems, Wordsworth’s attempt to write the nation in the Thanksgiving Ode becomes a contest between different visions of the nation, the idealized and abstract prospect view of the surveyor being repeatedly upset by the particular and not subsumable details of the local survey. Another mistake the reviewer makes is in taking Wordsworth at his word and reading this poetry as if it was intended to be “within reach of ordinary readers.” To Southey, Wordsworth confided this disclaimer about the universality of the poem: I am much of your mind in respect of my ode. Had it been a hymn, uttering the sentiments of the multitude, a stanza would have been indispensable. But though I have called it a Thanksgiving Ode, strictly speaking it is not so, but a poem composed or supposed to be composed on the morning of the Thanksgiving, uttering the sentiments of an individual upon that occasion. It is a dramatised ejaculation ... (MY 2:324)

14 The tension between the abstract and the physical, between the imagined glory of the dead and the very real suffering made clear by the return of the physical body reinforces Colley’s claim: “The fact that Britain escaped a substantial invasion did not make the prolonged conflict with France seem irrelevant to the mass of its inhabitants. It merely made responses to the wars more unabashedly chauvinistic. Unlike most of their European neighbours, Britons at this time—like Americans in the twentieth century—were able to savour military glory without ever having to pay the price in terms of civilian casualties and large-scale domestic destruction.” See Britons: Forging a Nation 1707–1837, 3.

Surveying and Writing the Nation

89

Although Wordsworth appears to be splitting hairs here, he is actually admitting something quite extraordinary. In choosing the ode, he recognizes that he is speaking in a public form upon national events, but he also asserts that it was not his intention to speak for the “multitudes” but rather to utter “the sentiments of an individual upon that occasion.” If such was Wordsworth’s intention, the Eclectic Review was correct in identifying the difference between Wordsworth’s response to the Thanksgiving Day and that of “ordinary readers,” for Wordsworth apparently never intended to speak the public mind. Although this disclaimer might salvage the strangeness of the response represented by the Thanksgiving Ode, it does so at the expense of any claim to write a national poetry that would utter the sentiments of the multitude and reach the sympathy of the nation. By focusing on “the sentiments of an individual,” Wordsworth chooses to dissociate himself from the community formed by the simultaneous tolling of the bells on the third Sunday of 1816. To avoid being engulfed in this moment of national commemoration, Wordsworth turns back to the particular and individual. The “homogeneous, empty time” necessary to create the imagined community of the nation is sacrificed to Wordsworth’s desire for a temporality available for individual utterance and for a space in the lair of the skull that is exempt from usurpation. The remaining poems in the 1816 volume reenact these tensions and record Wordsworth’s own frustrations over his failure to write the nation, though we can read these frustrations less as signs of a personal failure and more as a generic one, the inevitable outcome of the abstraction of commemoration. When the 12 poems that follow the Thanksgiving Ode in 1816 are read in sequence, they describe the poet’s struggle to write a public national poetry on contemporary events. The “Ode, Composed in January 1816” begins with an epigraph from Horace that eschews the “marbles inscribed with public notices” (SP 537n) for the praises of poetry. A picturesque setting of pastoral Britain is invoked as the background to a vision of St. George, “Guardian of this Land” (25), uttering words that vivify the poet’s “patriotic heart” (24). The picture is a chivalrous and romanticized one of the end of war, where virgins adorn the heads of victorious soldiers with “Fit garlands for the Brave” (33), amid streaming banners, throngs of “rosy boys” (55), and smiling “grey-haired Sires” (57). But in the midst of this celebration, “on the verge / Of busiest exultation hung a dirge” (70–71), a somber reminder of the costs of war even in victory, and a recognition of the transience of the outward show that usurps the pageantry of the spectacle: —But garlands wither,—the festal shows depart, Like dreams themselves, and sweetest sound, Albeit of effect profound, It was—and it is gone! (78–81)

The shift in tense moves the poem out of the Spenserian past into Wordsworth’s present. Now the work of commemoration must begin: monuments, statues, sculpture, and art that will fix “Expressive records of a glorious strife” (94). But more than all these, poetry is needed, and so the poet hopes:

90

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation That I, or some more favoured Bard, may hear What ye, celestial maids! have often sung Of Britain’s acts,—may catch it with rapt ear And give the treasure to our British tongue! (115–8)

No such song of “Britain’s acts” is caught in this poem, functioning as it does as an invocation to the Muses for such a song. But that wished-for song never materializes, certainly not in the next poem, an “Inscription for a National Monument in Commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo.” Whereas the epigraph from Horace eschewed such public monuments and the “Ode, Composed in January 1816” seemed to set the stage for a bardic poetry that would celebrate the nation, Wordsworth seems unable to proceed to such poetry. The sonnet following the inscription rehearses the same invocation to the Muses and enacts the same failure to get started. In “Occasioned by the Same Battle, February 1816,” Wordsworth describes the bard who will be able to write the poetry that Wordsworth seems desirous of writing, the poet “to whom, in vision clear, / The aspiring heads of the future things appear, / Like mountain-tops whence mists have rolled away” (6–8). Wordsworth desires a vision like that gained in “The View from the Top of Black Comb,” the imperial prospect view that creates a unified nation out of a unified field of vision. This desire is repeated in the next poem, “Siege of Vienna Raised by John Sobieski, February 1816,” which recounts the glories of Vincenzo da Filicaia’s depiction of Sobieski’s deliverance of Vienna. The poet asks “for a kindling touch of that pure flame / Which taught the offering of song to rise” (1–2). But that the poet still feels the need to ask for inspiration in this, the fifth poem of the volume—the fourth consecutive poem to express such a desire—only reminds us that no such inspiration has been granted and that the commemorative poetry still remains unwritten. This difficulty of writing on recent public events appears painfully clear to Wordsworth, who states in a note to this sonnet that Filicaia’s poems commemorating the Siege of Vienna “are superior perhaps to any lyrical pieces that contemporary events have ever given birth to, those of the Hebrew Scriptures excepted” (SP 173). Given Wordsworth’s depiction of God in the Thanksgiving Ode, it is not surprising that he envisions his task as comparable to that of writing the Old Testament. Nonetheless, such a comparison makes it clear how difficult he perceived this task to be and perhaps explains why he appeared to have so much trouble starting. Indeed, through the first five poems, this volume, which was to present Wordsworth to the nation as a national poet, was a painful record of what he felt to be the enormity of the undertaking he was confronting as well as his own sense of failure in completing it. Perhaps, as Anne Janowicz suggests, this invocation of the “lost bard” signals a “nostalgia for the figure of a central political, social poet who, sometime in an ever receding past, yoked poetry, prophecy, and political life” and thus represents the modern poet’s sense of “poetic marginality” (15). Following three sonnets placed at the center of the volume, which mark a brief shift away from the theme of the nation and back to the natural world, Wordsworth returns to the subject of the nation. In the ninth and tenth poems of the 13-poem collection, Wordsworth returns to the subject of war, not to depict a pitched battle between armies of men but rather to describe a battle between an army of men and

Surveying and Writing the Nation

91

the natural world. Both “Composed in Recollection of the Expedition of the French into Russia, February 1816” and “Sonnet On the Same Occasion, February 1816” describe the experience of the French Army in Russia during the Winter of 1812– 1813. Writing of war not as a confrontation between nations but as a confrontation between nations and Nature enables Wordsworth to proclaim Nature itself as victor over France, allowing him to forget the “crouching purpose” and “distracted will” of his own nation. The defeat of Napoleon’s army is not attributed to Wellington or to the British people or even the British nation, but to Winter, that “season potent to renew.” “Composed in Recollection of the Expedition of the French into Russia, February 1816” contains the only depiction of battle in the entire volume, a vicious, awful Miltonic picture of war with Nature and the ultimate folly of such an encounter. Here the victor is not a nation, but a personification of “dread Winter,” the natural equivalent of the vengeful Jehovah, who wreaks confusion and destruction greater than any army could on Napoleon’s forces. The concluding stanza opens with abstract, highly figurative language but, like the Thanksgiving Ode, returns as with an obsessive gaze to the sight of lifeless human bodies. The first six lines of the last stanza present a personified Winter setting loose an army of winds and storms. When we are actually shown the battlefield, it is not the conventional picture of blazing guns and wild clashes, but a scene of eerie silence where “No pitying voice” (32) is heard. This annihilation of the French Army by natural forces is almost a fantasy of a “clean” war, a war where the enemy is destroyed, but without the messy presence of dead and mutilated human bodies. The resulting scene, “A soundless waste, a trackless vacancy” (38), is a prototypical Wordsworthian encounter with Nature’s negative sublime, though one that is figured as a kind of renewal by annihilation. The scene is morning, the sky is “clear blue” (37), and the vision is prospect-like, but what the eye sees is not so much Nature as the blankness that is beyond Nature. The “trackless” land is the land untouched by human presence, unmarked and unmapped, not France, Poland, or Russia, but Nature itself, and the mind that turns to silence and blankness is the mind that dissolves the borders and grids that nations and maps construct. The nation that Wordsworth set out to celebrate and the great war of nations that he sought to explain are finally reduced by the greater forces of the natural world to a silent and unreadable waste, an unmarked absence that the map sought to make present through representation, but that Nature has rendered invisible like the map in Mudge’s hand on the summit of Black Comb. In the end, France had been defeated and Britain has merely survived; only Winter has been victorious. Wordsworth had struggled to write about the war and found in Nature the only subject about which he could write. Although he sought to sing praises to the British nation and its people, the only praises sung are to the personification of Winter in “Sonnet On the Same Occasion, February 1816.” In this sonnet, the festivities that could not be sustained and that eventually passed away in the “Ode Composed in January 1816” return in full force as the poet finally finds something worthy of song. The personifications of natural elements and the emphasis on imperatives— “Sing ye,” “Knit the blithe dance,” “report your gain,” “Whisper it”—recall the declamatory style of the eighteenth-century nationalist verse of Thomson and Dyer. But it is not a nation or a people who find praise and are accorded victory, but Nature

92

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

itself, for it is Winter, not Britain, who has conquered “That Host,” Napoleon, and French nation. It is Winter, Nature, and what the Thanksgiving Ode called the God of the storm and “fierce Tornado” who have triumphed. The final two poems of the 1816 volume return to the attempt to understand that working out of justice. In the ode that begins “Who rises on the banks of Seine,” Wordsworth returns to the issue of Napoleon’s rise to power and the failure of Britain and Europe to engage him aggressively. As Carl Woodring points out, the poem curiously begins in present tense, as if to highlight the immediacy of the poem’s concerns and perhaps allude to the possibility of continuing imperial ambitions (142). Nations have fallen down in impotence, imploring “How long shall vengeance sleep?” (41), but this question is dismissed by the poet in a curious sexual figuration as an “Infirm ejaculation” (42). The distracted will shows itself in nations seeking help in everything but action. Such nations “must sink down to languish / In worse than former helplessness” (56–7), reduced to “imbecility / Again engendering anguish, / The same weak wish returns—that had deceived [them] before” (58–60). The call for humility that characterized the recognition of error and sin in the Thanksgiving Ode has been transformed into righteous indignation. Unlike the Thanksgiving Ode, which was circumspect in its placement of blame and communal in its regret, this poem places blame on the “Weak spirits” and the “Nations wanting virtue to be strong” (43) who have dared “not to feel the majesty of right” (45). In this highly charged polemic against the “infirm ejaculation” of Napoleon’s opponents, there is self-chastisement of the poet’s own “dramatised ejaculation,” and the dramatized failure to proceed with the national poetry he sought to write: Weak spirits are there—who would ask, Upon the pressure of a painful thing, The Lion’s sinews, or the Eagle’s wing; Or let their wishes loose, in forest glade, Among the lurking powers Of herbs and lowly flowers, Or seek, from Saints above, miraculous aid; That Man may be accomplished for a task Which his own Nature hath enjoined (46–54)

Wordsworth too has failed to act under pressure of “a painful thing,” the task of writing public poetry commemorating the nation. He too has let his “wishes loose, in the forest glade” and sought “from Saints above, miraculous aid,” whether it be St. George descending to deliver a glorious paean to victory, or the power of the bards, or the help of the Muses, or the touch of some kindling flame from above. In seeking to produce poetry to commemorate the great victory, Wordsworth has encountered firsthand the crouching purpose and distracted will that he blames for the length and cost of the just concluded war. When Wordsworth attempted to write the nation, he was himself caught between opposing visions of the nation that he could not unify and resolve. The result was a purposeful recourse to the prospect-view of the nation, an abstract vision that seemed to dissolve on close examination. Fittingly, the volume closes with an elegy, but it is a strange and dark elegy like the “dirge” that is heard underneath the celebration in “Ode Composed in January

Surveying and Writing the Nation

93

1816.” The “Elegiac Verses, February 1816,” which Wordsworth later referred to as “a second Part” of the Thanksgiving Ode (SP 537), are in the form of an address to the Earth, that “doleful Mother of Mankind” (2), by an otherworldly spirit. Here in the final poem of the volume, the consolation offered is Christian, as the spirit comes “thy stains to wash away, / Thy cherished fetters to unbind” (5–6). However, this spirit is not simply a consoling spirit but a righteous and accusing one as well, for the Earth is later addressed not simply as the “Mother of Mankind” but as the “False Parent of Mankind” (19). In the much earlier Intimations Ode, the earth was referred to as the “homely Nurse” who did all she could to help “her Inmate Man” forget the glories he had known, and yet that Earth could be figured as a “False Parent” capable of losing “maternal heart” (22) is a shocking revelation akin to Wordsworth’s perception of Carnage as the daughter of God, one that perhaps shocks the foundation of our nature. The tensions that troubled the Thanksgiving Ode and made impossible the task of writing the nation reassert themselves in the contradictory depiction of earth as both “doleful Mother” and “False Parent.” Divine will is both invoked as explanation and recognized as explaining little at all, for how can one explain the oxymoronic image of “rivers in their secret springs ... stained so oft with human gore” (25–6)? The source of the redemptive waters remains hidden from the surveyor’s view, which is too large and too abstract to pierce through the confused particulars of the local landscape. Indeed, after the Thanksgiving Ode, Wordsworth’s view of the nation shifted increasingly toward the local landscape, people, and manners of his native Westmoreland. Like the local surveyors who sought to contain the proliferating survey data they were collecting, Wordsworth felt that a great deal was erased by the national map and sought to repopulate the landscape with the monuments and meanings that the map of the landscape ignored. In 1816, the abstract vision of the nation proved inadequate to the nation itself, and the prospect view, like Mudge’s abstract triangulation map, proved false to the dense textuality of the landscape. At the conclusion of the Thanksgiving Ode volume, the comprehensive vision is denied, and the volume closes with perhaps the most elegiac verses of all: The Spirit ended his mysterious rite, And the pure vision closed in darkness infinite. (35-6)

From the sun-drenched landscape of the radiant sun as “Source of pure delight” to the radiant form of St. George, from the distant mountain’s glittering top to the trackless vacancy beneath the clear blue sky, Wordsworth had sought the all-embracing vision of the “Revelation infinite,” the “display august of man’s inheritance.” But if such a glimpse of Nature’s processes on the exalted hills was momentarily granted, it was just as quickly extinguished, the “Revelation infinite” changed into “darkness infinite,” and the pure light transformed into pure darkness and total gloom, where perhaps like the geographic laborer we sit with unclosed eyes upon the blinded mountain’s silent top.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 4

The Wreck of Is and Was Oh, ’tis the heart that magnifies this life, Making a truth and beauty of her own! And moss-grown alleys, circumscribing shades, And gurgling rills, assist her in the work More efficaciously than realms outspread, As in a map, before the Adventurer’s gaze, Ocean and earth contending for regard. —Wordsworth, “To the Same” (Second Ode to Lycoris)

It has been easy if not requisite for critics to dismiss the Thanksgiving Ode and its accompanying poems as failures, whether that dismissal is in the form of Arnoldian condescension—he confessed that he could read “even the Thanksgiving Ode” with some pleasure—or modern neglect. None of this goes very far toward explaining either why Wordsworth took on this project or why this project failed. The episode reveals that when Wordsworth attempted to write the nation, he was himself caught between opposing visions of the nation. The close examination of local details that had served him so well seemed to reveal only contrarieties and fractures, differences and tensions, which could be resolved only through recourse to an abstract vision. While abstractions could serve as either prelude to or culmination of more detailed exposition, by themselves they tended only to confuse and distract readers. This objection is raised by a reviewer for the Eclectic Review, who isolated the largest and most problematic abstraction attempted in the Thanksgiving Ode volume, that of the unified nation: We cannot approve of the avowed object of Mr. Wordsworth’s publication, whatever credit may be due him for the patriotism to which it owes its existence. When he speaks of Great Britain having ‘distinguished herself above all other nations for some time past,’ by a course of action so worthy of commemoration, we wish to know more definitely to what course of action he refers; and as we are always fearful of being imposed upon by abstractions, what portion of the nation is intended by Great Britain,—the cabinet, the army, or the people.” (Reiman 1:379)

When one considers that the reviewer is responding to the very first sentence of the “Advertisement,” it becomes clear why he failed to note the oscillations and reversals that actually characterize the Thanksgiving Ode and the volume as a whole. From such an inauspicious start, it is no wonder that the reviewer “cannot approve of the avowed object” of the 1816 volume. He has, however, hit upon the central problem of these poems. Wordsworth sought to present a vision of a unified nation, where military, cabinet, and all the people are unified in common cause, but the divided

96

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

nation that in fact fought the war cannot be entirely suppressed. Though Wordsworth succeeds in unifying the nation through personification—it is a nation with a single purpose, though crouching, and a single will, though distracted—the Eclectic Review points to the difficulties raised by such abstractions and to the political divisions that render a single personification of Britain impossible. Whatever Wordsworth’s avowed object was, the 1816 volume constitutes a very different response. Stephen Gill perceptively notes that Wordsworth “in attempting a generalizing utterance ... forsook the very ground of the success of most of his poems, which is that they are realized in and through the matter-of-fact, the everyday, the human” (Life 319). Yet while such an observation pinpoints what most concede to be the “failure” of the 1816 poems, it fails to note how these poems actually record and enact that failure and, more important, how the attempt itself is the culmination (or, for some, nadir) of Wordsworth’s distance from the desire expressed in The Excursion when the Wanderer exhorts the Pastor to “Give us, for our abstractions, solid facts; / For our disputes, plain pictures” (V.637–8). The problem in the Thanksgiving Ode poems, as in the two poems on Black Comb, is that the “solid facts” do not always support the abstractions but often oppose or undermine them. In this “failure” to subsume the “solid facts” in a totalizing vision, these poems reenact the “failure” of The Excursion, where the need for “solid facts” to clothe the Wanderer’s abstractions pushes the narrative well beyond the avowed conclusion, where despondency is corrected, to the point where the pressure of those “solid facts,” those many “ill-constructed tale[s]” (V.432), threatens to reveal not unity, but division. A brief examination of The Excursion points up these tensions and the difficulties they occasioned for Wordsworth. It is impossible to know what Wordsworth’s overall conception of the poem was when he began serious work on it in the summer of 1806, but it is interesting to note that the poem seemed to grow by accretion and supplementation. The first four books, mostly completed by 1806, form a unit, as do the subsequent three books completed by 1810 and the final two books completed by 1812. The first four books trace a trajectory from the model of response offered by the Wanderer in the tale of Margaret and the ruined cottage through the delineation of another’s sorrows and consequent despondency to the culminating exhortation of the Wanderer in Book IV, unabashedly titled “Despondency Corrected.” But by the winter of 1809 Wordsworth felt that despondency had not been corrected by the Wanderer’s abstract musings, and so these abstractions were supplemented by the Pastor’s narratives. The Pastor’s “words of heartfelt truth” (VII.1054) apparently did not satisfy Wordsworth either, and further supplementation was required, supplementation that took the form of a disquisition on the state of the nation. In both this large-scale need for supplementation and in its small-scale windings and turnings, the poem is characterized by an uneasy tension between the grand totalizing overview and the often intractable details that refuse to be subsumed in that overview. In Book II, the Poet and the Wanderer move steadily toward the Solitary’s house. In language reminiscent of the ascent of Snowdon in The Prelude, the Poet finds the ascent difficult but ultimately rewarding. “We scaled,” narrates the Poet, “without a track to ease our steps,” only to reach “a dreary plain, / With a tumultuous waste

The Wreck of Is and Was

97

of huge hill tops / Before us; savage region! which I paced / Dispirited” (II.323–7). Immediately this dreary view gives way to a breathtaking view of the land below, “a little lowly vale ... yet uplifted high / Among the mountains” (II.328–30). The vale is rendered with topographical accuracy, “with rocks encompassed, save to the south / Was one small opening, where a heath-clad ridge / Supplied a boundary less abrupt and close” (II.334–6). The survey is completed by an enumeration of the contents of the vale: “a treeless nook, with two green fields, / A liquid pool ... And one bare dwelling” (II.335–9). This overview is both like and unlike that seen from the top of Black Comb, for here the vale is “Urn-like” and “shut out from all the world,” not part of a large imperial landscape. This is the first hint that something is different here, and soon this imaginative prospect gives way beneath the pressure of details. The Poet and Wanderer descend into the vale, and upon closer inspection, the site loses the sublimity that could be attributed to it from the surveyor’s mount: Homely was the spot; And, to my feeling, ere we reached the door, Had almost a forbidding nakedness; Less fair, I grant, even painfully less fair, Than it appeared from the beetling rock We had looked down upon it. (II.638–43)

This spot is “homely” yet “forbidding,” and not simply “less fair,” but “painfully less fair,” as if the disjunction between the prospect view and the actual details of the vale could generate a physical response of pain. This possibility of pain is even read back into the prospect view when the mountaintop is refigured as “the beetling rock,” a reminder of the dangerous and sublime landscape, the “tumultuous waste of huge hill tops,” that initially confronted the poet. While from the mountaintop prospect the Poet could imagine the sound of the crowing cock filling the vale and the cuckoo shouting “faint tidings of some gladder place” (II.348), he finds upon closer inspection only silence, “save the solitary clock / That on mine ear ticked with a mournful sound” (II.645–6). This contrast between the prospect view and the actual details of the valley below is repeated by the Solitary in his narrative. Sickened by the turn in the French Revolution and his own personal trials, he seeks to escape them all and journeys to America, where he believes “Man abides, / Primeval Nature’s child” (III.918–19). Again, it is the prospect view that provides the fuel for these abstract musings, as he imagines that “contemplations worthier, nobler far / Than her destructive energies, attend / His independence” (III.928–30), when an explorer like the Solitary: having gained the top Of some commanding eminence, which yet Intruder ne’er beheld, he thence surveys Regions of wood and wide savannah, vast Expanse of unappropriated earth, With mind that sheds a light on what he sees; Free as the sun, and lonely as the sun, Pouring above his head its radiance down Upon a living and rejoicing world! (III.935–43)

98

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

However, when he comes down from the mountain into the valley, he discovers no such man, finding instead “A creature, squalid, vengeful, and impure; / Remorseless, and submissive to no law / But superstitious fear, and abject sloth” (III.953–5). The fanciful abstractions possible from the surveyor’s mount are shattered by the specific details that are not visible from the height. The mountaintop enables the visionary glimpse, but it is also subject to a peculiar kind of blindness that threatens to render invisible the map in one’s hand. Despite these cautionary tales, the Wanderer does not willingly relinquish the mountaintop vision. He too relates a tale of being “stationed on the top / Of some huge hill” (IV.112–13) and glimpsing the sublime vision, which filled his soul “with bliss / And holiest love” (IV.120–21). The Wanderer’s exhortation to the Solitary, which occupies much of Book IV, is an attempt to “aspire Heavenward” through acquisition of knowledge of the world. The sources of knowledge include the folk traditions and superstitions rejected by the Solitary as well as the scientific investigations that “assign / To every class its stations and its office, / Through all the mighty commonwealth of things” (IV.340–2). Another source proves to be the “authentic epitaphs,” which are intended to illustrate the Wanderer’s abstractions, but which in their proliferation and multiplicity threaten to overwhelm any attempt at totalization. The Pastor’s narratives are intended to illustrate “Forgiveness, patience, hope, and charity” (V.727), but as the Solitary warns a person’s life is “an ill-constructed tale” (V.432) that often “deviates from the line” (V.259), a spatial figuration that reminds us of the disjunction between the trigonometer’s gaze and the local surveyor’s detailed survey. While the Solitary is undoubtedly far too pessimistic, the Wanderer and the Pastor are probably far too sanguine about the uses to which narratives can be put once they are circulated and underestimate the possibility that these narratives could prove “incongruous, impotent and blank” (V.317). Hazlitt’s review of The Excursion, which ran in three separate issues of the Examiner, points up the dangers of exemplary narratives. The first part of the review is unstinting in its praise and corresponds to the first four books of the poem, as if Hazlitt had only read that far at the time he wrote the first installment. The second and third parts are less full of praise; the second part begins with a note of disappointment over the failure of the last five books to fulfill Hazlitt’s expectations: We could have wished that Mr. Wordsworth had given to his work the form of a philosophical poem altogether, with only occasional digressions and allusions to particular instances ... But he has chosen to encumber himself with a load of narrative and description, which, instead of assisting, hinders the progress and effect of the general reasoning ... It is only by an extreme process of abstraction that it is often possible to trace the operation of the general law in the particular illustration, yet it is to supply the defect of abstraction that the illustration is given. (Reiman 2:524)

For Hazlitt, the function of “the particular illustration” is “to supply the defect of abstraction.” However, what he finds in The Excursion are particular illustrations that

The Wreck of Is and Was

99

can be coerced under the “general law” only by an “extreme process of abstraction.”1 Like the squalid, vengeful creature encountered by the Solitary when he came down the mountain, the particular details of Wordsworth’s “narrative and description” continually work against the totalizing abstractions they were intended to support. Spread throughout Books V, VI, and VII are approximately 16 narratives ranging in length from the 50 or so lines on the miner of Patterdale to the nearly 300-line tale of Ellen. These narratives constitute what Geoffrey Hartman calls a “heaping up of exempla in the medieval manner” (Wordsworth’s Poetry 319), each narrative supposedly serving as an illustration to Wordsworth’s high argument. Initially the stories focus on how various individuals have overcome adversity and sorrow to achieve peace, but following the Solitary’s querulous demand for stories that must exist of those “cut off / From peace like exiles on some barren rock” (VI.533–4), the Pastor recounts the story of a woman of keen intelligence, but overambitious for recognition and zealous for protection of her household power, who even on her deathbed was vexed by the thought of her ministering sister-in-law usurping her place. The Pastor concludes the story with the weak hope that something may be learned from this tale, that “her uncharitable acts, I trust, / And harsh unkindnesses are all forgiven, / Tho’, in this Vale, remembered with deep awe” (VI.775–7). The hope is that this woman’s story has served the people of the vale as an admonishment, but forgiveness by the people of the vale is left to the Pastor’s conjectural “I trust.” From this point forward, we are asked to “trust” that the implied lessons are learned and the particular instances conform to and support the general laws. Frequently this trust is misplaced. The Pastor then tells the story of Ellen, a tragic tale of a woman seduced and subsequently abandoned, first by her seducer, then by the death of her child, and finally by the self-righteous hard-heartedness of the community. Moved by her sense of being a burden, Ellen leaves her child with her parents and takes employment as a wet nurse. But “ungentle minds can easily find means / To impose severe restraints and laws unjust” (VI. 954–5), and soon Ellen is denied by her employers the right to visit her child. Shortly afterward, her child dies. Her employers nearly prevent her from attending the funeral and confine her within their house and garden to keep her from visiting the child’s grave. Eventually Ellen “passed / Into that pure and unknown world of love / Where injury cannot come” (VI.1049–51), calling forth from the Wanderer this interpretation: Blest are they Whose sorrow rather is to suffer wrong Than to do wrong, albeit themselves have erred. This tale gives proof that Heaven most gently deals With such, in their affliction.” (VI.1069–73)

But this certainly is not the only interpretation available. The narrow-mindedness of Ellen’s employers and the tremendous trials to which she is put seem not to prove 1 James K. Chandler examines the importance of abstraction to Hazlitt’s ideas of culture and justice in Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 144–9.

100

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

that Heaven deals gently with the afflicted, but rather the complete opposite. Perhaps, as Susan Wolfson argues, the Wanderer’s interjection is a purposeful “exposure of [his] limitations,” a reminder of how frequently he “serenely exploits” such tales “for his didactic ends” (115). However, despite occasions when “the Author’s sensitivity to his mentor’s penchant for sententious summary ... shadows his regard for the Wanderer’s wisdom” (115), these moments mark what Wolfson calls “the anti-interrogative mood” of the later books, where “‘mystery’ may be subsumed under the workings of a ‘controuling Providence’ and entertained chiefly to advance opportunities for Faith to meet all mysteries” (118). It is this section of The Excursion that Hazlitt refers to as showing the “depraved and inveterate selfishness” only to be found “among the inhabitants of these boasted mountain districts” and that occasions his acerbic disquisition on how “All country-people hate each other” (Reiman 2:528). Despite the Wanderer’s assertion that these tales adhere to the general message of the Pastor’s other stories, they actually work against that message to prove Hazlitt’s allegation that only by an “extreme process of abstraction” can they be brought back in line. As Sally Bushell observes, “we find ourselves questioning the Pastor’s choice of narratives, the nature of his moral purpose in telling them, and the function of these tales in the poem” (18). The remainder of Book VI and much of Book VII consists of more stories, “solid facts” that lend themselves to many interpretations, but the pressure of “solid facts” intrudes into the narrative in other ways. The Pastor’s narrative is interrupted by the sight of a waggoner hauling timber, which gives rise to the Pastor’s acknowledgment of “a motion of despite” toward such men “whose bold contrivances and skill ... bear such a conspicuous part / In works of havoc” (VII.590–3). The Pastor laments the disappearing forests of Britain, a condition exacerbated by wartime demand for ship timbers and industrial demand for machinery. The waggoner, denuding the hills to supply “the enormous axle-tree / That whirls (how slow itself!) ten thousand spindles” (VII.606–7), is nothing less than a “keen Destroyer” (VII.631), one of the “haughty Spoilers of the world” (VII.630). What began innocently enough as an appearance of a genuine rustic full of “gaiety and health, / Freedom and hope” (VII.560–1), ends with an appearance of the death’s head amidst this supposed arcadia. While the Pastor tells tales of forbearance, perseverance, hope and charity, the demands of the world outside the vale intrude upon the wished-for peace. A close examination of even the most peaceful glade reveals the timberman with his axe in hand. The poem turns to the world outside the vale in the final two books. Both hymn and dirge are sung to this “inventive Age” (VIII.87), which has so altered the landscape and the people, almost with “the speed of magic” (VIII.88). Yet while the Wanderer laments the changes and the loss of intercourse with nature and the freedom and liberty that such intercourse nourishes, the Solitary’s rejection of either change or Nature’s salutary influence goes unanswered. Ostensibly the answer to the Solitary’s “ardent sally” comes in the form of the Pastor’s children, who appear as a confirmation of all that the Wanderer has asserted, but when the Wanderer closes his exhortation at the end of the poem, it is impossible not to be struck by the fact that this consoling vision is available not to everyone, but only to “this little band” of people perched upon a solitary mountaintop in the most sparsely populated county in England.

The Wreck of Is and Was

101

What makes the final vision possible is a recourse to abstraction, an abstracting imagination free from the confusion of petty details. The Wanderer, in asserting his right to speak, compares increasing age not to a descent into a vale, but to an ascent to a mountaintop. The mountaintop is a sublime landscape, the peak “bare / In aspect and forbidding” (IX.52–3). The Wanderer’s earlier enthusiasm for the mountaintop vision, however, seems dampened and his belief in its availability seems more circumspect. He tells the others that “ ’tis not impossible to sit” (IX.54) upon this peak, the litotes implying that it is difficult and perhaps unavailable to some, or perhaps most. From this surveyor’s mount, one might see all the land that lies around, a topographer’s view: “Faint, and diminished to the gazing eye, / Forest and field, and hill and dale appear, / With all the shapes over their surface spread” (IX.60–2). What such a vantage offers is not simply a view of the surface but a view beneath the surface of things, yet such a view is possible only when the surface perturbations of the world are dismissed, the local details ignored, and all subsumed within an imaginative totalizing vision: For on that superior height Who sits, is disencumbered from the press Of near obstructions, and is privileged To breathe in solitude, above the host Of ever-humming insects, ’mid thin air That suits not them. The murmur of the leaves Many and idle, visits not his ear: This he is freed from, and from thousand notes (Not less unceasing, not less vain than these,) By which the finer passages of sense Are occupied; and the soul, that would incline To listen, is prevented or deterred. (IX.69–80)

The “thousand blended notes,” which Wordsworth characterized in “Lines Written in Early Spring” as providing access to and evidence of Nature’s secret impulses, are here representative of all that distracts one from contemplation. The world outside the vale is the world that must be left below, and the people that constitute that world are simply “ever-humming insects.” The abstract vision is only possible when local details are ignored. But the mountaintop vision is always susceptible to darkness, and despite the Wanderer’s staunch belief in the “one maternal spirit” of which all partake (IX.111), his brutally realistic depiction of the current state of the nation, begun in Book VIII and continued in Book IX, belies any hope or foundation for such a belief; and the solutions offered—state-mandated education and increased emigration—seem incongruously pragmatic for a visionary exhortation. When the entire party ascends a mountain for one last look at the vale, they see a different vision of Britain from that seen from the top of Black Comb: far off, And yet conspicuous, stood the old Church-tower, In majesty presiding over fields And habitations seemingly preserved From all intrusion of the restless world By rocks impassable and mountains huge. (IX.574–9)

102

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Unlike the unending prospect of imperial Britain, this is a vision of an isolated and endangered Britain, rocks and mountains like Sir John Pennington’s fortress walls keeping away “the restless world.” Like the Wanderer’s mountaintop vision, which required freedom from the confusion of voices in the valley below, this vision of Britain is possible only once the distractions of the outside world, the local details, and incongruous stories that cloud the prospect are ignored like the buzzing of so many insects, and yet this vision relies on the presence of idealized local details. As Alison Hickey observes, The Excursion “thematizes the ‘impure conceits’ upon which systems of meaning ultimately rest” (131). Such systems, whether they be morals for tales, reforms for education, or mountaintop visions of the nation, are repeatedly undone. Hickey suggests that “the whole project may be read as a challenge to the adequacy of systematizing modes” (146). In short, the abstract vision requires the subsumption of local details, congruous and incongruous, but as the mapmakers to Britain were discovering at this time, it was the delineation of local detail—not the impossible mountaintop vision—that proved the accuracy, utility and beauty of the finished map. As argued in Chapter 3, when Colonel Mudge stationed himself on the top of Black Comb, his purpose was not to gather information for a detailed mapping of the land but to gather triangulation data necessary to establish the accuracy of the survey as a whole. As J.B. Harley has pointed out, it is important to remember that the survey was originally called the Trigonometrical Survey—the published maps were not designated Ordnance Survey maps until after 1810—and that “the idea of making a national topographical map was not determined upon until several years after 1791” (“Error” 116). As J.E. Portlock, the nineteenth-century biographer of Mudge’s successor Thomas Colby, wrote in 1859, the topographical survey was “grafted ... upon an independent scientific work, was local, and detached in order of performance ... and ... the importance of a great national survey was at first only partly recognized” (quoted in Harley, “Error” 116). As Harley makes clear, “it was the trigonometrical operations (rather than the work of the detailed survey) that not only captured the imagination of the layman but also commanded the attention of the scientific world.” Mudge’s observations were “reported alike in the Philosophical Transactions and in the Gentlemen’s Magazine” (117). When William Roy commenced final measurements of the Hounslow Heath base2 in 1784 as part of an international project to connect geodetically the royal observatories of Paris and Greenwich, the King himself “deigned to honour the operation by his presence, for the space of two hours, entering very minutely into the work of conducting it,” and no doubt partook of the hospitality of Joseph Banks, then president of the Royal Society, who repeatedly visited the operation and “ordered his tents to be continually pitched near at hand, where his immediate guests, and numerous visitors whom curiosity drew to the spot, met with the most hospitable supply of every necessity, and even elegant refreshment” (quoted in Arden-Close 17). While the trigonometrical work 2 The “base” is the base of an imaginary triangle, and the measurement of its length is the most important and most time-consuming activity in trigonometric surveying. Once the base has been accurately measured, its length (along with the base angles) is used to calculate the distances to the apex along the two sides of the imaginary triangle.

The Wreck of Is and Was

103

often took on the form of a scientific carnival, “hidden by the lanes and hedgerows of the English lowland the topographical surveyor plotted away unnoticed” (Harley, “Error” 117). While the scientific work of the trigonometric survey retained its prominence, the detailed survey remained a poor relation, always short of funds and personnel and constantly forced to justify its utility against a prevailing attitude that such work was better left to private surveyors, draftsmen, engravers, and printers. For example, the Commissioners of the Board of Ordnance—under which the survey operated— had concluded in 1811 that “after the public objects of the Trigonometrical Survey were attained, it might have been left to individual speculation to fill up the Triangles with a local Survey” (116). While it is tempting to place the Ordnance Survey within a larger episteme of nationalist consolidation, the actual operation of the survey was carried out with at best the lukewarm support of government and at worst the outright resistance of government to finance the work. It is interesting to note that when more detailed local maps were required by the New Poor Law (1834), the Tithe Commutation Act (1836), the various sanitary reform initiatives of the 1840s and the various transportation projects of the 1830s and 1840s, each of the government commissions or private entities set up to look into these issues initially rejected the Ordnance Survey maps and initiated their own mapmaking projects (Seymour 112–14).3 While the Ordnance Survey maps attempted to create a uniform series of accurate topographical maps of Britain, uniformity of the symbols, contents, and topographical representation was not achieved in the Old Series (those produced between 1801 and 1870). Instead, changing ideas about what should be represented on the maps and how they should be represented produced an incremental movement toward uniformity. For example, three methods were used for representing changes in elevation. Hachuring represents hills by uphill strokes, with the thickness of the line corresponding to the steepness of the slope. Hill-sketching represents hills through the use of brush and ink to depict a landscape in oblique or vertical light. Contour lines represent hills by using lines to connect all points of equal elevation. The earliest maps represented relief with a combination of hachuring and shading, while those produced up to midcentury represented relief with hill-sketching, and those after mid-century used a combination of hill-sketching and selected contour lines to represent changes in elevation. The use of contour lines to represent relief had been considered for use by the Ordnance Survey as early as the 1830s but was rejected because of the limitations of available printing technology and the resistance of the surveyors and draftsmen. Despite the survey’s origins in scientific operations, the surveyors and draftsmen viewed their work more as art than as science. In 1810, when Mudge entrusted the

3 Generally, the Ordnance Survey maps, which were 1 inch to 1 mile in scale, were rejected because they were considered to be too small scale. The need for larger scale surveys (such as the now common 6 inches to 1 mile scale) and town plans (at a scale of 5 or 10 feet to 1 mile) for transportation and public planning eventually forced the Ordnance Survey to diversify its map scales.

104

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

field instruction of cadets in surveying and drawing to Robert Dawson, he offered this praise of Dawson: Besides his other qualifications, Mr. Dawson had the merit of bringing topographical drawing to a degree of perfection that had given to his plans a beauty and accuracy of expression which some of our eminent artists had previously supposed unattainable. (quoted in Arden-Close 80)

Mudge praises Dawson’s work for its “beauty” and accuracy, though not accuracy of representation, but of “expression.” While the land may be subject to a certain degree of scientific measurement, in the early days of the Ordnance Survey, there remained a sense that the landscape was still something that was seen, and so its cartographic representation had to adhere to how someone might see it. Dawson was quite unambiguous about what he felt to be the duties of the mapmaker: “The draughtsman’s art is to do justice to nature and the engraver’s art is to do justice to the draughtsman; on neither side should rules and methods be imposed, except by superior artistic judgment” (quoted in Seymour 126). For Dawson, it is not a question of plotting, drawing, or even representing, but rather one of “justice.” Measuring the land is not so much an arithmetic activity as it is an artistic one, and the justness of the measure is determined by fidelity to Nature. Mudge was in complete agreement with Dawson’s sentiments, summed up by his simple, yet of course entirely ambiguous, instruction for surveyors: “I would have them all draw from nature” (quoted in Seymour 52). Of course not everyone liked Dawson’s system. In a report critical of the Ordnance Survey made to Parliament in 1828, Major-General Sir James Carmichael-Smith advocated a more scientific approach, declaring that Dawson’s approach “left too much to the taste, imagination and fancy of the individual draughtsman” (quoted in Seymour 52). As J.B. Harley has shown, upon close examination, the surveyor’s field sketches “exhibit wide variations in accuracy, in attention to detail, and in style of drawing” (“Error” 118), but such differences are inevitable in any approach that sees the representation of landscape as dependent upon the expressive power of the observer as much as on the scientific measurements of the surveyor, on imagination as much as on chaining and perambulation.4 But this local variation was due as much to what was represented on the map as to how it was represented. The early days of the survey were marked by confusion over what should be included on the maps, and the details included were often contingent upon the personal interests of the surveyor as well as the closeness of the ties established by the surveyor with the local population. The general policy was that surveyors were supposed to locate and record everything attached to the ground, “to show any features visible from the ground” and avoid “except in the case of administrative divisions, to mark ideal, or invisible, lines” (Arden-Close 112). Despite the anxiety felt by the local populations, the survey was never intended 4 Chaining and perambulation were the two methods of determining distance. Chaining used a chain of fixed length to determine distance and was used when exact measurements were necessary. Perambulation was the traversal of land by a surveyor and was used to estimate distances.

The Wreck of Is and Was

105

as a cadastral one (that is, to serve as the basis for taxation and/or administration), and the Ordnance Survey office would not be given such a task until late in the nineteenth century. However, it is one thing to record the presence of an object and quite another to identify and name it. Despite William Roy’s personal interest in antiquities—his posthumously published monograph, The Military Antiquities of the Romans in Britain, was the standard source on the subject until well into the twentieth century—the pre-1791 material collected for the detailed survey shows no interest in mapping antiquities. Over the next two decades, antiquities were increasingly noted as the survey extended into the artifact-rich southwest, but still there was no policy on the inclusion of such material, it depending more upon “the personal interests of the surveyor and on his contact with well-informed local antiquaries anxious to secure inclusion of their own work on the maps” (Seymour 63–4). The most prominent example of the effect a local antiquarian could have on the “official” representation of the local landscape is the survey of Dorset conducted by Philip and Edmund Crocker between 1805 and 1809. The Crockers worked closely with Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who was at the time preparing his foundational study of ancient British monuments, Ancient Wiltshire, first published in 1812. Mudge reported that Hoare was delighted with the work of the Crockers, and corrections on proofs of the OS maps in Hoare’s hand reveal his close involvement with the mapping. By 1807, Philip Crocker had begun drawing maps and illustrations for Hoare, a task that eventually led him to leave the survey and work first as Hoare’s illustrator and later as his land agent. The resulting OS map represented the Wiltshire area as containing the highest concentration of prehistoric antiquities in Britain, a view that supported and was supported by Hoare’s own work (Seymour 63–5). These contingent practices of personal interest and local enthusiasm were not finally codified into rules until 1816, when in a detailed statement of policy, field surveyors were instructed that “all remains of ancient Fortifications, Druidical Monuments, vitrified Forts, and all Tumuli & Barrows shall be noticed in the Plans [detailed field sketches] wherever they occur” (quoted in Seymour 54). Increasingly, the cartographic representation of the nation was being transformed into a museum of national heritage. In addition, surveyors went to great lengths to establish the correct orthography and in many cases etymology of place-names, a practice that, while well intentioned, embroiled the survey in nationalistic controversies when a plethora of possible spellings for Welsh and Irish place-names frequently led to anglicizing the names. The names of principal towns and parishes were checked against official sources such as the published census returns, but for minor names, local spoken and written forms were adopted with only cursory attempts to resolve disagreements. For example, the names in South Wales were mostly anglicized, but as the survey moved further west, away from the English border, increasingly there was controversy. The maps of Pembrokeshire published in 1818 and 1820 were disputed by local authorities. Thomas Colby, then head of the survey and himself a Welshman, replied that proof maps had been sent to two prominent Pembrokeshire residents for correction and that one was returned unchanged and the other was returned with substantial revision. Which one was adopted is unclear, but such significant disagreement probably led to frequent unhappy compromises (61–4). In Ireland, the survey made great efforts to collect place-names, even employing the noted Irish philologist John O’Donovan to

106

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

gather variants and select the one that seemed to come closest to the presumed Irish original. O’Donovan’s procedure is clear from a letter he wrote in 1834 to Thomas Larcom, the head of the Irish survey: In the parish of Tyrella there is a townland called Ballykinler, which Vallency, Beauford, and in all probability O’Reilly, would have explained, the Town at the Head of the Sea ... but as soon as I heard it pronounced by an old Irishman, I said it must mean the Town of the Candlestick (horrid name ! !), and silly conjecture for any sensible person! Be it so, say I—but turn to the fact. Look at Harris’s History of the County of Down, 1744, and you will find, Ballykinler lower, middle, upper ... formed the parish of Ballykinler, the tithes of which were appropriated to Christ Church, Dublin, for WAX LIGHT (quoted in Arden-Close 137)

However, controversy ensued when the survey was faced with cases in which the current spelling could not be reduced to original meanings. In these cases, the survey often invented new spellings. For example, the survey adopted the names Ballynacorra for Ballinacurra, Cahir for Caher, Monasterevin for Monasterevan, and Skull for Schull, adoptions that were ignored by the Irish government and the Post Office as well as by later mapmakers (Seymour 89). From the representation of relief according to artistic principles to an investigation into the origin of place-names, the local survey proceeded under the assumption that land, while reducible to triangles, was essentially a human landscape, seen by people and marked by their historical presence. While the directors of the Ordnance Survey never lost sight of the goal of producing a uniform map of Great Britain, the surveyors, draftsmen, and engravers progressed slowly from secondary triangle to map sheet to county set, accumulating in the process vast stores of ethnographic and folkloric information drawn from local informants. In this way, the survey perpetuated the practice of commercial mapmakers of the eighteenth century whose maps catered to the taste of their landlord customers. Aesthetically attractive maps replete with local historical and archaeological information appealed to customers who would number among their polite accomplishments some training in drawing and painting as well as in history and antiquities. The increased availability of detailed maps not only allowed a larger proportion of the population to “own” the British landscape; it allowed more people to demonstrate their own possession of polite accomplishments formerly reserved for a higher class. One curious by-product of this combination of aesthetic design and the interest in the local that can still be seen in today’s Ordnance Survey (OS) maps is a nearly uniform density of information, which while rendering the map aesthetically attractive actually reifies the rural landscape at the expense of the urban. Close inspection of an OS map, whether it be the 1801 map of Kent or any modern one, reveals the frequency of names assigned to rural farms and houses and the lack of names for similar structures in urban areas. For example, on a midtwentieth-century OS map of the city of Canterbury and its environs, farms, inns, houses, and public houses along the A291 north of Sturry are represented and labeled, while in Canterbury itself no such structures are noted. So while the “Fox & Hound,” located on the A291 in the Blean Woods, is represented and named, no similar establishments are noted in Canterbury. Of course, this does not mean there are no pubs in Canterbury,

The Wreck of Is and Was

107

but rather that the increased density of the urban environment restricts what can be represented, in this case allowing only a school, a cathedral, and a couple of hospitals to be identified (though not named) in the city.5 In the larger-scale maps of the early nineteenth century, similar problems were encountered. W.A. Seymour points out that “in the hilly but densely populated areas of the Pennine fringes and in South Wales, the engraved map began to fail, especially where names coincided with woods and steep slopes” (105). Urban areas took on the look of monolithic, undifferentiated, and unnamed masses of buildings while rural areas were picturesquely dotted with inns and farms and antiquities. Curiously, urban areas took on a blank appearance while the blank rural spaces were filled in with specific local detail, creating a uniform density of information that did not correspond to the wide variations in density found in the landscape. The effect of such a representation was to create a rural landscape that appears more human in its picturesque mixture of habitation and open space and an urban landscape that appears bereft of human activity, close, cramped, and undifferentiated. Of course, urban areas were not bereft of human activity, but overwhelmed with it, the absence or presence of activity leading to the same figuration of undifferentiated signs. This lack of differentiation, or rather the inability to register or read the plethora of activities, makes the juxtaposition of urban and rural landscape the cartographic equivalent of Wordsworth’s juxtaposition of London and a county fair in Books VII and VIII of the 1805 Prelude. As noted in Chapter 1, this juxtaposition enables Wordsworth to register the unreadability of the uncounted and unaccountable multitude and contrast it with the eminently readable rural landscape. The “blank confusion” of the “mighty City” (VII.696–7) gives way to an ordered landscape where proportion between man and nature implies reciprocity between man fitted to the land and the land fitted to man: Immense Is the Recess, the circumambient World Magnificent, by which they are embraced. They move about up on the soft green field: How little They, they and their doings seem, Their herds and flocks about them, they themselves, And all that they can further or obstruct! Through utter weakness pitiably dear As tender Infants are: and yet how great! For all things serve them; them the Morning light Loves as it glistens on the silent rocks, And them the silent Rocks, which now from high Look down upon them; the reposing Clouds, The lurking Brooks from their invisible haunts, And Old Helvellyn, conscious of the stir, And the blue Sky that roofs their calm abode. (VIII.46–61)

5 The map of Canterbury described here was published by the Ordnance Survey in 1959 and is reproduced in David Turnbull’s Maps are Territories, Science is an Atlas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

108

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Unlike the “Parliament of Monsters” (VII.692), the “undistinguishable world” (VII.700) of London, the rural landscape does not overwhelm the rural people, but places them in a relationship with the land that both infantilizes and sanctifies them. This “Recess,” like the “urn-like” vale of the Solitary or the vale guarded “By rocks impassable and mountains huge” glimpsed at the end of The Excursion, is an idealized portrait of the British landscape that relies on elements of the picturesque to provide the aesthetic equivalent of national identity. Wordsworth provides such a picturesque depiction of the rural landscape in revisions made to “Ode, Composed in January 1816,” which was originally published in the Thanksgiving Ode volume. In the 1816 version, Wordsworth provides a picture of the rural landscape of Britain as background to a vision of St. George descending to earth to deliver a patriotic commemoration at the end of the war: I saw, in wondrous perspective displayed, A landscape richer than happiest skill Of pencil ever clothed with light and shade; An intermingled pomp of vale and hill, Tower, town, and city—and suburban grove, And stately forest where the wild deer rove. (9–14)

In the version published in the 1827 edition of his poems, this background is embellished with the picturesque local details that, like the Ordnance Survey maps, had come to represent a certain vision of Britain: I saw, in wondrous perspective displayed, A landscape more august than happiest skill Of pencil ever cloth’d with light and shade; An intermingled pomp of vale and hill, Tower, town, and city, and naval stream, Nor wanting lurking hamlets, dusky towns, And scattered rural farms of aspect bright, And, here and there, between the pastoral downs, The azure sea upswelled upon the sight. Fair prospect, such as Britain only shows! (SP 202, app. crit.)

The aristocratic features such as the suburban grove and stately forest are replaced by the more egalitarian and utilitarian naval stream and picturesque scattering of hamlets, towns, and rural farms, with the towns appropriately dusky and unclear and the farms brightly delineated. The landscape is a much more distinctly human landscape, and it is the delineation of these local details, the placement of human habitations intermingled with vale and hill and azure sea, that defines this “Fair prospect, such as Britain only shows.” The unending prospect of imperial Britain is only one possible vision of Britain, one that has proven too susceptible to the fickle skies. What was needed was an explication of the British national character from the local details increasingly depicted on the maps of Britain, details that fed an idealization of the British landscape and the equally idealized British character purportedly formed by and responsive to the local.

The Wreck of Is and Was

109

This national character was not defined so much by shared geography as by shared response to an imagined geography, and in this way Wordsworth is able to define the problem of oppositional politics as one of deviant response to landscape. In a letter to John Scott of 18 April 1816, Wordsworth attempts to explain how the political opposition deviates from the true British character: The partialities of these individuals, from different causes and in different ways are both foreign ... Suppose the opposition as a body, or take them in classes, the Grenvilles, the Wellesleys, the Foxites, the Burdettites, and let your imagination carry them in procession through Westminster Hall, and thence let them pass into the adjoining Abbey, and give them credit for feeling the utmost and best that they are capable of feeling in connection with these venerable and sacred places, and say frankly whether you would be satisfied with the result (MY 2: 304).

By calling the opposition “foreign,” Wordsworth is able to dissociate them from the true British character, but here foreignness is not some overt mark of physiognomy, color, or language, but a subtle distinction in how one responds to the artifacts of the nation. To be truly British, one must respond with appropriate reverence for British artifacts, be suitably moved at the trappings of British power and heritage. However, for Wordsworth, one must be stirred not only by the overt symbols of Church and State, but also by the subtle configuration of the British landscape: Imagine them to be looking from a green hill over a rich landscape diversified by Spires and Church Towers and hamlets, and all the happy images of English landscape, would their sensations come much nearer to what one would desire; in a word have [they] becoming reverence of the English character, and do they value as they ought, and even as their opponents do, the Constitution of the country, in Church and State (MY 2:304).

In a process described by Pfau as the “disestablishment of nature’s materiality and its gradual coalescence into a prospect,” what one sees is not what is there but what ought to be there (65). In this idealized picture of the British landscape, there is a striking resemblance to that landscape described at the end of The Excursion, where the “old Church-tower” stood “In majesty presiding over fields” (IX.575–6). It is astonishing how rapidly Wordsworth passes from landscape to character to Constitution, as if “Constitution” could be mapped straight out of topographical features and both were equally legible. As Anne Janowicz observes, “In such a seemingly self-evident and therefore ‘unimagined’ coincidence between country and country—the ‘naturalizing’ of the nation—was born the myth of rural England, as well as the myth of the homogeneous coherence of the nation” (4). This is both an ingenious and dangerous solution to the problem of competing ideas about the nation and the character of the nation. By shifting the burden of patriotism from overt act to intricate response, Wordsworth establishes a new test for inclusion, one focused on the individual’s response to an idealization of the local and specific. Since both Whig and Tory could wave the flag, a finer discrimination was necessary to distinguish true from false, and so reverence for the established forms of Church and State, embodied in an imagined

110

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

feudal landscape of Church and hamlet, Westminster Abbey and Westminster Hall, provides the means to discriminate between the false patriot and the true.6 If a test of patriotism is dependent upon a proper appreciation of rural landscape, the very idea of a uniform national character becomes difficult to maintain in the face of competing local characters formed by idiosyncratic local landscapes—the urban sprawl of London, the Suffolk downs, the industrial midlands, the Cumberland mountains. All different, but not all equal. For years Wordsworth had been troubled by the growth of “the lower orders,” which had been “for upwards of thirty years accumulating in pestilential masses of ignorant population,” and the change this urbanization had wrought in the national character, a change he perceived to be a threatening “disease” which now was breaking out in “all its danger and deformity” (MY 2: 21). The disease was even touching his native Westmorland, where Wordsworth worried about the loss of “the principal ties which kept the different classes of society in a vital and harmonious dependence upon each other” and the replacement of “this moral cement” with nothing but “a quickened self-interest” (MY 2: 375–6). For Wordsworth the cure for this disease lay not in a recourse to an abstract national rhetoric but in a return to a delineation of the local character and the landscape he felt produced it. That landscape was his native Westmorland. Such a delineation of local character and its relationship to the abstract nation can be found in the polemical and highly partisan tract Wordsworth wrote in support of Lord Lonsdale’s candidate for the 1818 Westmorland election: And first looking at this matter locally, what is that portion of England known by the name of the County of Westmorland? A Country which indeed the natives of it love, and are justly proud of; a region famous for the production of shrewd, intelligent, brave, active, honest, enterprising men:—but it covers no very large space on the map; the soil is in general barren, the country poor accordingly, and of necessity thinly inhabited (Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland in PrW 3:156).

Wordsworth uses the local character as both an idealization of what he feels to be best about the national character and as a counterexample to what he feels to be the current state of the national character. Despite the fact that it occupies little space on the physical map, Wordsworth wants to argue that it occupies, or should occupy, a large space on the imaginative map of the nation’s character. If the inhabitants of Westmorland are characterized as “independent” (PrW 3:170), it is to contrast them with “the ignorant and distressed multitudes, in other parts of the Island” (PrW 3:168) subject to “demagogues and mob-exciting patriots” (PrW 6 This near conflation of landscape with Constitution is characteristic of what J.G.A. Pocock describes as the self-image of preindustrial England: “A society thinks of itself in purely traditional terms in proportion as it is aware of itself simply as a cluster of institutionalised modes of transmitting behaviour ... In pre-industrial England, for example all social and national institutions could be conceived as bound up with the common law, that law was conceived as custom, and the activity of law-making was conceived as the conversion into written precedents of unwritten usages whose sole authority was that of immemorial antiquity.” See Politics, Language and time; essays on political thought and history (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 240.

The Wreck of Is and Was

111

3:169). If the Lowthers are praised for their long association with Westmorland, it is to contrast them with London agitators who “have no natural connection with the county” (PrW 3:177) and have come to Westmorland “from the dirty alleys and obscure courts of the Metropolis” (PrW 3:171) to disseminate their “falsehoods and misrepresentations” (PrW 3:184). Wordsworth’s purpose here, as well as in his uncharacteristic electioneering activities, was not motivated simply by a toadyish adherence to his patron, but by a siege mentality that saw in this local election the spread of the diseased national character into his native vale. Like the sequestered vale in Book IX of The Excursion, this landscape must be guarded from the intrusions of the Metropolis and the “restless world” that it represented. In this local campaign, Wordsworth confronted the loss of the local, the usurpation of Westmorland “independence” by the “dark dependence” (PrW 3:182) symbolized by Henry Brougham, the opposition candidate. What was at stake was not simply a seat in Parliament, but a vision of Britain which sought to counter the spread of disease with a localized vision of what the national character should be, a vision that rested on the exemplary character of the people of Westmorland and the detailed delineation of the landscape that formed that character. Furthermore, Wordsworth’s celebration of the local should not be seen as a sign of latent liberal tendencies, as we would be led to conclude by a too-literal application of David Aram Kaiser’s analysis of nationalism. The contest is not, as such an application would suggest, between the heterogeneity of particulars and the homogeneity of the universal, but between which particulars will serve as the source of the universal. This connection between landscape and character and its relationship to the exchange of the abstract mountaintop vision for the delineation of local detail can be seen in the complicated revision history of the second ode to Lycoris, titled “To the Same.” In an early fair-copied manuscript dated 1817, the poem depicts a quiet scene of meditation, which is held to be more desirable than any mountaintop vision: Come—let us venture to exchange the pomp Of widespread landscape for the internal wealth Of quiet thought—protracted till thine eye Be calm as water when the winds are gone And no one can tell whither. (“Reading Text 1,” SP 8–12)

The last three lines of this passage date back to 1799 and an early version of “Nutting” and a poem called “Travelling” that emerged out of it. In 1817 “quiet thought” is set in opposition to the “pomp of widespread landscape” as if these were mutually exclusive. In this version, the implication is similar to that found in the suspiciously apt passage Petrarch encounters in his Augustine on the top of Mont Ventoux, that humans marvel at the wonders of the world but of themselves consider not. However, sometime between 1817 and the initial publication of the poem in 1820 Wordsworth dramatically reworked this 18-line version and produced a 30-line version that expands on the meaning of the widespread landscape, the source of that “quiet thought,” and the foolishness of valuing the one over the other. In this new version, the poem begins abruptly with a rejection of the struggle for the mountaintop:

112

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation Enough of climbing toil!—Ambition treads Here, as in busier scenes, ground steep and rough, Oft perilous, always tiresome; and each step As we for most uncertain gain ascend Towards the clouds, dwarfing the world below, Induces, for its old familiar sights, Unacceptable feelings of contempt, With wonder mixed—That Man could e’er be tied In anxious bondage, to such nice array And formal fellowship of petty things! (“Reading Text 2,” SP 1–10)

Rejected here is the movement up the mountain described in “View from the Top of Black Comb,” which reduced the “lofty Mount” of Anglesey to a “dwindled object,” a movement that produced an aesthetic colonization. In addition, the struggle up the mountain to gain the grand vision is, as in the inscription to Black Comb, simply ambition uncomfortably aligned with a desire for domination, and one that, like mastery, produces contempt for the familiar sights dwarfed by the perspective. The “familiar” is allied to the material in a critique of transcendence. It is for “most uncertain gain” that we aspire heavenward, when the product of such aspirations is to despise the earth, to see it as a “nice array” of “petty things.” The pomp of this widespread landscape, despite its allures, must be exchanged for the source of those “quiet thoughts,” a source present in the landscape but too often unseen by the abstract vision: Oh, ’tis the heart that magnifies this life, Making a truth and beauty of her own! And moss-grown alleys, circumscribing shades, And gurgling rills, assist her in the work More efficaciously than realms outspread, As in a map, before the Adventurer’s gaze, Ocean and earth contending for regard. (“Reading Text 2,” 11–17)

The poet says “Enough of climbing toil,” for such desires for mastery and the “grand terraqueous spectacle” induce contempt for the world and, more important, for the small recesses and hidden spots that truly nourish the soul. These spots, while unimportant to the Adventurer’s gaze, are what define the landscape, filling in the trigonometer’s triangles with the surveyor’s art. The tension noted in the previous chapter between the desire for the imperial vision and its problematic association with that most notorious Adventurer Napoleon, between “realms outspread / As in a map” and the “formal fellowship of petty things,” is here momentarily resolved. The uncertain gain of the abstract imperializing vision is rejected in favor of the local and obscure details that are visible only to the initiate and the topographical surveyor who seeks to represent not the ideal or invisible lines but things attached to the ground.7 7 The “local” available only to the locals themselves was a common troping of local integrity. Stephen Bann uses De Quincey’s Recollections to suggest that the Lakes themselves were once conceived of as “a place resistant to the armies of tourism ... traversed not by a

The Wreck of Is and Was

113

Lo! there a dim Egerian grotto fringed With ivy-twine, profusely from its brows Dependant,—enter without further aim; And let me see thee sink into a mood Of quiet thought—protracted till thine eye Be calm as water when the winds are gone And no one can tell whither. (“Reading Text 2,” 18–24)

It is in this “dim Egerian grotto,” virtually hidden from sight, that the poet locates the source of “quiet thought.” Yet this place is not simply the origin of “quiet thought,” but constituted by those thoughts as well, by how well one responds to this secret place. It is through one’s response, through “the heart that magnifies this life,” that any place is defined, and ultimately it is through the accumulation of such spots or the modeling of such responses that the nation itself is defined. For Wordsworth, this is not so much the discovery of a new place as it is the return to his native country after exile. In the Preface to the Poems of 1815, Wordsworth used a brief passage from Virgil’s first Eclogue to illustrate his definition of Imagination.8 The passage is spoken by Meliboeus, who, soon to begin his exile from his “patrios” (father’s lands), looks upon his little flock of goats and laments: “Non ego vos posthac viridi projectus in antro / Dumosa pendere procul de rupe videbo” (Not I hereafter, stretched full length in some green cave, / Shall watch you far off hanging on a thorny crag) (75–6). The “green cave” returns in “To the Same” as the “dim Egerian grotto,” and the sight of the goats “hanging” is replaced by the “ivy-twine” which, as the enjambment literalizes, is “Dependant.” In short, the exile has ended; the poet has returned home. When Wordsworth further revised this poem for the 1827 edition of his poems, he left the first 17 lines of the 1820 version largely unchanged and focused on further defining the mysterious source of power he found in the dim Egerian grotto: Long as the heat shall rage, let that dim cave Protect us, there deciphering as we may Diluvian records; or the sighs of Earth Interpreting; or counting for old Time His minutes, by reiterated drops, Audible tears, from some invisible source That deepens upon fancy—more and more Drawn tow’rd the centre whence those sighs creep forth To awe the lightness of humanity: heroic remnant of revolt but by a poet with a growing mind.” De Quincey characterizes the Lakes as unspoiled, truly picturesque in the times when “false taste, the pseudo-romantic rage, had not violated the most awful solitudes amongst the ancient hills.” This land before tourism De Quincey called a “labyrinth.” See Bann, “The truth in mapping” in The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 215. See also De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, 157–8. 8 Susan Wolfson examines Wordsworth’s use of this same passage from Virgil in his Preface to the Poems of 1815 to argue for an ironic reading of the Wanderer’s self-imposed exile (112).

114

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation Or, shutting up thyself within thyself, There let me see thee sink into a mood Of gentler thought, protracted till thine eye Be calm as water when the winds are gone, And no one can tell whither. (“Reading Text 3,” SP 32–46)

This is unmistakably autumnal poetry, the poetry of advancing middle age and increasing isolation. But to attribute these almost antiquarian desires for reading and deciphering “Diluvian records”—whether they be the local markings of the earth or poetic fragments composed years earlier—a retreat from the world into the fortified vale, to increasing age is to miss the context of that retreat. Even to call it a retreat is an injustice since Wordsworth is returning to those local habitations from which he had always drawn strength.9 Wordsworth is not advocating or justifying a hermit’s sequestration from the world, there to dabble in local history or shut up oneself within oneself but instead posits that it is only through the detailed examination of the local that any possibility exists for knowing the abstract or the general. The moss-grown alleys, circumscribed shades, and gurgling rills do the work “more efficaciously” than the Adventurer’s map, and given the failure of his own overtly imperial poetry it is hard to argue against him. This turn is clearly marked by Wordsworth’s decision in 1819 to publish two long poems, one that had lain in manuscript for more than two decades and the other for more than one decade. Little is known about why Wordsworth chose to publish Peter Bell in April 1819 and The Waggoner in May 1819. Perhaps, as John E. Jordan suggests, Peter Bell was intended as an elaborate offering to Southey, to whom the poem is dedicated and who had privately paid to Wordsworth the very high compliment of associating him with Milton. That Wordsworth later defended the publication of Peter Bell by consciously invoking Milton’s own defense of the publication of Tetrachordon lends some support to this theory. Or perhaps Wordsworth was responding to a passage in Coleridge’s recently published collected edition of The Friend, which reported how Sir Alexander Ball was struck by “the Truth and psychological insight with which [the manuscript version of Peter Bell read to him by Coleridge] represented the practicability of reforming the most hardened minds, and the various accidents which may awaken the most brutalized Person to a recognition of his nobler Being” (2: 290). Certainly it would not be the first or the last time that Wordsworth reacted to Coleridge’s praise or criticism through revision or publication. Or perhaps it was only in 1819 that Wordsworth recognized how Peter Bell might be fit, as he states in the dedication to Southey, “for filling permanently a station, however humble, in the Literature of the Country” (PB 41) and how too it might fit into his own attempts to write a local but generalizable poetry of the nation. In an early journal entry, Dorothy Wordsworth referred to Peter Bell as “the Yorkshire Wolds poem” (Journals 99),10 and it is very much a poem about a specific 9 “Retreat” is Woodring’s characterization of the later Wordsworth, which he identifies as beginning in 1814 (85–147). 10 Both de Selincourt (PW 5: 366) and Reed (152) suggest that Peter Bell is the Yorkshire Wolds poem referred to by Dorothy Wordsworth in her journal entry for 10 March 1802.

The Wreck of Is and Was

115

place. But it takes some time for the poem to get to this place, as the poet first describes a journey in and the subsequent dismissal of a fairy boat shaped like the crescent moon and then details the wandering itinerary of the roving Peter Bell. The fairy boat marks an initial escape from the restless world, an abandonment of the real for the fanciful. The fanciful is figured as an elevated view of the world like that of the prospect view, which diminishes the earth to a “tiny grain.” But this diminishment, like the mountaintop view described in the second ode to Lycoris, “To the Same,” which induces contempt for old familiar sights, troubles the narrator and so, over the objections of the fairy boat, the narrator dismisses it in favor of the known and observable world, the “common growth of mother-earth” (138). The expansive vision is again coupled with ambition, the narrator chiding the boat to “Take with you some Ambitious youth” (133). In a later revision, the boat is even called a “restless Wanderer” as if to call further attention to the abstracting imagination figured by the boat. Despite this embracing of the common and rejection of the abstract and fanciful, the narrator hints at a deeper fear, that it might already be “an age too late” (132). In place of the abstract vision, we have a homely tale that centers on a rover who, seeking a shortcut through the woods, gets lost and stumbles on an ass standing stationary by the river lamenting the loss of its master. But before we get to the Yorkshire Wolds, we are told of Peter’s wide-ranging travels, covering virtually the entire geography of Britain, from “Cornwall’s rocky shore” (219) to the cliffs of Dover, “Caernarvon’s Towers” (221), Salisbury Plain, Lincolnshire, Northumberland, Lancastershire, the lowlands and highlands of Scotland, and the “Cheviot Hills” (235). The movement of the narrative is from the elevated overview of the trigonometer to the perambulation of the local surveyor. Yet despite these wide-ranging travels, Peter knew nothing and learned nothing: “He travelled here, he travelled there;— / But not the value of a hair / Was heart or head the better” (248– 50). Like many Wordsworthian characters, Peter Bell is perceived to be formed by the landscapes he has known. However, unlike most of the others, something has gone wrong with Peter’s natural education. For Peter, “A primrose by a river’s brim / A yellow primrose was to him, / And it was nothing more” (258–60). The “mountains and dreary moors” (305) have only marked him with a “savage character” (304), and “solitary Nature” (307) has only fed “the unshap’d half human thoughts” (306), which when wedded with “whatever vice / The cruel city breeds” (309–10) produce a thoroughly profligate and vicious person. But even this man is capable of reform, though it requires the almost supernatural conjunction of his own superstitious mind with a dead man, a preternatural ass, a strange and exotic landscape, and a Methodist preacher to bring it about. After encountering the ass by the river, Peter attempts to steal it, is foiled, and then discovers the body of the ass’s dead master, which he frees from the river and drags ashore; he then sets out with the ass to return the dead man to his home. The journey takes them through a “wild fantastic scene” made wild by Peter’s own imagination: For conjectures that cast doubt on this attribution, see John E. Jordan’s “Introduction” in Peter Bell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 7.

116

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation The rocks that tower on either side Build up a wild fantastic scene; Temples like those among the Hindoos, And mosques, and spires, and abbey windows, And castles all with ivy green! (725–30)

This is an imaginative rendition of the landscape that moves from the oriental exoticism of Hindu temples and Moslem mosques to the more familiar objects of British exoticism, ruined abbeys, and castles. It is important to remember that this is the narrator’s description of Peter’s thoughts, thoughts that render the natural landscape supernatural. The narrator later disdainfully rejects such magical visions and playfully chastises the “Dread Spirits,” who “torment the good ... Disordering colour, form, and stature!” (811–13), and calls on them to let “good men ... see things as they are” (814–15). To assume that Wordsworth agrees with this chastisement by his commonsensical narrator or that he allies himself with the superstitious Peter is to miss the point, for the real and the fanciful both serve Peter’s reform. Surely it is efficacious that Peter is frightened by a rumbling in the earth, which he feels is a portent of his coming retribution for past iniquities, an efficacy that the narrator’s matter-of-fact explanation of miners at work with gunpowder only diminishes. And when in this state of expectancy the site of a ruined chapel recalls to Peter his own proclivity for uncivil marriage, it matters little how Peter is reformed— only that the work of reform has begun. Peter’s reform is a product of the conjunction between a superstitious mind, a series of preternatural events, and a local topography susceptible of imaginative interpretations. While he has previously roved the length and breadth of Britain without learning a thing, now a certain state of mind allows him finally to read the landscape, to figure in its strange configurations the symbols of his own doom, and discover in its ruins the analogues of his own ruinous life. In the sonnet “Gordale,” which was published with Peter Bell in 1819, Wordsworth returns to these local superstitions as a way of delineating the power of the local landscape. In Gordale-chasm at a particular time of day and in suitable weather, one might catch sight of: The local Deity, with oozy hair And mineral crown, beside his jagged urn Recumbent:—Him thou mays’t behold, who hides His lineaments by day, and there presides, Teaching the docile waters how to turn (8–12)

Like the local field surveyors who walked the country sketching hills, mapping everything attached to the ground, and gathering folkloric and ethnographic material, Wordsworth instructs his readers on the local superstitions and supernatural sightings attributed to places. Like the fanciful names given to the Lake District mountains by the locals—names like “The Astrologer” or “The Ancient Woman”—these local traditions humanize nature by characterizing it as an active, lived-in landscape. Peter Bell is just such a folk tale, and one can easily imagine how the stations of his

The Wreck of Is and Was

117

journey could be named for his presence, spots on the map marked with names that carry tradition and history. For Wordsworth this return to local traditions recovers the meaning of the landscape by investing it with human transit and human purposes. Unlike the unpeopled and impossibly abstract national landscape of the trigonometer, the local landscape is marked everywhere by a history that reconnects the present with the past. Imperial dominion is replaced by historical contingency, as the abstract map is filled in with local detail. In “Malham Cove,” another sonnet included in the Peter Bell volume, Wordsworth exemplifies how the folkloric traditions attached to a place are not merely superstitious ephemera but constitutive of both the place and one’s response to it: Was the aim frustrated by force or guile, When giants scooped from out the rocky ground, Tier under tier, this semicirque profound? (Giants—the same who built in Erin’s isle That Causeway with incomparable toil!)— Oh, had this vast theatric structure wound With finished sweep into a perfect round, No mightier work had gained the plausive smile Of all-beholding Phoebus! But, alas, Vain earth! false world! Foundations must be laid In Heaven; for, ‘mid the wreck of IS and WAS, Things incomplete and purposes betrayed Make sadder transits o’er thought’s optic glass Than noblest objects utterly decayed.

In telling the story of how giants might have “scooped from out the rocky ground” the shape of the landscape, there is a telling echo of the “Prospectus” to The Recluse, where Wordsworth had openly rejected such stories: Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man— My haunt, and the main region of my song. (“Prospectus,” 35–41)

Whereas earlier in the decade Wordsworth had seen such tales as unsuitable for his poetry, by the end of the decade he was increasingly turning to the history and folklore and local mythology that differentiated the local landscape. William Galperin argues that the opening question of “Malham Cove” about “the mystification of place—the cove’s mythological origins—becomes a means, indeed, not only to contest this myth, but, more important, to reveal the self-aggrandizement of all mythmaking” (11–12), and yet nowhere does Wordsworth characterize this folk tradition as mythological and subject to skepticism. While clearly a tale of mythological origins, the poem does not reject the mythology, but rather folds it into other human concerns.

118

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

When the sonnet turns at the end of the ninth line, the rejection of the “Vain earth, false world” is curious, given that we have been in the company of giants, in its utter practicality and serves to humanize the mythological. Furthermore, the folk tradition that Malham Cove was formed by the action of giants both humanizes and historicizes the sublime abstract work of geologic time. A purpose is attached to the work, as if the very form of rocks and hills was willed into being. But purposes can be betrayed, and even giants capable of building that causeway in Ireland can be frustrated by force or guile. The local landscape, then, is not simply background or picturesque attraction but revealing in the associations built up over immemorial time of the ways in which people have observed and interpreted that landscape. As James K. Chandler remarks in his discussion of a later Wordsworth sonnet, “Powers we love seem to cling to places; tradition is universal love localized by fancy” (173). Tradition, and traditional knowledge, is not merely a mythology to be dismissed, but as Peter J. Manning calls it, a kind of “imaginative history” (“Cleansing” 293), which is as necessary to understanding place as any documentary record. Despite this effort at reclamation and preservation, the “wreck of IS and WAS” remains as both a reminder of present and past failures and a recognition of the disjunction between present and past. The wreck is both artifact and gap, ruin and abyss, traceable connection and irresolvable distance. It is both the wreck of is and was and the wreck between is and was. It is both a “vain earth” and a “false world” because it is simultaneously a readable landscape marked everywhere by history, and an unreadable landscape marked by the irreversible nature of time and the irreconcilability of the present and the past. If Peter Bell recounts how the superstitious mind reads personal meaning into the specific local landscape, The Waggoner depicts a specific local landscape already written over by human transit and domestication. While the narrator of Peter Bell might have been unduly disdainful of such supernatural imaginings, the narrator of The Waggoner uses such local traditions and superstitions to create a decidedly human landscape. As with Peter Bell, it is unclear why Wordsworth chose to publish The Waggoner in 1819, just over a month after the appearance of Peter Bell. According to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth “consented” to publish the poem just to give critics who had blasted Peter Bell “another bone to pick” (154). Whether this goes far enough toward explaining Wordsworth’s decision, or whether it at all answers why The Waggoner was considered a suitable bone, is subject to debate. What is clear is how well The Waggoner answered to the sort of local poetry Wordsworth was trying to write at this time, some of which appeared in the 1819 volumes but much of which would be included in the poems on the Duddon. Wordsworth was well aware of the local nature of The Waggoner, but his attitude toward the utility and acceptability of poetry with local interest had apparently changed. In the dedication to Lamb, Wordsworth recalls the effect the poem had on the dedicated city dweller: In the Year 1806, if I am not mistaken, THE WAGGONER was read to you in manuscript; and, as you have remembered it for so long a time, I am the more encouraged to hope, that, since the localities on which it partly depends did not prevent its being interesting to you, it may prove acceptable to others. (39)

The Wreck of Is and Was

119

As early as 1809 Dorothy Wordsworth had written that The Waggoner was soon to be published.11 In 1814 she mentioned the imminent publication of The White Doe of Rylstone, Peter Bell, and The Waggoner. “This is resolved upon,” she wrote to Catherine Clarkson, “and I think you may depend upon not being disappointed” (MY 2: 140). Yet, while The White Doe of Rylstone was published in 1815, Peter Bell and The Waggoner were not, and while this failure is generally attributed to Wordsworth’s personal “disappointment over the reception of The Excursion and The White Doe” (MY 2: 140n), there exists no support for this conjecture. Perhaps Wordsworth was uncomfortable with the specifically local character of these poems at a time in his career when he was uncertain about the utility and significance of the local and at a time in history that seemed to require the high impassioned strains of a bardic voice. By 1819 these reservations seemed to have been allayed by Wordsworth’s discovery (or rediscovery) of the ways in which the local can inform and perhaps even constitute the larger abstract and national visions. The Waggoner focuses on a single night’s journey along the Keswick road leading from Ambleside past Rydal Lake, over Dunmail-raise, through Wythburn, past Thirlmere and Castlerigg, and on to Keswick. It is a poetical guidebook or itinerary map, complete with descriptions of the local inns and taverns and the traditions that surround various points of interest. It is also a comic tale about a good-natured but weak-willed waggoner who offers shelter to vagrants, is much too fond of the temptations of the roadside inn, and is dismissed by his master for just these faults. But the hero is also a skilled waggoner able to coerce his eight-horse wagon gently up the steepest grade without recourse to the whip and knowledgeable about the local traditions of the landscape over which he travels. Despite its wry comic tone, the poem is elegiac about the loss of the waggoner, who had himself become something of a “living Almanack” (798), a “speaking Diary” (799), and who in his sure movements “Gave to days a mark and name / By which we knew them when they came” (801–2). In his stead, the narrator sees only confusion and lack of compassion, “Eight sorry carts” (827) and the vagrants and stragglers who follow in their wake, which occasion for him regret for “what we have lost” (843). Besides the practical difficulties occasioned by the loss of both “WAGGONER and WAIN” (773), the loss of Benjamin the waggoner points to greater losses, suffered when the need for commercial efficiency overtakes the human purposes that local traditions serve. Benjamin’s dismissal is seen as part of a more general dismissal of that idiosyncrasy that, while perfectly suited to the demands of the local conditions and landscape, is deemed inefficient waste and unbusiness-like practice by outside commercial interests. To counter this dismissal of the local, the poem serves as a repository for local traditions, a local surveyor’s sketchbook recording the local names given to rocks and mountains, and the traditional associations that have built up around the various features in the landscape. Helm-crag is further defined by the names “The Astrologer” and “The Ancient Woman” given to the two figures of its broken summit by the locals, and Dunmail-raise is further delineated by a local tradition that explains the source of its name:

11 See her letter to De Quincey of 1 May, 1809 in MY 1: 335.

120

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation [They] now have reach’d that pile of stones, Heap’d over brave King Dunmail’s bones; He who had once supreme command, Last king of rocky Cumberland; His bones, and those of all his Power, Slain here in a disastrous hour! (205–10)

This local tradition, which holds that King Dunmail—the last king of Cumberland—is buried on the top of Dunmail-raise, recalls a time of local independence, visible daily to the inhabitants of Cumbria in the origins of the mountain’s name. The mountain itself is a constant reminder of the loss of the local, the absorption of Cumbria in the twelfth century by the already expanding English nation. The landscape is marked with these historic reminders that provide local identity and differentiate this spot, or these spots, from other spots in Britain, the nation, paradoxically, consisting of infinitely multiplied, differentiated, and nonhomogeneous “spots.” At the beginning of Canto Fourth, the narrator embarks on a fanciful journey through such a marked landscape, recalling the local traditions of fairy bands seen in certain lights upon Skiddaw and relating the mythic stories surrounding Threlkeld Hall. This celebration of the local in its idiosyncrasy, eccentricity, and incongruity serves to differentiate this landscape from other landscapes. As Peter J. Manning argues in reference to the Yarrow Revisited poems, Wordsworth asks his readers “to interpret local superstition as true signs of national character” (“Cleansing” 290). The features of the local landscape become figures for the local character, a character held up as exemplary in the face of continual encroachments from the metropolis and the restless world. One’s responsiveness to local idiosyncrasy becomes a measure of how deftly one reads the national character. Contrasted sharply with this depiction of the local landscape is the oddly mocking depiction of one of the nation’s greatest triumphs. The discharged sailor turned traveling showman unveils before the patrons of “The Cherry Tree”—a pub in Wythburn—a model of Nelson’s ship “The Vanguard” and proceeds to recreate the Battle of the Nile. Part of the mocking fun in this episode lies in the stunned credulity of the rural crowd and Benjamin’s drink-induced toast, “To Nelson, England’s pride and treasure, / Her bulwark and her tower of strength” (423–4), where “treasure” is made to rhyme with the “bowl of double measure” and “strength” with “a draught of length.” But whereas rural patriotism is surely being gently mocked, there is a hint that all such shows of national spirit are suspicious and amusing for other reasons. When the show is over, the discharged sailor carefully puts his model ship away: Then, like a hero crown’d with laurel, Back to her place the ship he led; Wheel’d her back in full apparel; And so, flag-flying at mast-head, Re-yoked her to the Ass:—anon, Cries Benjamin, “We must be gone.” (435–40)

The devious interior rhyme of “mast” with “Ass” and the very idea of yoking Nelson’s ship to an ass are curiously subversive treatments of one of the great icons

The Wreck of Is and Was

121

of British perseverance and independence. Though The Waggoner was written in 1806, it must be remembered that Wordsworth withheld publication until 1819. Such a passage might have been offensive even to Wordsworth only a few years before, but by 1819 he had already tried and failed to write poetry that could depict the nation. For despite the ostensible shows of unanimity and undifferentiated purpose that seemed to inform such national celebrations as that which followed the news of Nelson’s victory, what Wordsworth perpetually saw, and perhaps eventually came to accept, was the lack of unanimity and the different even opposed purposes found in the various local populations and local landscapes. Wordsworth’s desire to salvage local tradition from the encroachments of the inventive age receives a serious, and at times elegiac, treatment in the 12 sonnets that conclude the 1819 edition of The Waggoner. While the marked landscape of the Keswick road called forth the playful interweaving of the broadly comic and mock-heroic, the sonnets record a struggle between the desire to preserve a vanishing past, and with it local identity, and the nagging fear that it was already an age too late. The sonnet “Aerial Rock” describes such an attempt to preserve the local associations of places, as the poet considers imaginatively placing “an imperial Castle” upon the rock, which “the plough / Of ruin shall not touch” (8-9). But this act of imagined preservation is rejected almost immediately as an “Innocent scheme” incapable of improving the identity of a place that had been neglected by “hoar Antiquity” (12). All that remains is the hope that this place might “catch a gleam / Of golden sun-set—ere it fade and die!” (13–14), an elegiac wish signaling the possibility that not everything can be salvaged and preserved. Despite the futility of this innocent desire to salvage the local by recording its traditions, many of the sonnets continue the attempt. These attempts, which can come across as bordering on the sentimental and the nostalgic, resume the commentary on the national character begun in Peter Bell and The Waggoner. The poem “Meditations on Easter Sunday” recollects the common tradition of wearing new clothes on Easter, and such recollections move Wordsworth to recall how “Domestic hands the home-bred wool had shorn, / And she who span it culled the daintiest fleece” all in remembrance of the Passion. However, these recollections serve only to point out what has been lost, the domestic cottage spinning industry, and the imaginative ties and associations that accompany it: A blest estate when piety sublime These humble props disdained not! O green dales! Sad may I be who heard your sabbath chime When Art’s abused inventions were unknown; Kind Nature’s various wealth was all your own; And benefits were weighed in Reason’s scales! (“Composed in One of the Valleys of Westmoreland on Easter Sunday” 9–14)

In an earlier draft of this sonnet, Wordsworth was much more direct about the nation’s involvement in this change and also much more optimistic about the possible recovery of these lost traditions:

122

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation A blest Estate, where Piety sublime These humble props disdained not—art thou flown, Vanished for aye from Britain’s hills and Vales, Extinct, or lingering in a happier clime Where our abused inventions are unknown And benefits are weigh’d in Reason’s scales? (“Composed on Easter Sunday,” “Reading Text 1,” 9–14)

In this earlier draft, these traditions are gone forever from Britain, but there exists the possibility that somewhere “our abused inventions are unknown” and labor remains unalienated from the manifold purposes and meanings that actuate it. In the published version of 1819, this possibility is eradicated, the change is marked as universal and irrevocable, and the local traditions are not transplanted to some “happier clime” but placed in the distant realm of the irretrievable past. As the sonnet following this one makes clear, what has been lost is a way of life, a structure and an order that the “revolving motions” (“Grief, thou hast lost an ever ready friend,” 11) of the cottage spinning wheel gave to the domestic laborers of the valley. In short, the loss of these local traditions from Britain’s hills and vales signaled for Wordsworth the irreversible decay of the national character. This sense of the eradication of a way of life and the cost to the nation of such a loss is the subtext of the three autumnal sonnets that close the 1819 edition of The Waggoner. The sonnet “I watch, and long have watch’d with calm regret” is a moving elegy to passing time, irrevocable change, and even pitiable decline. The poet details the slow descent of a star as it sinks below the horizon, and how, unlike the star, which is guaranteed a cyclic rebirth, human time offers no such recompense: Angels and Gods! we struggle with our fate, While health, power, glory, pitiably decline, Depress’d and then extinguish’d: and our state, In this, how different, lost Star, from thine, That no to-morrow shall our beams restore! (10–14)

The pitiable decline lamented by the poem points to the decline which the two preceding sonnets had described, the loss of local associations and traditions, which was, for Wordsworth, the chief cause of what he perceived to be the decay of the national character. If the nation had declined, the decline had been brought about by the erosion of local ties and feelings, the loss of tradition and the sense of local history and identity, the wreck of is and was, which no tomorrow can restore. Paradoxically, this destruction of the local is both the product of and necessary to the rise of nationalism. But amid this elegy for things past, Wordsworth is unwilling to give himself over entirely to despair. Though the second-to-last sonnet records the poet’s despair and frustration at being unable to follow the song of the swan heard in a dream, of awaking from the dream and “struggling in vain to follow” (“I heard (alas ’twas only in a dream),” 14), the final sonnet sounds a note of seemingly impossible optimism in the face of adverse circumstances. The 1819 edition of The Waggoner closes with the sonnet that originally began “Eve’s lingering clouds extend in solid bars,” later revised and titled “Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake.” Written in

The Wreck of Is and Was

123

1807 in the depths of the Napoleonic War, the sonnet records a struggle to reach an affirmation in the face of so many contradictory events. It is, like the two preceding sonnets, a sunset scene. Here the poet glimpses upon the smoothed surface of the lake an inverted image of the stars “beauteously revealed / At happy distance from earth’s groaning field, / Where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars” (6-8). This leads the poet to ask darkly, “Is it a mirror?—or the nether sphere / Opening its vast abyss,” uncertain whether the vision is one of heaven or hell. But these dark thoughts are interrupted by a still, quiet voice: But list! a voice is near; Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds, “Be thankful thou; for, if unholy deeds Ravage the world, tranquillity is here!” (11–14)

Paul de Man has called attention to the “complex set of spatial ambiguities” that lead one to wonder “where this ‘here’ is located” (Rhetoric 126). For de Man this sonnet is representative of the “double vision,” simultaneously literal and symbolic, so essential to Wordsworth’s poetry, which allows the poet “to see landscapes as objects, as well as entrance gates to a world lying beyond visible nature” (132). But “here” raises not only spatial ambiguities but temporal ones as well, for “here” is both a place and a time—“here” is always also a “now.” These temporal ambiguities are complicated further by the long delay between composition and publication. While de Man demonstrates how the “here”—ostensibly referring to the side of Grasmere Lake that is the site of the utterance—is geographically unstable, it is the “now” that is always bound to the “here” that destabilizes “here” by forcing us to consider both the here and now of writing and the here and now of reading. Here includes not only the specific and unique spot celebrated by the poem, but the reader’s unlocalizable “here,” which marks the shared act of contemplation that unites the poet and the reader, the one speaking, the other listening. Wordsworth, through intense response to the local, transforms the localized here of writing into the universal here of reading, creating a nation of qualified readers and like-minded believers, and overleaping the middle step—the actual historical nation with which he violently disagreed. The “here” is not the mark of the smug little-Englander, but the appeal for a community of enlightened meditative minds. Wordsworth is, after all, the national poet, only the nation is an imagined and purified nation not coextensive with the nation-state. The local is not a fragment of the nation; the nation is a subset of the local. During the 12 years between the composition and publication of this poem, Wordsworth sought to resolve the tension between the restless world outside the vale and the protected space of his native Cumbria. Only in the years following the war was he able to locate the here where tranquility resides in the memory of people, the tradition of places, and the minds of readers. On the shores of Grasmere, in the dim Egerian grotto, in the recesses of the Yorkshire Wolds, on the Keswick road, and along the course of the River Duddon, Wordsworth sought to overcome the wreck of is and was, and on the Cumberland coast near Bootle, he cast his eyes over the estuary of the Duddon there to “see what was, and is, and will abide.”

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5

A Detailed Local Survey The River Duddon sonnets and the writing of the nation

Enough if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour; And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know. —Wordsworth, Sonnet XXXIII, The River Duddon (1820)

More than three decades after the trip to Bootle, Wordsworth recalled its importance in the Fenwick note to The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets. Following a wide-ranging list of his various encounters with this river, his recollections close on a note of circumspection: I have many affecting remembrances with this stream. These I forbear to mention, especially things that occurred on its banks during the latter part of that visit to the seaside of which the former part is detailed in my epistle to Sir George Beaumont. (32)

Wordsworth provides the itinerary of “the latter part of that visit” in a letter to Sara Hutchinson written in 1811 upon the return of the Wordsworths to Grasmere: Mary and I returned from Duddon Bridge, up the Duddon through Seathwaite, the children with Fanny taking the direct road through Coniston. We dined in the Porch of Ulpha Kirk, and passed two Hours there and in the beautiful churchyard. Our pace was so slow and our halts so many and long that it was half past 4 in the afternoon before we reached New Field (the public house in Seathwaite) though we had left Duddon Bridge at nine. The next day we took as long a time to reach Eugh-dale [Yewdale], over that long and steep ascent which you will remember to have passed with Coleridge and me a few years ago (MY 1:509–10).

Given the fears about the successful restoration of their children’s health discussed in Chapter 3, it is easy to see what some of those “affecting remembrances” were. Separated from their children on their way back to Grasmere and idling about the churchyard at Seathwaite, those fears soon to be realized must have occupied the minds of William and Mary and cast over the splendid views an autumnal coloring, a sense of impending loss and the belatedness of action. In their dilatory progress back to Grasmere, we can sense a desire to escape from the reality of a sickly child, a reality that continually found its reflection in every halted sight, such that the respite stolen from further anxieties of care was constantly overshadowed by a landscape that seemed to be marked everywhere by loss and the passage of time. From the very personal need to remember what has been lost, the need to punish oneself with

126

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

the question, “But how could I forget thee,” springs the impassioned desire for a memory of the land, the traditions and the customs that provide for Wordsworth the only bulwark against the chaos of forgetting. It is in opposition to the painful self-flagellation evinced in the sonnet “Surprized by joy—impatient as the Wind” that Wordsworth embarks on a project of preservation, of a not-forgetting that seeks to locate the character of the nation in its ability to remember and to read the landscape marked with history, the landscape of memory.1 If the publication of Peter Bell and The Waggoner signaled a conscious turn to the local landscape, the publication a year later of the seemingly miscellaneous collection of poetry and prose titled The River Duddon2 marked the ascendancy of the local—and Wordsworth’s most elaborate and conscious effort to write the nation through the detailed local survey of a representative landscape.3 As is often the case with Wordsworth, to call it a triumph, as many contemporary reviewers did, is to miss the point, for while the poems and the prose are something of a triumph of memory, they exemplify by the very need to remember the parallel movement and possible ascendancy of forgetting. In the dramatic structure of their arrangement, the poems and prose enact the never wholly resolved tension between memory and forgetting. While the 1820 volume containing the River Duddon sonnets was almost immediately effaced by its incorporation and dispersal in the 1820 four-volume collected edition of Wordsworth’s poems, Stephen Gill is right to point out that “its identity as a discrete volume is of the greatest historical significance” (Life 334).4 Although Gill is correct 1 Robin Jarvis refers to the genre of travel poems as Wordsworth’s attempt “to leave a poetic trace of his itinerary.” Although Jarvis focuses on the 1822 publication Memorials of a Tour of the Continent, 1820, his claim for those poems, that they are “a record of human frailty in the face of mortality” applies equally to the Duddon sonnets. See “The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820.” Studies in Romanticism 40 (2001 Fall): 321–43. 2 The complete title of the 1820 volume was The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets, Vaudracour and Julia, and other Poems, To which is annexed A Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England. 3 Jalal Uddin Khan offers this interesting reading of “The Pilgrim’s Dream,” one of the poems of the River Duddon volume: “Wordsworth’s celebration of the beauty and vitality of the unimposing and unpretentious glory of a glow-worm shining in its native, local surroundings is thus a defense of not just his own poetry and ideology but also his English Lake District paid a high tribute in the River Duddon series of sonnets and the Topographical Description.” See “Publication and Reception of Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Volume” in Modern Language Studies 32.2 (2002 Fall), 51. 4 One significant way that the River Duddon volume was important is that it marked a striking turn in Wordsworth’s reputation as measured by contemporary reviews. Though he persisted in claiming that he never read reviews of his poetry, Wordsworth himself late in his life told an acquaintance that “My sonnets to the river Duddon have been wonderfully popular. Properly speaking, nothing that I ever wrote has been popular, but they have been more warmly received” (PW 3: 505). The reception accorded The River Duddon volume ranged from the grudging praise of the unrepentant reviewer for the Monthly Review who sought to take credit for Wordsworth’s transformation to John Wilson’s characterization of Wordsworth as “a genuine English classic, in the purest and highest sense of the term” (Reiman 1:101). In both the traditionally sympathetic and unsympathetic journals, critics

A Detailed Local Survey

127

in stating that “none of these poems is exclusively local” (334), it was the “thoughtful delineation of local scenery” that a reviewer for the British Review of September 1820 identified as justification for considering Wordsworth one of the great poets of the age: He has entitled himself to this place by an intensity of natural expression, and a thoughtful delineation of local scenery ... From these obvious resources he has turned himself to those treasures of contemplative wealth, which, by adding value to rural objects, and all the possible combinations of scenery, general, local, and domestic, have philosophized, and spiritualized, and raised into commerce with the soul, those beauties and sublimities of nature. ... To Mr. Wordsworth we do really think the praise of this new style of local poetry eminently belongs. (Reiman 1:248)

These are not local poems in the sense that one requires knowledge of the road out of Ambleside to read “Ode: The Pass of Kirkstone,” just as familiarity with Grasmere was not necessary for reading Michael. However, as Gill notes “the poems and the detailed Topographical Description which is their complement proclaimed once again Wordsworth as poet, celebrant, and interpreter of a particular, blessed region” (Life 334). What makes the 1820 volume not exclusively local and the celebration of a particular, blessed region is the way the local stands in for the national both as exemplary and as cautionary tale. What appears to be a retreat into the hills and vales of Westmorland is in fact Wordsworth’s most ambitious attempt to write the nation, an attempt that is simultaneously celebration and elegy. In the “Advertisement” to the River Duddon volume, Wordsworth acknowledges the literary tradition of the river poem, though curiously enough the first debt cited is to a poem never written. In an ironic challenge that serves as a necessary distancing, Wordsworth notes that while writing this series of sonnets he did not at first perceive that he “was trespassing upon ground preoccupied, at least as far as intention went, by Mr. Coleridge; who, more than twenty years ago, used to speak of writing a rural Poem, to be entitled ‘The Brook,’ of which he has given a sketch in a recent publication.” But, as Wordsworth is quick to point out, “a particular subject cannot, I think, much interfere with a general one,” and in what must have been a painful reminder to Coleridge of his many unfulfilled projects and failed schemes, Wordsworth adds that “these Sonnets may remind Mr. Coleridge of his own more comprehensive design, and induce him to fulfill it” (PW 3: 503). Wordsworth both conjures up the ghost of those Racedown years, with its unfulfilled ambitions, and dismisses it, invoking Coleridge only to put him aside as irrelevant.5 In eschewing the “comprehensive design” envisioned by Coleridge, Wordsworth implies that the praised this volume for possessing “all of the beauties and very few of the defects of this writer” (Literary Chronicle, July 1, 1820, Reiman 2: 586). What Blackwood’s describes as the “native strength and originality” (Reiman 1:101) of Wordsworth’s genius, the British Critic locates in some “individualizing trait thrown in, which gives a reality to it, and makes us feel that he is describing some real spot where the event in narration occurred” (Reiman 1:191). 5 For more on the psychodynamics of this riposte between Wordsworth and Coleridge, see Linda J. Palumbo, “Wordsworth’s Coleridge in the River Duddon,” Round Table of South Central College English Association, 27:2 (Summer 1986), 1–4.

128

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

River Duddon does not possess any pretensions beyond the local, but as usual there is danger in taking him at his word. In the address “To the Rev. Dr. Wordsworth,” which was printed in the River Duddon volume and later (in 1827) positioned as the introductory poem to the sonnet series, Wordsworth makes clear that these local poems are comprehensive and speak to matters of national importance: Ah! not for emerald fields alone, With ambient streams more pure and bright Than fabled Cytherea’s zone Glittering before the Thunderer’s sight, Is to my heart of hearts endeared The ground where we were born and reared! Hail, ancient Manners! sure defense, Where they survive, of wholesome laws; Remnants of love whose modest sense Thus into narrow room withdraws; Hail, usages of pristine mould, And ye that guard them, Mountains old! (49–60)

These sonnets (and the volume as a whole) were written not simply for the delineation of the local, the emerald fields alone, but also for what they say about “ancient Manners” and their presumed preservation in essentially rural areas like the Duddon valley. The very idea of the rural engenders its opposite, the urban, and if “wholesome laws” and “love” have withdrawn into the “narrow room” of the sparsely populated rural landscape, the writing of the local serves to exemplify what Wordsworth feels must be preserved and what he fears is fast ebbing away in the face of a nationalistic assault emanating from London. For Wordsworth these local poems speak directly to the general state of the nation and the character of the nation, but to discover as much, one must be willing to journey into the recesses where Wordsworth locates the true character of the nation: Bear with me, Brother! quench the thought That slights this passion, or condemns; If thee fond Fancy ever brought From the proud margin of the Thames, And Lambeth’s venerable towers, To humbler streams, and greener bowers. Yes, they can make, who fail to find, Short leisure even in busiest days; Moments, to cast a look behind, And profit by those kindly rays That through the clouds do sometimes steal, And all the far-off past reveal. (61–72)

The stanzas both restate a common Wordsworthian theme, great knowledge in humble sources, and reject that most common subject of the British river poem, the Thames. Equally important is the particular temporality that Wordsworth implies

A Detailed Local Survey

129

is only available in rural scenes, those “Moments, to cast a look behind.” The collapsing of spatial and temporal frames, prefiguring the movement of the series itself, recuperates the surveying glance as an act of reflection that brings history and futurity, origin and tendency together in a single action.6 If this action is, as Paul de Man argues in “Time and History in Wordsworth,” always a prefiguring of the poet’s death, it is also a prefiguring of the death of a particular vision of the nation as well. Wordsworth turns away from the Thames, the great river of the state that represents all that is destructive of the British character, to “humbler streams” where he feels the true source of the British character can still be found. However, even along the course of the humbler streams the source has already receded, and even there one must “cast a look behind” in order to study what the “far-off past” reveals. As Wordsworth notes in the “Advertisement” to the River Duddon volume, “The power of waters over the minds of Poets has been acknowledged from the earliest ages,” from Virgil down to Burns (PW 3:504). The course of the river from obscure birth through tempestuous youth and slow-moving middle age down to eventual dissolution and dispersal has served as the topographical symbol of both the course of human life and the destiny of empires.7 A brief look at arguably the most popular depiction of the Thames known to Wordsworth, Thomson’s The Seasons, reveals the common assumptions about the Thames and the difficulties that employing the landscape as a symbol can encounter. When Thomson came to write his celebrated description of the view from Richmond Hill, the Thames was already a deeply inscribed river, the frequent subject of literary treatments such as Denham’s Cooper Hill that sought to harmonize the mercantile and the pastoral. Thomson’s depiction was one of many that positioned the Thames as exemplar of the state of the nation. Suvir Kaul’s rich discussion of the “contradictions and irresolutions” of Thomson’s The Seasons identifies some of the difficulties of writing the nation. Kaul suggests these contradictions are part of “the poem’s efforts to craft a national balance of power between the more traditional agrarian and the newly expanding trading interests in contemporary Britain” (148). The result of that effort is “the 6 These are Wordsworth’s terms from the “Essay Upon Epitaphs” which served as a note to Book V of The Excursion: “Origin and tendency are notions inseparably co-relative. Never did a child stand by the side of a running stream, pondering within himself what power was the feeder of the perpetual current, from what never-wearied sources the body of water was supplied, but he must have been inevitably propelled to follow this question by another: ‘Towards what abyss is it in progress? what receptacle can contain the mighty influx?’” (PW 5: 446n). 7 Wyman Herendeen, in From Landscape to Literature: The River and the Myth of Geography (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1986), points out how the genre of the river progress was a favorite subject of English Renaissance writers who used the river as a metaphor of the state, of the life and death of empires and the fateful alternation between commerce and calamity. Raleigh’s journey in search of El Dorado is the consummate blending of an individual spiritual journey with a mythos of imperial penetration and subjugation, while the numerous excursions on the Thames found in such diverse works as Camden’s Britannia or Drayton’s Poly-Olbion were the literary equivalent of Queen Elizabeth I’s frequent river processions orchestrated to demonstrate British opulence, commercial success, and imperial power.

130

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

panegyric to British power argues that rural Britain is the basis of commercial and naval strength overseas” (152). However, as Kaul demonstrates, the harmony Thomson achieves in The Seasons is always uneasy, shifting from celebration of commerce and industry to celebration of rural life; from praise for urban learning and enlightenment to ridicule of rural superstition; and back again to criticism of the pride, ambition, and flattery of urban and courtly life.8 The view from Richmond Hill in “Summer” follows the course of the “silver Thames” (“Summer” 1416) from its rural birth through a landscape marked not so much by rural ease as by civilizing forces: Slow let us trace the matchless vale of Thames; Fair-winding up to where the muses haunt In Twit’nam’s bowers, and for their Pope implore The healing god; to royal Hampton’s pile . . . O vale of bliss! O softly-swelling hills! On which the Power of Cultivation lies, And joys to see the wonders of his toil. (1425–8, 1435–7)

The power of cultivation is both the presumed fecundity of the land and the implied strength of British civilization, improvement of the land through better husbandry and through higher learning. The prospect reveals a landscape that is rich because it has been cultivated and civilized: Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around, Of hills, and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires, And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all The stretching landscape into smoke decays! Happy Britannia! where the Queen of Arts, Inspiring vigour, Liberty, abroad Walks unconfined even to thy farthest cots, And scatters plenty with unsparing hand. (1438–45)

Just as the prospect spreads to the sight, so in this idealized vision of the British landscape prosperity spreads to the farthest cottages, taking in all objects from the seemingly natural hills and dales and woods to the signs of cultivation, the lawns, the spires, the towns, that humanize the landscape. Like Wordsworth’s imagined prospect of the British landscape discussed in Chapter 4, which he proposed as a test for patriotism, this view demands a nationalistic response. Indeed, so powerful was the association between Thomson’s description of the view from Richmond Hill and the actual view itself that when J.M.W. Turner climbed to the top of Richmond Hill 8 See Kaul’s discussion, 147–67. As Raymond Williams notes in The Country and the City, The Seasons seems to mark a moment of change, when the traditional uses of the pastoral as celebration of country life and critique of city life prove inadequate to contain the multiple and conflicting ideologies of the country and the city. The seemingly easy opposition between country and city gives way to the complex demands of a rapidly changing capitalist economy that while ostensibly the source of increased wealth, ease, and power, is also productive of unremitting toil and drudgery and threatening to the rural peace which it purportedly enables.

A Detailed Local Survey

131

in 1810, he found the pages containing this description affixed to a post placed at the summit, placed there by someone as if to make the landscape literally readable (Hill 46). As Thomson describes the movement down the Thames into the port of London, the picturesque view of the British landscape is replaced by the bustle of the commercial city. In what can only be described as hopeful verse, Thomson attempts to write this landscape as similarly felicitous: Full are thy cities with the sons of art; And trade and joy, in every busy street, Mingling are heard: even Drudgery himself, As at a car he sweats, or, dusty, hews The palace stone, looks gay. Thy crowded ports, Where rising masts an endless prospect yield, With labour burn (1457–63)

The picture of dusty Drudgery laboring at the palace stone recalls the work involved in this process of civilization and cultivation, work that reminds us of the disparity between those who must labor in drudgery, even if it is oxymoronically “gay” drudgery, and those who need not labor at all. The rising masts, those potent symbols of commerce, also must be built, and, gay or not, it is labor that burns, consuming the laborer in the process. While “whate’er / Exalts, embellishes, and renders life / Delightful” is the “gift of Industry” (“Autumn” 141–3), these gifts are not purchased without cost, and in “Autumn” Thomson reminds his readers of those who bear the burden, though his reminder takes the softened imperative “Be mindful”: Ye masters, then Be mindful of the rough laborious hand That sinks you soft in elegance and ease; Be mindful of those limbs in russet clad Whose toil to yours is warmth and graceful pride; And oh, be mindful of that sparing board Which covers yours with luxury profuse, Makes your glass sparkle, and your sense rejoice; Nor cruelly demand what the deep rains And all-involving winds have swept away! (350–9)

Yet despite the frequent paeans to rural life and the industry of laborers, Thomson frequently bemoans the hold of folk tradition and “those superstitious horrors that enslave / The fond sequacious herd, to mystic faith / And blind amazement prone” (“Summer” 1712–14). The sight of meteors “swells the superstitious din” (“Autumn” 1123) of the crowd, and the rural laborer celebrated as the source of the nation’s wealth becomes at nightfall “a benighted wretch / Who then bewildered wanders through the dark / Full of pale fancies and chimeras huge” (“Autumn” 1145–7). And yet a few lines later this benighted wretch is said to be “of men / The happiest he” (1235–6) when compared with those who live in the city surrounded by “the sneaking crowd / Of flatterers false” (1240–41) who “fret in guilt / And guilty cities” (1348–9).

132

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

For Thomson the solution is not predicated on a simple choice between country and city, but on a recognition of the power of cultivation to refashion both the mind and the landscape. The difficulty is that he would like to civilize the rural and divest it of simple-minded traditions and superstitions and at the same time ruralize the urban and endow it with innocence and simple truth. As Kaul jests, this contradiction “allows the poet to eat his moral cake and have his empire, too” (164). It also, however, points out the complexity of imagining the nation through the national river that represents both an innocent and barbarous rural past, both a civilizing and destructive imperial present, and ultimately the irreversible movement of time and the inevitable fall of empire. Unlike Thomson, who sought to contain the contradictions of the nation in a new myth of national and imperial identity, when Wordsworth comes to write his river poem, he is, at a minimum, ambivalent about the growth of commerce, trade, and empire, if not actually hostile to that growth. He chooses an obscure local river over that which flows through the metropolis, and this choice of the Duddon over the Thames is neither a retreat into a mountain hermitage nor a rejection of national issues. As described in Chapter 4, Wordsworth had come to believe that the national character was growing daily more diseased. The Duddon, its surrounding rural landscape, and associated ancient manners provided an antidote to national decline. Wordsworth pointed out the difference in a late addition to the River Duddon sonnets when he split the octave and sestet of one sonnet into two separate sonnets and supplied a new sestet for the first and a new octave for the second. The sonnets numbered XXXI and XXXII in 1820 were in manuscript part of a single sonnet. The added material directly connects the Duddon to the Thames: Beneath an ampler sky a region wide Is opened round him;—hamlets, towers, and towns, And blue-topp’d hills, behold him from afar; In stately mien to sovereign Thames allied, Spreading his bosom under Kentish downs, With Commerce freighted, or triumphant War. (XXXI, 9–14)9

In this sestet added to sonnet XXXI, the prospect view presents a scene reminiscent of Thomson’s view from Richmond Hill and Wordsworth’s own description of “The View from the Top of Black Comb,” though the objects of the landscape—the hamlets, towers, towns and hills—occupy the subject position, as if the archetypal British landscape were approving of itself. Here the humbler Duddon is allied to the “sovereign Thames,” both representative of the state, with the Thames clearly marked as emblematic of the modern commercial nation “With Commerce freighted, or triumphant War,” and the Duddon stately through its association with an idealized British landscape. Though the rivers may be allied, there remains an important difference, one that Wordsworth offers as justification for turning away from the proud Thames to humbler streams:

9 All quotations from The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets are taken from the first edition.

A Detailed Local Survey

133

But here no cannon thunders to the gale; Upon the wave no haughty pendants cast A crimson splendour; lowly is the mast That rises here, and humbly spread the sail; While, less disturbed than in the narrow Vale Through which with strange vicissitudes he pass’d, The Wanderer seeks that receptacle vast Where all his unambitious functions fail. (XXXII, “Conclusion,” 1–8)

In this octet added to sonnet XXXII, the Duddon, unlike the Thames, is not the overt symbol of the nation’s strength, the visible emblem of commercial power and imperial might, for on the Duddon “lowly is the mast” and “humbly spread” is the sail. Instead of valuing these overt symbols of the nation’s strength, Wordsworth characterizes them as “haughty” and in contrast lauds the “unambitious” Duddon. For Wordsworth, the Thames might be a symbol of the nation, but of a nation troubled and diseased, falling to ruin because in the ambitious pursuit of geographical and commercial empire, it has abandoned the ancient manners and traditions that are the true bulwark of British strength. The course of the Duddon is pursued not for “emerald fields alone” but for what it might reveal about a vanishing British culture. As published in 1820, the River Duddon series consisted of 33 sonnets that fall into three equal groups of 11 sonnets each. While this tripartite division is not overtly marked in the text, each separate part can be seen to have its own unity and structure, and the three parts together describe a movement through both the geographical and an imaginative landscape. Sonnet XII beginning “On, loitering Muse” and sonnet XXIII beginning “Sad thoughts, avaunt!” both call attention to the shift from one part to another through an injunction to the poet and the reader that seemingly rejects all that has come before. In sonnet XII, the poet feels chided by the stream to abandon his fanciful indulgences, and in sonnet XXIII, he attempts to reject the sad thoughts that the folkloric and historical remembrances attached to places have provoked. The first 11 sonnets are preoccupied with the imaginative representation of the landscape, while the middle 11 sonnets move through an historical landscape. Each of these representative modes is supplemented in turn, and the final 11 sonnets move through a human landscape dominated by memory, both personal and local. Yet while the fanciful and the historical are each pushed aside, the series is not so much a progress in stages as a series of variations, the truth of representation lying not in the overcoming of fancy and history but in their incorporation within the larger structure of a local memory that is or should be the basis of the national character. It is through all of these that the landscape is made legible and the silent tomb transformed into a speaking monument. The series begins with a rejection of the classical and the exotic in favor of the “birth-place of a native Stream” (I, 9). Wordsworth’s choice is the Duddon River, “remote from every taint / Of sordid industry” (II, 1–2). The Duddon is recommended as a fit subject by its perceived unchanged nature that enables it to be the repository of ancient manners. This unchanged nature is balanced against the recognition that much change has already taken place even here:

134

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation to chaunt thy birth, thou hast No meaner Poet than the whistling Blast, And Desolation is thy Patron-saint! She guards thee, ruthless Power! who would not spare Those mighty forests, once the bison’s screen, Where stalked the huge deer to his shaggy lair Through paths and alleys roofed with sombre green (II, 6–12)

In a note, Wordworth identifies the “huge deer” as “the Leigh, a gigantic species long since extinct,” which along with the lost forests of Britain serves as a tacit reminder of the destructive processes of change. A memorial is needed, a “speaking monument” (III, 3) that might preserve native character (or species, or landscape features) before it is lost to the passage of time.10 The question for Wordsworth is not whether preservation is necessary but how it should be achieved. “How shall I paint thee?” is the question that opens the third sonnet, and the question of how the landscape can be represented preoccupies the entire series. The poet speaks of the unpromising, seemingly unpoetic beginnings of the river and notes as he did in the sonnet “Aerial Rock”: To dignify the spot that gives thee birth, No sign of hoar Antiquity’s esteem Appears, and none of modern Fortune’s care; (III, 9–11)

While “Aerial Rock” sounded a note of despair at the prospect of a seemingly blank or erased landscape, here the poet discovers Nature’s own markers and, more important, the ability of the poet to recognize those markers Yet thou thyself hast round thee shed a gleam Of brilliant moss, instinct with freshness rare; Prompt offering to thy Foster-mother, Earth! (III, 12–14)

The origins of the river are seen as self-monumentalizing, inscribed with legible figures drawn from the original source of all things, the Earth itself. If the river is capable of shedding around itself its own legibility, perhaps through an imaginative reading of the landscape, the poet too can discover the means of reading and writing the landscape. Not the grand prospect view but the attention to small detail is required, a study of the land not as in the Adventurer’s map but in the finely observed details of a local survey:

10 Stephen Bann’s discussion of Alois Riegl’s “The modern cult of monuments: its character and its origin” considers the problem of the silence of fragments from the past. “Inevitably,” he states, the fragment can only bring back the past “if it is supported by an implicit or explicit narrative.” See “‘Views of the past’: reflections on the treatment of historical objects and museums of history” in The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 131. See also Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion of the “resonance” that surrounds decontextualized historical objects in “Resonance and Wonder” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 42–56.

A Detailed Local Survey

135

Starts from a dizzy steep the undaunted Rill Rob’d instantly in garb of snow-white foam; And laughing dares the Adventurer, who hath clomb So high, a rival purpose to fulfil; Else let the Dastard backward wend, and roam, Seeking less bold achievement, where he will! (IV, 9–14)

The “Adventurer,” now unambiguously termed a “dastard” whose rival purpose is a conquering ambition, is chastised to seek a “less bold” but seemingly more substantial achievement that is possible only when one abandons the height and comes down the mountain into the valley, down to the streamside there to study Nature not in its grand effects but in its nearly imperceptible workings. There one glimpses how the river and all Nature work to create monuments to itself: but now, to form a shade For Thee, green alders have together wound Their foliage; ashes flung their arms around; And birch-trees risen in silver colonnade. And thou hast also tempted here to rise, ‘Mid sheltering pines, this Cottage rude and grey; (V, 5–10)

The natural architectural structure of trees moves seamlessly to the manmade and seemingly naturalized structures of human habitation, a blending that Wordsworth will return to in some detail in the Topographical Description that concludes the River Duddon volume. The landscape is lived in and yet still natural, the “silver colonnade” of trees blending imperceptibly into the rude cottage and the “old remains of hawthorn bowers” (VI, 2) that provide habitation for birds. This idyllic landscape is possible only in a place free from the taint of sordid industry, in a spot seemingly unchanged amid increasing change and dislocation. This idealized landscape provides an impossible exemplar for the landscape of Britain, a remembered and memorialized depiction of what might have been but that is increasingly no more. To idealize a landscape, to remove from it all sign of taint, is not an easy task. The concern with origins, frequently evinced in this first section of the Duddon sonnets, forces the poet to confront the possibility that not all inhabitants of this idealized landscape are themselves ideal. The eighth sonnet contrasts the poet’s own desire for knowledge of origins and the recognition of past streamside travelers whose desires seem greatly at odds with the restorative function of water: What aspect bore the Man who roved or fled, First of his tribe, to this dark dell—who first In this pellucid Current slaked his thirst? What hopes came with him? what designs were spread Along his path? His unprotected bed What dreams encompass’d? Was the intruder nurs’d In hideous usages, and rites accurs’d, That thinned the living and disturbed the dead? No voice replies;—the earth, the air is mute And Thou, blue Streamlet, murmuring yield’st no more

136

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation Than a soft record, that, whatever fruit Of ignorance thou might’st witness heretofore, Thy function was to heal and to restore, To soothe and cleanse, not madden and pollute!

The wished-for end of desire occasions thoughts not of calm and peace but of an earlier visitor to the Duddon.11 The repetition of “first” in the second line reiterates both the poet’s own desire to comprehend some first sight of the river and the impossibility of knowing with any certainty of such a sight. The questions asked of this original traveler who first “slaked his thirst” cannot be answered; his hopes, designs, and dreams remain unrecoverable. The initial sympathy for the first visitor, concern for the fragility of his “unprotected bed,” gives way to anxiety. The anxiety occasioned by these unaccountable purposes leads to the equally unaccountable and disturbing surmise that this original visitor, called “the intruder” by the sixth line, might have brought with him “hideous usages, and rites accurs’d,” might have brought with him attitudes and desires completely incongruous with the beauty and sublimity of the natural setting. But as disturbing as these thoughts are, equally disturbing and yet strangely comforting is the fact that no record exists, the landscape offering no markings; “the earth, the air is mute.” Here mid the wreck of is and was, past purposes are lost forever to time and the landscape seems impervious to records of human transit. Yet, as in this case, nature’s supposed resistance can be figured as positive in that the landscape remains inviolate despite human action. If this is true, then the meaning of the landscape lies in one’s responsiveness to it in both its local details and in its universal functions. True responsiveness is meaning-making; it is not simple seeing but imaginative deciphering of the diluvian records that mark the land. And yet that deciphering is uncomfortably allied to a violation of the spirit of the place—the first visitor who may have brought “hideous usages” and the poet who attempts to read the landscape are aligned with desire that is counter to the repose offered by the river. The 11th sonnet, “The Faery Chasm,” closes the first part with a powerful depiction of the desire to read the landscape imaginatively and the ways in which the landscape can frustrate those desires. The sonnet begins with a seemingly unambiguous assertion of the truth of a local superstition attached to a place. In this faery chasm, local tradition maintains that the stones themselves are marked with the footprints of child-stealing elves, marks that can be deciphered by the traveler versed in such legends: No fiction was it of the antique age: A sky-blue stone, within this sunless cleft, Is of the very foot-marks unbereft Which tiny Elves impress’d;—on that smooth stage Dancing with all their brilliant equipage In secret revels—haply after theft 11 See Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, 75–115, for a discussion of “repose” as a figure which enabled the harnessing of desire and violence specifically tied to a larger movement towards supervision and social control.

A Detailed Local Survey

137

Of some sweet babe, flower stolen, and coarse weed left For the distracted mother to assuage Her grief with, as she might! (XI, 1–9)

The assuredness of the beginning, that the story is “No fiction” of the past, betrays an anxiety that surrounds the fanciful associations that the imaginative reading of landscape produces. The very surface of the stone is said to be evidence of these local traditions, of elves who are responsible for the disappearance of children. Such folk tales exist in many different cultures as mechanisms to account for the extreme vulnerability and often precarious existence of children, and yet for Wordsworth and Mary Wordsworth, herself a “distracted mother” forced to assuage her grief however she might, such fanciful explanations for the loss of the children who accompanied them on the banks of the Duddon in 1811 must have seemed wholly inadequate. In a sudden turn away from the fanciful, the sonnet concludes with the poet’s demand for verification, a demand useless in its desire and productive of nothing but despair: But, where, oh! where Is traceable a vestige of the notes That ruled those dances wild in character?— —Deep underground?—Or in the upper air, On the shrill wind of midnight? or where floats O’er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer? (XI, 9–14)

As the attempt to uncover the desires of the original visitor to the Duddon ended in a hopeless string of questions, here too the desire for verification dissolves in a series of surmises, each without hope of resolution. The repetition of “where” in the ninth line and the sudden injection of “oh,” which marks actual pain, reinforce the fact that these are not idle questions but a recurrence of the desire for knowing which the landscape frustrates. The anxiety has been displaced from the vanished child to the vanished text. The anxiety that lies behind this troubled shift from the fanciful story of child-stealing to the realization that hope was “deep underground” or, as Wordsworth writes in “Surprized by Joy,” “long buried in the silent Tomb,” surfaces and the landscape becomes again a blank illegible tablet. It is disturbing that not even a “vestige” is traceable, and whether it is to be found deep underground or on “the shrill wind of midnight” or amid the autumnal gossamer that floats over the twilight fields matters little because such traces would be ephemeral and ultimately untraceable, tantalizing in their presence but impossible to catch. If this is all that fancy can offer, it is not enough, and some more permanent marks of the landscape must be sought if Wordsworth is to answer the now pressing question “How shall I paint thee?” and represent this landscape as representative of the nation. The 12th sonnet explicitly marks a turn away from fancy. The first line, “On, loitering Muse—the swift Stream chides us—on!,” with its repetition of “on,” implies a certain impatience with the results of the fancy, that “loitering Muse” who has seemingly led the poet astray. Everywhere nature presents “Wild shapes for many a strange comparison” (XII, 4), a landscape that demands a fanciful reading, but these must be left behind, though of course the richness of these fanciful images, these “Bright liquid mansions” (XII, 7) of the imagination, belies the poet’s resolve

138

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

to quit them. Leave them he must, yet still the poet lingers over what must be left behind, for these “toys of Fancy” (12), while rich in themselves, have drawn the poet into unanswerable meditations and endless surmises. The poet turns away from the faery chasm to the open prospect of Donnerdale and there encounters the seemingly more legible picturesque landscape of Britain: Hail to the fields—with Dwellings sprinkled o’er, And one small Hamlet, under a green hill Cluster’d with barn and byer, and spouting mill! A glance suffices,—should we wish for more, Gay June would scorn us; (XIII, “Open Prospect,” 1–6)

The landscape, with its picturesque placement of hamlet, barn, mill, and green hill, seems self-evident, a glance sufficing to make it readable as an emblem of the nation itself. Yet amid this seemingly perfect vision, the slight notes of a dirge sound almost imperceptibly in the winds that roar across the vale, “loud as the gusts that lash / The matted forests of Ontario’s shore / By wasteful steel unsmitten” (XIII, 7– 9). The sound of the wind that seems allied to those sounds that emanate from North America recalls that while forests remain there, in Wordsworth’s Britain they are mostly gone, smitten apparently by the seemingly endless demands of civilization, war, and industry. In Britain, the landscape has been dramatically altered by human presence; and, as in Book VII of The Excursion, even the most idyllic retreat is threatened by the presence of the timberman with axe in hand. Despite the attractions of the picturesque “Mountain Stream” with its “Shepherd and his Cot” (XIV, 1), the poet is drawn away from human intercourse, from the “warm hearth” of the “generous household” (XIII, 12–13) by the progress of the river, which seems impelled by “some awful Spirit” to leave, “utterly to desert, the haunts of men” (XIV, 9–10) and “through this wilderness a passage cleave” (XIV, 12). As in the second ode to Lycoris discussed in Chapter 4, the poet leaves the open prospect and seeks some deep chasm, and there he encounters the possibility of an illegible landscape: From this deep chasm—where quivering sunbeams play Upon its loftiest crags—mine eyes behold A gloomy niche, capacious, blank, and cold; A concave free from shrubs and mosses grey; In semblance fresh, as if, with dire affray, Some Statue, placed amid these regions old For tutelary service, thence had rolled, Startling the flight of timid Yesterday! Was it by mortals sculptur’d?—weary slaves Of slow endeavour! or abruptly cast Into rude shape by fire, with roaring blast Tempestuously let loose from central caves? Or fashioned by the turbulence of waves, Then, when o’er highest hills the Deluge passed? (XV)

This deep chasm, like the faery chasm the poet has left behind, occasions the possibility of blankness by the multiplicity of readings that it produces, all without

A Detailed Local Survey

139

hope of verification. It is “blank” and therefore both available for inscription and impervious to a single interpretation. Here we have a figure or statue but cannot discover its origins or purpose, how it was formed or how it was used. The landscape appears marked by human transit, and yet the monument itself was fashioned by natural forces. Or was it? Is it the work of “weary slaves” used for “tutelary service,” a monument of some pagan religion nursed in hideous usages and rites accursed? Or is it the product of catastrophic geological processes cast out from the bowels of the earth? Or is it the product of slow geological time, the constant action of waters let loose in ancient biblical times? As in “The Faery Chasm,” the series of surmises reflects an anxiety of unknowing, though here the surmises move through a real landscape examined by the local surveyors of ethnography, history, geology, and tradition. Yet these seemingly more real explanations also produce an impasse of undecidability. Just as was the case with the local surveyors who struggled to map and name the landscape, close examination reveals not certain but competing and often mutually exclusive explanations. However, unlike the fanciful surmises that Wordsworth chooses to abandon without regret, it is in the conjunction between fancy, history, and folklore that Wordsworth finds a temporary solution. In “American Tradition,” the poet rejects the “fruitless questions” (XVI, 1) that concluded the 15th sonnet as wrong-headed in their desire for certainty because certainty, such as it is, exists only in how the landscape is read by its inhabitants. While the naive traveler may be perplexed by seemingly unreadable monuments, the local population, like the Native Americans who “smile” at the “White Man’s ignorance” (XVI, 4-5), do read the landscape and attach meanings to it. Just as the Native Americans on the banks of the Oroonoko can tell a story about the origins of “the sculptured shows” (XVI, 2) that grace the high cliff side, so too can local history and tradition provide the foundation for a human attachment to the landscape, a landscape that is read as marked and written by human presence and transit. The Native Americans tell of how the “Great Waters” rose and covered the plains and how over these waters: his Fathers urged, to ridge and steep Else unapproachable, their buoyant way; And carved, on mural cliff’s undreaded side, Sun, moon, and stars, and beast of chase or prey; Whate’er they sought, shunned, loved, or deified! (XVI, 10–14)

This is a story about how the landscape is written over and read, but it is also a story about how the writing itself takes place. Natural forces directed by supernatural forces create the opportunity for the artist’s work, a remarkably succinct explication of Wordsworth’s own ideas about composition. The questions raised by the unreadable gloomy niche are fruitless because they fail to recognize that the landscape is read, that there are stories attached to monuments, that the silent tomb is only silent if one does not know how to listen or what to listen for, or simply if one does not listen at all. The history and local traditions attached to places always provide a way of reading the landscape, but, as with all reading, to read one must abandon all hope of certainty.

140

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

At the very center of the River Duddon series are two sonnets that both embrace the past and the landscape marked by human presence and raise the disturbing possibility that the past with its ancient manners and customs is fast moving beyond recall. Sonnet XVII is titled “Return” and marks a doubling back to historical sources, a reversal of time that both preserves the meanings attached to the landscape and openly questions whether such meanings can be preserved. The sonnet begins with a request, “A dark plume fetch me from yon blasted Yew / Perched on whose top the Danish Raven croaks,” as if possession of a souvenir or memento, “a dark plume,” will safeguard the memory of the past. The Danish raven, symbol of the ancient Danes who occupied parts of Britain, gives way to the sight of an eagle, “the imperial Bird of Rome” (XVII, 3), a sight that invokes “Departed ages” (XVII, 4). These sights return the observer to the past and mark the landscape as bearing the inscriptions of past ages and cultures, but the return is tenuous, as Wordsworth states in the lengthy note that accompanies Sonnets XVII and XVIII, for though the eagle “frequently returns,” it “is always destroyed” (43). Like the inhabitants of the sparsely populated mountain districts, the eagle “requires a large domain for its support” (42), and though its return is capable of invoking departed ages, those ages are departed, vanished, and the symbol itself threatened. Though the past is present in the landscape, it is also already departed, and the marks and symbols that record its former presence are subject to erasure. While the eagle’s “wild wailing” fills the air and hushes into silence the sheep that sleep amid the monuments of departed ages, the eagle is threatened with destruction and the monuments are subject to decay. The eagle’s call that invokes departed ages is already something of a ruin, its “loose fragments” (XVII, 5) falling to the ground like so many pieces of stone. On the ground are other loose fragments, pieces of stone that mark the Roman and Druid presence, a presence that survives in the memory of the “country people” who have given the names “Hardknot Castle” and the “Sunken Church” to the decaying monuments (43). Whereas antiquities can be mapped and named, they must also be preserved in memory and local tradition, for the processes of nature are steadily at work eradicating human history. The “Sunken Church,” that “mystic Round of Druid frame” (XVII, 12) is even as the poet speaks “Tardily sinking by its proper weight / Deep into patient Earth, from whose smooth breast it came!” (XVII, 13– 14). History is present in the land, but even monuments of stone are subject to decay. This twofold recognition of a landscape marked by history and the eradication of history from the landscape produces an overflow of the sonnet form, the 14th line of this sonnet being the only hexameter line in the entire series of sonnets. The slow cadence of this last line reinforces the slow process of eradication while the overflow of the line indicates an inability to contain these forces and the meditations they give rise to within the structure of the poem itself.12 12 The anxieties about preservation, specifically whether preservation is possible, surface in another overflow in this sonnet. Wordsworth’s ornithological note quickly shifts to a discussion of Roman ruins and other antiquities, and that discussion gives way to lengthy excerpts from guide books describing the Duddon Valley. The note concludes with a lengthy biography of the Reverend Robert Walker. In all the note exceeds 25 pp. (the Duddon sonnets themselves are only 33 pp.).

A Detailed Local Survey

141

The anxieties raised by this poem call into question the ability to preserve the past in the face of change, whether that change be the taint of sordid industry, the loss of ancient manners, or nature’s own processes of eradication. History, which entered the River Duddon poems as a seeming source of salvation, is shown to be a temporal entity built upon a fragile materiality, what de Man calls “the retrospective recording of man’s failure to overcome the power of time” (Romanticism 91). If, as de Man asserts, “The restorative power, in Wordsworth, does not reside in nature, or in History, or in a continuous progression from one to another, but in the persistent power of mind and language after nature and history have failed” (89), the task of the poems and the accompanying prose is the impossible task of writing into cultural memory both the artifacts that comprise history and the dissolution that is everywhere unwriting that history. At this midway point in the sequence, Wordsworth appears trapped in a cycle of preservation and decay, writing the history of the land at just the moment when that history is being erased, and his project of writing the nation through the symbol of the local appears to be threatened. These anxieties over undifferentiated dissolution surface in the 18th sonnet, “Seathwaite Chapel,” which opens with a recognition that even sacred religion is not free from the touch of change and dissolution: Sacred Religion! “mother of form and fear,” Dread Arbitress of mutable respect, New rites ordaining when the old are wreck’d, Or cease to please the fickle worshipper; If one strong wish may be embosomed here Mother of Love! for this deep vale, protect Truth’s holy lamp (XVIII, 1–7)

By quoting from Samuel Daniel’s Musophilus, Wordsworth invokes another departed age as a context for the decay of outward forms and the potential decay of “Truth’s holy lamp.” Daniel’s poem is a cautionary tale about the loss of Britain’s established church, threatened by the rise of dissenting churches. Yet it is strangely illogical to characterize religion as “mother of form and fear,” the “Dread arbitress” who enforces respect and is capable of ordaining “new rites” to replace the loose fragments of the old and yet to assert “one strong wish” that somehow the current form will escape such change. It is surely no accident that the respect enforced by the church is characterized as a “mutable” respect—mutable because of the fickleness of the believers, but also because, despite claims to the contrary, mutability is the condition of all things that exist in time. In a landscape seemingly without permanence, Wordsworth invokes a “wish” that some things might be free from change, and yet when he considers Seathwaite Chapel and his hopes for the protection of truth’s holy lamp, he can only turn to the past to describe what he hopes will be preserved. What Wordsworth hopes to preserve, the established church and the ancient manners it fostered, is already located in the past, in “those days” (XVIII, 9) of the Reverend Robert Walker, the “Gospel Teacher” (XVIII, 10) who died in 1802, of Chaucer and Herbert long past, and of Goldsmith whose “deathless praise” (XVIII, 14) occurs amidst a lament for an irretrievable past. The lengthy hagiographical Memoir of the Rev. Robert Walker, which Wordsworth affixed as a note to this sonnet, is an act of

142

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

preservation, an attempt to write into memory the ancient manners of “those days,” which require preservation because they are so quickly vanishing from the land. Yet despite the grandness of the attempt, despair at being thwarted surfaces in the recognition that irreversible change steadily remakes the landscape and eradicates human monuments: We have been dwelling upon images of peace in the moral world, that have brought us again to the quiet enclosure of consecrated ground in which this venerable pair lie interred. The sounding brook, that rolls close by the churchyard, without disturbing feeling or meditation, is now unfortunately laid bare; but not long ago it participated, with the chapel, the shade of some stately ash-trees, which will not spring again. (66)

Despite these belated attempts at preservation, much has already been lost. But how have these changes come about? Who or what has “laid bare” the sounding brook, and what has become of the “stately ash-trees,” and why will they “not spring again”? In the uncertainty between whether the landscape has been changed by natural forces or human improvements lies the anxiety over mutability. Is it a natural force of eradication that is silently folding human monuments into the breast of the patient earth, or are these changes wrought by human intervention, by the taint of sordid industry? While in this passage it is unclear what the source of change is, later in the Memoir Wordsworth shows no uncertainty as to how these changes have been effected: Upon the Seathwaite Brook, at a small distance from the parsonage, has been erected a mill for spinning yarn; it is a mean and disagreeable object, though not unimportant to the spectator, as calling to mind the momentous changes wrought by such inventions in the frame of society—changes which have proved especially unfavourable to these mountain solitudes. (66)

The changes have already taken place, and so the act of preservation is really more an act of recuperation, a rescuing of precious artifacts from the fire. Yet if it is a recuperation, if those ancient manners really are ancient and belong to the past, this belatedness raises the question of their applicability to Wordsworth’s own time. Can Wordsworth’s project be anything other than nostalgia? Wordsworth attempts to address the question by appealing (as he will in the conclusion of the River Duddon series) to the unchangeable nature of the form and function of Walker’s life. Wordsworth claims that Walker “was not a man of times and circumstances,” that had he lived at a later time, “the principle of duty would have produced application as unremitting” (67). The purpose of the memoir is to preserve the ancient manners of the past and their association with the monuments of the landscape, and these must be salvaged not for their beauty but for their continued necessity as a counterexample to a nation forgetful of its past. As evidence of mutability—even in the symbols of truth’s holy lamp—mounts, to write and preserve the past becomes an act of national importance, the only hope for the nation’s salvation. For preservation to rise above nostalgia, for memory to rise above remembrance, the need for and applicability of the past to reform the present must be demonstrated, and the wreck between is and was healed. That truth’s holy lamp and its visible symbol require

A Detailed Local Survey

143

preservation in Chaucer, Herbert, Goldsmith, and especially in Wordsworth’s poetry and the lengthy notes affixed to it, all speak to the precariousness of the past; and the constant intrusions of dissolution, perhaps by natural forces, perhaps by human intervention, all seem to denote that the attempt might be futile. Just as the second part of the series opened with a chastisement of the poet’s digressive fancy, the third part opens with a rejection of the melancholy despair that memory and the past have evoked. “Sheep-Washing” recounts another tradition of the landscape, the annual washing of the sheep prior to shearing, and elicits from the poet the injunction “Sad thoughts, avaunt!” (XXIII, 1). Perhaps what makes the landscape worthy of interest is the presence of human activity or more specifically human labor. After detailing Wordsworth’s lukewarm response to Uvedale Price’s landscaped estate at Foxley, Tim Fulford suggests that “Wordsworth was politely suggesting that the occupations of farmers and labourers, the work of a rural population, and not the gentlemanly taste for the picturesque, make the land aesthetically as well as economically productive” (Landscape 183). Whether it is rural tradition or rural labor that momentarily rouses the poet, sad thoughts prove difficult to banish, and though the poet is able to lose himself in the riotous clamor of the scene, the sonnet closes with an almost petulant condescension toward the incongruity of this noisy human activity amid the mountain solitude: Meanwhile if Duddon’s spotless breast receive Unwelcome mixtures as the uncouth noise Thickens, the pastoral River will forgive Such wrong; nor need we blame the licensed joys, Though false to Nature’s quiet equipoise: Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive. (XXIII, “Sheep-washing,” 9–14)

The poet’s reaction is like that of the tourist promised soundless mountain solitude and encountering instead a boisterous country fair. The emphasized we draws the reader into this condescension to the local population whose actions are “false” to nature but fortunately “fugitive.” Here local tradition appears to interfere with the appreciation of the landscape rather than to inform it. Just as the thoughts of the first visitor to the Duddon conjured up visions of druidic sacrifice, so the sight of the dalesmen and the hint of the pollution they bring to the scene create an incongruous matching of landscape and inhabitants that momentarily raises the possibility of misreading. However, as the series moves toward its conclusion, what the poet discovers is that he is the one who has misread the landscape, and his own desire to escape from human presence produces not the promise of a pure experience of nature but the danger of forgetting. The remainder of the series attempts to show that the landscape requires both absence and presence and that to desire both solitude and human presence is not error. Human history and the narratives it attaches to physical objects, what Stephen Greenblatt calls in another context “resonance,” are necessary to any landscape serving as the imaginative representative of the nation and nursery of the national character. According to Greenblatt, the appeal of the museum artifact lies partly in our ability to read in it the thickness of historical context, the presence behind the object of “names, and behind the names, as the very term resonance suggests, of voices”

144

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

(47). When the poet turns back to the local details of the local landscape in Sonnet XXVII, “Journey Renewed,” with observations of living nature, the cattle in the field, the fish in the stream, the insects in the air, he attempts to demonstrate that the fascination with closely observed nature is not incompatible with the need for human presence, nor is the desire for an unpeopled picturesque landscape incongruous with the reading of landscape as marked by human presence. Both are necessary, if not required, to paint the living landscape in all the richness of its detail. As the sestet of “Journey Renewed” makes clear, the landscape is marked by more than rocks and stones and trees. It is marked by the memory of people, of “hopes and remembrances” (XXVII, 9), of “Glad meetings—tender partings—that upstay / The drooping mind of absence” (XXVII, 11–12), which are “worn / Close to the vital seat of human clay” (XXVII, 9–10). This life is not that of the hermit, for in memory lives the recognition of people rooted in the land itself, a lived-in landscape that everywhere bears the marks of history, local tradition, and personal memory, of past and present human transit and human presence. While “No record tells” of the battles that might have raged across the land, whether that land be the North of Britain or the European continent, “The passing Winds memorial tribute pay” (XXVIII, 11) to those who lie “In the blank earth, neglected and forlorn” (XXVIII, 10). The land itself, marked everywhere by symbols of British liberty and freedom, is self-monumentalizing, itself the record that tells of lance opposed to lance. Landscape is constitution. If the earth appears blank, it is only so if memory fails, for the landscape is only readable as a palimpsest of human activity. Those soldiers conducted home in single state have their memorials in the memory of local inhabitants and the memory of human intercourse. To Wordsworth the physical geography appears blank only because we have suffered ourselves to forget, and therefore the dangers of forgetting are never far from the celebration of triumphant memory: And oft-times he, who, yielding to the force Of chance-temptation, ere his journey end, From chosen comrade turns, or faithful friend, In vain shall rue the broken intercourse. (XXIX, 5–8)

Wordsworth uses the potent figure of infidelity to characterize forgetting. The one “who swerves from innocence” (XXIX, 1) abandons all ties to the past in the heedless pursuit of “chance-temptation.” Forgetting is nothing less than a violation of one’s consummate duty, and remembering is nothing less than the fulfillment of one’s sacred vow. Yet the need to figure forgetting in such strong terms implies that it remains a powerful and real danger. The bulwark of the British national character is the ability to remember. The act of remembering draws together the memory of people and the measurement of places. To read the landscape, one must not merely measure the height of the distant mountains but extract from the very earth itself the marks left by the people who have inhabited the land. The poet’s task is to remember, to crown the good with deathless praise, to preserve for future generations the people’s heritage.

A Detailed Local Survey

145

The representation of the river’s end, the geographical location where the river empties into the sea, describes the move out of the Duddon Valley into the larger nation, that which is usually represented by the Thames. As discussed earlier, the two sonnets numbered XXXI and XXXII in 1820 grew out of a single sonnet. This manuscript sonnet consisted of the octave of Sonnet XXXI and the sestet of Sonnet XXXII, and the interpolated material provided Wordsworth’s justification for writing the nation, or the wished-for nation, through a humble stream instead of the great national river. If the Thames had been historically the symbol of national progress and wealth, it was also for Wordsworth closely allied with that national progress that was fast eradicating local differentiation and the ancient manners, customs, traditions, and histories of local populations. The power of cultivation, while necessary to the advancement of wealth, was also producing widespread and, for Wordsworth, undesirable change. Yet all rivers, local and national, humble and proud, eventually come to an end, and so too the Duddon moves inexorably toward its final destination: Not hurled precipitous from steep to steep; Lingering no more ‘mid flower-enamelled lands And blooming thickets; nor by rocky bands Held;—but in radiant progress tow’rd the Deep Where mightiest rivers into powerless sleep Sink, and forget their nature;—now expands Majestic Duddon, over smooth flat sands Gliding in silence with unfettered sweep! (XXXI, 1–8)

The first few lines of this sonnet recap the progress of the river, and the second half of the octave, with its repetition of long vowel sounds, captures the stately flow of the river as it expands across its estuarial sands and empties into the sea. Just as the end of the river marks the end of the river’s progress, so the end of the river raises for the poet the fear that his progress will be lost, that like the river the history he has sought to preserve is destined to sink into powerless sleep. The danger is that even the mightiest rivers come to an end and in that dissolution they will “forget their nature.” But what exactly does it mean for a river to forget its nature? One way in which the river might forget its nature is shown in the concluding sestet where the Duddon is represented as losing its local character, of becoming more and more an abstract symbol and in its increasing abstractness seen to be allied to that other national river and symbol of the state: Beneath an ampler sky a region wide Is opened round him:—hamlets, towers, and towns, And blue-topp’d hills, behold him from afar; In stately mien to sovereign Thames allied Spreading his bosom under Kentish downs, With commerce freighted, or triumphant war. (XXXI, 9–14)

Here the “ampler sky” provides a prospect view of the landscape that could be any landscape in Britain, a generic view of hamlets, towers, and towns like the “goodly prospect” seen from Thomson’s Richmond Hill, or the “Fair prospect, such as

146

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Britain only shows” that served as background to Wordsworth’s vision of St. George in “Ode, Composed in January 1816.” De Man argues that this movement between octave and sestet is superficially a “progression from nature to history, from a rural to an urban world” (Romanticism 85). However, as discussed earlier, to be allied with the Thames—symbol of prosperity and wealth but also symbol of the tremendous cost of the changes wrought by prosperity and wealth—is to be associated with all that is wrong with the nation. Therefore, even the “Majestic Duddon” can be said to forget its nature. In a sense, the Duddon must forget its nature, become so abstract as to be undifferentiated from countless other British landscapes, in order for it to be allied to the Thames, for the Duddon has provided Wordsworth with an opportunity to address what is wrong with that abstract picture of the nation. De Man asserts that this sonnet rejects the world of history represented by the “human creations” and human “enterprises” raised in the sestet, but such an argument collapses two very different histories—the local history and character represented by the Duddon and the national history and character represented by the Thames. While undoubtedly the movement toward the sea is a “movement away from nature toward pure nothingness” (86), on the level of representational politics nature is the local character of the many “spots” throughout Britain, and pure nothingness is the abstract nation emptied of local differentiation. That the following sonnet is not a separate poem but a continuation of the preceding one is made clear by its first word, “But,” which marks both the syntactic conjunction and thematic disjunction between the two. The poem begins, “But here no cannon thunders to the gale,” and proceeds to note not how the Duddon is allied to the sovereign Thames but the ways in which it remains local and differentiated. Importantly, the differentiation relies on the distinction between humility and pride, with the Duddon marked by signs of humble nature and “unambitious functions,” in direct contrast to the “proud margin of the Thames” (“To the Rev. Dr. Wordsworth,” 64). It is this sense of humility that the poet initially hopes to emulate and so to be, like the river, resigned to destiny: And may thy Poet, cloud-born Stream! be free— The sweets of earth contentedly resigned, And each tumultuous working left behind At seemly distance—to advance like Thee; Prepared, in peace of heart, in calm of mind And soul, to mingle with Eternity! (XXXII, 9–14)

The stream offers something of a chastisement to the poet, to leave behind “each tumultuous working,” the workings of fancy and imagination, to abandon pride and also in a sense to abandon figuration, both imaginative and historical, so that at the end one might enter Eternity with humility. Eternity is the locus of forgetting, the end of figuration and memory, for Eternity marks the end of differentiation, the subsumption of identity by timelessness. In this next to last sonnet, which is curiously titled “Conclusion,” the consideration of the course of the river forces us to literalize the symbol: If the river denotes time, and time is the agent of decay, how can the river become a symbol of the preservation of the past, and not the agent of its destruction?

A Detailed Local Survey

147

The final sonnet undoes the conclusions reached in the supposed “Conclusion” of the river. While the physical geography can be said to come to an end in the sonnet “Conclusion,” in that the conclusion of the river is the point at which it empties into the sea, the imaginative geography of the river persists because the very concept of landscape requires some observer, some human presence. In “After-Thought,” the reflective observer, the eye (I) that controls the landscape, offers another reading of the river: I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide, As being past away.—Vain sympathies! For, backward, Duddon, as I cast my eyes, I see what was, and is, and will abide; (XXXIII, “After-Thought,” 1–4)

The downward movement of the series from imagined source to visible end is reversed by the observer’s simple act of looking backwards, upstream across space and time. Whereas time moves inexorably forward, the human mind is not tied to such strict temporal laws, and memory, which is the act of looking backwards, can restore that which seemed to have been lost. The empirical facts of human existence, the perceived course of human life, requires, as Wordsworth states in “Ode to Lycoris,” an “art / To which our souls must bend; / A skill—to balance and supply” (39–41), to counteract the movement of time and recover from the geographer’s map the landscape of human memory. This backward look is a return to sources, a movement when in the brief parting of clouds the far-off past is revealed. The wreck of is and was is healed by both the abstract notion of functional endurance and the continued necessity of cultural memory: Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide; The Form remains, the Function never dies; While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, We Men, who in our morn of youth defied The elements, must vanish;—be it so! (XXXIII, 5–9)

In the Fenwick notes to “Ode—1817,” Wordsworth characterized his purpose in that poem as intending “to place in view the immortality of succession where immortality is denied, as far as we know, to the individual creature” (SP 544), and this characterization serves to elucidate “After-Thought” as well. To the observer not chained to the succession of images produced by a journey downstream but capable of a backward look, the river, while still a symbol of time’s forward movement, can also be a symbol of the solace provided by memory and the history that can be constructed by the individual mind. Like the waters themselves destined “to mingle with Eternity,” individual human existence can be freed from the blank forgetfulness of Eternity by the interposition of an observer capable of reading the marks left on the landscape by prior human presence. As de Man notes, “This backward motion does not exist in nature but is the privilege of the faculty of mind that Wordsworth calls the imagination, asserting the possibility of reflection in the face of the most radical dissolution, personal or historical” (Romanticism 88). For Wordsworth, reflection and the memory it produces are nothing less than national imperatives, constitutive

148

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

not merely of the self but of the nation as well. For the “Bard of ebbing time” these poems are memorials, and memorials are the highest work of human endeavor: Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour; And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know. (XXXIII, 10–14)

The vagrant reeds have been fashioned into a speaking monument that speaks of human presence and absence, history, the present, and futurity. But the backward glance that salvages history from the forward movement of time is ever subjected to increasing pressure to move forward, and the speaking monuments themselves are subject to decay. The landscape that Wordsworth has sought to celebrate was already under pressure from spouting mills, and the ancient manners that Wordsworth sought to preserve were in his opinion as early as 1812 already vanished from the face of the land. As The Excursion makes very clear, Wordsworth was well aware that the past had already receded, and no amount of backward looking could bring it back. Poetry and memory, memorials and markers, something left behind to mark the landscape as human, epitaphs and monuments, all make the landscape legible as a human landscape and transform the silent tomb into a speaking monument; all attest to the belief that something can be left behind and ultimately preserved. But what exactly is preserved, the soaring eagle on the wing or the stuffed bird in a glass case? Like the extinct Leigh preserved only in the poet’s note or the South Kensington museum, what becomes of the landscape when it exists only as memory, when the nation itself can be preserved only as a jumble of artifacts in the museum that is the nation itself?

Chapter 6

A National Property Wordsworth’s new local poetry, which dominated the 1820 edition of the River Duddon, was local in its details but national in its mission. The local geography, traditions, and people of the Lakes, marked by idiosyncrasy and a narrative of rugged resistance, stood in a synecdochic relationship to an idealized vision of the nation. This landscape was both commonplace and exotic, representative and rare, representative of the nation paradoxically because it was becoming increasingly rare. As an object of study, isolated yet threatened, as a site of pilgrimage and promised transformation, as a ritual space set apart from everyday life by geography and the imagination, the landscape of the Lakes can be likened to a vast national museum space dedicated, like the contemporary British Museum and National Gallery, to the education of the modern citizen, the construction of national identity, and the demonstration of state power. Using Carol Duncan’s analysis of the ritual characteristics of the public art museum, we can identify a similar construction and use of the landscape in Wordsworth’s poetry and prose. This construction of the landscape as a museum creates what Svetlana Alpers refers to as “the museum effect,” the transformation of all objects into objects of aesthetic interest. This aestheticizing gaze, so frequently the subject of recent Wordsworth scholarship, finds its parallel in two seemingly disparate discourses: that of Wordsworth’s poetry of landscape, and that surrounding a planned railway connecting a large manufacturing town with the Lake District. While both Wordsworth’s poetry of landscape and the railway promised widespread access to the improving influence of aesthetic contemplation, both also threatened to destroy the objects of contemplation they purported to make available. For Wordsworth, the poetry that sought to teach the public how to respond to the British landscape promised unprecedented opportunities for the refinement of taste and thus the improvement of society, while the increased interest in the Lakes, partially attributable to his own personality and writings, and the proposed increased accessibility of this region made easier by the railway and his own published tourist guide book, offered no promise of improvement to the visitor and threatened the destruction of the proper constitution of society. This irony, commonly known in conservation circles as the opposed interests of preservation and access, cannot be attributed solely to the narrow self-interest of a drawbridge mentality but must be seen as revealing commonly held ideas concerning who the “people” were and who constituted the nation. The education of the citizenry was more like a discrimination: One’s citizenship in the nation could be measured by whether one responded appropriately to the symbols of the nation, whether those symbols were found in the metropolitan museums or the rural landscapes; but knowledge of how one should respond was not equally available to all. Like his campaigning in the 1818 Westmorland election and his

150

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

vehement opposition to and subsequent despair over the Reform Bill, Wordsworth’s opposition to the Kendal and Windermere Railway was a political act that sought to safeguard Britain’s last best hope from the restless world outside the vale. In some ways, this direct relationship between museum culture and Romanticism is unsurprising. Both museum culture and Romanticism can be said to coincide with a new awareness of historicity and a concerted effort to locate, collect, classify, catalog, and interpret the past. The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a wide-ranging attempt to construct a native literary tradition. Gray’s imaginative recreation of a heroic past, James MacPherson’s spurious attempts at creating a native epic tradition, and Percy’s yeoman efforts at cataloging antique poetry all were part of an emerging preoccupation with a national past, which can be said to be basic to any understanding of the Romantic era. In ballads, narrative poems, novels, and plays, the “Romance” that is part of the definition of the “Romantic” found a wide variety of expressions: the self-consciously antique forms adopted by Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads, the mock archaisms of Byron’s Childe Harold, and the self-conscious archaisms of the Ancient Mariner; the many retellings of medieval tales like Keat’s “Eve of St. Agnes” or Scott’s narrative poems or Hemans’s tales of the crusades; the medieval settings of romance and later gothic novels; the medieval or gothic settings of the mostly unperformed dramas of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge as well as the performed ones of Joanna Baillie and Thomas Love Peacock. Furthermore, this interest in the past, and more specifically in the forms of the past, gave rise to another feature shared by museum culture and Romanticism: a preoccupation with the fragmentary and the invention of a heuristics of the fragment. Since Thomas McFarland’s characterization of the fragment as part of a cultural theme of fragmentation that reflects the “diasparactive” cognitive reality of Romantic writers and Marjorie Levinson’s attempt to recover the history of the fragment poem’s composition, publication, and reception, the fragmentary and fragment have received considerable attention from scholars.1 As archaeologists, antiquarians, historians, and eventually museum curators collected and assembled narratives of history from the fragments of civilization, Romantic era writers created works that were already fragments. While Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” stands as the prototypical Romantic fragment, the fragment came in many forms. Some were intentionally fragmentary, like Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s prose tale “Sir Bertram” or Byron’s verse tale “The Giaour,” and some unintentionally, like Keats’s Hyperion epics, Coleridge’s gothic verse “Christabel,” or even Byron’s 16,000-line Don Juan. But interest in the fragment was not restricted to the form; the fragment, like the cultural fragment found in the museum’s glass cases, became a prominent Romantic metaphor for both the creative power of imagination and the ultimate undecideability 1 See Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, 1981); Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton, 1985); Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill, 1986). Related to interest in the fragment is interest in the ruin, the near-ruin and the sham-ruin. See Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

A National Property

151

of Romantic irony. This metaphoric use of the fragment figures prominently in such familiar Romantic works as Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and countless Wordsworth poems from the story of Margaret and her cottage in Book I of The Excursion to “Poems on the Naming of Places” and countless sonnets on a curiously unreadable British landscape marked everywhere by the fragments of history. Two important considerations extend the relationship between the rise of museum culture and Romanticism beyond this shared interest in the past to encompass the emerging nationalism of Britain as well. First, when we begin to see museums not simply as reflecting the values of the culture but initially articulating them as well, we can appreciate the powerful role museums can and have played in defining the proper attainments of the ideal citizen. Both Marc Redfield and David Aram Kaiser, in fact, use this observation to focus their investigations on the coincident emergence of aesthetics and nationalism. Eric Gidal, in Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum, offers a persuasive reading of the conflict between the museum’s institutional identity and its popular reputation, a reading that should serve as a caution against naively accepting the claims of the national architects.2 Second, when we begin to see that the museum can be more than a physical space filled with physical objects, that it can be anyplace where we participate in the rituals necessary to acquire those proper attainments, we can recognize that even Nature itself in the form of the rural landscape can be brought into the service of forming national identity. According to David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, “From the end of the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century a remarkable convergence takes place in Europe between theories of the modern state and theories of culture” (1). Because of this connection between the modern state and culture, it is not surprising that the modern national museum originates in Revolutionary France, during what might be one of the most self-conscious attempts at creating a national identity since Augustus Caesar’s Rome. The political importance of the public museum was not lost on Napoleon or on his contemporaries, nor could Napoleon be said to have discovered the political power inherent in the idea of the collection. The forerunners of the museum, the princely art collections and the cabinets of curiosities, functioned as demonstrations of the collector’s wealth and taste and served to legitimate power. As Eilean HooperGreenhill notes of the Medici Palace, with its huge private collection of art, artifacts, books and curiosities, “Culture, connoisseurship and ostentatious display began to be used to support the positions of the dominant merchants to underlie their economic power” (24). In short, one of the basic functions of this first museum of Europe “was the establishment of a position of superiority and exteriority through the display of wealth and status” (72), a display that Tony Bennett points out was only accessible 2 Gidal’s project focuses more specifically on the historical articulation of the British Museum—its curatorial practices and their relation to a range of discourses, including aesthetic, scientific, historic, and national—not to read the masked ideologies contained therein, but to suggest that the “utopian space of the museum” provides “a space wherein a public and secular nation could be imagined and, in part, created, through individual, and thereby contradictory, aesthetic experiences” (12, 28).

152

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

to “those who possess[ed] the appropriate socially-coded ways of seeing” (35). Like the studiolo of the Renaissance prince studied by Guiseppe Olmi, these collections formed “an attempt to re-appropriate and reassemble all reality in miniature, to constitute a place from the centre of which the prince could symbolically reclaim dominion over the entire natural and artificial world” (5). As Hooper-Greenhill adds, “This representation of the world, ... together with the fact that the room was secret, combined to constitute a specific subject position, a position that reserved to the prince not only the knowledge of the world constituting his supremacy, but the possibility of knowing itself” (106). While Napoleon’s overtly political gesture of opening the Louvre to the public implies a sudden revolutionary shift from secret knowledge and limited access to national demonstration and public display, private collections like the Imperial Gallery of Vienna were frequently open to the public, though that public was limited to those who could pay a large fee (Hudson 4). Even an ostensibly public institution like the British Museum, founded in 1757, required visitors to submit to a tedious and complicated process of approval that only the most diligent were willing to endure. Once approved for admission, visitors were hurried through the collection by impatient readers eager to return to their private studies (Hudson 9). What a late eighteenth-century visitor to the British Museum saw was an enormous and miscellaneous collection characterized by a French visitor in 1795 as “an immense magazine in which things have been thrown at random, rather than a scientific collection, destined to instruct and honor a great nation” (quoted in Miller 90). As Kenneth Hudson describes the collection: Excavations were going on in steadily increasing numbers throughout Europe and the Middle East. Travellers and explorers were bringing back enormous quantities of what can only be called loot from Africa, South America, China, Japan and the Pacific Islands. Botanists, zoologists and geologists were foraging all over the world and shipping their finds back to their motherlands. The problem, which became more acute each year, was what to do with it all. How was it to be sifted, housed and arranged and made meaningful? (53–4)

The loot of the world that formed the bulk of the British Museum’s collections dates from the origins of the museum in the Sloane collection. The Sloane collection, the first of the many private collections bequeathed to the nation, was the lifelong work of Sir Hans Sloane, whose collecting activities began during his service in colonial Jamaica in the 1680s. As personal physician to the Duke of Abermarle, then Governor of Jamaica, Sloane used his position to amass a large collection of natural history specimens, native art, and other curiosities, which were transported to England in ship after ship. After the British Museum was officially founded as a public institution, the ships full of colonial acquisitions continued to arrive, and the representational value of these acquisitions was not lost on those in government. Referring to the many gifts to the museum made by Sir James Cook, Matthew Maty, Principal Librarian of the museum, wrote to the Lord Chancellor: “The Museum is going to be enriched with a complete and most superb collection of all natural and artificial curiosities which have been found in the expedition to the South Seas.” The Admiralty, Maty stressed, was insistent that these collections be displayed at the

A National Property

153

museum “in a particular manner and in a distinguished place as a monument of these national exertions of British munificence and industry” (quoted in Miller 75). From its beginnings in colonial expropriation through its growth as repository of imperial spoils, the British Museum functioned, like the princely galleries of the Renaissance, as representative of the wealth and status, not of a single individual, but of the nation as an abstract entity of concerted interests. However, in order to function in this way, the museum needed to be available to the public it was supposed to educate, a public toward which the museum directors were decidedly ambivalent. Calls to make the museum more accessible were frequently met with concerns over public behavior, and it is telling that during the Gordon Riots in 1780 troops were stationed in the museum gardens, as if the “rabble” would consider the Museum a symbol as potent as the Bastille (Bennett 69). Yet in 1782, when Parliament tried to force the museum to charge an admission fee to keep the number of visitors down, and more specifically to keep the “lower orders” out, the fee was opposed by the Trustees of the museum and was never implemented (Miller 71). However, the museum retained its policy of reviewing the credentials of all prospective visitors and allowing only those found “not exceptionable” to be admitted (Wittlin 113). It is clear that the trustees of the “public” museum saw their public as a limited one, and their fear that unrestricted access would bring visitors “in liquor” who “will never be kept in order” (quoted in Miller 62) betokens a fear of the unruly mobs, the “lower orders” they wished to educate but were unwilling to admit. The museum public, then, was always thought of as an educable public, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century excluded the vast majority of the people, like Wordsworth’s own distinction between the Public and the People made in the prose supplements to the 1815 edition of his collected poems. The museum public consisted of franchised citizens, or those who thought of themselves as franchised, and it is no coincidence that museum attendance, essentially stagnant from 1783 to 1809, doubled in the years surrounding Waterloo and increased tenfold in the year before the Reform Bill.3 What these new visitors saw was an increasingly sophisticated articulation of the citizen and the nation to which he (and the gendered pronoun is appropriate) belonged. This educative process was built around the notion of improvement—a notion that was itself receiving widespread currency in the decades following Waterloo—a “march of intellect” that tied individual improvement to national improvement and vice-versa (Briggs 216–225). In what Carol Duncan calls

3 Miller quotes attendance figures given by Matthew Maty, then Principal Librarian, to the House of Commons. For 1 July 1783 through 30 June 1784, attendance was estimated at 10,000 visitors. By 1808–1809, this figure had increased to 15,390, a substantial percentage increase over 1783–1784, but still a slight figure given the population of Great Britain, some 12 million people, recorded by the 1811 census. By 1810–1811, attendance had nearly doubled over 1808–1809, and by 1830–1831, the 99,112 visitors marked a near tenfold increase over 1783–1784 (Miller 99). Attendance continued to rise, dramatically reaching 266,008 in 1837–1838, and after reforms in admissions policies, 897,985 in 1847–1848 (Robert Cowtan, Memories of the British Museum (London, 1872), 305). See Thomas Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, for a more sophisticated argument on the relation between citizenship and culture apprenticeship.

154

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

the “specific ritual scenarios” (2) of the national museum and the museum that was the nation, the public learned how to be the people. The specific ritual scenarios identified by Duncan participate in what anthropologists characterize as the function of ritual, both secular and religious: “That is, like other cultures, we, too, build sites that publicly represent beliefs about the order of the world, its past and present, and the individual’s place within it” (8). The museum does this by providing a space outside the everyday, a script of responses, and the promise of transformation for those who properly make use of the space and the script. The museum functions as a ritual space by being cordoned off from everyday experience, “marked off and culturally designated as reserved for a special quality of attention—in this case, for contemplation and learning” (10). As anthropologist Mary Douglas notes of ritual practice in general, “A ritual provides a frame. The marked off time or place alerts a special kind of expectancy” (63). For Duncan the museum constitutes an instance of what anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminality,” that “mode of consciousness outside of or ‘betwixt-and-between the normal, day-to-day cultural and social states and processes of getting and spending’” (“Frame” 33). As Turner’s allusion to Wordsworth makes clear, the liminal space and the experience it makes available exist not only outside of the everyday, but in opposition to it, as an imagined space of retreat from cares that threaten to lay waste to our powers. This special argument for the benefits of aesthetic contemplation, for the “special kind of expectancy” created by the liminal space of the museum, leads to the frequent characterization of museums as “sites which enable individuals ... to move beyond the psychic constraints of mundane existence, step out of time, and attain new, larger perspectives” (Duncan 12). Besides being clearly marked off, the museum space, like other ritual sites, is a performance space, “a place programmed for the enactment of something”: It may be something an individual enacts alone by following a prescribed route, by repeating a prayer, by recalling a narrative, or by engaging in some other structured experience that relates to the history or meaning of the site (or to some object or objects on the site). Some individuals may use a ritual site more knowledgeably than others—they may be more educationally prepared to respond to its symbolic cues. (12)

In the museum, the visitor enacts the performance usually by following a prescribed route through the museum, responding appropriately to the objects and internalizing some master narrative used to order the artifacts, exhibits, rooms or buildings. The museum provides “both the stage set and the script,” and ideally it even constructs its own dramatis personae, those individuals predisposed “to enact the museum ritual.” The reward for those receptive to the museum experience is nothing less than a transformation of the self. As Duncan summarizes, the experience “confers or renews identity or purifies or restores order in the self or to the world through sacrifice, ordeal, or enlightenment ... According to their advocates, museum visitors come away with a sense of enlightenment, or a feeling of having been spiritually nourished or restored” (13). In this performance, as Thomas Pfau notes, is the demonstration of citizenship:

A National Property

155

What defines authentic membership in the domestic and national economy of the middle class, then, is not one’s wealth or ‘substance’ but one’s felicitous performance in the never-ending task of self-description and self-representation and, requisite to that practice, one’s capacity to find the proper ratio of cognitive and affective investment, reserve, and display. (259)

Like the necessary response to the landscape described by Wordsworth in his 1816 letter to John Scott, one proved one’s belonging by belonging. The liminal space of the museum and the prescribed performance of its visitors brought about a transformation in how those visitors saw themselves as citizens of the state. In revolutionary France, the transformation of the King’s Palace into a public space purportedly represented an emerging principle of equality, but also according to Duncan made visible “a new relationship between the individual as citizen and the state as benefactor” (24). The Louvre, later rededicated as the Musée Napoléon: addressed its visitor as a bourgeois citizen who enters the museum in search of enlightenment and rationally understood pleasures. In the museum, this citizen finds a culture that unites him with other French citizens regardless of their individual social position. He also encounters there the state itself, embodied in the very form of the museum. (26)

In Britain, however, as the limited and difficult access to the British Museum at the beginning of the nineteenth century made clear, the relationship between the citizen and the public was more complex. As Iain Pears has noted, the gentlemanly art collections of eighteenth century Britain were open only to members of “polite society” and closed to the public, functioning as demonstrations of the disposable wealth, proper breeding, and good taste that separated its owners from vulgar society and thus served as legitimations of power (176–8). When William Cobbett denounced the British Museum “as a place intended only for the amusement of the curious and rich” (quoted in Miller 138), he was merely echoing similar denunciations that had appeared earlier in the Edinburgh Review and the generally pro-museum Quarterly Review. As Linda Colley argues, though, the relationship between “polite society” and the public was much more complex. Colley points to the British Institution, founded in 1805, to suggest that the patrician class maintained its control over public taste without giving up private ownership. The British Institution provided a permanent gallery where British artists could exhibit their work, and, more important, where great works from private country house collections could be displayed for viewing by artists and the general public. As Colley sums up, “By lending some of his Old Masters to the Institution, a gentleman collector could flaunt his wealth and culture, and seem a patriot into the bargain” (176–7). The ritual space of the museum, however, was not limited to the monumental edifices of culture situated in the metropolis but extended over the whole of a monumentalized British landscape. Geoffrey Hartman sees Wordsworth’s achievement as freeing the inscription from the physical monument (Unremarkable 40), but clearly Wordsworth’s procedure of forming a generalizing utterance from the mundane details of the legible landscape transforms that landscape into a ritual space that calls for the performance of something and promises nothing less than the transformation

156

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

of the visitor. While a poem like “Tintern Abbey” seems to enact this ritual of imaginative transformation freed from the physical monumentality of the landscape, it is the landscape’s monumentality, in the form of the past narratives inscribed in the landscape, that create a museum space of physical monuments, a guidebook of British heritage. Any number of early Wordsworth lyrics could be used to demonstrate the museum quality of the landscape. “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew Tree” marks a site singled out for a special kind of expectancy. The mundane detail in the landscape gives rise to a narrative associated with the site, a cautionary tale of pride and selfpity, which then leads to an exordium on the part of the speaker against such vices, what Laurence Goldstein calls “the prophet’s scorn for worldly splendor” (5). Like an artifact in the museum, this site even comes with its own label, the supposed “Lines” that have been left on the seat for the education of some future visitor. For this fancied future visitor, the reading of the landscape (“Stranger! these gloomy boughs / Had charms for him” [24–5]) is actually a rereading of an already inscribed prior reading of the landscape. The transformation promised the visitor/reader is in the form of a moral lesson (“Stranger! henceforth be warned” [50]), which curiously instructs the visitor to look away from the monument back to the landscape itself. In “Michael” we have a similar movement, first off from the public way into the liminal space of a “hidden valley” (8), where an illegible heap of stones will be made legible by the poet’s narrative. Again, though, the landscape available to the visitor/reader is one that has already been written and can only be repeated by one who will act as “second self” to the poet. Like artifacts in a museum, the landscape we are asked to contemplate is one already marked by contemplation, and the visitor’s experience is scripted by the prior visit of the poet. A visitor to a museum, like a view-hunting tourist, is of course a reader of previously read and written signs, and Wordsworth himself suffers from no pretensions as to being the original reader of the landscape.4 What is important is how the landscape is organized as a museum space for the performance of these rituals of self-improvement, whether that improvement comes in the form of a moral lesson learned, an exemplary narrative told, or a prayer recited. The landscape, or proper appreciation of the aesthetic value and moral lessons offered by the landscape, was a means of social improvement. Nature, in all its contested meanings, was not merely a source of aesthetic pleasure, but properly read (and therein lies much future disagreement) it was a source of moral education and spiritual fulfillment. Of course, such claims for the proper appreciation of nature were already commonplace in some circles, though they would not receive widespread currency in Britain for some time yet, a currency that owed much to Wordsworth’s later increased popularity. These wideranging claims for the educative value of landscape find perhaps their fullest expression in “Tintern Abbey,” where ritual, performance, and transformation take place in a landscape virtually stripped of materiality, what Thomas Pfau calls the “disestablishment

4 In fact, by casting the Poet as a listener to the Wanderer in The Excursion, Wordsworth makes clear that the normative position for the poet is that of a reader, not an originator, of signs. For more on the poet as listener, see Wolfson’s The Questioning Presence.

A National Property

157

of nature’s materiality and its gradual coalescence into a prospect” (65), making it the quintessential example of Hartman’s inscription without a physical monument. As recent commentators have pointed out, the poem generally called “Tintern Abbey” does not actually have an abbey, the one at Tintern or otherwise, anywhere in its text. Its lengthy title, typical of inscriptive poetry, locates the poem “a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” in a setting from which the Abbey itself is not even visible. The physical landscape is rendered both visible and invisible in other ways as well, as Marjorie Levinson points out, in such metonymic slides as that which turns “hedge-rows,” marks of increased enclosure, into “hardly hedge-rows” and finally into the aestheticized “little lines / Of sportive woods” (Wordsworth’s 42). It has become something of a commonplace in recent criticism to see these acts of dematerialization, these slides away from the real landscape into a privileged site of nourishment and redemption, as part of Wordsworth’s strategy to erase the social and political landscape and replace it with an internalized landscape. As Jerome McGann states, “Wordsworth lost the world merely to gain his immortal soul” (88), and this elegant phrasing points up the opposition that has marked one of the critical battlegrounds of the poem: social responsibility versus personal desire.5 Shifting the debate from this essentially historicist concern with ideology and evasion, Thomas Pfau has argued for more careful attention to genre and form, which “may be understood as mediating social desire, as constructing an imagined, sympathetic community no less ‘real’ than the domain of material reference allegedly compromised by the lyric’s systematic obfuscation” (121). Readings such as Pfau’s emphasize the concern with the picturesque found in “Tintern Abbey” and rely ultimately on critical interest in tourism and the picturesque.6 Without disagreeing with the details of these readings, I would like to focus on how “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” attempts to write personal desire as social responsibility and even national necessity through its narrative of the improving influence and educative value of the landscape as museum space. Such a focus suggests that the poem’s evasions are less a product of false ideology and more the result of Wordsworth’s self-professed desire to teach the public the “sensations” that would “come much nearer to what one would desire,” the sensations that would prove their possession of the proper “reverence of the English character” (MY 2, 304). 5 Or perhaps, as Peter J. Manning proposes, the resistance of “Tintern Abbey” to these coded readings is one way of understanding the poem’s persistence. See “Troubling the Borders: Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1998.” Wordsworth Circle 30.1 (1999 Winter): 22–7. The key texts articulating these historicist readings of “Tintern Abbey” are Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1983), Marjorie Levinson, “Insight and Oversight: Reading ‘Tintern Abbey’” in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Kenneth R. Johnston, “The Politics of ‘Tintern Abbey’,” in The Wordsworth Circle 14 (1983): 6–14. 6 Basic to these arguments is the complex relationship between tourism, the picturesque, appropriation, and aesthetic pleasure articulated by John Barrell in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (Cambridge University Press, 1972) and The Dark Side of the Landscape: the Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology (University of California Press, 1986), and Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford University Press, 1989).

158

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

As the title, the opening lines, and structure reiterate, “Tintern Abbey” is a poem about recurrence. The occasion of the poem is described in the title as “On revisiting the Banks of the Wye,” and the opening lines, with their repetition of the time that has passed between visits (“Five years,” “five summers,” “five long winters”), invoke the sense of pilgrimage, of ritual repetition. The five unequal verse paragraphs of the poem, with their returning, reiterating motion, also mark this sense of repetition with difference. In the first verse paragraph, the landscape is made ostensible through the use of determinate pronouns, as if the poet were a guide pointing to the noticeable features of the landscape: “these waters,” “these steep and lofty cliffs,” “this dark sycamore,” “these plots of cottage-ground,” “these orchard tufts,” these hedge-rows,” “these pastoral farms.” While Thomas McFarland reads this first stanza as representative of Wordsworth’s blurring of fact and fiction in the poem, the sheer repetition of the determinate pronouns forces the reader to acknowledge at least imaginatively the presence of the landscape (Wordsworth 48– 53). Virtually no line passes without our guide pointing to some aspect of the view, as if the poet demands that we too experience the presence of the “landscape,” a word that recurs three times in the first 25 lines and that, like the physical landscape itself, strangely disappears until the penultimate line of the poem. “These forms of beauty” (or “These beauteous forms” as the line stood after 1827) occupy, as Levinson points out, a precarious position between cultivation and wildness, between plots of arable land, hedgerows, and planted woods and the “wild green landscape” that they do not “disturb” (Wordsworth’s 14). The seeming paradox is that these improvements, which to most visitors appear as an ordering and structuring of the chaotic natural scene and creative of the very idea of landscape, are seen not as providing order but as not disturbing or disordering some existing order. The odd ambivalence raised by the idea that order might, but insistently here does not, lead to disorder recurs in two opposed uses of the same verb, “disturb,” later in the poem. The first use occurs in the midst of the poem’s climax, the recitation of the “other gifts” that have brought “Abundant recompense” to the poet. In speaking of the great moral and spiritual lessons that a proper reading of landscape can give to those who “have learned” how “To look on nature” (89–90), the gift, for the poet, is a recognition of “A presence that disturbs [him] with the joy / Of elevated thoughts” (95–6). This presence, or “sense sublime” is disturbing because the joy of elevated thoughts forces on the poet a disordering of the conventional view and a recognition “Of something far more deeply interfused.” This is a model of how the landscape teaches, how reading the landscape forces on the reader knowledge that disrupts the everyday. The promise of the liminal space is that it will foster a certain heightened kind of expectancy, that it will “disturb” us with the joy of elevated thoughts, and this disordering will lead to a transformation of the self, a conferring and purifying of the self. Thus the poet can declare at the end of the fourth-verse paragraph a renewed sense of self-identity (“Therefore am I still” [103]) founded on “purest thoughts.” Enlightened and renewed, the poet can return to the everyday, “the dreary intercourse of daily life,” which now cannot “disturb / Our chearful truth” (133–4) that the world is full of blessings. In this last use of “disturb,” it is the renewed state that is somehow safeguarded from disorder, as if the poet, like the wild green landscape, was somehow immune from the disordering effects of cultivation and

A National Property

159

civilization; or if not immune then it is as if the disorder does not disturb some more basic order. If the contemplation of the landscape promises to disturb us out of the everyday, to grant us some enlightened knowledge, then the continued presence of the landscape in memory somehow protects us from the disturbing influence of the everyday. Like the wild green landscape, we can somehow remain wild and green amid a world of hedgerows and evil tongues. This is the evangelical message of “A worshipper of Nature,” that in Nature’s presence we will be anointed, changed, and renewed for our work in the world, that Nature will be found to be a source of pure delight and enlightenment readying us to be “unwearied” in our service. And, like the church, this process relies on the continued separation of the sacred space from the secular world and the representation of sacred space as the place to which we long to return, to which we occasionally return, but from which we are necessarily absent. Despite the stationary quality of the poem—it gives the illusion of standing still upon a single spot of earth—the narrative depends on movement through space and time. Following the scene-setting first verse paragraph, which establishes (almost manically as pointed out earlier) this place, the second verse paragraph immediately invokes the absence of this place. While the presence of the landscape might enable a certain aesthetic experience, such an experience only has meaning because of its liminality because it differs so from the everyday life led in the “lonely rooms, and mid the din / Of towns and cities” (26–7). What provides “tranquil restoration” (31) is not so much the actual presence of the landscape as its imagined presence somewhere out there on the margins of the everyday. In short, the infrequency of its presence is necessary for its liminal status, and its liminal status is necessary for its redemptive quality. For the landscape to teach and for the visitor to learn, the landscape must remain a place to which the visitor can return. The importance of this relationship is made clear in the short third-verse paragraph, where the poet again imaginatively removes himself from the landscape so that he can return to it yet again. As at the beginning of the second verse paragraph, the everyday world is again invoked, the getting and spending, the “fretful stir / Unprofitable,” “the fever of the world” (53–4) that is necessary both to mark the boundaries of the sacred space of landscape and to create the need for such a place of restoration. To complicate the matter further, the fourth-verse paragraph, which turns back in time to those earlier visits, posits the possibility that all are not equally capable of learning from the landscape. That earlier self, figured as “boyish,” experienced pleasure at the landscape, but this pleasure is clearly distinct from the sort of restoration and enlightenment that would characterize a proper response. In short, this earlier self proves on retrospect to be an exceptionable visitor to the museum of the landscape. These movements back and forth between this sacred spot and the everyday world, between this prepared visitor and some earlier unprepared visitor, create the illusion of a progression that is like a procession. These turns and counterturns, as Hartman calls them (Wordsworth’s 27), are always returns to the sacred place, the place that promises education and enlightenment. As we move through this particular museum of the landscape, the script takes us from a contemplation of the place itself to a contemplation of the not-place, which proves the usefulness of the place, to a contemplation of the not-time, which proves our

160

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

qualification to read this place, to our return to the everyday world enlightened and restored. If we have been properly open to the museum experience, the place and time of composition have become the place and time of reading. The “here” the poem insists upon has become the “here” of the invisible true nation of readers, who through their responsiveness to the poet’s cues have proven their right to citizenship. During this process we have rehearsed narratives associated with the place, and we have even recited a prayer. The performance of “Tintern Abbey,” like that required of any museum visitor, moves from artifact through contemplation to enlightenment. If there is a difference between this early Wordsworth poem and those written after Waterloo as part of his “new local poetry,” it is in the increased emphasis on the artifact, and a decreased expectation of transformation. Like a weary traveler trudging through the undifferentiated rooms of museum after museum, the visitor’s search for meaning continued, but the potential for things to mean seemed to grow questionable. The poetry Wordsworth published after 1819 is dominated by the tour, the itinerary poems and sequences that describe almost in guidebook fashion journeys through the British and continental landscape. Some, like Peter Bell and The Waggoner, are narrative poems that describe the fictional journeys of imagined characters through actual landscapes, but most are sequences of poems that describe the movement of the poet himself through the actual landscape. These poems encompass many miles of travel, through the Duddon Valley, Scotland, Wales, France, Spain, and Italy. With at times numbing repetition, the poet moves from place to place, from artifact to artifact, recording his thoughts. However, with few exceptions, the traveler avoids entering the actual museums of these localities, taking instead a museum “way of seeing” to the physical and imaginative monuments of the landscape. While an imaginative whole can be fashioned out of some of these collections, most of them offer no more structure than the ambulatory, the physical movement through a landscape of monuments, like the guided tour through the museum space. In Wordsworth’s sonnet, “After Visiting the Field of Waterloo,” we can see how what Svetlana Alpers calls the “museum effect,” or the museum “way of seeing” (26), contributes to the curious disappointment felt by the poet on his encounter with one of the pregnant sites of European history. The poem opens with a fanciful image of “A wingèd Goddess” holding in her hand the numerous “glittering crowns and garlands” at stake in the Battle of Waterloo, hovering in the air “above the far-famed spot” (5). Her presence is evoked only to invoke her absence and to call attention to the gap that absence creates in the experience of the visitor: She vanished; leaving prospect blank and cold Of wind-swept corn that wide around us rolled In dreary billows, wood, and meagre cot, And monuments that must soon disappear; Yet a dread recompense we found, While glory seemed betrayed, while patriot-zeal Sank in our hearts, we felt as men should feel With such vast hoards of hidden carnage near, And horror breathing from the silent ground! (PW 3: 6–14)

A National Property

161

Alpers characterizes the museum effect as the process by which the isolation of “something from its world,” the offering up of it “for attentive looking,” transforms the object into an aesthetic object, into a work of art (26–7). The special kind of expectancy associated with these acts of isolation and offering fosters an attentive looking that aestheticizes the object, and the isolation of the object from its context strips the object of historical meaning, rendering feeling the only response that is available. In this poem, that context is supplied somewhat tenuously in the fleeting image of the wingèd Goddess, the political importance of the battle conveyed by the conventional image of a deified arbiter holding aloft the spoils. To the visitor, however, even this tenuous context is denied, and what is left is a “prospect blank and cold,” marked by temporary “monuments that soon must disappear.”7 The scene betrays the “glory” and the “patriot-zeal” that the visitors expected to find, and yet they do find a recompense, though a “local” and thus ephemeral one. The visitors “felt as men should feel” at such a site, in spite of the site itself. But what characterizes this proper response, its propriety so clearly marked by the italicized should? The earlier version of this poem (1822) supplies the suppressed counter-term to these proper feelings: She vanished; all was joyless, blank, and cold; But if from wind-swept fields of corn that roll’d In dreary billows, from the meagre cot, And monuments that soon may disappear, Meanings we craved which could not be found; If the wide prospect seemed an envious seal Of great exploits; we felt as men should feel (app. crit. PW 3: 167)

In this earlier published version, the relationship between landscape and feeling is made possible only after the craving for meaning is exhausted. The landscape is not so much available for reading as it is available for the imaginative re-creation of feeling, which is the only possible meaning available. Viewed entirely in this context the field of Waterloo makes available the contested historical and political meanings of “great exploits.” It is only after the Goddess has vanished, leaving behind a landscape so like many other landscapes, that the visitor is free to aestheticize the site. The monumental landscape is available for inscription and reading regardless of the presence of actual monuments. The museum way of seeing forces meaning to be written over the blank prospect, whether that meaning be based on history, politics, folklore, or personal feeling. The visitors felt as men (and women) should feel, that this was a sacred space hallowed by the dead, set apart from other fields of dreary billows of corn for contemplation and transformation. What sets this landscape apart is “horror breathing from the silent ground.” Horror is a response produced by the recollection of the site’s historical importance, what Stephen Greenblatt calls the “resonance” associated with this place. Writing on the appeal 7 Robin Jarvis refers to this moment as “a felt crisis of representation, in which Nature in its indifferent fecundity refuses to give witness to the slaughter that has taken place” (336). See “The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820.” Studies in Romanticism 40.3 (2001 Fall): 321–43.

162

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

of the museum exhibition, he identifies the two contrary though often simultaneous responses as “wonder” and “resonance,” our desire to be stirred by the marvelous, the strange, and the beautiful, as well as our desire to tell stories about the object or experience, or rather our ability to read in it the thickness of historical context, which is itself a collection of stories. For Greenblatt, both responses are tied to fantasies of appropriation, wonder feeding the desire to possess that which we cannot possess, to take a portion of the cultural cache of the object to ourselves, and resonance initiating our ability to contextualize and therefore contain the object.8 “This resonance,” continues Greenblatt, “depends not upon visual stimulation but upon a felt intensity of names, and behind the names, as the very term resonance suggests, of voices; the voices of those who chanted, studied, muttered their prayers, wept, and then were forever silenced” (47). What is felt is there, but typically the there is silent and speaks only to those who feel, those who are contemplative enough to understand the meaning without the monuments. The trick of this implied but never articulated response is that merely to ask the question,” How should men feel?” is to betray a lack of knowledge, sympathy, and preparation, a lack that would render one a spurious visitor. The implication is that a properly educated British citizen would know how to respond and would respond as one should. In its utilization of response as a mark of distinction and its emphasis on the capacity of the decontextualized object (or site) to induce feeling, Wordsworth’s sonnet on the field of Waterloo reenacts the complex relationship between landscape, taste, and citizenship laid out in the 1816 letter to John Scott discussed in Chapter 4. In that letter, Wordsworth associated correct politics with correct taste, where correct taste was represented by how one responded (or whether one responded at all) to an idealized picture of the British landscape. In rapid order, Wordsworth moved from an idealized presentation of “the happy images of English landscape” to the “sensations” of the imagined observer to the “becoming reverence of the English character” these unarticulated sensations supposedly represented. Possession of these proper sensations, knowing how one should feel and respond to these happy images, discriminated the true patriots, those who “value as they ought” the “Constitution of the country” (MY 2: 304), from the false patriots. Just as the visitors to the museum demonstrate their right to inclusion through their ability to respond appropriately and with due reverence to the display of cultural achievements and national power, the visitor to the sacralized landscape is called upon to perform a like demonstration. Failure to possess the proper feelings marks one as a member of a lesser class, perhaps even as a member of the uneducable public and thus, according to some, excludes one from participation in the aesthetic life requisite

8 Greenblatt, writing on museum exhibition and display practices, defines resonance as “the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world,” and wonder as “the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks” (42). While Greenblatt frequently opposes resonance and wonder, he suggests that “every exhibition worth viewing has both” (54). See Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 42–56.

A National Property

163

for full citizenship.9 The irony is that the sonnet’s deliberate refusal to embrace militaristic patriotism is subsumed by the invocation of the museum way of seeing, the need to aestheticize, which is directly tied to the imagined nation. Even while surrendering one mode of nationalistic discourse, the poem embraces another. These are the assumptions that underlie the seeming paradox of Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, which participates in and profits from the continued inundation of the Lake District by view-hunting tourists, tourists Wordsworth would struggle to exclude in the controversy over the Kendal and Windermere Railway. However, the Guide is paradoxical only if it is seen as addressed to the tourist of the early Victorian age, an assumption that a close examination of the Guide does not bear out. The tourist constructed and addressed by Wordsworth is a gentleman tourist of an earlier age, the educated man of taste and feeling of Wordsworth’s own youth. What later became the Guide to the Lakes was originally written to accompany a series of sketches made by a local artist and published in 1810. This text was later republished as part of the 1820 River Duddon volume, where it attracted considerable critical attention, which led to its independent publication in 1822 as A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England. A fourth edition appeared in 1823, and it achieved its final form in 1835 along with its new title A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England. As the 1835 title page explicitly states, the Guide was intended “For the use of Tourists and Residents,” but as the very first sentence of the text makes clear, by “Tourists,” Wordsworth meant “Persons of taste, and feeling for landscape” (1).10 While the purpose of the guide was “to reconcile a Briton to the scenery of his own country” (106), the “Briton” constructed by the Guide was very different from the Briton constructed by the recently passed Reform Bill. The person of taste constructed by the Guide was characterized by the ability to make proper discernments, by an interest in the aesthetics of landscape and landscape painting, and by possession of a proper education and the right politics. In what had served as the introduction to the Guide through its first four editions, Wordsworth defines his purpose as providing a more “orderly arrangement” to the thoughts of those who have already visited the Lakes and “directing the attention” of the future traveler “to distinctions in things,” which would better enable the visitor to form “habits of more exact and considerate observation” (22). Like a museum docent, the Guide encourages the visitor to utilize a special kind of expectancy, a 9 Colley illustrates this attitude with a passage from Austen’s Northanger Abbey, where Catherine Morland is instructed on how to read the landscape by her patrician admirer and his sister. Colley comments: “As always in her novels, Austen lets us know exactly how much each of these characters is worth in the social and money stakes. Henry is the Oxford-educated son of an army general with a fortune and a country estate; his sister is the future wife of a viscount. Superior social status and education have allowed them to appropriate the scenery of their own land: to see and describe it ... in ways that Catherine, who is only the daughter of a modest country clergyman, simply cannot hope to do.” See Britons, 174. 10 John Whale examines the distinction between the picturesque as described by guidebooks and tour narratives and the picturesque as created by the tasteful landowner (such as Uvedale Price) in “Romantics, Explorers and Picturesque Travellers,” in Copley and Garside, The Politics of the Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 175–95.

164

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

more concerted gaze, which is the foundation of aesthetic experience. Frequently, Wordsworth refers to his reader as a “person of taste” and forms the boundaries of this exclusive group through both admonition and appeal. The person of taste is admonished for being initially “seduced” into the mistake of confusing magnitude with grandeur when viewing large bodies of water, a mistake from which the future person of taste is saved by Wordsworth’s direction. More often, the person of taste is appealed to as holding opinions like the author’s on subjects as various as the impertinence of excessive calculation, the beauty of rural bridges, and the choice of color for cottages (36, 65, 72–3). These appeals—to imagination over economic need, to rudeness and antiquity over utility, and to painterly aesthetics over utilitarian ideas of order and cleanliness—invoke a picturesque ideal, the proper appreciation of which requires a painter’s eye or a gentleman’s education in the aesthetics of painting. Aesthetic training, though, is only the initial step, for proper reading leads from pleasure to veneration, from a recognition of aesthetic beauty to a political reading of the sacralized British landscape.11 That the distinction that marks the person of taste extends to something so seemingly insignificant as the color of the cottages merely points out how deeply embedded in aesthetic practice a “feeling for landscape” is. When Wordsworth speaks of proper colors for cottages, he can do so only by using “the technical language of painters” (78). His chief objection is to the color white, an objection he bases on the belief that “an object of pure white” destroys “the gradation of distance” and therefore “can scarcely ever be managed with good effect in landscape-painting” (80). The primary consideration of color in the rural landscape is its manageability in the mind’s painting of the scene, the traveler’s construction of the picturesque landscape. The wrong color threatens to “divide” the landscape “into triangles, or other mathematical figures, haunting the eye” of the observer. The continued emphasis on “forms, surface, and colour” (31), on elements not “uninteresting to painters,” reifies the landscape as an aesthetic object and associates proper appreciation of the Lakes with possession of the proper education and vocabulary. The hidden specter in the form, the mathematical figure that haunts the eye, is the impertinent calculation of those who seek to subject the landscape to measurement, the surveyors, government officials, merchants, railway builders, and timbermen untrained in the proper construction of the picturesque. For Wordsworth, fundamental to the picturesque quality of the rural landscape are the distinctiveness and isolation of its inhabitants. Like the uniform density of representation on Ordnance Survey maps discussed in Chapter 4, which created the sense of a readable rural landscape and an unreadable urban landscape, the scarcity of cottages is seen as necessary to the aesthetic design of the Lakes. The emphasis on the “single cottage, or cluster of cottages” (32) subordinates human habitation, even population, to aesthetic demands. In the first edition, Wordsworth makes clear the importance of aesthetics when he notes that cottages located in mountain recesses, by 11 In Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, Theresa Kelley uses Wordsworth’s pronouncements on the aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful to identify the Guide to the Lakes as being informed throughout by Burkean politics. See especially pp. 14–23. See also my earlier discussion of landscape and constitution in Chapter 4.

A National Property

165

their “retirement and seclusion ... are endeared to the eye of the man of sensibility” (179). This explicit justification of the appeal of these cottages was removed from subsequent editions, as was the explicit reference to “the man of sensibility.” Later editions merely stated that isolated cottages, “by seeming to withdraw from the eye, are the more endeared to the feelings” (43). The substitution of “feeling” locates one’s ability to read and appreciate the landscape in one’s ability to respond aesthetically to the landscape. To the person of taste, any further explanation was unnecessary. For Wordsworth, a cottage should be like “a production of Nature,” seeming rather “to have grown than to have been erected” (62). The aged cottage should “call to mind the processes of Nature” and should “appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of things” (63). This description could be used to describe Margaret’s cottage in The Excursion, but here in the Guide dilapidation is stripped of the social and economic forces that at least partially account for the degradation of Margaret’s cottage. In the economy of Nature and the construction of the picturesque, there is little room for poverty not subjected to aestheticization. When Wordsworth speaks of the tarns of the Lake District, he describes an “economy of Nature” that sets the large lakes against the small tarns. This economy is characterized chiefly by “a gradual distribution” of water into smaller streams, which then feed the tarns. The “waters thus reserved, instead of uniting, to spread ravage and deformity, with those which meet with no such detention, contribute to support, for a length of time, the vigour of many streams” (39–40). The hierarchical economy that works to separate large from small, which promises gradual distribution and relies upon the isolation of the lesser from each other, locates in Nature the model of the quasi-feudal economy so celebrated by Wordsworth. The threat of combination spreading ravage and deformity, like the “marshalled thousands, darkening street and moor” imagined in the apocalyptic political poem “The Warning,” is here defeated by geography and rendered safe by a higher economy, that of Nature. Here the analogy is tempting though unproven, but throughout the Guide the explicit politics of the person of taste are everywhere rendered as natural, as grown from the native soil and not imported, as exemplary of a “Republic of Shepherds” threatened by the “appetites and instincts, pursuits and occupations, that deform and agitate the world” (48). When Wordsworth turns to the history of settlement in the Lakes, he tells the story of an exemplary social order that serves as counterpoint to the unstable political climate of the 1820s and 1830s. The contrast between then and now is frequently alluded to in the 1835 edition by a careful marking of the passing of this social order, which existed “till within the last sixty years” (59, 64, 67). Like the longstanding political narrative of native vigor maintained through the isolation of the island nation protected by the encircling sea, the history of the Lakes is the history of a rugged and peculiar geography that has enabled the perpetuation of ancient customs, traditions, and allegiances. This resistant geography meant the region could not “participate much of the benefit of Roman manners” (52), a curiously benign figuration of colonization. The difficulty of access and communication “furnished a protection to some unsubdued Britons,” making the region something of a cradle of native British valor. It is not so much its history of resistance, however, that gives the Lakes its unique (and endangered) social order as its history of subordination founded in the

166

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

hierarchical social order of a quasi-feudal society. For Wordsworth, the connection between ancient social order and the aesthetic beauty of the landscape is direct, feudal tenancy “being, in fact, one of the principal causes which give [this region] such a striking superiority, in beauty and interest, over all other parts of the island” (55). Enclosure is described as an independent action of the local inhabitants, which has been everywhere softened and naturalized by the passage of time, a natural and not disfiguring process. Benign landowners and independent dalesmen coexisted peacefully in a landscape everywhere marked by proper subordination, just as the landscape itself reflected the “hand of man ... incorporated with and subservient to the powers and processes of Nature” (61). The result was a balanced economy of rights and allegiances where “person and possession, exhibited a perfect equality, a community of shepherds and agriculturists, proprietors, for the most part, of the lands which they occupied and cultivated” (60). What made this all possible was the sense of hierarchical order, man subordinated to Nature, tenant subordinated to Lord, where power is naturalized as a benign force, always acting in the best interests of the greater order. The preservation of the land is dependent upon the preservation of this order, and it is no careless coincidence that it is in “the woods of Lowther” that “is found an almost matchless store of ancient trees, and the majesty and wildness of the native forest” (44). The preservation of the native forest relies upon the preservation of the native social order. Ancient trees require ancient manners, and the majesty of one is dependent upon the continued majesty of the other. Up until “the last sixty years,” this social order, derived from a higher natural order, made possible a “perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturists” (67). At the conclusion of the second section, Wordsworth describes “this pure Commonwealth” as being a product of the landscape itself, “a powerful empire like an ideal society or an organized community, whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it” (68). The mountain republic, whose social order developed from the peculiar geography of the local landscape, is naturalized and idealized, held up to an unstable nation as exemplary. Yet, as this second section has been concerned with how the country has been “affected by its inhabitants” (51), the relationship between landscape and social order is a reciprocal one, where first the mountains define the hierarchical society and then the hierarchical society inscribes the landscape with its marks of power and subordination: Venerable was the transition, when a curious traveller, descending from the heart of the mountains, had come to some ancient manorial residence in the more open parts of the Vales, which, through the rights attached to its proprietor, connected the almost visionary mountain republic he had been contemplating with the substantial frame of society as existing in the laws and constitution of a mighty empire. (68)

The veneration felt by the curious traveler is the response that every man should feel at the sight of this physical representation of the natural order of society. The descent down the mountain is a descent from imaginative idealization to physical inscription, from the visionary to the substantial, from the “heart” to the “frame.” This act connects the sky to the landscape, the mountain republic to the laws and constitution of the nation. Here Wordsworth makes explicit the implied response

A National Property

167

required by the “happy images of English landscape,” the response that marks the reader and tourist both as possessing the right politics and as being a person of taste qualified to read the landscape. The person of taste is the true citizen of the nation, able to read the constitution in the configuration of the prospect view or reflected in the small details of the landscape. Even in the tiny chapel of Buttermere, “A patriot, calling to mind the stately fabrics of Canterbury, York, or Westminster, will find a heartfelt satisfaction in the presence of this lowly pile, as a monument of the wise institutions of our country, and as evidence of the all-pervading and paternal care of that venerable Establishment” (66). In short, the response required of the person of taste, the response that proves citizenship, is veneration, a sense of awe in the presence of these substantial manifestations of a symbolic order, an order that is itself derived from a symbolic reading of the physical landscape. An aesthetic reading of the landscape, then, decontextualizes the landscape in order to recontextualize it. Chapels become lowly piles, manor houses become repositories of ancient manners, and all become representative of the Constitution as well as the constitution of society.12 That this proper response to the Chapel at Buttermere clearly marks the qualifications of the visitor is made clear by De Quincey’s observation that, unpossessed of this ability to read the landscape, “the first movement of a stranger’s feelings would be towards loud laughter,” the chapel resembling “not so much a mimic chapel in a drop scene from the Opera House, as a miniature copy from such a scene” (69). The distinction offered by De Quincey is between true and false taste. According to De Quincey, true taste, like Wordsworth’s recontextualized symbolic reading, would read the chapel in terms of “its antiquity, its wild mountain exposure, and its consecrated connexion” to the “almost helpless humility of that little pastoral community” (64). False taste, elsewhere described by De Quincey as that “pseudoromantic rage” that would eventually violate “the most awful solitudes amongst the ancient hills by opera-house decorations” (157), would read the scene not simply as a copy, but a copy of a copy, a representation not of some symbolic relationship between people and the land or between the land and the Constitution, but of another representation. While this distinction offered by De Quincey mirrors Wordsworth’s distinction between cultivated and common taste, for De Quincey cultivated taste is always threatened by the peal of improper laughter. Of greater importance, though, is how De Quincey’s figuration of the chapel points out the displacement performed by the act of reading, the movement from perception to symbol, which is always threatened by the possibility of the unlimited deferral of a chain of substitutions, of copies that are copies of copies.

12 Anne Janowicz comments on this development: “The landscape of Britain has come to be entirely identified with the culture of Britishness. This assimilation of culture to nature serves nationalism in that it makes it impossible to extricate the purposes of the polity from the soil itself. The greatest poet of such an assimilation is Wordsworth” (90). As I have argued throughout this book, such an appraisal only tells us half the story. While Wordsworth attempted to be the national poet in the ways outlined by Janowicz, he was not only not always successful but at times consciously or unconsciously contradictory.

168

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

It is also important to remember that the description of the curious traveler’s descent is in the past tense. This legible landscape reflecting the native social order existed up until “within the last sixty years.” Since that time, changes have occurred, changes that Wordsworth attributes to the increased popularity of the region, which has led to increased tourism, which in turn has resulted in the increased settlement of nonnatives. While increased population might account for a degradation of the region’s aesthetic beauty, Wordsworth focuses not on the presence of these newcomers but on their bad taste. He recounts change after change, improvement after improvement, perpetuated by newcomers and asks of each “What could be more unfortunate than the taste that suggested” these changes (Guide 72). Ornamental gardening, landscape follies, larch plantations, the immoderate “craving after prospect,” the choice of color for cottages, the introduction of nonnative plants, the destruction of native forests, all these are held up as examples of the bad taste that threatens the aesthetic pleasure provided by the picturesque landscape. The fear, though, is not simply the loss of aesthetic pleasure, but the loss of one’s ability to read the landscape as representative of a reconceptualized symbolic order. Only after exhaustively treating these various imports does Wordsworth address what undoubtedly was the chief cause of change in the region: the introduction of machinery and the consequent decline of the native cottage industry. The narrative Wordsworth rehearses is a familiar one, of small independent statesmen unable to maintain their small farms, of buildings decayed or destroyed, of mortgages defaulted, and of the acquisitiveness of wealthy nonnative purchasers. The future envisioned is one in which “the country on the margin of the Lakes will fall almost entirely into the possession of gentry, either strangers or natives,” and in one last exhausted appeal to aesthetics, Wordsworth hopes “that a better taste should prevail among these new proprietors” (91). Given Wordsworth’s reliance on taste as the safeguard of both the social order and aesthetic beauty of the region, and given his reliance on a passed social order as guardian for that taste, this is an impossible hope. In one final appeal to persons of taste, the true citizens of the nation, Wordsworth imagines a new dispensation that will save the land from the people: In this wish the author will be joined by persons of pure taste throughout the whole island, who, by their visits (often repeated) to the Lakes in the North of England, testify that they deem the district a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy. (92)

Again the appeal is to like-minded readers, persons of discrimination throughout the nation who form an imagined community of interests that elevate them above the public. To these persons of taste, the educated, the gentlemanly, the affluent, belongs the responsibility to safeguard the nation from its people, as in the distinction between the People and the Public articulated by Wordsworth in his classification of readers. This “national property” might belong to every man, but it is the “every man” who already possesses the ability to see the landscape as an aesthetic object and to read in the physical landscape a symbolic order that legitimizes his social position and right to rule. The national property belongs to the nation only when that nation is seen as consisting of those enfranchised by the existing social order.

A National Property

169

Like the public art museum or natural history museum that enables the visitor to read culture and history as the narrative of the nation’s beneficence and the progress of man, the museum of the landscape enables those—whose cultural acquirements predispose them to discriminate, judge, and rule—to read back their own citizenship and possession of rights and responsibilities. This appeal, present in all editions of the Guide from 1810 on, was always an appeal to a social order that, by the time of the fifth edition, had virtually passed away. In a passage that appeared only in 1810, Wordsworth could state that “if the evil complained of should continue to spread, these vales ... will lose their chief recommendation for the eye of the painter and the man of imagination and feeling” (197). In subsequent editions, the aesthetic training that qualified the visitor became more of an implied and shared response, a secret address to the proper visitor who would know how one should feel and who would recognize himself as a person of taste. The irony of course is that the marketplace made no such distinction and the Guide could function as a conduct manual for anyone who sought the civilizing ritual of the museum of the land. As Tim Fulford explains, such ironies and contradictions were part of the picturesque from its beginnings because the picturesque was deeply intertwined in questions of authority, which initially were tied specifically to the possession of property. Fulford argues that as the picturesque became less tied to property ownership, it “became a popular mode of consumption, a leisure activity in which the middle classes were able, by enjoying their native land as a series of rustic scenes at little financial cost, to show that they too could afford and enjoy the disinterested view which had been a criterion for the exercise of cultural and political power by the landed interest” (117). The “proper” responsiveness, which Wordsworth wants to employ to mark distinction and thus qualification, could be learned, if not feigned. If a proper feeling for the picturesque marked one as a member of the appropriate class, then the ability to feign such feeling could be used to deceive others into believing that one possessed the acquirements (of property and education) necessary to form such taste. De Quincey retells the story of such a fraud, perpetuated by a man named Hatfield, who assumed the name of “The Hon. Augustus Hope,” supposed brother to Lord Hopetoun. Though “some persons had discernment to doubt this,” what partially allayed such doubts was Hope’s possession of a proper feeling for landscape: The stranger was a picturesque-hunter, but not of that order who fly round the ordinary tour with the velocity of lovers posting to Gretna, or of criminals running from the police; his purpose was to domiciliate himself in this beautiful scenery, and to see it at his leisure. (67)

De Quincey’s irony is that Hope’s “leisure” masked the fact that Hatfield’s true motives were like those of “lovers posting to Gretna,” that he actually was a criminal “running from the police.” His supposed desire to “domiciliate himself” in the picturesque scenery, coupled with the incontrovertible evidence of the post office (Hatfield franked letters under an assumed name, a capital offense), opened all doors to the impostor, whom De Quincey carefully designates as “the ‘Honourable’ gentleman” (68). That Hatfield was a polygamist, forger, and impostor, the seducer

170

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

of the “Maid of Buttermere,” eventually brought him to scaffold, but for Coleridge and De Quincey the great crime was that designations like “Honourable” and “gentleman” could be entirely false, ironized by their assumption by an entirely unqualified person. As De Quincey paraphrases Coleridge, the troubling lesson of the tragic tale is that distinction itself is unreliable: Coleridge said often, in looking back upon that frightful exposure of human guilt and misery,—and I also echoed his feeling,—that the man who, when pursued by these heartrending apostrophes, and with this litany of anguish sounding in his ears, from despairing women, and famished children, could yet find it possible to enjoy the calm pleasures of a Lake tourist, and deliberately hunt for the picturesque, must have been a fiend of that order which fortunately does not often emerge amongst men. (71)

The gap that Hatfield’s actions open up between persons of taste and base impostors threatens to confound true and false taste and destroy the distinction that is used to discriminate between those properly educated to appreciate landscape and those whose moral behavior must render them exceptionable visitors. If a man like Hatfield could pass for a man possessing the eye to perceive and the heart to feel the distinctive scenery of the Lakes, then the opposition between the imaginary nation of persons of taste and the general public who lack this taste collapses. If the landscape must be saved for a few by forbidding access to all, the confounding of the honorable with the “Honourable,” the “not exceptionable” with the “fiend,” undermines the criteria for distinguishing between the few and the many. When taste and conduct are at such variance, the high-minded claims for preservation at any cost are reduced to bald assertions of ancient rights and privileges and personal and national selfinterest that aesthetic appeals sought to mask. When at the end of the Guide Wordsworth appeals to the nation to save itself from its own people, he duplicates the longstanding justification used by the British Museum and the British government to limit access to the national museums and the cultural capital and symbolic power represented by the museum collections. In 1816 and for many decades afterward, access to these symbols of national pride was limited to a relatively privileged class. As Tony Bennett points out, it was not until the opening of the South Kensington Museum in 1857, with its “opening hours and admissions policy designed to maximize its accessibility to the working classes,” that the museum could be said to serve “an extended and undifferentiated public” (70). Wordsworth, through education and friendships, was a member of that privileged class. In 1806 he was able to attend a private viewing at the Royal Academy through his association with Sir George Beaumont, whose bequest to the nation upon his death formed the foundation of the National Gallery’s collection. Later, in 1808, Wordsworth and Coleridge used a letter of introduction from Beaumont to see Sir John Angerstein’s collection. In 1817, Sara Hutchinson wrote to her cousin, Thomas Monkhouse, to relay Wordsworth’s promise to apply to Samuel Rogers or to Beaumont for tickets to the British Gallery. If Wordsworth had “come to town,” she writes, “he has no doubt but he could have got one [ticket] from somebody, but it is an aristocratic thing and the Tickets are so charily dispensed that the holders have membership candidates for them when they do not use them themselves” (Letters 106). By 1828, Wordsworth required no intermediary to gain access to the museums,

A National Property

171

making three visits in as many weeks in the company of Henry Crabb Robinson, an ease of access that signals both Wordsworth’s improved reputation and the museum’s changing admissions policy. In his own practice as a tourist Wordsworth chose rapture and wonder over resonance, aestheticization over contextualization. In June 1815, Crabb Robinson accompanied Wordsworth on a tour of the British Museum. “Wordsworth beheld the antiquities with great interest and feeling as objects of beauty,” writes Robinson, “but with no great historical knowledge” (On Books 1:170). This choice parallels to some degree the aesthetic education of the tourist that is the ostensive purpose of the Guide but runs counter to the more complex task of Wordsworth’s new local poetry and the subtext of the Guide—to discriminate the true citizen able to read into the forms of the landscape the symbolic and recontextualized ideal political order. The form of landscape reading encouraged by the Guide relies on the production of resonance, of historical knowledge, which is the source of the veneration that necessarily underlies the desire for preservation. Preservation, however, has an unruly twin in access. The pressure of reform, in the form of demands for increased access to cultural capital, continued unabated. Select Committees formed by Parliament in the 1830s and 1840s to investigate the management of the museum found it to be “as bad as could be” (Miller 138), and despite resistance by the keepers, the doors of the British Museum were slowly opened to the public. Reform, in conjunction with that other great engine of access in the 1830s and 1840s—the railways—increasingly brought pressure on the museum of the landscape, and in 1844 Wordsworth found himself fighting a solitary and rearguard action against the encroachments of the public on the sacred space of the Lakes. For Wordsworth the argument was clear: Increased access would only bring destruction, and so again the nation had to be safeguarded from its people. His opposition to increased access took the form of an argument against the availability of the aesthetic training necessary to appreciate the beauty of the Lake District scenery. His real fear, however, was that increased access would destroy the aesthetic object that access made available, and once the aesthetic object was lost, so was the possibility of resonance, the historical knowledge necessary for the citizen to understand the veneration that was the true response to the symbolic British landscape. Although Wordsworth himself participated in the transformation of landscape into museum space, when increased access threatened to make rapture the only response available, he sought to safeguard the museum by closing its doors. Wordsworth was not opposed to access, but he was opposed to increased access, to the cheap and easy access made possible by modern conveyances. Coleridge’s nephew, John Taylor Coleridge, recounted an incident that occurred in 1836. Traveling together to a social gathering at Lowther Castle, Wordsworth led them through private, enclosed property. The Honorable Mr. Justice Coleridge asked Wordsworth whether they were not trespassing, and paraphrased Wordsworth’s reply: “No, the walks had, indeed, been inclosed, but [Wordsworth] remembered them open to the public, and he always went through them when he chose.” At Lowther, they encountered the owner of the enclosed property who, when he heard of their walk, also noted that Coleridge and Wordsworth “had been trespassing.” To this:

172

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation Wordsworth maintained his point with somewhat more warmth than I either liked, or could well account for. But afterwards, when we were alone, he told me that he had purposefully answered Lord W——— stoutly and warmly, because he had done a similar thing with regard to some grounds in the neighbourhood of Penrith, and excluded the people of Penrith from walking where they had always enjoyed the rights before. He had evidently a pleasure in vindicating these rights, and seemed to think it a duty. (Grosart 3:425)

While historical access to public ways was a “right” of the local inhabitants and the “duty” of the poet to protect, no such rights extended to the masses of tourists crowding the margins of the Lakes. As early as 1805 we find Dorothy complaining of “the season of bustle,” exacerbated by the fact that Dove Cottage lay “directly in the highway of the Tourists” (EY 621). For Wordsworth this situation worsened as the century progressed, ever faster and ever cheaper modes of transportation making even the most isolated regions of the Lakes accessible to more and more tourists. The impact of all these tourists, what Frances Ferguson refers to in another context as the pressure of too many consciousnesses, was to render the aesthetic contemplation of the landscape difficult, if not impossible. Traveling himself by one of these accursed modern conveyances, Wordsworth records his first impression of the Cave of Staffa seen from a steamboat in 1833: We saw, but surely, in the motley crowd, Not one of us has felt, the far-famed sight; How could we feel it? Each the other’s blight, Hurried and hurrying, volatile and loud. (“Cave of Staffa,” 1–4)

Relegated to the status of a tourist, penned in among the motley crowd, Wordsworth’s encounter with “Fingal’s mystic cave” is reduced to a London street fair where contemplation is impossible. Again the appeal of the landscape is to a feeling, a response that a person of taste should feel, but here could not. Proper contemplation of the aestheticized landscape is defined first as seeing, then as feeling, and finally as reading. Everyone with eyes can see, so the true discrimination that marks the properly trained visitor is dependent upon both an “eye to perceive” and “a heart to enjoy.” When modern conveyances threatened to bring the motley crowd to the Lakes, Wordsworth responded immediately. The Kendal and Windermere Railway proposed to connect Kendal with the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway and carry the line northwest from Kendal to Windermere. Such a line would provide easy and relatively inexpensive access to the Lakes to those who lived mid the din of towns and cities. In two letters to The Morning Post, later revised and republished as a pamphlet, Wordsworth based his opposition to the proposed railway on two propositions: that a taste for Lake District scenery could not be taught, and thus increased access would not benefit those who lacked taste, and that increased access would destroy the very object it intended to make available—the aestheticized landscape of contemplation. While the former proposition proved woefully short-sighted, the latter has proven remarkably prophetic. Wordsworth’s appeal to taste as a marker of class involves him in a curiously circular argument. He posits that a taste for “what has acquired the name of picturesque

A National Property

173

and romantic scenery is so far from being intuitive, that it can be produced only by a slow and gradual process of culture” (PrW 3:349). In this rejection of what might be called natural (“intuitive”) taste in favor of cultivated taste, Wordsworth discriminates between seeing the landscape and seeing and feeling the landscape. Curiously, though acquired through a slow and gradual process of culture, this superior taste cannot be taught, nor can it be learned from repeated visits. Natural or common taste is characterized by the “green fields, clear blue skies, running streams of pure water, rich groves and woods, orchards, and all the ordinary variety of rural nature” that finds “an easy way to the affections of all men” (PrW 3:343). These rural sights, like “a rich meadow, with fat cattle grazing upon it,” evoke images of domesticated landscape, enclosed and cultivated land made useful by man’s labor. Opposed to these sights are such images as the scenery of the Lakes, or “the Alps and Pyrenees in their utmost grandeur and beauty” (PrW 3:343), images that evoke a landscape free of human intervention, undomesticated, and accessible mostly to those only with the time and money to travel extensively. The “processes of culture or opportunities of observation” that habituate the observer to an appreciation of the picturesque and sublime landscape are processes and opportunities that are simply not available to the vast majority of the public. Like so many other opportunities, training in the proper taste for landscape is available only to a select few. In a passage that appeared in The Morning Post but that was struck when the letters were republished, Wordsworth makes clear that the question of taste is a question of class. In chastising those who seek to educate the lower classes through open access to recreation, Wordsworth states: “The constitution of society must be examined with reflection. As long as inequalities of private property shall exist, there must be privileges in recreations and amusements. All cannot be equally enjoyed by all” (PrW 3:347n). The slow and gradual process of culture is available only to those who belong to the cultured class. Increased access can do nothing to change these differences so long as “inequalities of private property” exist, inequalities that are the foundation of the happy republic of shepherds and agriculturists described in the Guide and here referred to as “a blessing to these vales” (PrW 3:352). Those reform-minded people should instead encourage the “artisans and labourers, and the humbler classes of shopkeepers” to make “little excursions with their wives and children among neighbouring fields” (PrW 3:344). Whereas reformers might boast of the spread of “comprehensive taste” that “easy entrance” to the British Museum and National Picture Gallery have made possible, increased access cannot make available the cultural attainments necessary for a just appreciation of landscape (PrW 3:349). For Wordsworth, the aesthetic response called for by the metropolitan museum was rapture, but that called for by the symbolical British landscape moved beyond rapture to reading. The metropolitan museum could teach the public to feel the decontextualized feelings evoked by objects of beauty, and the danger of the aestheticized landscape was that by teaching the public how to feel, pleasure would replace veneration. For Wordsworth, any benefit to the motley crowd would be outweighed by the irreparable damage that crowd would inflict. The threatened damage was both to the aesthetic object and by the aestheticization of the object, both to the fragile landscape and the constitution of society, which safeguarded the proper form of reading.

174

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

The damage inflicted by ease of access would transform the Lakes into a Londonized street fair, where all distinction would be lost. The dark fantasy envisioned by Wordsworth is like a miniature Bartholomew Fair, where “wrestling matches, horse and boat races without number, and pot-houses and beer-shops” (PrW 3:346) would be brought to the Lakes by the “molestation of cheap trains” (PrW 3:345). “Go to a pantomime, a farce, or a puppet-show,” he tells these interlopers, “if you want noisy pleasure” (PrW 3:345), and do not disturb the solitary and peaceful nature of the region, which is its chief asset. For Wordsworth, the great irony is that “the lakes are to pay this penalty for their own attractions!” (PrW 3:351), that the trains and the great influx of people they promise shall result in “a great disturbance of the retirement, and in many places a destruction of the beauty of the country, which the parties are come in search of” (PrW 3:346). Although “desecrations” performed in the name of preservation and the promise of universal access could be justified, as in the case of the Elgin Marbles, as a service to the aesthetic education of the nation, preservation of the landscape required that limitations be placed on access.13 This “desecration” of the local landscape would be 13 In a recent history of the British Museum, we find this unironic description of the “heroic” efforts of Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and then ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, to save these artifacts from the people: “Not only were many of the finest surviving statues being constantly ground down for mortar ... but even more aimless destruction of buildings and other remains was continually going on. With great difficulty, but aided considerably by Britain’s new-found prestige from her recent victories over the French in Egypt, Elgin at last obtained a firman or official license from Constantinople to take away ‘any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon’. Slowly, with frustrating delays and constant obstruction by local authorities, the great sculptured friezes were removed from the Parthenon and then carefully packed and embarked on a British man-of-war for transport to England. Elgin was now convinced that the operation, drastic as it undoubtedly was, was the only certain means of saving the precious sculptures” (Miller 103). Elgin’s “preservation” of the Parthenon sculptures has always been a subject of controversy. In his own time, he was censured by Parliament and called a thief and a robber by Byron and others. Lord Aberdeen, an advisor to the British Museum, objected to Elgin’s methods. In the debate on the purchase of the Elgin Marbles, Sir John Newport characterized the sentiments of many when he said of Elgin: “The Honourable Lord has taken advantage of the most unjustifiable means and has committed the most flagrant pillages. It was, it seems, fatal that a representative of our country looted those objects that the Turks and other barbarians had considered sacred” (Cobbett’s ccci, 828.). Newport’s sarcastic reference to the “Honourable” Lord Elgin recalls the anxieties raised by the Hatfield-Hope fraud in the Lakes. In this case, Elgin is, of course, an Honorable Lord, but his actions place him below even the barbarians, and threaten not merely the distinction of class, but also the distinction of the nation. John Hobhouse, Byron’s friend and fellow-traveler, recorded that he saw on a wall in a chapel of the Acropolis the following inscription: “Quod non fecerunt Gothi, hoc fecerunt Scoti” (“What the Goths did not do, here the Scots did”), an all too clear reference to the honorable Scottish Lord (St. Clair, Lord Elgin and the marbles [London: Oxford University Press, 1967], 193). Interestingly the question of ownership has frequently taken the form of a genealogizing of the nation, with Britain claiming for itself Greece’s democratic heritage. When the parliamentary committee set up to evaluate Elgin’s offer of the sculptures to the nation recommended that the offer be accepted, the report concluded: “No other country can offer

A National Property

175

brought about by a loss of distinction that would in turn eradicate the distinctiveness of the Lakes. The Londonized Lakes, overwhelmed by an influx of visitors unable to discriminate properly among what they saw, threatened to destroy the sacred space of the museum of the landscape. Or, as James Mulvihill paraphrases Wordsworth, the railway “threatened the aesthetic and cultural integrity of the region—in effect, the object’s context if not literally the object itself, though once recontextualized the object is no longer what it was” (325). As outrageous as a railway proposed through the ruins of Furness Abbey, the railway that would violate the Lakes was an even greater outrage. “Sacred as that relic of devotion of our ancestors,” Furness Abbey, deserves to be kept, “there are temples of Nature, temples built by the Almighty, which have a still higher claim to be left inviolated” (PrW 3:353). Such might have been the thoughts of “a man of imagination and feeling” (PrW 3:353), a man with “an eye to perceive and a heart to feel and worthily enjoy” (PrW 3:355). Against this threat, Wordsworth invokes, in his sonnet “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway,” Nature itself: Baffle the threat, bright Scene, from Orrest-head Given to the pausing traveller’s rapturous glance: Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance Of nature; and, if human hearts be dead, Speak, passing winds; ye torrents, with your strong And constant voice, protest against the wrong. (9–14)

In this fantasy of local resistance, of a Nature resistant to reading by the unworthy and speaking out its opposition to those capable of hearing and feeling, Wordsworth attempts to invoke a scenery that discriminates amongst its observers. In response to this sonnet, William Gladstone offered a very literal and practical reading of this defiant landscape, stating “It had been my hope that Orrest Head, and other like projections on the earth’s surface, would have pleaded for themselves in terms intelligible to engineers and speculators” (quoted in LY 616n). These wholly practical, unaesthetic readers of the landscape would be concerned primarily with the ease of negotiating a railway through the landscape, and Gladstone’s observation points out how narrow was Wordsworth’s conception of the training that would qualify one to read. While Orrest-head might baffle the aesthetic reading of the humbler classes of shopkeepers, it could not withstand the topographical reading of the surveyor. As Gladstone rightly notes, the true threat was not uneducated masses, but those educated in this “iron age” to perform a different kind of reading, where, as Wordsworth himself laments, “Fact with heartles search” would explore and be “Imagination’s Lord” (“To the Utilitarians” 2–4). The final irony is not that the railway was built, for that can invoke only a nostalgic sadness for what once was but is no more. The great irony of Wordsworth’s opposition such an honourable shelter to the monuments of Phedias and Pericles than ours where, safe from ignorance and degradation, they shall receive the admiration and reverence due them; they will serve as an example for rivalry and imitation (Report of the Select Committee). Of course, the question of honor and how one both designates and is designated as “honorable” remains open.

176

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

to the railway, and his attempt to discriminate between a natural taste for domestic landscape and a cultured taste for the picturesque and sublime, is that Wordsworth himself, through his poetry and prose, had done more than anyone else to naturalize the taste for the picturesque and acculturate the readers of Britain to the better taste he thought to be a marker of class. It did not benefit his argument when the author of Table Talk in The Morning Post wrote in fervent praise of Wordsworth’s Kendal and Windermere letters that the Lakes should remain inviolate out of deference to Wordsworth himself: And that so many of us at the present day have escaped from this insensibility to the more secluded and awful forms of natural beauty we in a great measure owe to Wordsworth and his writings. Bearing this in mind, and giving him the honour which is his due, the public ought, on his account alone, to spare the land he loves so well from that violent intrusion against which he protests. (PrW 3:363n)

Veneration, which was the appropriate response to the landscape and exemplified a proper reading of its symbolic cues, was already being transferred to the poet himself and the landscape that everywhere was inscribed by its relation to his text. For the countless visitors who journeyed to the Lakes, the sacred space of landscape was made more sacred by the marked presence of the Lake poet, which made the landscape readable as a museum dedicated to a single man. The ritual practice of the museum and the museum of the landscape became a way of speaking about the poet himself as well as about his poetry. The Wordsworth Tour through Wordsworth Country, a tour made possible by the Guide to the Lakes and the many repackagings of Wordsworth after his death, provided an opportunity for many to demonstrate their citizenship in the nation through their responsiveness to what was becoming an increasingly literary landscape. This increased interest has led to increased demand, necessitating, like the debates over the Lake District railways, a balance between the demand for access and the need for preservation. It was entirely fitting that one of the first “literary museum” properties was the privately administered Dove Cottage, home to the Great Decade Wordsworth, and ironically one of the leading historic attractions in Britain today. Wordsworth has become one of those wise institutions, one of those representatives of British heritage who enable the tourist to read in the landscape the Constitution of the nation. Yet, one might ask how many visitors gathered on the banks of the Wye a few miles above Tintern Abbey on 13 July 1998 to recite a prayer about the misty winds, and whether amidst the motley crowd, the t-shirt hawkers, the National Trust caravan, and the ice cream van anyone was able to feel that far-famed sight.

Chapter 7

A Service to the Nation Wordsworth country and the Wordsworth museum

Small service is true service while it lasts Of Friends, however humble, scorn not one: The Daisy, by the shadow that it casts, Protects the lingering dew-drop from the Sun. —Wordsworth, “Written in an Album”

At the final meeting of the original Wordsworth Society, William Angus Knight proposed that the society establish “somewhere in the Lake Country ... an institution— it could hardly be called a museum ... it which all the memorials of Wordsworth that can be collected may be brought together.” For this purpose he suggested Dove Cottage be purchased, so that it might be “to Grasmere, what Shakespeare’s house is to Stratford, or Burns’ Cottage is to Ayr” (quoted in Peek 193–4). While the society disbanded before this project could be brought to fruition, a few years later one of the society’s members, Stopford Brooke, did purchase the cottage and in 1891 opened it to visitors. That first year, 420 visitors explored the tiny cottage where the Wordsworths lived during much of William’s “Great Decade.” One hundred years later, more than 80,000 would come in a single year to eye the newspaper wall covering in Dorothy’s room and stand in the sitting room where Wordsworth and Coleridge recited poetry and discussed the politics of the day. On a typical summer’s day, nearly 500 tourists participate in this ritual, visiting this institution that could hardly be called anything but a museum.1 The homes of William Wordsworth have been the site of literary pilgrimage since Hazlitt and De Quincey presented themselves on the poet’s doorstep to pay homage, and yet it is doubtful that any of Wordsworth’s contemporaries could have foreseen the transformation of the English Lake District into what the British Tourist Authority unabashedly calls “Wordsworth Country.” The name is fitting, for the landscape that Wordsworth recorded has come to record him, his movements, his compositions, his triumphs, and his failures. The speaking monument he sought to create has come virtually to speak only a single word: Wordsworth. As David Lowenthal has suggested, the need for preservation arises out of a myriad of complex and at times contradictory impulses but almost always involves a nostalgia for some past time that was purportedly better—simpler, slower, more humane, more wild, less polluted, more spiritual, less confused.2 The preservation of 1 Visitor statistics courtesy of Sylvia Wordsworth of The Wordsworth Trust, from a personal communication 16 October 1997. 2 Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4–13, 363–412. Lowenthal also identifies nationalism as a related impulse toward

178

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Wordsworth and the parallel creation of Wordsworth country arise out of nostalgia, though we must be careful not to characterize this nostalgia as simply backwardlooking but as bound up with questions of national identity. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, two primary versions of Wordsworth emerged out of what Gary Harrison identifies as the multiplicity of Wordsworths available (173–93). One was closely tied to the late nineteenth-century preservation movement and was local in effect, isolationist in focus, and popular in character. The other was closely tied to academic discourse and was wide-ranging in effect, global in focus, and elitist in character. Such a characterization is overly broad, but in its outlines we can see why Wordsworth was and is so essential to the nation and how he did and does provide a service to the nation. Although Wordsworth did call for the designation of the Lake District as a national property and was (over)zealous in his defense of footpaths and public byways, his chief association with the preservation movement is, as John Gaze terms it, as a kind of “patron Saint” (9).3 When Wordsworth died in 1850, the Commons Preservation Society (CPS), the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), the Kyrle Society, and the Lake District Defense Society (LDDS), were still some years away. One direct tie between Wordsworth and the preservation movement, though, is provided by the Reverend Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley. Rawnsley, along with Robert Hunter of the CPS and Octavia Hill, the housing reformer, formed the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty in 1895. He was an indefatigable campaigner and fundraiser for preservation causes, a frequent writer of pamphlets, and a poet as well. One of his chief pastimes was literary place-hunting, and, along with William Angus Knight, Rawnsley produced detailed itineraries locating the places referred to in Wordsworth’s poetry. His Literary Associations of the English Lakes was his most popular book, and he assiduously collected recollections of and anecdotes about Wordsworth from those Lake District residents still alive who had known the poet. Rawnsley’s activities extended to the material marking of the landscape as well. In conjunction with the Wordsworth Society, of which he was a founding member, a memorial marking the parting place of the brothers John and William Wordsworth and inscribed with the last stanza of “Elegiac Verses” was erected in 1882 above Grisedale Tarn. Another memorial to Wordsworth was placed in Cockermouth and unveiled by Matthew Arnold. At the Hawkshead Grammar School, the name carved by Wordsworth with a penknife was covered in glass, and lines from Wordsworth’s poetry were frescoed in scrolls on the walls of the school. The most prominence was given to the line from “Written in an Album”: “Small service is true service while it lasts.” preservation: “vernacular languages, folklore, material arts, and antiquities became foci of group consciousness and folk identity for Europe’s emergent—and often beleaguered— nation-states” (393). 3 Stephen Gill, in Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), claims “while recognizing the danger of making exaggerated claims, what can be said with certainty is that without the drive of Wordsworthians the National Trust of 1895 would not have come into being” (260).

A Service to the Nation

179

Not all of Rawnsley’s preservation efforts were successful. When the Metropolitan Water District of Manchester proposed turning the seasonal lake of Thirlmere into a reservoir, Rawnsley and the CPS vehemently opposed it. The plan called for a dam at the southern end of Thirlmere and the enclosure of a wide area of common land in the catchment area, a plan that would lead to the destruction of the valley. While the CPS was able to secure public right of access to the commons of the catchment, the dam was approved. When Rawnsley realized he could not block the plan, he sought to move the “Rock of Names”—the stone halfway between Dove Cottage and Coleridge’s house on which the household members had carved their initials— to save it from being immersed in the rising reservoir waters. Masons were engaged to move the stone, but such a move proved impracticable. During construction, the stone was dynamited to produce rubble for the dam. Rawnsley and his wife picked through the rubble and used the fragments to build a cairn high above the site. The fragments can now be found mortared into a wall at the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere. As lasting as stone is, Rawnsley’s more permanent marking of Wordsworth country was his literary place-hunting. The immense popularity of Arnold’s selection of Wordsworth’s poetry created demand for books on Wordsworth, and Rawnsley and others obliged, producing dictionaries of place-names found in Wordsworth’s poetry, picture books of scenes from Wordsworth’s poetry, and itineraries for tours of the Lake District that highlighted Wordsworth’s presence. Typical of these is Rawnsley’s Past and Present at the English Lakes, which, though written and published in 1916, exemplifies Rawnsley’s oft-practiced procedure for reading the landscape. While the earlier published Literary Associations of the English Lakes was a self-conscious attempt to aid literary place-hunters, Past and Present at the English Lakes had no such overt purpose. However, by 1916 the act of literary placehunting, and more specifically of Wordsworth place-hunting (and haunting), had become so commonplace that a walk through the countryside could not be anything other than a walk through Wordsworth country. A brief examination of Rawnsley’s procedure demonstrates how landscape becomes a text that is legible only through a reading of literary associations, as an iconic landscape mediated by texts. In the brief itinerary “The Bluebells of the Duddon,” Rawnsley describes a walk from Rydal Lake to the lower reaches of the Duddon, but it is not “nature” that is described but the literary “nature” found in Wordsworth’s poetry. “Cuckoos called left and right of us as we passed under the grey Nab Scar,” he writes, “and we remembered how Wordsworth, sauntering along the opposite side of the lake, had listened to that ‘wandering voice’” (103). Descending into the Duddon Valley, the travelers pause by the river’s side, and there they “could not but remember those lines of Wordsworth’s which describe felicitously the passing of Duddon to the sea” (106). As they make their way back toward Duddon Bridge, Rawnsley wonders “why it was that Wordsworth, with his love for flowers, wrote so little of the bluebell glories of the North Country,” a thought banished by the belief that “such a lover of the Duddon as he was ... he must have often gazed, as we are gazing to-day, at the ineffable beauty of the bluebell woods and thickets by its side.” Rawnsley then closes by commenting “who is it who is really helping England in this bluebell time

180

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

of 1915 but the soul of the man who poured forth that soul in his inspired sonnets for freedom and independence a hundred years ago” (107–8). Although it is tempting to dismiss Rawnsley as an overly zealous Wordsworthian, it is striking how the preserved landscape is not that of rural England, but that of the poet who celebrated rural England. Everywhere Wordsworth comes athwart Rawnsley’s path rising up out of the most casual sights and sounds, like Napoleon the bold adventurer, or Imagination in the form of the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime. In short, the recurring trope of literary association is usurpation like that described by Wordsworth in the River Duddon sonnets, with its conscious echoes of the Simplon Pass. Usurpation here functions as constant and unavoidable mediation, the prior presence of texts, like the pages from Thomson’s The Seasons fixed to a post on Richmond Hill. An earlier reading and writing of nature has itself become the only nature that is available to the literary tourist. Even when some Wordsworth text is not ready at hand to describe the scene, Rawnsley still calls up Wordsworth’s presence, if only to ask why Wordsworth is not more present, a concern quickly banished by the conjecture that, though unrecorded, this view of the bluebells must also have been seen first by Wordsworth. Rawnsley’s final invocation of Wordsworth is the most striking. When he speculates that it is Wordsworth “who is really helping England” in the dark days of 1915, he is designating Wordsworth as source of the proper spirit of the national character. In this the zealous rector was not alone. In 1915, Wordsworth’s Patriotic Poetry, selected and published by the Right Honorable Arthur Acland, presented Wordsworth as representative of all that was good about the English character, and the reviews of this volume pointed out how Wordsworth served the nation in its time of need. A.V. Dicey’s The Statesmanship of Wordsworth, published in 1917, offered up the poet as the champion of self-determination, a proto-nationalist whose message was as current in 1917 as it was in 1809.4 Yet though this Wordsworthian spirit seems allied to the nationalist spirit of the war effort, inevitably there is tension in the association of the poet of the Lakes, “this blessed region,” with international politics. In a telling slide from Wordsworth to war to local scenery, Rawnsley reveals how ultimately Wordsworth’s service to the nation lies in the ways in which the poetry can be said to draw one into a kind of personal and political isolationism. Rawnsley notes that Wordsworth today would not be able to write, “‘But here no cannon thunders to the gale,’ for in imagination, through the scented air and above the sound of Duddon and song of birds, there comes to us thunder of the guns above the Yser’s side; and those far-off chimneys, with their dark banners of smoke, tell us how night and day away at Barrow men are working to produce the instruments of death, the much-needed munitions of war” (106–7). This intrusion of the present troubles into the idyllic landscape threatens to lay bare the fragile underpinnings of the retreat into nature. Rawnsley’s solution, which follows immediately, is disavowal 4 John L. Mahoney’s summary of Cornelius Howard Patton’s 1935 volume The Rediscovery of William Wordsworth includes Patton’s speculation that “as a result of the [First World] War, American college men have come to appreciate Wordsworth as par excellence the Poet of Patriotism” and of how “from a revolutionist in France he came to be a patriot in England” (quoted in Mahoney 42).

A Service to the Nation

181

of the death’s head in Arcady through the invocation of the isolationist Wordsworth: “Yet so potent is the spell of the bluebell slope on this gorgeous Maytide afternoon, that at times, though it be for a few moments, we can forget the horrors of battle, and can feel in tune with the ‘cloud-born stream’ with ‘each tumultuous working left behind’” (107). The complex function of Wordsworth invoked by Rawnsley is one that posits the poet as both mediator of the natural world and representative of English values, values that provide for a justification of war and a withdrawal from the realities of war. Rawnsley duplicates what he believes to be the ritual of the scene as established in countless Wordsworth’s poems—the shift from the world outside the vale to the vale itself and finally to the mind meditating on nature’s work. The curious feature of this shift is that the mind invoked is not that of the present visitor, but that of a prior visitor, Wordsworth, whose consciousness inhabits every scene, including those he left unrecorded. Here the mediation of texts is complete. A walk through Wordsworth Country transforms everything into an artifact in the vast museum space of the nation. While the Lake District preservation movement, of which Rawnsley was a key figure, offers a ready example of local opposition to meliorist claims of national interest made by the railway, mining, and timber industries, the politics of preservation were much more complex. Though Rawnsley opposed the scheme to dam Thirlmere and created a minor sensation with his futile attempt to save the “Rock of Names,” Robert Somervell, a local merchant and a prominent member of the Thirlmere Defense Association, was pained to discover that the leading members of the Thirlmere community were more interested in compensation than in conservation. Rawnsley himself invoked the national interest in defending this about-face to Somervell, that if there was not to be a continuing danger of cholera, cities required a safe and plentiful supply of fresh water.5 The LDDS, formed by members of the Wordsworth Society and led by Rawnsley, was equally ambivalent in its aims. Rawnsley was adamant that the LDDS work with the CPS and the Kyrle Society to protect rights of way and access over commons. Though more than ready to use arguments about rights of access “to support the protection of ‘picturesque beauty’,” the LDDS was “nervous of being invaded by hordes of fell-walkers” (G. Murphy 89). Though purportedly formed to ensure the protection of “rest places for weary workers,”6 the membership of the LDDS was drawn primarily from the intellectual, professional, and managerial classes. According to Graham Murphy’s analysis, less than 10 per cent were Lake District residents and more than half lived either in London and the Home Counties or in Manchester and surrounding industrial Lancashire. Rawnsley’s defense of the predominance of outsiders, “that the inhabitants of the dales, who have their world of beauty ‘too much with them late and soon,’ are not the safest guardians of their lovely homes,” brought from 5 Rawnsley’s about-face is discussed in Somervell’s autobiography Robert Somervell (London: Faber & Faber, 1935), 50–56. 6 Rawnsley quotes this phrasing from the Select Committee formed to investigate a proposal to build a railway along Lake Ennerdale. See E.F. Rawnsley, Canon Rawnsley: An Account of his Life (Glasgow: MacLehose, Jackson: 1923), 53.

182

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

a local newspaper the charge that the LDDS were “cheap aesthetes” and “noisy sentimentalists.” “Cumberland people,” continued the unsigned editorial, “could look after their own interests without interference from outsiders who put the protection of scenery before the livelihoods of the locals.”7 In Rawnsley’s justification and in the newspaper’s attack, we see the confused result of Wordsworth’s own calls for isolation and preservation of the Lake District. When Wordsworth warned about the encroachments of the metropolis that would replace the independent spirit of the dalesmen with the dark dependence of the urban center, he was arguing that the Lake District was one of the last bastions of an independent moral spirit that should be an exemplum for a diseased nation forgetful of its past. His call for its preservation was to save the landscape both for the people and from the people. By Rawnsley’s time, these positions had undergone a curious reversal—it was the metropole that offered to protect the landscape from the encroachments (and short-sightedness) of the locals to preserve the unique individual character of the region from itself. Local resistance, still using the language of independence and self-determination, was now motivated by a desire to share in the economic benefits that the rest of the nation was allowed to enjoy. Wordsworth’s wish had been granted: preservation was a national imperative, but the cost of preservation was the local independence that Wordsworth most wanted to preserve. For whom was the nation being preserved? Whom would this great national museum serve? For Wordsworth, as laid out in his Guide as well as in his battle against the railway, preservation was necessary to safeguard a particular vision of the British nation, one that probably never existed and yet could serve to reform the present nation. But the lessons were available only to those who already possessed the proper attainments necessary to enact the rituals, to register the requisite wonder, and to respond to the resonance. While preservation has always been characterized as stewardship—the safeguarding of heritage for unborn generations, the national and individual responsibility of the Burkean citizen—charges of selfishness and elitism, such as those leveled at Wordsworth’s opposition to the railway, have dogged the movement since its inception. Robert Hunter could characterize the mission of the National Trust as a “purely patriotic interest in those things which in the crush of our commercial enterprise and in the poverty of landholders or in the lack of local care, ran risk of passing away,”8 but “patriotic interest” had been the staple justification of the prior usurpation of local interests conducted by the railways, mining companies, and industrial and commercial interests. The Times could declare that the Trust “aims to establish a National Gallery of natural pictures” (17 July 1894), but what were the costs of such an aestheticization of the landscape, and who would be made into artifacts, and who would be allowed access to this museum? The charge of selfishness and elitism has been difficult to overcome, primarily because it is in some 7 This charge was leveled by The Whitehaven News, and is quoted in J.D. Marshall and J.K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to Mid-twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 214. 8 Hunter makes this claim in the promotional pamphlet The National Trust: Its Aims and Its Works, published in 1897, and quoted in Jennifer Jenkins and Patrick James, From Acorn to Oak Tree: The Growth of the National Trust 1895–1994 (London: Macmillan, 1994), 28.

A Service to the Nation

183

ways deeply embedded in the very idea of preservation itself. The historian John Julius Norwich, in his foreword to The National Trust Guide, unironically claims that the Trust is attempting to overcome its image as “a toffee-nosed oligarchy of aesthetes, scholars or snobs” by holding “fêtes champêtres in our parks ... A theatrical garden party at Cliveden ... a Victorian extravaganza at Dunham Massey” and “a performance of Cosí fan tutte at Blewcoat School” (xviii). If the Trust does indeed exist “for everyone,” Norwich’s understanding of “everyone” is a very narrow one. The problem, though, is not simply selfishness or elitism, but a practical problem as well. Just as Wordsworth worried over the entertainments of the city invading the quiet of the Lakes, and the crowds that blight one’s encounter with scenery, so the Trust continues to worry about the motor car with “a caravan swaying behind” (xii), and the 335,000 annual visitors to Stourhead.9 The museum of the landscape raises the paradox of preservation versus access. If preservation is intended to safeguard the “beautiful, peaceful and unspoilt land for the benefit of the public ... if too much of the public takes advantage of that land ... the land loses those very qualities for which it was acquired” (xv). The solution offered by the Trust is the same as that offered by Wordsworth 150 years before: Make access difficult. To preserve the museum itself, “Enjoyment ... can be given only to a few; it should therefore by right belong to those who will take the time and trouble to find them for themselves. Too much signposting, in other words, can be as disastrous as too little. For those moderately sound of wind and limb, possessed of an Ordnance Survey map and a stout pair of shoes, the rewards will be immense. But they must be earned” (xvi). It is for the athletic tourist, the bold Adventurer with map in hand, that the museum is accessible. Wordsworth’s ambitious bounder has become the Trust’s consummate visitor, and the attainment of the culture represented by heritage can be gained only after subjecting oneself to a disciplinary initiation. It is difficult to separate the version of Wordsworth useful to the preservation movement from the version of Wordsworth useful to the tourism industry. As an advocate for preservation, Wordsworth has been immensely useful to the heritage industry, and the heritage industry has been immensely successful as a source of tourism. Where Wordsworth differs greatly from the late-nineteenth-century preservationists is in the motivation behind preservation. Wordsworth thought he was safeguarding some precious and threatened version of the national character, whereas the preservationists were safeguarding Wordsworth. In commenting on the formation of the Wordsworth Society, Ruskin evinces this confusion over what is being preserved. He notes that “the grand function of the Society is to preserve, as far as possible, in England, the conditions of moral life which made Wordsworth himself possible.” The purpose behind preservation, however, is not as an antidote to the present national character but to safeguard Wordsworth himself, for without these “conditions of moral life” Wordsworth’s poetry would be “vainer than the hymns of Orpheus” (quoted in Peek 190). The solution offered by preservation groups and the Wordsworth Society, two versions of the preservation movement, was to save everything—texts, portraits, unpublished manuscripts, sites, views, in 9 These figures are drawn from The National Trust’s Annual Report and Financial Statements 2004/05 (Swindon, England: The National Trust, 2005), 49.

184

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

short everything “of perishable character ... which, if not soon rescued from oblivion, might be lost to posterity.”10 In this sense, Wordsworth and Wordsworth Country were a national archive, a vast magazine perhaps in which all sorts of artifacts are thrown at random. A different but complementary imagining of the “Wordsworth” museum that emerged contemporaneously with the wholesale preservation of Wordsworth was that of the museum as cultural training ground. Articulated by Pater and Arnold, Wordsworth was an initiatory rite of cultural training and the preservation of Wordsworth relied, not without its paradoxes, on the selective act of the critic.11 Pater is quite explicit concerning the pedagogic utility of a certain configuration of Wordsworth. In an essay first published in 1874 and later collected in Appreciations, Pater begins by bemoaning “the presence of an alien element in Wordsworth’s work” that is not representative of Wordsworth’s greatness and states that “of all poets equally great, he would gain most by a skillfully made anthology.” For Pater, however, there is something to be gained by the unevenness, this “absolute duality between higher and lower moods,” for the type of reading it forces upon the reader is “an excellent sort of training towards the things of art and poetry”: It begets in those, who, coming across him in youth, can bear him at all, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind in the right appreciation of poetry, an expectation of things, in this order, coming to one by means of a right discipline of the temper as well as of the intellect. (415–16)

The juxtaposition of high and low, of sublime and mundane, provides a sort of aesthetic education for those strenuous enough to bear it. The “right” taste arises out of a “right discipline,” which is produced by the process of selection, a curiously circular process that defines good taste as the ability to exercise good taste. Of more importance than the result itself, though, is the process that transfers distinction from the object of aesthetic contemplation to the perceiver: [Wordsworth] meets us with the promise that he has much, and something very peculiar, to give us, if we follow a certain difficult way, and seems to have the secret of a special and privileged state of mind. And those who have undergone his influence, and followed this difficult way, are like people who have passed through some initiation, a disciplina arcani, by submitting to which they become able constantly to distinguish in art, speech, feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive, from that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive. (416)

Pater figures the act of reading Wordsworth as a kind of initiation, a ritual process that, like that of the museum experience, promises some kind of transformation. Like the museum visitor, the reader is curiously passive as he or she is led through a prescribed route with the promise that something will be given if he or she submits to the ennobling effects of the process itself. Completely mystified in this description is how that transformation takes place, how one graduates from waiting for a gift 10 These remarks are made by William Angus Knight in the preface to Wordsworthiana: A Selection from Papers Read to the Wordsworth Society (London: MacMillan & Co., 1889), xv. 11 See also Stephen Gill’s fine overview of Wordsworth’s posthumous reputation in Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 206–34.

A Service to the Nation

185

and submitting to influence to being “able constantly to distinguish” between the true objects of aesthetic experience and the mundane world that surrounds it. The reading of Wordsworth, itself a mundane experience, holds the promise of a “secret” and “privileged state of mind,” a transcendence of the everyday possible only after one has endured the “difficult way.” But how, or when, or even whether that transcendence takes place remains obscure, hidden in an assumption about the salutary effects of culture. For Pater, though, the end is not simply the refinement of taste or the aesthetic experience itself. For Pater, this process is moral. Although “the first aim of Wordsworth’s poetry is to give the reader a peculiar kind of pleasure,” through this pleasure one gains the “perfect end”—“the supreme importance of contemplation in the conduct of life ... That the end of life is not action but contemplation—being as distinct from doing—a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality” (427–8). This “art of impassioned contemplation” is the secret knowledge, the privileged state of mind, one is given by a study of Wordsworth. But as this passage suggests with its virtually unparseable syntax, such a state can be achieved only after much strenuous activity. For Pater, “the aim of all culture” is “to witness ... with appropriate emotions” those “great facts in man’s existence which no machinery affects.” Wordsworth, the isolated seer, becomes in Pater’s formulation the poet of isolation, the poet who calls us to contemplation, not action. In this construction, Pater’s Wordsworth mirrors Rawnsley’s shift from contemplation of war to contemplation of scenery to eventual usurpation by Wordsworth’s voice. If it is difficult to equate Pater’s Wordsworth with the Wordsworth who wrote on the Convention of Cintra and the Westmorland elections, the political sonnets and “The Warning,” The Excursion and The River Duddon, it is only because we have not purged away “those weaker elements in Wordsworth’s poetry” to find “the more powerful and original poet, hidden away” (429). The paradox implicit in Pater’s use of Wordsworth’s complete works as a training ground for aesthetic taste emerges when such a use is placed alongside Pater’s call for a “skillfully made anthology.” Such an anthology would present in toto the “more powerful and original poet,” but such an anthology, or rather one’s appreciation of the skill that made the anthology, would be possible only after one had followed the “difficult way” of reading through the complete works. In order to appreciate the part, one would need to know the whole, and yet the part would render the whole superfluous. Of course, this formulation is only paradoxical if everyone could follow the difficult way and acquire proper aesthetic taste. That an anthology is at all necessary implies that some readers will not, cannot, or should not attempt to follow the difficult way. In other words, preservation is necessary for access, but access must be limited to a select few, those sound of wind and limb. While on first glance Pater’s use of Wordsworth seems focused on the problem of every reader’s aesthetic education, this education is available only to a select few. Ultimately Wordsworth’s poetry, through its aesthetic qualities, is seen as a moral and didactic corrective, though one necessarily limited to those who can endure the difficult way. For everyone else, the redacted Wordsworth will do. Like the landscape of “Tintern Abbey” and the Lake District, like the museum and the museum of the land, “Wordsworth” the poet,

186

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

the museum process, and the repository, functions as an educational opportunity, an initiation, for a select few, and a space outside the everyday for the many. As Pater notes in the republished version of “Wordsworth” that appeared in 1888, two such skillfully made anthologies had appeared since 1874. The first, Poems of Wordsworth, was edited by Matthew Arnold and published by MacMillan in 1879 as part of its Golden Treasury series. The second, Selections from Wordsworth, was edited by William Angus Knight and published for the Wordsworth Society by Kegan Paul in 1888. In literary historical terms, Arnold’s edition established an aesthetic configuration of the “Great Decade” poet that persists to this day, whereas in strictly historical terms, Knight’s edition—along with his many other publications—established a geographic configuration of the Lake District Poet. Both used Wordsworth to create a sense of an endangered national heritage. The “Great Decade” poet reflected the nation’s need for a universalized figure of contemplative calm amid a world of movement and agitation, while the Lake District poet reflected the needs of the nation for a localized landscape of contemplative calm amidst a world of getting and spending. In both cases, the poet and the landscape fulfilled the desire for an idealized past which stood in opposition to the present, but Arnold’s Wordsworth has proven to have the most lasting effect. It is impossible to overestimate the popularity of Arnold’s edition of Wordsworth’s poems. First published in September 1879, it was republished with minor changes in November 1879. It went through 7 editions by 1890, 14 editions by 1900, 24 editions by 1910, and 29 editions by 1920. When Edward Dowden published his own edition of Wordsworth’s poems in 1897, he was quick to reassure readers that “[w]ith a very few exceptions all the pieces chosen by Matthew Arnold are included” (vii), as if to do otherwise was to risk instant rejection. While eschewing Wordsworth’s classificatory scheme, which he calls “ingenious but far-fetched” and ultimately “unsatisfactory” (xiii), Arnold adopts an equally suspect classificatory scheme purportedly based on genre and sanctioned by the example of the ancients. Arnold’s selection and arrangement of the poems preserve a poet whose project appears to focus on the problem of preservation. From youthful experiments in ballads and narratives through mature exercises in antique forms to sagacious reflections full of nostalgia and belatedness, the Wordsworth constructed by Arnold is a bard of ebbed time, a voice from the past singing of ways which have long vanished from the earth. Arnold’s edition consists of 170 poems, a modest total when one considers that it represents only about one fifth of the total number of poems in Wordsworth’s collected works published in 1850. In rejecting Wordsworth’s arrangement, Arnold contends that “Wordsworth’s poems will never produce their due effect until they are freed from their present artificial arrangement, and grouped more naturally” (xiii). Now, of course, there is nothing that makes genre more natural than Wordsworth’s cumbersome method of “mental physiology” (as Arnold terms it), and Arnold’s genres prove slippery as well. Of the six classes employed by Arnold, three—“Poems of Ballad Form,” “Narrative Poems,” and “Sonnets”—use conventional forms as the criteria for inclusion. Two of the classes—“Lyrical Poems” and “Reflective and Elegiac Poems”—seem to rest uncomfortably between form and effect, the form being either lyric or elegy and the effect being lyrical, elegiac, or reflective. In these

A Service to the Nation

187

two classes, the classification is based more on mood, either the mood of the writer at the time of writing (like Wordsworth’s own 1807 class “Moods of My Own Mind”) or the mood produced on the reader by the poem. The sixth class (placed fourth in sequence), “Poems Akin to the Antique and Odes,” seems partially based on form, partially on affinity to some prior poetic models, and partially on content. Besides proving that any classificatory scheme will be subject to some objections, the sequence of Arnold’s classifications reflects his own conception of the growth of the poet. The volume opens with ballad poems, and of the nine poems in this the shortest section of the book, five are taken from Wordsworth’s “Poems of Childhood” class. All nine of the poems were published by 1807, with six of the poems originally published in either the 1798 or 1800 Lyrical Ballads. The ballad class, with its association with older folk poetry, is followed by the narrative poems, a class that is clearly allied to the ballad but one that is assumed to mark an advance in the handling of narrative materials and poetic form. With the exception of the 84line “The Force of Prayer,” all the other narrative poems were written and published by 1807, except for Arnold’s unsanctioned editorial reconstruction of the narrative of Margaret and the ruined cottage from Book I of The Excursion, which though mostly written in 1797–1798 was not published until 1814. The “Lyrical Poems” class that follows marks a movement from storytelling to impassioned utterance. With their emphasis on commonplace things and their effect on an individualized speaker, these poems shift from the more public narratized landscape to a more private subjective landscape. This shift recurs in the next two classes, “Poems Akin to the Antique and Odes,” and “Sonnets,” both of which begin with poems occasioned by public events and close with poems concerned with private matters. In the “Sonnets” class, this shift occurs abruptly after the 18th sonnet. The first 18 sonnets of the section deal with public events, and all but two were classed by Wordsworth in “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty.” Following these 18 political sonnets, the sequence shifts abruptly to the less public and more technical concerns of the poet with his form (“Scorn not the sonnet,” and “Nuns fret not”) and the more private concerns of the poet himself (“Surprised by joy,” and “Go, faithful portrait”). This shift to a more private register leads to the final class, “Reflective and Elegiac Poems,” which appears to focus attention on the mature and necessarily withdrawn (reflective) poet singing of the past (elegiac). As discussed in Chapter 2, one of the primary effects of Arnold’s selection was the creation of the “Great Decade” poet, who between 1798 and 1808 produced “almost all of his really first-rate work” (xii).12 While for Wordsworth the idea of selections from his poems was thought of as an act of mutilation, for Arnold surgical selection 12 Ibid, xii. The persistence of the Great Decade Wordsworth and the narratives of anticlimax and decline is remarkable when one considers the revolutions in critical practices of the last 100 years. A.C. Bradley was arguably one of the last critics to reject the two Wordsworths (one lyrical and one philosophical) and the Great Decade poet offering praise even of Wordsworth’s late poetry. With very few exceptions, however, Wordsworth criticism has proceeded under the tacit assumption that little of value happens after 1807 or 1814. See John L. Mahoney’s Wordsworth and the Critics: The Development of a Critical Reputation (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), especially 109–12, for an overview of the persistence of this Romantic narrative of Wordsworth’s career.

188

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

was necessary to administer relief. Arnold’s selections are dominated by the Great Decade Wordsworth. Nearly two thirds of the poems occupying nearly three fourths of the space in the volume come from the Great Decade, and it is interesting to note that it is not until the 51st selection in the volume that one encounters a poem written after 1814. Thirty-two of the poems were originally published in either the 1798 or 1800 Lyrical Ballads, and 65 of the poems were originally published in the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes. Only the curious category “Poems Akin to the Antique and Odes” and “Sonnets” devote more space to non-Great Decade works, and in both cases the difference is only of a few pages. However, if Wordsworth is defined primarily by what he wrote between 1798 and 1808, it is inevitable that later work (or even dissimilar Great Decade work) will be seen as oddly un-Wordsworthian. Perhaps also this lyricization of Wordsworth is part of the general movement from epic to lyric described by M.H. Abrams in the middle of the twentieth century.13 Such a movement would account for the increased value given to Wordsworth’s shorter pieces and the decreased value given to The Excursion, though Wordsworth’s own lengthy career does not provide a model of such a movement. What remains unaccounted for is why the lyric should come to possess so much value. In the case of Arnold’s Wordsworth, the lyric, with its emphasis on personal feeling, becomes representative of the true power of poetry, the power to make us feel: Wordsworth’s poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and desires; and because of the extraordinary power which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it. (xxi)

Lyric poetry, as the vehicle for feeling, provides the primary access to Wordsworth’s power, but our access to this power is limited. There is a diminution from Wordsworth’s “feeling” to his “showing” to our “sharing,” a slipping away that is reminiscent of Arnold’s own sense of the belatedness of both Wordsworth’s desire and his own. Shortly before Wordsworth’s death, Arnold had written in “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’” that “Wordsworth’s eyes avert their ken / From half of human fate” (53–4), a criticism that questions the utility of a parochial vision that doggedly excluded much of the world. This image of the self-marginalized poet, withdrawn into his mountain retreat, out of touch with the great movements of the age, was something of a commonplace by the middle of the century. The anonymous obituary writer for The Times had simply stated as fact that Wordsworth was “removed by taste and temperament from the busy scenes of the world” (“Death of the Poet Wordsworth”). In the months following Wordsworth’s death, however, Arnold returned to the subject of the isolated seer, and the idea of the contemplative 13 Abrams argues the ascendancy of the lyric in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 70–99. Since a general assumption of this study is that versions of Wordsworth like the “Great Decade” poet have been constructed—by Wordsworth, his supporters, his critics, and later editors and critics—to satisfy specific historical contingencies, Abrams argument for a shift from epic to lyric as explanatory of the “Great Decade” Wordsworth is something of a tautology.

A Service to the Nation

189

life that would later prove to be the foundation of his own conception of the relationship between the artist or critic and the society that he or she served. Arnold’s “Memorial Verses, April 1850,” published in the 1852 edition of his Poems, begins appropriately enough at Wordsworth’s tomb amidst the landscape memorialized by Wordsworth’s poetry. For Arnold, Wordsworth’s gift to the nation is the gift of feeling, but what is distinctive about this conception is the studied absence of a relationship between feeling and action, between private experience and public duty: He spoke, and loosed our hearts in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us and we had ease; The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o’er the sun-lit fields again; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. (47–53)

Wordsworth’s power is figured as a kind of sensual recall, the ability of his poetry to recall us to some earlier time and some earlier relationship with the natural world. That relationship is one of physical responsiveness to natural stimuli, but it is one that can be described only in the past tense. Arnold hymns this prior relationship in “Empedocles on Etna” as descriptive of when “We had not lost our balance then, nor grown / Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy” (II.240–41). Having now lost our balance, grown to be thought’s slaves, and now dead to every natural joy, what salutary purpose could Wordsworth’s poetry serve? In the “Memorial Verses,” it is unclear what purpose it can serve now, for Arnold can only invoke instances of past regenerations of the spirit, and he can only convey a nostalgic longing for a time when Wordsworth’s poetry could have revived a world now long since dead: Our youth return’d; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furl’d, The freshness of the early world. (54–7)

There is a certain fatality and despair in this depiction of some past episode of regeneration, as if the very moment of possibility has passed as well. “The freshness of the early world” might have once been shed and “our youth” might have returned, but this easy link between cause and effect is separated by a description of the “spirits” that are being acted upon, a description that denies the possibility of regeneration. The objects of this regeneration are said to have “long been dead,” “dried up and closely furl’d,” human spirits as desiccated plant life, flowers or leaves undergoing natural decay and not subject to regeneration. At the risk of being too literal, the freshness of the early world, like the early morning dew, might rime the surface of the spent bloom, but it cannot return it to full flower, nor can it restore its fragrance. The remoteness and thus the inaccessibility of these salutary effects emerge out of this series of regressions: Arnold the poet remembering some past effect brought about by an evocation of an even earlier world. What has intervened between the

190

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

early world, Wordsworth’s representation of it, and the “spirits” in need of the cure is the death of the spirits that would be saved. Poetry has passed from salvific to nostalgic for the possibility of salvation. Of course, Arnold is writing a eulogy, but what is being eulogized is the possibility of poetry itself to have a place in what Arnold himself called this “deeply unpoetical” age (Honan 196). In what appears to be a curiously backhanded tribute to Wordsworth’s genius, Arnold locates the future of poetry in the notion of disinterestedness that would become so important in his later critical work. Arnold imagines that the future may produce another poet of “Goethe’s sage mind” or “Byron’s force” but questions whether anyone of “Wordsworth’s healing power” will emerge: Others will teach us how to dare, And against fear our breast to steel; Others will strengthen us to bear— But who, ah! who, will make us feel? The cloud of mortal destiny, Others will front it fearlessly— But who, like him, will put it by? (64–70)

These seven lines are marked out from the rest of the poem by a shift in rhyme scheme from couplets and an occasional triplet to these alternating rhymes closed by a triplet. Within this passage there are three parallel syntactic units of two lines each, with the first lines beginning with the trochaic “Others” and the second lines beginning with a conjunction (“And,” “But,” “But”). The single line left out of this parallelism is “The cloud of mortal destiny,” a phrase descriptive of not what is representative of Wordsworth, but rather what Wordsworth manages to put by. This action of Wordsworth, if it can even be called such, stands in marked contrast to the heroic diction attributed to “Others” whose poetry involves teaching, daring, fearing, strengthening, bearing, and fronting. There is almost bathos in the paired rhyme of “steel” and “feel,” and the concluding triplet moves from the heroic implications of “destiny” and “fearlessly” to the strangely flat and passive “put it by.” In what appears to be a moment of uncompromising strenuousness, Arnold places the seductiveness of heroic action against the plainness of passive contemplation. To put by the cloud of mortal destiny, while seemingly an act of will, can hardly be called active. To desire “Wordsworth’s sweet calm”(“Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’” 79) requires one to resist the temptations to act, to tempt the accusations of retreat, and to risk the slide into the bathetic. For Arnold, Wordsworth has become the exemplum of the disengaged, contemplative poet, a bard of ebbing and ebbed time. Arnold’s “Memorial Verses” memorialize not merely the man or even the poetry, but a relationship between poetry or literature or culture (as defined by Arnold) and the nation itself. The regressing belatedness of this poem marks Arnold’s own anxieties over the recuperability of this past relationship, a relationship or even a nostalgia for such a relationship, which he has imaginatively located in Wordsworth. The passing of Wordsworth marks not the passing of this relationship—for Arnold admits that Wordsworth was himself nostalgic for it—but rather the further passing or slipping away of the possibility of such a relationship. For Arnold, imaginative

A Service to the Nation

191

feeling as represented by Wordsworth is itself a relic of an earlier time, preserved in Wordsworth and cherished by Arnold because it is alien to his own times. While “feeling” covers a large range of human experience, Arnold focuses on “joy” and more specifically on “the joy offered us in nature.” This focus ignores much in Wordsworth and forces Arnold to contain other feelings to which the poems may give rise. The chief containment strategy in Arnold’s edition of Wordsworth is Arnold’s classification system itself, specifically the two miscellaneously titled classes “Reflective and Elegiac Poems” and “Poems Akin to the Antique and Odes.” Both of these classes, clearly marked as backward looking, become repositories for the nostalgic yearning and regressing belatedness that Arnold associated with Wordsworth in “Memorial Verses.” The “Reflective and Elegiac Poems” class also becomes a repository for what might be called Wordsworth’s museum pieces. Very few of the poems can be called elegies, and in fact only 3 of the 39 poems are drawn from Wordsworth’s “Epitaphs and Elegiac Pieces” class. Virtually all of the poems are reflective in some way, but then virtually every one of Wordsworth’s poems could be called reflective. What appears to be the dominating characteristic of these poems is how reflection is constructed by Arnold as a temporal experience, which will always lead to the elegiac. In other words, if reflection is a kind of intense contemplation, it is also a looking back over time, and this insistence upon a temporal distance between the poet and the poetic occasion constantly invokes the additional temporal distance between the poet and the reader. It is this additional temporal distance that enforces the elegiac mood on poems that appear to have no relation to elegy and actually creates the need for an elegized subject. In a poem like “To the Lady Fleming,” the only possible elegized subject, in what is essentially a perfunctory occasional piece, is the social order itself as represented by the Fleming’s stock of a “noble line / Of chieftains.” These ancient manners form the elegized subject of the poem placed after “To the Lady Fleming”—“To the Rev. Dr. Wordsworth.” As discussed in Chapter 5, this poem, which came to serve as an introduction to the River Duddon sonnets, focuses attention on the “ancient Manners” of the local landscape to both call attention to what Wordsworth feels must be preserved and to what he feels is fast ebbing away. The elegized frame, by calling attention to the historical distance that has intervened between Wordsworth’s call for preservation and the present time of the reader, transforms the call for preservation into an elegy for what has been lost and converts Wordsworth’s fears into historical fact. As mentioned before, the criteria for inclusion in the “Poems Akin to the Antique and Odes” class involves form, affinity to some prior poetic models, and content. The criterion for including the three last poems in the class is clearly marked by the titles of these poems, all of which contain the word ode. The first six poems are neither identified as odes, nor do they employ either the ode form or odic characteristics. These six poems—“Laodamia,” “Dion,” “Character of the Happy Warrior,” “Lines on the Expected Invasion, 1803,” “The Pillar of Trajan,” and “September 1819”— would be expected to be “Akin to the Antique,” though it is not clear whether they are akin to the antique in form or content. “Laodamia” and “Dion” treat ancient subjects, the first drawn from Homer and the second from Plutarch, and may be said to be akin to the antique in content. However, to classify these two poems as antique

192

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

in content denies these poems their topicality. As discussed in Chapter 2, the story of “Laodamia” counseled a mourning nation of the need to recognize the higher cause and the greater sacrifice that supersedes personal suffering. “Dion,” which was probably composed shortly after Waterloo and which was published in the River Duddon volume, uses a classical narrative to address the contemporary problem of political leadership raised by Napoleon. Some commentators see the topicality of the poem more specifically in the parallel between Dion’s orders to kill Heraclides and Napoleon’s orders to kill the Duke d’Enghien, a subject that Wordsworth had treated already in a sonnet.14 Regardless of the specificity of the contemporary context, the focus of attention on the antique content denies these poems their original status as contemporary critiques, a timeliness evident in 1820, but not so evident by 1879. Indeed, even if we could recall the political climate surrounding their original publication, the classification itself, with its emphasis on the antique, with what has passed or passed away, implies that the sentiments expressed in the poems are themselves antique. This potential slippage between antique form, antique content, and antique sentiment affects how one explains the inclusion of the two most overtly nationalistic poems in Arnold’s volume. The “Character of the Happy Warrior” uses the ancient form of the character piece to delineate a distinctive kind of person, in this case that of the happy warrior. Again, however, Arnold’s classification exerts a pressure on the content of the poem itself, making it difficult to conclude whether the antiquity of the poem is restricted to its form or whether the sentiment itself—the idea of the selfless man devoted to national service—is antique as well. This inability to identify the characteristic “antiquity” of a poem, and thus the reason for its inclusion in this classification, is most clearly seen in “Lines on the Expected Invasion, 1803” and “September 1819.” The “Lines,” written in 1803 but not published until 1842, appears to have no antique antecedent in form, nor does it rely on an antique narrative. The repetition of the invocation “Come ye” may have reminded Arnold of the numerous Latin veni hymns addressed to sacred spirits, but this would hardly be a recognizable antique form. In the context of 1803, the poem is a call to arms, a plea to all England to take up arms in the fight against Napoleon, a duty that falls to every man: Come ye—whate’er your creed—O waken all, Whate’er your temper, at your Country’s call; Resolving (this a free-born Nation can) To have one soul, and perish to a man, Or save this honoured Land from every lord But British reason and the British sword. (Poems of Wordsworth p. 191)

14 The sonnet on the Duke d’Enghien was titled “Sonnet on the Disinternment of the Duke d’Enghien” when originally published in the Thanksgiving Ode volume of 1816. It was later retitled “Feelings of a Royalist on the Disinternment of the Duke d’Enghien.” For more on the contemporary background to “Dion,” see John Paul Pritchard’s “On the Making of Wordsworth’s ‘Dion’” Studies in Philology, 49 (January 1952), 66–74, and Zera S. Fink, “‘Dion’ and Wordsworth’s Political Thought,” Studies in Philology, 50 (July 1953), 510–14.

A Service to the Nation

193

Although this poem was written in response to the pressure of contemporary events, it remained unpublished for nearly four decades. The “1803” in the title identified the context of the poem, first in 1842 and then in 1879, as belonging to a past time, deep in the past of most of the 1842 readers and virtually lost in the past to Arnold’s 1879 readers. Perhaps what appeared to Arnold to be most antique about this poem, however, is its fervor, its baldly jingoistic tendencies; and though such tendencies abound in many of Wordsworth’s war poems, Arnold’s placement of this poem in this class of antique poems renders these tendencies antique, antiquated, belonging to some earlier time when such fervor was possible. In Wordsworth’s collected works, this poem is placed amidst other poems detailing the tumultuous events of 1803, and in the collected works the poem that follows it is the sonnet “Anticipation, October 1803,” which opens with the lines “Shout, for a mighty Victory is won! / On British ground the Invaders are laid low.” Stripped of this historical context in Arnold’s edition, “Lines on the Expected Invasion, 1803” appears quaint and almost ridiculous, representative of a historical time long past when such fervor was not only possible but perhaps even necessary, but that now appears as antique as the pillar of Trajan or Plutarch’s Lives. Like “Lines on the Expected Invasion, 1803,” “September 1819” appears to have no clear tie to antiquity. Its form is indistinguishable from other poems that Arnold classed as “Lyrical Poems.” The stanza form, meter, and rhyme scheme are the same as those used by Wordsworth in “To a Young Lady, Who Had Been Reproached for Taking Long Walks in the Country” and “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower,” both classed by Arnold as “Lyrical Poems.” The year in the title identifies the occasion of the poem as contemporary (to Wordsworth), and the poem, like many of the lyrical pieces, treats the poet’s thoughts on the passing of the seasons. The final four stanzas do invoke classical figures, but these invocations are used to comment on the current state of poetry. By themselves, these invocations do not account for the classification of this poem as akin to the antique. Again, what appears to mark this poem as antique are the sentiments themselves, Wordsworth’s claims for the power of poetry and his distress over how that power have been squandered: For deathless powers to verse belong, And they like Demigods are strong On whom the Muses smile; But some their function have disclaimed. Best pleased with what is aptliest framed To enervate and defile. (Poems of Wordsworth p. 195)

Originally published in 1820, Wordsworth’s high claims for poetry are balanced by his belief that some poets, like Byron, have chosen to disregard the sanctity of their calling. But what is interesting, and perhaps very perceptive of Arnold, is that while Wordsworth maintains that “deathless powers” belong to poetry and that poets are “like Demigods,” all of Wordsworth’s examples of deathless poetry and demigod-like poets are taken from an irretrievable past. The poet invokes the poets of “Britain’s earliest dawn” of which no records remain, and calls up the historical figures of Alcaeus of Lesbos and Sappho of the sixth century BCE. The most curious invocation, though, is reserved for poetry that does not exist at all. The poet

194

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

addresses the antiquaries at work on the manuscripts discovered in Herculaneum, and exclaims: What rapture! could ye seize Some Theban fragment, or unroll One precious, tender-hearted scroll Of pure Simonides.

The poet wishes for the discovery of some Theban fragment of Sophocles or a poem by Simonides, discoveries that were not made at Herculaneum. What makes this desire so curious is that the discovery would be important not so much for what it would add to our possession of deathless poetry, but rather for how such a discovery might enable us to connect the ancient poetry we know to the ancient poetry that we have lost. That were, indeed, a genuine birth Of poesy; a bursting forth Of genius from the dust! What Horace gloried to behold, What Maro loved, shall we unfold? Can haughty Time be just?

In this poem about the deathless power of verse, the climax is an imagined discovery of dead poetry, a “genuine birth” that is more like a resurrection. Also, this birth of poetry is not only fanciful, it is located in a deep and irretrievable past, a birth that, while allowing us to behold what Horace and Virgil read and loved, does not betoken any similar birth of poetry now. While the first five stanzas of this poem address the possibilities of poetry in the present tense, the final four stanzas locate those possibilities in a distinctly past tense. The birth of poetry is tied not to acts of creative genius but to acts of preservation that create links to the past. Perhaps it was this almost antiquarian delight in the possibilities of the past that led Arnold to class this poem as akin to the antique. But as the opening of the poem that follows “September 1819” in Arnold’s edition confirms—with the phrase “An age hath been”—what is antique about these poems is the yearning toward the past and, more important, the seeming belief in the possibility of such recoveries. What is antique about these antique poems is not a question of form or narrative but one of desire, and for Arnold it is this desire itself that is past recovery. The question for Wordsworth and Arnold, “Can haughty Time be just?” remains unanswered. That time could not be trusted to be just is the underlying assumption behind Arnold’s edition of Wordsworth. To preserve and present Wordsworth’s “power” to the “English-speaking public and to the world” is Arnold’s avowed object (345). As he states in his introduction to his selection of Byron’s poetry, his editorial work is a “service” both to the reputation of the poet and “to the poetic glory of our country” (361). But Arnold’s “skillfully made anthology,” his collection of Wordsworthian touchstones substitutes for Pater’s literary aesthetic initiation “a halo for a physiognomy ... a statue where there was once a man.” Arnold quotes these phrases from a contemporary French critic in his “Study of Poetry” as representative of

A Service to the Nation

195

what he calls critical “charlatanism,” which confuses or obliterates “the distinctions between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true” (307). Arnold would have us substitute for this “charlatanism,” the touchstones of poetry that through their purported distinction enable the reader to lay claim to distinction. Yet, like Pater’s mystified transformation from novice to initiate, Arnold claims that the distinctiveness must remain undefined, that “if we are asked to define this mark or accent in the abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should thereby be darkening the question, not clearing it” (313–14). To provide a service to the “poetic glory” of his country, Arnold must create a universal, globalized poet, a Wordsworth who writes not the nation but nature. This is necessary because Arnold envisions culture as a global competition, and to Arnold the great shame about Wordsworth is that he is virtually unknown on the continent. In a letter to his sister, Arnold speaks to this global competition, hoping that “this collection of mine may win for [Wordsworth] some appreciation on the Continent,” an appreciation due because “Wordsworth’s body of work ... is superior to the body of work of any Continental poet of the last hundred years except Goethe” (Letters 3:48). It is in this context of international competition of national poets that Arnold’s configuration of the lyrical Wordsworth belongs. If Arnold obliterates the local and historical Wordsworth, it is to create a national representative, “one of the very chief glories of English poetry,” which Arnold believes will be better suited to upholding his overtly nationalist claim that “by nothing is England so glorious as by her poetry” (346). Both Pater and Arnold claim for Wordsworth this place on the world stage, and both feel the need to strip Wordsworth of the localism and parochialism that had been Wordsworth’s most celebrated and criticized characteristic. Such a configuration of Wordsworth was essential to a global critical vision, to asserting the (prominent) place of English literature within the competitive world of other national literatures, both historical and contemporary. Whereas this universalizing of Wordsworth was undoubtedly instrumental in and, historically speaking, essential to establishing Wordsworth’s reputation, equally instrumental was the contemporaneous attempt to clarify and monumentalize Wordsworth’s association with the specific locations of his life and work. Though still the poet of nature, the local Wordsworth used by Rawnsley and the preservation movement was the poet of particular places in nature, specific sites preserved in his poetry and themselves worthy of preservation. Chief among those cultural needs that gave rise to the preservation movement is the nostalgia produced by the sense of dislocation brought on by the bewildering speed of changes that began during Wordsworth’s lifetime and have continued unabated to the present. Wordsworth himself was nostalgic for those earlier times and assiduous in his attempts to preserve something of that past. For Wordsworth, though, the question was not simply one of preservation for its own sake, but preservation of those ancient manners, a kind of moral life that he felt was disappearing from the landscape. His call for the creation of a “national property” in the Lake District, made as early as 1810, was not simply an aesthetic or nationalist plea, but, as described in the previous chapter, a political one that sought to attach the reading of landscape to the proper sentiments of a citizen of the nation. But just as Arnold’s “Memorial Verses” record an anxiety of belatedness, a nostalgia literally for the

196

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

possibility of nostalgia itself, the preservation of Wordsworth country preserves not the ancient manners that Wordsworth sought to preserve but the poet nostalgic for such ancient manners. Wordsworth walked the landscape in search of a nation’s history in small things, and countless others have followed him, some with the Guide in hand, in search of Wordsworth himself. While Wordsworth sought the speaking monuments of the unmonumentalized landscape, the National Trust and other likeminded organizations have sought to monumentalize that landscape and make the monuments speak Wordsworth’s own history. If the landscape itself, the scenes formed by our own practice of view-hunting, is a museum, it is not surprising that it too is subject to the contrary appeals of a universal aesthetic and a localized narrative—what, as discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, Stephen Greenblatt identifies as “wonder” and “resonance.” Because Wordsworth’s poetry so frequently makes use of both the universal appeal and the personal response, it was inevitable that his response would become to countless literary tourists the universal appeal of the landscape he recorded. There is of course no irony in the fact that Wordsworth’s private responses have become the resonances of the Lake District landscape. Had he been and remained an obscure writer of no interest, such private utterances committed to the public record would have remained for all practical purposes private. Nor is it particularly ironic that the landscape he read has become so inscribed by his presence that it practically cannot be read without that presence, for this appropriative reading of the local is, as critics since Hazlitt have been quick to point out, one of the primary features of Wordsworth’s poetry. In some of Wordsworth’s earliest inscriptive poetry, those poems collected in 1800 under the title “Poems on the Naming of Places,” we find this feature presented as a kind of poetic procedure. In the “Advertisement” prefixed to the poems, Wordsworth invokes an unmapped territory where “places will be found unnamed or of unknown names.” These places are therefore available for a kind of initial inscription, a naming that is available, though only to the local residents, those “attached to rural objects” (LB 241). Though this attachment implies a precondition for the act of naming as well as a privilege required by and granted to the one who names, attachment also implies the possession one takes of the landscape itself through naming. While the name might grow from some “private and peculiar Interest,” the name itself privatizes the landscape. Stout of wind and limb and with an Ordnance Survey map in hand, we can go off the public way and find the unfinished sheepfold, Point Rash Judgment and the eminence named for the poet of commonplace things. These sites have been privatized by Wordsworth, but our reading of the resonance enables us to privatize Wordsworth. Wordsworth might possess the land, but we possess the Great Decade Wordsworth and Wordsworth country. In a study of the debates leading up to the 1842 Copyright Act, Chris R. Vanden Bossche notes that “Wordsworth was the author most often cited as deserving better remuneration for his works and their service to the nation” (61), but one could argue that it was the Victorian preservation movement and Matthew Arnold who created the configurations of Wordsworth that have proven most serviceable to the nation. The idealized nation, the imagined community of shared interests, is brought into existence by writing but made real by a revision that coerces all writing under a single unified sign. The Great Decade Wordsworth and the Lake District

A Service to the Nation

197

Wordsworth are constructions of a nation seeking its own unified representation. The poet attempts to write the nation, and the nation revises the poet into its own image, the poet both creator and creature. The statistical man, the triangulated land, the preserved past, and the poet who stands in purported opposition, all sanctify the process of classification and buttress the construction of a neutered self capable of feeling but not action. Isolated not participating, preserved not changing, these constructions of Wordsworth have proven to have the greatest utility: the domestic and domesticated poet, made to oppose the everyday world he celebrated, singing of retreat from worldly cares. The service to the nation provided by the census, map, museum, and the Victorian construction of Wordsworth is the construction of a normative national identity safely divested of any characteristics that might threaten the nation. Certainly no small service, but true service while it lasts.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. 1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Acland, Arthur, ed. Wordsworth’s Patriotic Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915. Alpers, Svetlana. “The Museum as a Way of Seeing.” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1991. 25–32. An Illustrated Record of Ordnance Survey in Ireland. Dublin: Ordnance Survey of Ireland; Belfast: Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland, 1991. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. 1983. London: Verso, 1991. Arden-Close, Charles Frederick, Sir. The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey. New York: A.M. Kelley, 1969. Arnold, Matthew, ed. Poems of Wordsworth. London: MacMillan, 1879. Arnold, Matthew. The Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848–-1888. 3 vols. The Works of Matthew Arnold. 15 vols. Ed. George W.E. Russell. London: MacMillan, 1904. Arnold, Matthew. The Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold. Ed. A. Dwight Culler. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. Bann, Stephen. The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Craft. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Barrell, John. The Dark Side of Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Barrell, John. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Barrell, John. “The public prospect and the private view.” Projecting the Landscape. Ed. J.C. Eade. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1987. Bayly, C.A. Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830. London: Longman, 1989. Bazin, Germain. The Museum Age. Trans. Jane van Nuis Cahill. New York: Universe Books, 1967. Benis, Toby R. Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth’s Homeless. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1999. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum. London: Routledge, 1995. Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bradley, A.C. Oxford Lectures on Poetry. 2nd ed. London: MacMillan, 1909. Briggs, Asa. The Age of Improvement. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1959. British Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 1. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1968.

200

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

British Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 3. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1971. British Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 5. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970. British Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 6. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970. Broglio, Ron. “Mapping British Earth and Sky.” Wordsworth Circle 33.2 (2002 Spring): 70–76. Bushell, Sally. “Exempla in The Excursion: The Purpose of the Pastor’s Epitaphic Tales.” Charles Lamb Bulletin 105 (1999 Jan): 16–27. Carlson, Julie A. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Chandler, James K. Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Choldin, Harvey M. Looking for the Last Percent: The Controversy over Census Undercounts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Christensen, Jerome. Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Christensen, Jerome. Lord Byron’s Strength. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Close, Sir Charles Arden. The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969. Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England. London: T.C. Hansard, 1813. 36 vols. 1806–1820. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Friend. Ed. Barbara E. Rooke. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Cosgrove, Denis E. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984. Cowtan, Robert. Memories of the British Museum. London: R. Bentley & Son, 1872. Curtis, Jared. Introduction. Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807. By William Wordsworth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 339. “Death of the Poet Wordsworth.” The Times [London] 25 April 1850: 5 De Man, Paul. Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. De Quincey, Thomas. Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets. Ed. David Wright. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Dicey, A.V. The Statesmanship of Wordsworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917. Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. Leslie Stephen. 64 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885.

Bibliography

201

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. Dowden, Edward. Preface. Poems by William Wordsworth. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1897. Drake, Michael. “The census, 1801–1891.” Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data. Ed. E.A. Wrigley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. 7–46. Duff, David. “Wordsworth and the Language of Forms: The Collected Poems of 1815.” Wordsworth Circle 34.2 (2003 Spring): 86–90. Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge, 1995. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Eilenberg, Susan. Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Literary Possession. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Fink, Zera S. “‘Dion’ and Wordsworth’s Political Thought.” Studies in Philology 50 (July 1953): 510–4. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1973. Fry, Paul. A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Fulford, Tim. “Apocalyptic Economics and Prophetic Politics: Radical and Romantic Responses to Malthus and Burke.” Studies in Romanticism 40 (2001 Fall): 345–68. Fulford, Tim. Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Galperin, William. Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Garside, Peter. “Picturesque figure and landscape: Meg Merrilies and the gypsies.” The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770. Eds. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 145–74. Gaze, John. Figures in a Landscape: A History of the National Trust. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1988. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Gidal, Eric. Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2001. Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Gill, Stephen. Wordsworth and the Victorians. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Glass, D.V. “Gregory King’s Estimate of the Population of England and Wales, 1695.” Population and History: Essays in Historical Demography. Eds. D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1965. 183–220. Glass, D.V. Numbering the People. Farnborough, GB: Heath, 1973.

202

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Glass, D.V. The Development of Population Statistics: A Collective Reprint of Materials Concerning the History of Census Taking and Vital Registration in England and Wales. Farnborough, GB: Gregg, 1973. Goldstein, Laurence. Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. Gravil, Richard. Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Great Britain Office of Population Censuses and Surveys & General Register Office, Edinburgh. Guide to Census Reports, Great Britain 1801–1966. London: HMSO, 1977. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1991. 42–56. Grosart, Alexander, ed. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. 3 vols. London: E. Moxon, 1876. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Habbakuk, H.J. Population Growth and Economic Development Since 1750. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1971. Habbakuk, H.J. “The Economic History of Modern Britain.” Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography. Eds. D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1965. 147–58. Harley, J.B. “Error and Revision in Early Ordnance Survey Maps.” The Cartographic Journal 5 (1968): 115–24. Harley, J.B. “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe.” Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57–72. Harley, J.B. “The re-mapping of England, 1750–1800.” Imago Mundi 19 (1965): 56–67. Harley, J.B. “The Society of Arts and the Surveys of English Counties 1759–1809.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 112 (1963–1964): 110–118. Harper, George McLean. William Wordsworth: His Life, Works, and Influence. 2 vols. 1916. New York: Russell & Russell, 1960. Harrison, Gary. Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty and Power. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Hartman, Geoffrey. The Unremarkable Wordsworth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Hartman, Geoffrey. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1815. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. P.P. Howe. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930. Heffernan, James A.W. “Mutilated Autobiography: Wordsworth’s Poems of 1815.” Wordsworth Circle 10.1 (1979): 107–12. Heffernan, James A.W. The Recreation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable and Turner. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984. Herendeen, Wyman. From Landscape to Literature: The River and the Myth of Geography. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1986.

Bibliography

203

Herman, Judith. “The Poet as Editor: Wordsworth’s Edition of 1815.” Wordsworth Circle 9.1 (1978): 82–90. Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Hickey, Alison. Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s Excursion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Higgs, Edward. Making Sense of the Census: The Manuscript Returns for England and Wales, 1801–1901. London: HMSO, 1989. Higgs, Edward. “Women, occupations and work in the nineteenth century censuses.” History Workshop Journal. 23 (1987): 59–80. Hill, David. Turner on the Thames: River Journeys in the Year 1805. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Hobsbawm, E.J., and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Honan, Park. Matthew Arnold: A Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1992. Hudson, Kenneth. A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975. Hume, David. Selected Essays. Eds. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Hunter, Michael. “The Cabinet Institutionalized: The Royal Society’s ‘Repository’ and its Background.” The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in 16th and 17th Century Europe. Eds. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. 159–68. Hutchinson, Sara. The Letters of Sara Hutchinson. Ed. Katherine Coburn. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954. Janowicz, Anne. England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990. Jarvis, Robin. “The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820.” Studies in Romanticism 40 (2001 Fall): 321–43. Jenkins, Jennifer, and Patrick James. From Acorn to Oak Tree: The Growth of the National Trust, 1895–1994. London: MacMillan, 1994. Johnston, Kenneth R. The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Johnston, Kenneth R. “The Politics of ‘Tintern Abbey’.” The Wordsworth Circle 14 (1983): 6–14. Kaiser, David Aram. Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987. Kaul, Suvir. Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Keats, John. The Complete Works of John Keats. Ed. H. Buxton Forman. 1939. New York: Phaeton Press Inc., 1970.

204

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Kelley, Theresa M. Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Ketchum, Carl H. Introduction. Shorter Poems, 1807-1820. Ed. Carl H. Ketcham. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. 3–32. Khan, Jalal Uddin. “Publication and Reception of Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Volume.” Modern Language Studies 32.2 (2002 Fall): 45–67. Knight, William Angus, ed. Selections from Wordsworth. London: Kegan Paul, 1888. Knight, William Angus, ed. Wordsworthiana: A Selection of Papers Read to the Wordsworth Society. London: MacMillan, 1889. Konvitz, Josef W. Cartography in France 1660–1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Levinson, Marjorie. The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Levinson, Marjorie. Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Liu, Alan. Rev. of Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination, by David Simpson. Wordsworth Circle 19.1 (1988): 172–82. Liu, Alan. “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism.” ELH, 56.4 (1989): 721–71. Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Lloyd, David, and Paul Thomas. Culture and the State. New York: Routledge, 1998. Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. MacGregor, Arthur. “The Cabinet of Curiosities in 17th Century Britain.” The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in 16th and 17th Century Europe. Eds. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. 147–58. Mahoney, John L. Wordsworth and the Critics: The Development of a Critical Reputation. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001. Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1798. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1976. Manning, Peter J. “Cleansing the Images: Wordsworth, Rome, and the Rise of Historicism.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 33 (Summer 1991): 271–326. Manning, Peter J. Reading Romantics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Manning, Peter J. “The Other Scene of Travel: Wordsworth’s ‘Musings Near Aquapendente’.” The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. Eds. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2005. 191–211. Manning, Peter J. “Touring Scotland at the Time of the Reform Bill: William Wordsworth and William Cobbett.” The Wordsworth Circle 31.2 (2000): 80–3. Manning, Peter J. “Troubling the Borders: Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1998.” Wordsworth Circle 30.1 (1999 Winter): 22–7. Manning, Peter J. “Wordsworth in the Keepsake.” Literature in the Marketplace. Eds. John L. Jordan and Robert L. Patten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Bibliography

205

Marshall, J.D., and J.K. Walton. The Lake Counties from 1830 to Mid-twentieth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981. Mayall, David. Gypsy-travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. McFarland, Thomas. Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. McFarland, Thomas. William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. McGann, Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Miller, Edward. That Noble Cabinet, A History of the British Museum. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis, IN: Odyssey Press, 1957. Monmonier, Mark. “The Rise of Map Use by Elite Newspapers in England, Canada, and the United States.” Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 46–60. Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth, A Biography: The Early Years, 1770–1803. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth, A Biography: The Later Years, 1803–1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Morgan, Prys. “From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period.” The Invention of Tradition. Eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 43–100. Mulvihill, James. “Consuming Nature: Wordsworth and the Kendal and Windermere Railway Controversy.” Modern Language Quarterly 56.3 (1995 Sept): 305–26. Murphy, Graham. Founders of the National Trust. London: Christopher Helm, 1987. National Trust, The. Annual Report and Financial Statements 2004/05. Swindon, England: The National Trust, 2005. Newman, Gerald. The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1720–1830. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Norwich, John Julius. Foreword. The National Trust Guide: A Complete Introduction to the Buildings, Gardens, Coast and Country Properties Owned by the National Trust. Eds. Lydia Greeves and Michael Trinick. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990. “Obituary Memoir of Sir T.A. Larcom.” Proceedings of the Royal Society. 198 (1879). Olmi, Guiseppe. “Science-Honour-Metaphor: Italian Cabinets of the 16th and 17th Century.” The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in 16th and 17th Century Europe. Eds. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. 5–16. Owen, A.L. The Famous Druids: A Survey of Three Centuries of English Literature on the Druids. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Owen, Tim, and Elaine Pilbeam. Ordnance Survey: Map Makers to Britain since 1791. London: HMSO, 1992.

206

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Page, Judith W. “‘Nor Yet Redeemed from Scorn’: Wordsworth and the Jews.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 99 (2000 Oct): 537–54. Palumbo, Linda J. “Wordsworth’s Coleridge in the River Duddon.” Round Table of South Central College English Association 27.2 (Summer 1986): 1–4. “Parliamentary Intelligence.” The Times [London] 25 November, 1800: 3. Pater, Walter. Walter Pater: Three Major Texts (The Renaissance, Appreciations, and Imaginary Portraits). Ed. William E. Buckler. New York: New York University Press, 1986. Pears, Iain. The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–1768. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Peek, Katherine. Wordsworth in England: Studies in the History of his Fame. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. Pfau, Thomas. Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Phillips, C.W. Archaeology in the Ordnance Survey, 1791–1965. London: Council for British Archaeology, 1980. Phipps, Edmund, and Thomas Vardon. Occupation Abstract, 1841. Rpt. British Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 5. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970. Pocock, J.G.A. Politics, Language and Time; Essays on Political Thought and History. New York: Atheneum, 1971. Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pritchard, John Paul. “On the Making of Wordsworth’s ‘Dion’.” Studies in Philology 49 (January 1952): 66–74. Rajan, Balachandra. The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Rawnsley, E.F. Canon Rawnsley: An Account of his Life. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1923. Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond. Lake Country Sketches. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903. Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond. Literary Associations of the English Lakes. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1892. Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond. Past and Present at the English Lakes. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1916. Redfield, Marc. The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Reed, Mark L. Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years 1800–1815. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Reiman, Donald H., ed. The Romantics Reviewed. Part A The Lake Poets. 2 vols. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1972. Reitan, E.A. “Expanding Horizons: Maps in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731– 1754,” Imago Mundi 37 (1985): 54–62. Rickman, John. “Thoughts on the Utility and Facility of ascertaining the Population of England.” Rpt. in Numbering the People. D.V. Glass. Farnborough: Heath, 1973. 106–13.

Bibliography

207

Robinson, Henry Crabb. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers. Ed. Edith J. Morley. 3 vols. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1938. Robinson, Henry Crabb. The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle (1808–1866). 2 vols. Ed. Edith J. Morley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927. Rollinson, William. A History of Man in the Lake District. London: J.M. Dent, 1967. Rose, Sonya O. Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Ross, Donald Jr. “Poems ‘Bound Each to Each’ in the 1815 Edition of Wordsworth.” The Wordsworth Circle 12.2 (1981): 133–40. Ross, Marlon. “Romancing the Nation-State: The Poetics of Romantic Nationalism.” Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism. Ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Ruoff, Gene. “Critical Implications of Wordsworth’s 1815 Categorization, with Some Animadversions on Binaristic Commentary.” Wordsworth Circle 9.1 (1978): 75–82. Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies. The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. Vol. 18. London: George Allen, 1905. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Schoenfield, Mark. The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor & the Poet’s Contract. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Scott, Ann Herbert. Census, U. S. A. Fact Finding for the American People. New York: The Seabury Press, 1960. Seymour, W.A, ed. A History of the Ordnance Survey. Folkestone, UK: Dawson, 1980. Simpson, David. “Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender: What Is the Subject of Wordsworth’s ‘Gipsies’?” Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism. Eds. Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993. 154–72. Simpson, David. “Literary Criticism and the Return to ‘History.’” Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 721–47. Simpson, David. “Literary Criticism, Localism, and Local Knowledge.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review. 14.1 (1994): 70–88. Simpson, David. Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993. Simpson, David. Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1987. Simpson, Stephen, and Daniel Dorling. “Those Missing Millions: Implications for Social Statistics of Non-response to the 1991 Census.” Journal of Social Policy 23.4 (1994): 543–67. Siskin, Clifford. The Historicity of Romantic Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 2 vols. Ed. James Thorold Rogers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880. Smith, Nowell C. Preface. The Poems of William Wordsworth. 3 vols. London: Methuen and Co., 1908.

208

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Somervell, Robert. Robert Somervell. London: Faber and Faber, 1935. St. Clair, William. Lord Elgin and the marbles. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Stillinger, Jack. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Tacitus, Publius Cornelius. The Annals of Imperial Rome. Trans. Michael Grant. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1971. Taylor, A.J. “The Taking of the Census, 1801–1951.” British Medical Journal 1 (1951): 709–24. Thompson, B.L. The Lake District and the National Trust. Kendal: Titus Wilson & Son, 1946. Thomson, James. The Seasons. Ed. James Sambrook. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Turnbull, David. Maps are Territories, Science is an Atlas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Turner, Victor. “Frame, Flow, and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality.” Performance in Postmodern Culture. Eds. Michael Benamou and Charles Caramello. Milwaukee, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin, 1977. 33–55. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1974. Vanden Bossche, Chris R. “The Value of Literature: Representations of Print Culture in the Copyright Debate of 1837–1842.” Victorian Studies 38 (1995): 61. Walker, Eric C. “The Plan to Publish Peter Bell: A New Wordsworth Letter.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 90.1 (1996 Mar): 69–93. Wallace, Robert. A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times: In Which Superior Populousness of Antiquity Is Maintained. 2nd ed. 1809. New York: A.M. Kelley, 1969. Watson, J.R. Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. West, Kirsten K., and David J. Fein. “Census Undercount: An Historical and Contemporary Sociological Issue.” Sociological Inquiry. 60.2 (May 1990): 127–41. Westergaard, Harald. Contributions to the History of Statistics. London: P.S. King & Son Ltd, 1932. Whale, John. “Romantics, Explorers and Picturesque Travellers.” The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770. Eds. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 175–95. White, T. Pilkington. The ordnance survey of the United Kingdom. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1886. Wiley, Michael. Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1998. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Wittlin, Alma S. The Museum: Its History and Its Tasks in Education. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949. Wolfson, Susan J. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Bibliography

209

Woodring, Carl R. Politics in English Romantic Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Mary Moorman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Wordsworth, Sylvia. Letter to the author. 16 October 1997. Wordsworth, William. An Evening Walk. Ed. James Averill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Wordsworth, William. Benjamin the Waggoner. Ed. Paul F. Betz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Wordsworth, William. Descriptive Sketches. Ed. Eric Birdsall. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Wordsworth, William. Guide to the Lakes. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Wordsworth, William. Home at Grasmere: Part First, Book First, of The Recluse. Ed. Beth Darlington. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800. Eds. James Butler and Karen Green. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Wordsworth, William. Peter Bell. Ed. John E. Jordan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Wordsworth, William. Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807. Ed. Jared Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Wordsworth, William. Shorter poems, 1807–1820. Ed. Carl H. Ketcham. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Wordsworth, William. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth. Ed. Jared Curtis. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993. Wordsworth, William. The Fourteen-Book Prelude. Ed. W.J.B. Owen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Wordsworth, William. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. 2nd ed. Revised by Chester L. Shaver. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Vol. 1 of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 8 vols. 1967–1993. Wordsworth, William. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, Part I, 1821–1828. Revised by Alan G. Hill. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Vol. 4 of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 8 vols. 1967–1993. Wordsworth, William. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, Part II, 1829–1834. Revised by Alan G. Hill. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Vol. 5 of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 8 vols. 1967–1993. Wordsworth, William. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, Part III, 1835–1839. Revised by Alan G. Hill. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Vol. 6 of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 8 vols. 1967–1993. Wordsworth, William. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, Part IV, 1840–1853. Revised by Alan G. Hill. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Vol. 7 of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 8 vols. 1967–1993.

210

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Wordsworth, William. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1806–1820, Part I, 1806–1811. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. 2nd ed. Rev. by Mary Moorman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Vol. 2 of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 8 vols. 1967–1993. Wordsworth, William. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1806–1820, Part II, 1812–1820. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. 2nd ed. Rev. by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Vol. 3 of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. 8 vols. 1967–1993. Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest De Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952–1959. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850. Eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (Text of 1805). Ed. Ernest De Selincourt. 2nd ed. corrected by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Wordsworth, William. The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets; Vaudracour and Julia; and Other Poems. To Which is Annexed a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820. Wordsworth, William. The Ruined Cottage and The pedlar. Ed. James Butler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Wordsworth, William. The Salisbury Plain poems of William Wordsworth. Ed. Stephen Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Wordsworth, William. The Thirteen-Book Prelude. Ed. Mark L. Reed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Wordsworth, William. The tuft of primroses, with other late poems for The recluse. Ed. Joseph F. Kishel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Wordsworth, William. The White Doe of Rylstone, or, The fate of the Nortons. Ed. Kristine Dugas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Wrigley, E.A. “Malthus’s Model of a Pre-Industrial Economy.” Malthus Past and Present. Eds. J. Dupâquier and E. Grebink. New York: Academic Press, 1983. 111–24.

Index

Abbot Charles 19, 22 abstraction (see also particular) 3, 5–9 and census 19, 23 and classification 66 The Excursion 95–102 and imagination 23, 26–9, 105–7 and mapping 69, 80, 82, 98, 120–29, 145–7 and museums 154–63 “Thanksgiving Ode” 87–9, 95–6 access (see also preservation) to Lake District 165–76, 179, 181 to landscape 171–6, 181–5 to museum 152–5, 170–71 to picturesque 71–2, 181 to prospect view 71–2, 75 Wordsworth on public ways 171–2 Alpers, Svetlana 11, 149, 160–61 ambition (see also Napoleon, prospect view) mapping as 76–8 rejected by Wordsworth 112, 115, 135 Anderson, Benedict 2–5, 7, 20, 66–7, 70, 86–8 Arnold, Matthew 6, 12 as editor 53–4, 64–5, 178–9, 186–8, 191–5 “Memorial Verses, April 1850” 189–91 “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’” 188, 190 Barbauld, Anna 12, 150 Beaumont, Sir George 70–71, 125, 170 body (see also discipline) census and 16–21 control of 26 reader as 65 text as 44–7, 53–4, 67, 187–8 war and 87–8 British Museum 149, 151–5, 170–74 Burke, Edmund 18n, 74, 164n, 182 census 1753 debates 14–17 1800 passage 19–22

avoiding 21, 36–9 Foucault 20–21 objections to 16–17 origins 14–20 and Rickman, John 19, 22 undercounting 29, 38–9 and Wordsworth 23–8, 46–50, 61–4 Chandler, James 99, 118 Christenson, Jerome 7, 47, 53 citizenship (see also national identity) and census 71–3, 76 and museums 149, 151–5, 160–63, 167–71 National Trust and 183 classification of 1815 poems 44–7 by Arnold 186–7, 191–4 and census 55–61 nationality 55–6 naturalized 47, 54 occupations 23n, 56–60 politics of 50–52 of readers 63–7 Colby, Thomas 1, 102, 105 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 5, 7, 19, 24, 47 “The Brook” 127 on “Gipsies” 34–5, 37 Maid of Buttermere 170 “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” 85 and Peter Bell 114 Colley, Linda 52n, 88n, 155, 163n De Man, Paul 123, 129, 141, 146–7 De Quincey, Thomas 167, 169–70, 177 discipline and census 21–3, 77 and imagination 23–8, 39, 61 druids 28, 73 Duncan, Carol 149, 153–5 egotistical sublime 24, 27, 29, 180 fancy 50, 62, 104, 133, 137–9, 143, 146

212

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation

Ferguson, Frances 13–14, 18n, 24–5, 172 Foucault, Michel 4, 14, 20–21, 39, 46, 54, 67n Fulford, Tim 28n, 76n, 143, 169 Gill, Stephen 47, 96, 126–7, 178n, 184n “Great Decade” 5–6, 53–4, 177, 186–8 Greenblatt, Stephen 134n, 143, 161–2, 196 Grenville, George 15–16, 20–21, 109 Hartman, Geoffrey 6, 28, 74, 80, 99, 155, 157, 159 Hazlitt, William 24, 27n, 30, 98–100, 177, 196 Hickey, Alison 6, 27, 76n, 102 history identity 139–48 literary 63–7 local 3–4, 11–12, 117–19, 122, 126, 165 maps and 105–6, 116–18, 119–23, 140–43 museums 149–52, 165, 169 imagination abstracting 101 as coercion 23 defined 23–9 domination 26–8 opposed to utility 164, 169, 175 threatened 39–41 imperial imagination 25, 27, 65–6 landscape 10–11, 70, 72–8, 80–81, 90, 97, 102 museum 152–4 vs. local 11, 112–17, 132–3 Janowicz, Anne 7–8, 28, 90, 109, 167n Johnston, Kenneth R. 6, 37n, 157n Kaiser, David Aram 5, 111, 151 Kant, Immanuel 9, 25, 39–41 Kendal and Windermere railway 27n, 149–50, 163–4, 171–2, 175–6 Knight, William Angus 177–8, 184n, 186 labor classification of 23, 58–62 and “Gipsies” 29–30 and landscape 143, 173 and mapping 78–9

and need for census 16–17 and sublime 40 in Thomson’s The Seasons 131 Lake District Defense Society (LDDS) 178, 181–2 Lamb, Charles 9, 53, 118 Levinson, Marjorie 150, 157–8 Liu, Alan 5, 27, 28, 30n, 53 local (see also history, memory, national identity) erosion of 122 mapping 80–81, 103–7 memory of 123, 126, 133, 140–48 opposed to nation 66, 110–23, 126–8, 132–3, 166–7 poetry 114–23, 125–48, 160 responsiveness to 108, 120, 136, 160, 169, 176 Westmoreland character 110–11, 118–21 Malthus, Robert 18–19 Manning, Peter 6, 118, 120, 157 mapping (see also Ordnance Survey) history and 105–6, 116–18, 119–23, 140–43 local survey 102–4 names 105–6, 116–20 national survey 79–80 and picturesque 106–7 memory, local 123, 126, 133, 140–48, 158–9 Milton, John 74, 76, 84, 114 Mudge, Colonel William 75–7, 79–81, 102–5 museum access to 152–5, 170–71 and citizenship 154–5, 158–63, 167–171 Dove Cottage 177 landscape as 155–69 origins of 151–2 and Romanticism 150–51 Wordsworth as 184–97 Napoleon (see also ambition, imperial) 10, 65, 70, 76–8, 80, 84–6, 91–2, 112, 151, 180, 192 National Gallery 11, 149, 170 national identity and counting 23, 55 and landscape 108–10, 151 and museums 178

Index and picturesque 163n, 164–76 responsiveness to local 108, 120, 136, 160, 169, 176 Wordsworth as basis of 180–81 National Trust 12, 176, 178, 182–3 nostalgia 90, 142, 177–8, 186, 190, 195–6 observation 16, 35–6 Ordnance Survey at Black Comb 75 local survey 103–8 origins of 79–80, 102–3 particular (see also abstraction) 3–10 in mapping 87, 102, 107, 111 opposed to abstraction 23, 80–81, 87–9, 98–9, 117, 134, 144, 156 Pater, Walter 184–6, 194–5 Pfau, Thomas 6, 53, 66, 71, 109, 154, 156–7 picturesque 37n, 118, 138 access to 71–2, 181 and mapping 107–8 and national identity 163n, 164–76 and preservation 181 Potter, Thomas 14–15 preservation (see also access) 6, 11–12 of landscape 118, 121, 126, 128, 134, 140–46, 166, 170–76 movement 177–8, 181–3 “Rock of Names” 179 of Wordsworth 184–96 prospect view (see also ambition) access to 71–2, 75 celebrated 72–5 in The Excursion 97–8, 100–102 failure of 75–8 rejection of 111–14 Rawnsley, H. D. 12, 178–82, 185, 195 Redfield, Marc 3, 6, 67, 87, 151 resonance 134n, 143, 161–2, 171, 182, 196 Rickman, John 19, 22 Robinson, H. C. 53, 61, 171 Roy, William 79, 102, 105 Scott, John 109, 155, 162 Simpson, David 5, 29–30, 34–5 Siskin, Clifford 27, 46, 53–4 Southey, Robert 19, 83, 88, 114 sublime 9, 14, 39–41, 72, 91, 97–101, 118, 173, 184

213

taste citizenship and 143, 151, 155, 162–70, 172–6, 184–5 created by poet 63–5 Thomson, James 71, 91, 129–32 Thornton, William 16–17, 21–2, 29, 43 Trigonometric Survey, see Ordnance Survey Wolfson, Susan 100, 113n Woodring, Carl 81, 92 Wordsworth Works: “Aerial Rock” 121 “After Visiting the Field of Waterloo” 160–63 “The Beggars” 38 “Cave of Staffa” 172 “Character of the Happy Warrior” 192 “Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake” 122–3 “Composed in Recollection of the Expedition of the French into Russia, February 1816” 91 “Dion” 191–2 “Elegiac Verses, February 1816” 92–3 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” 62–3 An Evening Walk 50–51 The Excursion 25, 27n, 44, 69, 73, 96–102, 108–9, 111, 129n, 138, 148, 165, 185–8 “Gipsies” 29–32 “Gordale” 116 Guide to the Lakes 163–76 “I watch, and long have watch’d with calm regret” 122 “Laodamia” 51–3, 191–2 “The Last of the Flock” 51 Letters on the Kendal and Windermere Railway 172–5 “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew Tree” 156 “Lines on the Expected Invasion, 1803” 192–3 “Malham Cove” 117–18 “Meditations on Easter Sunday” 121–2 “Michael” 51–3, 127, 156 “Occasioned by the Same Battle, February 1816” 90 “Ode, Composed in January 1816” 89–90, 108–9

214

Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation “Ode (Who rises on the banks of Seine)” 92 “On the Proposed Kendal and Windermere Railway” 175 Peter Bell 114–16, 118, 119, 121, 126, 160 “Preface” (1815) 23 The Prelude (1805) Book IX 40, Book XIII 26–7 “Prospectus to The Recluse” 117 “Resolution and Independence” 23–4, 28–9, 33 River Duddon sonnets 126–48 “September 1819” 193–4 “Siege of Vienna Raised by John Sobieski, February 1816” 90 “The Small Celandine” 33–4 “Sonnet on the Same Occasion, February 1816” 91–2 “The Sparrow’s Nest” 32

“Thanksgiving Ode” 81–9 “Tintern Abbey” 25, 156–60, 176, 185 “To the Daisy” 50 “To the Lady Fleming” 191 “To the Same (Second Ode to Lycoris)” 111–14, 147 “To the Utilitarians” 175 “View from the Top of Black Comb” 72–5, 90 The Waggoner 10, 69, 114, 118–21, 126, 160 “We Are Seven” 24 “Written with a Slate–pencil, on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb” 75–81 Wordsworth, Dorothy 25, 32–3, 35, 37n, 61, 71, 114, 119, 172 Wordsworth, Mary 61, 70–71, 125, 137 Wordsworth Society 177–8, 181, 183–4, 186