Romantic Localities: Europe Writes Place (The Enlightenment World)

ROMANTIC LOCALITIES: EUROPE WRITES PLACE

The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long Eighteenth Century

Series Editor: Series Co-Editors:

Advisory Editor:

Michael T. Davis Jack Fruchtman, Jr Iain McCalman Paul Pickering Hideo Tanaka

Titles in this Series 1 Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment David Worrall 2 The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 Michael Scrivener 3 Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism Carol Bolton 4 Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds) 5 Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism Jacqueline Labbe (ed.) 6 The Scottish People and the French Revolution Bob Harris 7 The English Deists: Studies in Early Enlightenment Wayne Hudson 8 Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds) 9 Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists Michelle Faubert

10 Liberating Medicine, 1720–1835 Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark (eds) 11 John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon Steve Poole (ed.) 12 The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century Jonathan Lamb 13 Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform Wayne Hudson 14 William Wickham, Master Spy: The Secret War against the French Revolution Michael Durey 15 The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx William Christie 17 The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783–1830 Michael R. Lynn 18 The Language of Whiggism: Liberty and Patriotism, 1802–1830 Kathryn Chittick

Forthcoming Titles William Godwin and the Theatre David O’Shaughnessy Ebenezer Hazard, Jeremy Belknap and the American Revolution Russell M. Lawson The Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland Gordon Pentland British Visions of America, 1775–1820: Republican Realities Emma Vincent Macleod

www.pickeringchatto.com/enlightenmentworld

ROMANTIC LOCALITIES: EUROPE WRITES PLACE

edited by Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2010

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com 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 prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2010 © Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe 2010 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Romantic localities: Europe writes place. – (The Enlightenment world) 1. European literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 2. European literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 3. Romanticism – Europe. 4. Landscape in literature. I. Series II. Bode, Christoph. III. Labbe, Jacqueline M., 1965– 809.9’145-dc22 ISBN-13: 9781848930025 e: 9781848930032

∞

This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in the United Kingdom at MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Contributors List of Figures Introduction – Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe 1 ‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape – Felicitas Menhard 2 At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality – Jacqueline Labbe 3 Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland – Kristin Ott 4 ‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9) – Tom Furniss 5 Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake –Nicola J. Watson 6 Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere – Polly Atkin 7 ‘O all pervading Album!’: Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry – Samantha Matthews 8 Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination – Stefanie Fricke 9 Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795) – Angela Wright 10 Henry Crabb Robinson’s Initiation into the ‘Mysteries of the New School’: A Romantic Journey – James Vigus 11 Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscans – Rolf Lessenich 12 The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama – Sophie Thomas 13 Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth’s ‘Magnificent Debt’ – J. Douglas Kneale

ix x xiv 1 15 25 39

51 67 81 99 117

131 145 157 169 185

viii

Romantic Localities

14 Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley’s Dim Crotonian Truths – Rosa Karl 15 ‘An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness’: Scott’s The Talisman – Silvia Mergenthal 16 Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: The Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster’s A Voyage Round the World – Christoph Bode

221

Notes Works Cited Index

237 281 301

197 209

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Quotations from Dora Wordsworth’s album and Rotha Quillinan’s album are used with kind permission of The Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere. The editors would like to thank Dr Stefanie Fricke and Dr Rochelle Sibley for their invaluable help in preparing the essays for publication and Mark Pollard of Pickering & Chatto for his unwavering support.

– ix –

CONTRIBUTORS

Polly Atkin is researching her doctoral thesis, entitled ‘A Place Re-Imagined: The Cultural, Literary and Spatial Construction of Dove Cottage, Grasmere’, a collaborative project undertaken between the departments of English and Sociology at Lancaster University, and The Wordsworth Trust, under the AHRC’s Landscape and Environment Scheme. She is also a published poet. Christoph Bode is Chair of Modern English Literature at LudwigMaximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich. His main fields of interest are Romanticism, Critical Theory, Travel Writing, and Narratology. Author and editor of more than twenty books, he has also published some seventy scholarly articles. His most recent publications in English are British and European Romanticism (2007, co-edited with Sebastian Domsch) and The Novel: An Introduction (2010, forthcoming). Bode is President of the German Society for English Romanticism (GER) and serves on the Advisory Board of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). In 2006 he received a Christensen Fellowship from St Catherine’s, Oxford, and in 2008 a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant for a major project on ‘Narrating Futures’. He is a Fellow of LMU’s Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) and a Corresponding Fellow of the English Association. Bode is also an occasional columnist for Times Higher Education – and he loves to read and travel. Stefanie Fricke is a lecturer in English Literature at Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität, Munich. She studied English, History and Japanese Studies at Munich and the University of St Andrews and completed her doctorate on ‘Antique Ruins and the Fear of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature’ (Memento Mori: Ruinen alter Hochkulturen und die Furcht vor dem eigenen Untergang in der englischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Trier: WVT, 2009). Her research focus is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and literature and history. Tom Furniss is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology (Cambridge:

–x–

Contributors

xi

Cambridge University Press, 1993) and of numerous articles on the politics and aesthetics of the Romantic period. His essay on ‘Plum-Pudding Stone and the Romantic Sublime’ marks the beginning of two new research projects on ‘Romantic geology’ and the Romantic ‘discovery of Scotland’. Rosa Karl studied in Bamberg and received her Ph.D. from the LMU in Munich in 2008 (supervisor Christoph Bode). She is now teaching at the FAU ErlangenNuremberg. She completed a thesis on Shelley’s poetics and their connection to ethics and agency based mainly on Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci and A Defence of Poetry. Since 2001 she has been a regular participant at the Wordsworth Summer Conference (in 2005–6 she taught a seminar there). J. Douglas Kneale is Professor and former Chair of English at the University of Western Ontario. Author of Monumental Writing: Aspects of Rhetoric in Wordsworth’s Poetry (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988) and Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,1999), and editor of The Mind in Creation: Essays on English Romantic Literature in Honour of Ross G. Woodman (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1992), his essays and reviews have appeared in PMLA, ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Ariel, English Studies in Canada, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism and Theory, Psychoanalytic Books, University of Toronto Quarterly, European Romantic Review, Criticism and elsewhere. Jacqueline Labbe is Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick, where she specializes in the poetry and fiction of the Romantic period. She is the author of Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), The Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence and the Uses of Romance, 1760–1830 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); the editor of Poems in The Works of Charlotte Smith (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), and History of British Women’s Writing, 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); and has published numerous articles on a variety of authors and themes of the Romantic and Victorian periods. She is currently working on a study of Smith, Wordsworth and the writing of Romanticism. Rolf Peter Lessenich is Professor Emeritus of English Literature in the Department of English, American and Celtic Studies of the University of Bonn. He received both his Ph.D. and his ‘Habilitation’ from the same university. His publications include Dichtungsgeschmack und althebräische Bibelpoesie im 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 1967), Elements of Pulpit Oratory in Eight-

xii

Romantic Localities

eenth-Century England 1660–1800 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1972), Lord Byron and the Nature of Man (Cologne: Böhlau, 1978), Aspects of English Preromanticism (Cologne: Böhlau, 1989). In preparation are Lord Byron and Romantic Disillusionism in Europe and Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School 1780–1830. His research interests are chiefly in literary history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. He is the author of around fifty periodical and festschrift essays, contributions to books, and dictionary articles on English and comparative literature. Samantha Matthews is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Poetical Remains: Poets’s Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and has wide-ranging interests in the literature, culture and book history of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Her current project is a cultural history of manuscript and printed albums and album verse in the long nineteenth century. Felicitas Menhard completed an accelerated BA degree in English at Wellesley College in 2001 before continuing her studies at the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität (LMU) in Munich, graduating with an M.A. in 2004. Her Ph.D. thesis, ‘Multiperspectivity and Unreliable Narration in the English Novel since 1800’, was published by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier in 2009. She is currently working at the LMU in the European Research Council project ‘Narrating Futures’. Silvia Mergenthal studied German and English at the universities of Erlangen, Germany; Austin, Texas; and St Andrews, Scotland. Since 1997 she has been a professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She has published five monographs and numerous articles. Her current research is indebted to the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies, which is reflected in her contribution to this volume. Kristin Ott gained her undergraduate (BA) degree at the University of Bonn in English Literature and Language and Philosophy, and followed this with an MLitt. in Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews. She is especially interested in the 1750s and notions of originality and creativity, as well as Scottish history and literature in general. Her thesis addresses the conceptions of originality and creativity in Macpherson’s poetical works and, to some extent, the Ossianic Collections, and offers a new approach to the study of the Scottish poetry of the 1750s. As part of her thesis she is preparing an edition of Macpherson’s first published poem The Highlander (1758). Sophie Thomas is Associate Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has published widely on Romantic literature and visual culture and

Contributors

xiii

is the author of Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2008). She is currently writing a book on ruins, fragmentary objects and collections in the Romantic period. James Vigus is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of English and American Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, a post funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Exzellenzinitiative). He is also Visiting Research Fellow of the Dr Williams Centre for Dissenting Studies, Queen Mary, University of London. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge and has taught English Literature and Philosophy at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. His publications include Platonic Coleridge (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), Coleridge’s Afterlives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008, co-edited with Jane Wright), and the critical edition Henry Crabb Robinson: Essays on Kant, Schelling and German Aesthetics (Leeds: Maney, 2010). Nicola J. Watson is currently Senior Lecturer at the Open University, having taught at Oxford, Harvard and elsewhere. A specialist in narrative, she is the author and editor of a number of books, including three on the Romantic period: Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1980–1825 (Oxford: University Press, 1994), At the Limits of Romanticism (co-edited with Mary Favret) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), and most recently The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). Forthcoming publications include an edited collection of essays, Literary Tourism ad Nineteenth-Century Culture and a sequel to The Literary Tourist, entitled Transatlantic Pilgrims, a project supported by the British Academy. Angela Wright is a Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. She has published widely on Gothic literature and its reception in the periodical press between 1764 and 1820. Her particular research interests include Anglo–French literary exchanges, women’s Gothic writing and translation during the Romantic period. She is the author of Gothic Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and has just completed a second book, entitled The Import of Terror: Britain, France and the Gothic, 1780–1820.

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Samuel Palmer, The Street of the Tombs, Pompeii (1837). Photo © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London [Museum No: P.28-1919] 173 Figure 2: View in the Model Room, from John Soane, Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields (London, 1835) (plate 38). By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum 174 Figure 3: Explanation of a View of the City of Pompeii, from The Panorama Strand Tracts 1814–31. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved (10349.ppp.20) 176

– xiv –

INTRODUCTION Christoph Bode and Jacqueline Labbe

Writing Place Romantic Localities explores the ways in which Romantic-period writers of varying nationalities responded to its languages, landscapes (geographical and metaphorical), and literatures. It addresses the ways in which geographies affected British and European Romantic writers ‘at home’: the South Downs, the Lakes, the Scottish Highlands, the Swiss and Italian Alps, Venice, Rome and Greece; but also Europe’s Others: the Orient, the South Seas. The current interest in the ‘transnational’ has focused new attention on the ways in which writers explore region and place in their work. More than simply providing a setting (whether cosily domestic and known, or exotically foreign and unknown), locality embeds within literary texts an exploration of identity and identities; it challenges readers with unexpected contrasts between ‘home’ and ‘away’; it allows authors to formulate a sense of self and subjectivity that both rests on and expands definitions of the known. Europeans were confronted, in the eighteenth century, with an idea of the global that expanded cultural understandings of the constitution of the civilized and the savage, and in the literature of the late eighteenth century poets and novelists create what might be called an aesthetics of exploration as they use locale to investigate ideas of self, other, home, the comprehensible, the incommensurable. The Romantic Period has long been associated with a special concentration on locale, with poets like Wordsworth and novelists like Scott seemingly singlehandedly recreating British locations as locales: places of interest and importance as places, and subsequently significant for their associations with their champions. And, as several essays in this volume show, such associative resonances continue to be worth studying, both for their historical value and for the continuing insights they provide into a national consciousness of the value of literature and its birthplaces. However, as this volume demonstrates, place itself,

–1–

2

Romantic Localities

as a concept, becomes of special interest in this period. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Europe shakes itself up and settles itself down into the map that is more or less recognizable today. Countries become nations, and nations take on firm, if persistently contested, borders. Nation-building, of course, does not complete its project at this point – Italy, for instance, is not yet Italy – and borders themselves prove to be somewhat organic entities, as the Napoleonic wars rupture and re-mark territorial boundaries. This in itself, however, underscores the centrality of place and environ in the period. Within the space of a few decades, Europe mutated from a collection of varied nation-states to a coherent number of nations, to an extended reflection of Napoleonic empire-building, and back to individual and discrete nations. Britain, muffled from such physical encroachments on its borders, found itself complicating its established locations of centre and periphery: Scotland was no longer simply North Britain, Ireland resisted its analogous position as West Britain. Acts of inclusion and enclosure forced Britons to think about the parameters of landscape and territory, even as their counterparts on the Continent used locale and place, both near and far, as templates with which to stabilize, disrupt and problematize identities. In an aesthetics of exploration, then, that grows from a cultural interest in, even preoccupation with, place, locality is both the endpoint and a means to an entirely different end. Writers explore place literally, through travels, habitation, emigration; they devise figurative geographies; they transform the one to the other. They do these things transnationally, meaning not only that migrations occur as ideas and texts as well as people cross borders, but also that there is a remarkable coalescence during the period around the notion that locale matters. Origin, destination, stopping points; home, exile, patriation; the familiar, the foreign, and who decides on such labels: the Europe of the Romantic period constantly journeys, continually arrives, consistently surveys, incessantly seeks out. What is particularly interesting, moreover, is the temporal flexibility of these movements. Linearity is more or less set aside. As authors travel and write about it, or write about others’ travel, or contemplate not travelling, or write about writing about place, or visit representations of place, or assert the primacy of one place over another through and because of writing about it, when this happens becomes a mark of creative intangibility. This collection demonstrates that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witness a new development in ideas of place and locale. Of course, as many studies have shown, changes and improvements to the technology of travel did a great deal to enable this: roads became more easily passable, and carriage springs more flexibly bouncy.1 Nascent colonial expansion did its part to open up to the cultural and creative imagination the plausibility of the foreign: an understanding of the international that did not feature dragons and creatures with their heads in their stomachs (which is not to say that misimaginings of the

Introduction

3

Other did not still occur, of course). More people travelled and came back; the Grand Tour made exposure to key sites in Europe and, latterly, the Middle East almost mandatory for the moneyed gentleman, who in turn imported souvenirs of his journeys and recreated aspects of foreign locales in his country house and its surrounding grounds. Place became about travel but it was also concerned with origin and destination, and about ways in which the local took on the tinge of the global. A central question for this collection asks whether, in writing place, European writers also create it? The Lake District displayed the same geography, for instance, after it was transformed into a noted locale as the home of Wordsworth and his Lake Poet contemporaries (this is only the most obvious example), but its cultural mapping had entirely changed; in other words, it became a place to go to rather than simply a place to live. And its distinct locations themselves took on the flavour of their literary residents, becoming literary locales. Once place becomes locale, is it forevermore mediated? Can one simply continue to live in Grasmere, maintain an existence entirely unaffected by this new mapping? Or does the recreation of a location into a locale also mean a kind of repeopling, residents becoming ‘locals’ to distinguish themselves from a new kind of visitor? Indeed, an aesthetics of exploration might militate that travel become tourism: that movement from one place to another must be accompanied by the exploratory gaze and a subsequent literary artifact. This in turn raises another issue central to the Romantic period: whether it is possible, after all, simply to write place: that is, reflect it accurately through travel narratives, capture some kind of essence or genius through poetry, even represent it matter-of-factly through sketching, painting or more monumental recreations such as panoramas. Even photographs maintain an artificial frame: so is the place that one gleans through literature and other art ever an authentic rendering of location? The essays in this collection suggest that the nature of real places is reconstituted once written (about): that writing place is different to merely describing it (as background or setting), and that perhaps it is the very fixity of geography that allows for the mobility of imaginative locale-building. The mutability of ideas about place, moreover, feeds into the aesthetic understanding of exploration. Place represented through writing changes according to genre, author and period (Mont Blanc, the Scottish Highlands, Tahiti). What remains constant in the period, however, is the concentration on actual locations, even if imaginatively conceived (Ossian’s Scotland, for instance). There is no loss of the pathetic fallacy, of course, and locale can still function as a representation of an emotional state, but nonetheless place as place remains key. The fact of Mont Blanc is essential: while mountains per se can connote the requisite grandeur, certain specific mountains provide pathways towards imaginative states of being as well. For this reason, exploration, like place, is not merely

4

Romantic Localities

literal, as writers chart an inner space that maps onto and arises from outer locale. They do so, interestingly, very physically: Romantic-period writers walk, stride, climb, delve, ride, sail and otherwise physically move about; rather than bemoaning their corporeal selves, they rely on solid flesh as enabling exploration. Even when the ultimate destination is an imagined or newly realized locale, their transport is in and of this world as well as that of dizzy rapture. This complex combination of types of place, space and conveyance provides the backdrop for the ideas discussed in this collection. If modes are aestheticized once they are examined as modes, then the explorations under examination here carry their practitioners beyond the boundaries ascribed to either literal, geographical place or imaginative, ecstatic space. Their concentration on locality is underpinned by explorations of mobility, mutability, sincerity and the real, and, as the essays in this volume show, their work questions what it means to wander, to stay put, and to move on; to be transported, mobile or mutable; and how place can lend its identity to an historical or mythical moment, even merging past and present, here and there.

The Temporality of Space When Isaac Newton postulated the existence of absolute space in his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica in 1687, this was necessary, as Albert Einstein explained in his foreword to Max Jammer’s classic account of the history of theories of space in physics, Concepts of Space, ‘to give the classical principle of inertia (and therewith the classical laws of motion) an exact meaning’.2 No doubt, the idea of an absolute, immutable space was strongly motivated by neo-platonic thought and it had an undeniable theological appeal as well: the numberless goings-on of daily life, the movements of bodies, heavenly and mundane, could all ultimately be referred to a never-changing frame that, constituent of all relative movements, was yet itself totally unaffected by these. But some sceptics remained unconvinced. Berkeley, Huygens and Leibniz came up with various objections, the most important of which was that the existence of absolute space (which for Newton was not just a theoretical construct, but an ontological reality) could never be verified by observation or experiment. The terrain was by no means easy, and the best minds of the eighteenth century found themselves grappling with the problem. For example, in the course of his lifetime Immanuel Kant held three different positions on the question: first he tried to reconcile Newton with Leibniz, though he clearly leaned to the latter’s relational point of view;3 he then fully endorsed Newton’s concepts of absolute space and absolute time;4 only to take up his own, very distinctive position in his final, critical phase: space and time are necessary Anschauungsformen, or intuitions, of human experience – we cannot experience anything but as in

Introduction

5

space-and-time, but space and time cannot be derived from experience, rather, they are necessary and unavoidable preconditions of human experience. The ‘real’ nature of time and space remains outside the scope of reason and experience; as intuition, space is no property of ‘things as such’.5 Interestingly enough, the unprecedented practical success of Newton’s mechanics (for which one didn’t need absolute space anyhow) let the fundamental objections against absolute space pale, until in the middle and towards the end of the nineteenth century mathematicians like Bernhard Riemann and physicists like Ernst Mach led a new attack upon what they regarded as merely a ‘metaphyscial concept’. Jammer summarizes Mach: The very idea of an absolute space, that is, of an agent that acts itself but cannot be acted upon, is, in his view, contrary to scientific reasoning. Space as an active force, both for translational inertia in rectilinear motion and for centrifugal forces in rotational motion, has to be eliminated from a system of mechanics.6

‘For me’, says Mach, ‘There is only relative motion’.7 In Jammer’s reading, Mach thereby opened up the way for the theory of relativity, in which mass, energy, motion, time and space are interrelated in such a way that space – far from being unaffected by what happens ‘in’ it – becomes itself a mutable, variable factor in an intricate field of forces. In Einstein’s summing up: ‘[T]he subsequent development of the problems, proceeding in a roundabout way which no one then could possibly foresee, has shown that the resistance of Leibniz and Huygens, intuitively well founded but supported by inadequate arguments, was actually justified’.8 This is not the time and place to engage with modern scientific concepts of space-time and with the idea of time as the fourth dimension, but it is an intriguing fact, we believe, and quite pertinent to the topic of Romantic localities and the writing of place, that the common conception of space (as opposed to philosophical and scientific theories of space) has always, or so it seems, ascribed an irreducible temporality to it, so that one could set up the bold thesis that, at least since the early modern age and in Western civilization, space has always been primarily imagined as having some temporal dimension. In direct contrast to Newton’s idea of absolute space, our imagination inadvertently peoples space with objects, motion and change – the space we experience is inevitably Newton’s ‘relative space’, it is the only kind of space that we know and have experience of. Now, to think of space and time as being related in some fundamental way does not necessarily imply that the relationship between these two entities is a symmetrical one. It is a culturally established practice to see time in terms of space: whether we think of the running sand of an hourglass, or of the moving hands of a clock or watch, or of the course of a lifetime or the running river of time – we always translate the passage of time into ‘movement in space’: that’s the way we

6

Romantic Localities

habitually think of time, and the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were clever in exploiting this spatial conception of time with its implied necessity and inevitability, as if historical developments followed natural laws. Prime examples are The Progress of Poesy by Thomas Gray (published 1757), James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790), Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812)9 or Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head’.10 Even most dictionary definitions of ‘time’ contain a spatial element, if only to illustrate ‘metaphorically’ how we imagine time – take, for example, this definition from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition: ‘time – a facet of human consciousness felt both in psychic and physical experience, and an aspect of the observed environment metaphorically describable as a one way flow providing, together with space, the matrix of events’.11 Curiously enough, it doesn’t seem to be quite so easy to define space in terms of time. Tellingly, the first sentence of the entry for ‘space’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica gives only instances of space, as if ‘space as such’ escaped definition, and time was only one aspect among others under which one could see space.12 It is true that in bygone days, to give an idea of distance one would say, for example, that to travel from A to B would be a three days’ ride on horseback, and astronomers measure immense distances in light-years. But apart from that, it seems to be difficult to ‘illustrate’ space with the passage of time, to imagine space as realized in time. One might think that not only for geologists at least the landscape of the Grand Canyon constituted a good example for space realized in time, but the more you think about it, the more you begin to wonder whether it’s not yet another example of time spatialized, rather than space expressed in terms of time. The temporalization of space we spoke of above (compare with note 9) may be a powerful ideological or subversive manœuvre, but it seems to be carried out against a general asymmetry in the perception of time and space: if it comes more naturally to see time in terms of space than space in terms of time, then space seems to be the slightly more ‘basic’ concept, to which time can be referred or reduced, whereas the opposite move requires more imaginative strength – and even then easily tilts over into its opposite. In his monumental Time and Western Man (1927), Wyndham Lewis raged against the predominant ‘time-mind’ of Western civilization with its cult of time and accused it of being forgetful of its opposite, i.e. space, with, or so he claimed, disastrous cultural and political consequences for man and society. To be forgetful of place (and everything correlated with it, like spirit, art, visual and plastic intelligence) means to be forgetful of what is basic – as we are often forgetful of what is simply taken for granted. But to go back to the claim that, maybe because for us space is somehow more basic than time, we, in a seemingly paradoxical way, find it hard to imagine any space that is not ‘always already’ permeated with temporality – since that is, after

Introduction

7

all, the way we imagine and experience time, as spatialized – so that any space we imagine is inevitably Newtonian ‘relative space’, or place: does it make sense to differentiate further between different kinds of temporalizations of space? It seems that at least two kinds of temporality of space can be distinguished, two forms in which temporality can be said to manifest itself in space: the first is when something occurs, something happens in a certain place – then we’re speaking of a concrete event; the other is that a concrete space, or place, is seen like a still shot or freeze of a particular moment in time, saturated with a specific past, full of semiotic and symbolical potential. It is true that some locations can be powerfully charged with meaning without having any concrete temporal associations: the threshold or gate, the way, the river, an island, a house – these are places that certainly can only exist in time, but their meaning doesn’t resonate with concrete historical ‘filling’. This is different from locations that lend themselves, in ideological space, to be seen as crystallizing points of specific historical times: say, the Athens of Pericles, Imperial Rome, the Rhine of the Middle Ages, revolutionary Paris, Victorian London. As their shadow, these specific space-time units are invariably followed by their counterparts: ideas of spaces that are imagined to be timeless and a-historical (and are, of course, anything but): the Alps and the pole regions, the Orient, the South Seas. This volume is about how Europe writes place and its other, how it imagines and mirrors itself in a series of written transversals, as the subject experiences itself in and moves through a space that can only be imagined as ‘relative’, as concrete place, as location and locality.

The Chronotope We still lack a concept that economically and elegantly encapsulates what we have here circumscribed as a concrete space-time unit that aspires to or has achieved a paradigmatic status – ‘historically charged meaningful place’, if you will. Michail Bakhtin’s chronotope is a likely candidate, one could say.13 Here is Bakhtin’s definition: ‘We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’.14 In the chronotope, time and space are inseparably connected,15 and the concrete way in which they are so fused in a fictional text is indicative of how that text conceives of its relationship to reality: ‘A literary work’s artistic unity in relationship to an actual reality is defined by its chronotope’.16 If that is so, then we can use typical chronotopoi to identify different types of ‘text-world-relationships’ in different kinds of novels in different epochs: for example, in classical antiquity, Bakhtin differentiates between three basic kinds of novels, depending on which kind of time-space unity they suggest or work with – these are ‘the adventure novel of ordeal’, ‘the adventure novel of everyday

8

Romantic Localities

life’, and ‘biography and autobiography’,17 although Bakhtin says that in classical antiquity we do not yet find the latter in a fully fledged form. As he goes on to analyse various significant chronotopoi – as, e.g., the chronotopoi of the chivalric novel or the picaresque novel or various idyllic chronotopes in the novel in general,18 two things stand out: in this 200-page essay Bakhtin focuses exclusively on fiction (and he insists categorically on the ontological difference between actual reality and reality as depicted in fiction)19 and does not investigate poetry or travel writing, although one can see that the concept of chronotope could easily be applied to these genres as well – wherever we find a significant space-time unity that can be read as expressive of a certain way of being-in-the-world, we can speak of a chronotope. Secondly, Bakhtin is mostly interested in the novel of classical antiquity and in pre-realist forms of the novel, all the way up to Rabelais (the topic of his doctoral dissertation), but he has next to nothing to say about the realist novel of the modern age, although one should think that it is here, where a supposedly realist representation moves closer to what is commonly conceived of as ‘reality’, that the concept of chronotope could really show its differentiating power. But be that as it may – also taking into account that we have meanwhile come to question ‘the unity of the work’, of which Bakhtin still speaks, as well as an ‘actual reality’, which he unquestioningly presupposes20 – chronotope is still a powerful instrument, we would argue, in the analysis of any text that conspicuously displays a specific ‘place-in-time’ as a paradigm for relating itself to the world ‘outside’. It can be such a powerful instrument for two distinct reasons: for one, it helps us to identify specific time-space ratios within a given chronotope, for, although Bakhtin declares (almost apodictically) that time is ‘the dominant principle in the chronotope’,21 the ratios do, in fact, vary, and they vary significantly: In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.22

In other words (and this idea is no longer a totally unfamiliar one), space becomes thematic to the degree that it is filled with time, and to the degree that it is mentioned at all, it becomes meaningful or symbolic. Once space is mentioned, it morphs into something that is symbolically charged; always silently assumed, it turns into something meaningful as soon as it is mentioned explicitly.23 The other reason why the concept of chronotope is so powerful and productive is that it has a reception-theory angle that allows us to identify historical layerings of chronotopes: for as the fictional world of a text becomes alive only

Introduction

9

in the interaction between text and reader,24 it becomes obvious that the way in which a particular text devises and conceives its relationship to the reader can itself be seen as a chronotope, so that texts in general can be seen as historically differentiated models of engaging with text and world alike. But since by the nature of things, this text–reader relationship is itself historically variable, we can read historical texts from a double perspective – read them from the point of view of today (inevitably so) and also see what kind of relationship to reality they suggested in their own day. To read texts with the instrument of the chronotope means to be aware of the fact that historically chronotopoi are layered upon each other or form entire series of chronotopes, so that, as these chronotopes are superimposed upon each other – and the most recent stratum or layer of sedimentation is always the one that we as readers add –each text in the history of its reception becomes a palimpsest. These series are like the track record of attempts at world-making.25 When we turn to Romantic localities, it is impossible not to register the striking and pronounced historicity of the chronotopoi of Romanticism itself, not to note the way they were assembled and constructed, used and functionalized. To give but one pertinent example: arguably Munich’s most Romantic landmark, the Englischer Garten is a unique and tellingly heterogeneous chronotope. Planned by Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell but realized under the supervision of the American advisor to the Bavarian Elector, Benjamin Thompson from Massachusetts (from 1792 on ‘Reichsgraf von Rumford’ or ‘Count Rumford’), the Englischer Garten was decreed to be open to the public in August 1789: a true people’s park – something unprecedented, because publicly accessible English gardens were then unheard of. (Munich’s Englischer Garten is still one of the world’s largest public parks, and it should be mentioned in passing that its construction was also a means to combat large-scale unemployment and juvenile crime and to give veterans something useful to do.) Considering that the concept of an English garden itself derives from oriental landscape gardening, it is intriguing, we believe, that from its very beginning (and following the example of Kew Gardens) the Englischer Garten was adorned with a Chinese pagoda, or Chinesischer Turm, and later with a Greek temple, or Monopteros (suggested in 1807, but completed only in 1836). Assembling heterogeneous chronotopoi, the Englischer Garten itself gives an example of how traditions are constructed by tapping into the semiotic reservoir of specific locations that either have (the Greek temple) or don’t seem to have (the Chinese pagoda) a historicity of their own – or that are transferred topoi from a different culture that itself has assembled chronotopes to construct a ‘new’ one, with a fake historicity – the English garden, for instance. To write place invariably means to be involved in a meaning construction that unavoidably designs space as filled with time, objects, motion and events, and as experienced by subjects, although inevitably the way to make

10

Romantic Localities

sense of it all, by marking out certain space-time units as meaningful and symbolically charged, is to take recourse to former chronotopoi, or attempts at worldmaking – if only to make it slightly different, to make it new.

Here and Now The essays in this collection, by a group of geographically diverse scholars, investigate poetry, fiction, travel narratives and historical and scientific texts. Essays examine versions of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, and issues of ‘now’ and ‘the past’. Stefanie Fricke’s ‘Into the Woods: Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest in the Romantic Imagination’ explores fascinating Romantic appropriations of the traditional chronotope (and heterotopia) of ‘Sherwood Forest in the Middle Ages’, as she can show that these appropriations evidently served different purposes and end in constructing a past, in modifying or subverting a tradition.26 In ‘“How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!”: Pedestrian Excursions into the Romantic Landscape’, Felicitas Menhard analyses the varying relationships between the mode of pedestrian travel and poetic explorations of the Romantic landscape. Looking at peripatetic texts by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, by way of contrast, Thomas Hardy, she examines discourses of movement, process and discovery and establishes significant parallels between a corporeal pedestrianism and a textual pedestrianism. Jacqueline Labbe also concentrates on the interplay between the corporeal and the textual. In ‘At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality’, she considers the mechanics and theoretics of writing and/or composing locality poems and argues that for Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith, the act of writing poetry, once literalized in titles, allows for an exploration of ‘a poetics of spatial and compositional geographies’. Tom Furniss’s essay must be one of the most intriguing in our collection: ‘“Plum-Pudding Stone” and the Romantic Sublime: The Landscape and Geology of the Trossachs in The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9)’ offers a brilliant case study in how the writing of place and locality even taps geological discourse and interestingly merges it with the discourse of the sublime and the picturesque to put a specific landscape on the national and ideological map. Placing the local landscape of the Trossachs at the epicentre of a virulent geological controversy, James Robertson simultaneously put his region at the epicentre of Romantic Scotland so that, in Furniss’s words, ‘the Romantic “discovery of Scotland” was intimately related to the geological “discovery of the earth”’ – an illuminating instance of how, by way of metonymy, geological ‘deep time’ was linked to ideas of pristine cultural conditions. Neatly illuminating the idea that writing place allows for multiple interpretations of that place, Kristin Ott and Nicola Watson show an alternative means of discovering Scotland. Ott introduces the notion of the literary tourist, for

Introduction

11

whom Scotland was meaningful not because of its geography but because of the way its geography was written by Macpherson and Burns. As Ott notes in ‘Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions: Eighteenth-Century Literary Tourism in Scotland’, ‘in Scotland tourism was book-based from the beginning’, while Watson discusses in ‘Readers of Romantic Locality: Tourists, Loch Katrine and The Lady of the Lake’ how a specific Scottish landscape feature, Loch Katrine, seemingly sprang into visible being as a result of Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. Both Ott and Watson explore the interface between the real and the fictive. For Ott, the plausibility of Ossian and the authenticity of Burns overwrite an earlier vision of Scotland as primitive and unpleasantly rugged, and effectively bury the landscape under reams of interpretation. However, for Watson, the interplay between text and space is time-specific: location becomes locale just at the moment that Scott’s poem was celebrated; with the loss of the visibility of the poem, so too Loch Katrine reduces to ‘a rather pretty, rather out-of-theway place’. As noted earlier in this introduction, in Britain Scotland is matched, probably, only by the Lake District as a distinctly Romantic locality. As Polly Atkin discusses in ‘Paradox Inn: Home and Passing Through at Grasmere’, the Wordsworth effect is perhaps even more pervasive than the idea of ‘Scottland’, and it centres on Grasmere and Dove Cottage. Atkin shows with aplomb that the paradox resident at this location was its simultaneous identity as a place to inhabit and a place to ‘pass through’. For Wordsworth, rootlessness was staved off, and homecoming fenced in, through residence in Dove Cottage, yet the underlying impermanence that besets the renter found play in his poems of the period with their features of loss, going away and belated return. How to make permanent one’s place in a locale, and the risks this brings, particularly for the women of the Lake Poets’ circle, is associated with the seemingly benign fashion for autographs in Samantha Matthews’s ‘“O all pervading ALBUM!” Place and Displacement in Romantic Albums and Album Poetry’. Matthews demonstrates the intriguing mixed identity of the album as a means to fix in time encounters and visits, and as an embodiment of a kind of repressed peripatetic desire. The album compresses geographical locale along with specimens of local flowers. In ‘Inspiration, Toleration and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795)’, Angela Wright roams further afield, investigating how Radcliffe uses the language and texts of ‘home’ – in this case, Shakespeare and England – not to point out the foreignness of her destinations but rather to defamiliarize the comforts of home. Cannily overturning the arguments that Radcliffe critiqued Europe through references to a superior Britain, Wright establishes that Radcliffe’s journey was as much away from assumptions of modern England’s preferability as it was towards a Europe in the process of remaking itself, partly (and surprisingly) in the image of a lost but mourned Shakespearian Eng-

12

Romantic Localities

land. The retrievability – or otherwise – of the lost past is also the subject of Sophie Thomas’s ‘The Location of Vacancy: Pompeii and the Panorama’. Locale becomes history when Pompeii is excavated and then recreated through popular panoramas in London. As Thomas shows, however, history is not always reassuringly past; the panorama focalizes the eerie hyper-reality of Pompeii, both there (visible, whole, available to touch), and always already on the verge of dissipating, a hollow, ‘vacant’ rendition of meaning. This Romantic locality threatens to collapse on itself. And, as Douglas Kneale argues in ‘Italy Visited and Revisited: Wordsworth’s “Magnificent Debt”’, sometimes it is only by romanticizing localities that such collapse can be avoided. Kneale reads Wordsworth’s poems about Italy as reflective of a desire to inhabit both his own past and present, and to import the significance of Milton to his future. Italy becomes a fertile locale, full of significance and fruitfulness. Kneale’s sensitive close reading illuminates how a poet whose own work made one locale Romantic finds in another a way to ground his Romantic identity. Rolf Lessenich’s ‘Italy as a Romantic Location in the Poetry of the Original English Della Cruscan’ offers a stunning tour de force in comparative literary analysis. Spanning one hundred years, Lessenich’s polymathic reading places the Della Cruscans in a wide historical and political context and can show that English views of Italy were at least as revealing about Italy as they were about the English poets ‘writing Italy’. James Vigus’s essay ‘Henry Crabb Robinson’s Initiation into “the Mysteries of the New School”: A Romantic Journey’ can, in a way, be linked both to Felicitas Menhard’s and Angela Wright’s contributions, because it is about the peripatetic exploration of space (this time foreign, as Robinson ‘walked through, stayed in, and commented on almost every Romantic locality in [Germany]’), but at the same time it is also about Robinson’s outstanding role as a go-between, a mediator of German philosophy and religious thought in Britain. Weaving the biographical into the philosophical and relating the latter to the topographical, Vigus can demonstrate that Robinson’s tour was also an attempt at creating a space, a ‘Society in Society’, in which philosophical understanding, artistic beauty and religious toleration could flourish and in which an idea of friendship could be realized that conformed to the highest ideals of both religion and philosophy. With Rosa Karl’s ‘Hollow Skies, Hupaithric Temples and Pythagoreans: Shelley’s Dim Crotonian Truths’ we more fully move into imaginary spaces, although the whole drift of this collection is to prove time and again, in concrete instances, that in writing place and space the point is exactly that the line between the real and the imaginary cannot be drawn, as the real is fed into the imaginary and transformed into a chronotope in its own right. In Karl’s powerful close reading of P. B. Shelley’s Laon and Cythna, these transformational processes themselves become thematic and the creation of utopian and dystopian places and spaces in the text is read as an allegory of the ways of the

Introduction

13

imagination and as a model of a text–reader relationship that opens up these spaces. Arguably, no region outside Europe has been more thoroughly shown to be a site for European projections and fantasies than the Orient. In her essay ‘“An Imaginary Line Drawn through Waste and Wilderness”: Scott’s The Talisman’ Silvia Mergenthal does not deny this – rather, she questions the established reading of Scott’s novel as an unduly simplistic one and asks whether it does, in fact, ‘obsessively, even aggressively’ ‘re-inscribe binary oppositions in the face of their inherent instabilities, or whether it accepts, perhaps even embraces, unpredictability and uncertainty’. Her essay is a strong demonstration that especially when alterity is put to domestic uses and when imaginary spaces are used to stage and dramatize differences and ambiguities, things aren’t always that clear-cut and it is sometimes the other that returns in the guise of its opposite, and the projecting civilization’s ‘own’ that is being altered. Finally, Christoph Bode’s piece on Georg Forster’s A Voyage Round the World is about how Forster engaged with and powerfully redefined Europe’s discourse on the South Seas, but like Forster’s monumental account of Captain Cook’s second voyage it is also an exploration of how an aesthetics and an epistemology of ‘viewpoint-in-motion’ radically undercuts established assumptions and seeming certainties: embracing subjectivism as a necessary condition of knowledge and experience, Forster’s Voyage is read as the greatest Romantic account of a voyage of exploration we have, because it conspicuously displays the fact that writing place invariably records a subjective scanning and a transversal crossing of ‘relative space’, thereby doubling as an imaginary or real movement of the subject in space in the dynamics of the text. Therefore, to encounter Romantic localities leaves no one unchanged. May the perusal of this volume offer the same experience to the reader.

1 ‘HOW BURSTS THE LANDSCAPE ON MY SIGHT!’: PEDESTRIAN EXCURSIONS INTO THE ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE Felicitas Menhard

Romantic poets are constantly on their feet. Few literary periods are as crowded with walkers as the Romantic era; the walk may even be defined as a ‘quintessentially … Romantic image’.1 Beside the fact that pedestrianism was an important and widespread means of travelling at the time, it also constituted a vital factor in the physical and intellectual well-being of nearly all major Romantic writers. William Hazlitt’s joy in walking, for example, is instantly recognizable in his impulsive ‘Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner – and then to thinking!’2 John Keats, too, was an avid walker; he toured the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands in the summer of 1818. In a letter to Benjamin Haydon, he described the trip as ‘a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue – that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest expence’.3 The age’s most prominent walkers, however, are undeniably Wordsworth and Coleridge. In ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, Hazlitt records the different peripatetic habits that accompanied their writing of verse; whereas Coleridge ‘liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood’, Wordsworth preferred ‘walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption’.4 Wordsworth can indeed be regarded as the foremost pedestrian poet of the Romantic age; Thomas De Quincey once noted that the poet probably walked a 100,000 miles in his lifetime,5 and indeed, the theme of walking can hardly be separated from Wordsworth’s creative potential or sense of self. As John Elder argues, ‘Wordsworth’s understandings of history, of poetry, and finally of the integrity of his own life may all be related to … depictions of himself walking’.6

– 15 –

16

Romantic Localities

This essay explores the relationships between the mode of pedestrian travel and poetic explorations of the Romantic landscape. By reading the act of walking both as a physical performance and as an intellectual and aesthetic entry into experience, I shall examine discourses of movement, process and discovery, establishing parallels between a corporeal and a textual pedestrianism. In the poems considered, including texts by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the post-Romantic Thomas Hardy, very different types of walkers and motivations for walking are presented; going on foot always contains, however, the promising potential of a discovery about the self that is shaped by varying and dynamic perspectives on the landscape. The act of walking is semantically polyvalent, as it comprises numerous different physical, sensual and aesthetic implications. Of course, one simple distinction serves to divide walkers into two principal groups: those who walk for pleasure and those who walk out of necessity. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the ratio between these two groups was strongly inclined towards the latter, as ‘only the poorest people walked … roads’ while everyone who could afford it ‘hired others – sedan chairmen – to do their walking for them’.7 Walking in the Romantic age constituted a necessary, though demanding and often strenuous form of travelling for the lowest of social orders, while today, ‘walking is a form of therapy’.8 By contemporary cultural standards, taking a walk signifies taking a break, escaping the routine, letting the soul breathe for a few minutes, or even hours. However, this pleasurable pedestrianism is something that the Romantic poetical subject engages in as well. The speaker in Wordsworth’s ‘Discharged Soldier’, for instance, starts out on his leisurely stroll purely for diversion, as walking grants him a ‘restoration like the calm of sleep / But sweeter far’,9 and nowhere can the delight in and enjoyment of going by foot be seen more clearly than in the journals and poems of Dorothy Wordsworth, whose late immobility rendered her ‘A prisoner on [her] pillowed couch’10 and clearly caused her a substantial amount of anguish and longing to ‘wander, free as air’ again.11 What, then, characterizes walking as a physical and spiritual experience? The most obvious facts can easily be stated: walking is defined as a relatively continuous motion through a landscape or any kind of other rural or urban space. In this sense, it is literally a very ‘down-to-earth’ activity; indeed, it appears that ‘[t]here is nothing more concrete than putting one foot in front of the other’.12 Walking is furthermore defined as an intensely physical act and can be, depending on the route and on the walker, more or less demanding on the body. Going on foot is also a comparatively slow movement; this becomes especially important when considering the perspective of the walker. The views of pedestrians are often panoramic, roaming over wide spaces, allowing the eye to travel freely at its own pace.13 Coleridge’s ‘This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison’ (1797) functionalizes the dichotomy between this all-encompassing vista of the walkers:

‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’

17

Now, my friends emerge Beneath the wide wide heaven – and view again The many-steepled tract magnificent Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,

and the speaker’s restricted visual position inside the bower: Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage; and I watched Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see The shadow of the leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine!14

to create two wholly different realms of aesthetic experience. The ‘zooming-in’ on the leaf, to use cinematographic terms, is positioned in direct contrast to the panoramic, bird’s-eye perspective of the pedestrians. Moreover, the views offered to peripatetic travellers are continuously in motion, changing in a doubled sense: changing themselves by incessantly shifting their aim and focus, but also changing the walker, who, by receiving these heterogeneous external impressions, experiences an internal transformation generated by the traces which the landscape leaves within him. ‘The mobile gaze of the pedestrian traveller’15 thus inevitably leads to intellectual, emotional or spiritual movement and expansion inside the walker. Along these lines, we can make a first connection between walking and thinking – or walking and writing, for that matter. This connection is certainly longstanding: in the Platonic Dialogues, philosophical discussions were led while walking, and Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, first published in 1782, establishes explicit associations between the mental act of dreaming (or thinking) and the physical act of walking.16 Both the creative and the pedestrian act are characterized by impulses of motion and process, by the fusion of external impressions with internal knowledge. Niccolini describes walking as an indefinite movement through space, which is not far removed from the act of writing.17 Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ (1804) could be taken as a direct poetological comment on these correlations, as its speaker not only wanders ‘lonely as a cloud’, but, more importantly, transfers the impressions accumulated on this walk to an intellectual reproduction of reality, to the ‘inward eye’.18 It is exactly this transmission which famously constitutes the ultimate aesthetic value of the daffodils. Undeniably, a conversion arises in both the walker and the writer, which modifies their view of and approach to reality and its parameters. Moreover, the discourse of discovery is intrinsic to going on foot, as well as to thinking and/or writing. Like the walker, who travels in search of both outward impressions and self-discovery, the writer discovers ideas and thoughts through and within the process of composition.

18

Romantic Localities

These links between the peripatetic and the intellectual act are perhaps most vividly illustrated in William Blake’s ‘Mental Traveller’ (c. 1803). In this text, the speaker embarks on an imaginative journey which, interestingly enough, also contains an actual pedestrian experience. In the first stanza, the mental traveller distinctly disconnects his intellectual path from ‘cold earth-wanderers’.19 His objective is the reproduction of an endless series of images that all relate to the same circular story. In the dreamlike landscape of the traveller, the cyclical nature of life ceaselessly repeats itself in a most unnatural reversal: as a male babe is born, the old woman tending to him grows younger in age as he matures. Then, as the man ages further, there springs ‘from the fire of the hearth / A little female babe’,20 and the ‘aged host’21 is driven out into nature to seek a young maiden. As he carries the female infant with him, he reverses in age and rejuvenates until ‘he becomes a wayward babe / And she a weeping woman old’22 – the cycle is complete and prepared to repeat itself. In typically Blakeian imagery that is fundamentally dialectical, the transgression of the mental traveller into a realm where the most basic human laws are turned upside down is rendered as a struggle between the male and the female, the young and the old, but also as a search for the possibility of permanence and closure through wandering ‘on the desert wild’.23 Here, the pedestrian experience is a highly disorienting and threatening one: when the cottage fades from the sight of the aged walker, travelling through the landscape becomes a sort of nightmare without a definite focal point. Both visual and physical laws are unhinged in radical shifts of perspective: For the eye altering, alters all; The senses roll themselves in fear And the flat earth becomes a ball; The stars, sun, moon – all shrink away, A desert vast without a bound; And nothing left to eat or drink, And a dark desert all around.24

As both the speaker and the child ‘wander in terror and dismay’,25 it becomes clear that this poem presents walking as a process which has, like its structure, no definite beginning or end; it is a movement that is just as aimless and fluid as the constant vacillation of birth and death in the ‘land of men and women too’.26 The ‘Old Man Travelling’ in Wordsworth’s short peripatetic sketch of 1797 is, as can be expected, somewhat more firmly grounded in the sphere of reality. Still, walking seems to be a largely intellectually determined activity for him as well: he is ‘A man who does not move with pain, but moves / With thought’.27 This pedestrian engages in a slow, meditative, introspective kind of motion and appears to be almost wholly numb to external impressions or influences outside of his own consciousness. His visual, sensual and emotional contact with the

‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’

19

landscape he traverses is very restricted, as he is ‘insensibly subdued to settled quiet’.28 He notices little of his surroundings, and just as little notice is taken of him: even ‘the little hedgerow birds’ that he meets along his way ‘regard him not’.29 This non-human perspective at the opening of the poem serves to distance the walker from our gaze and interpretative efforts even further: why is he walking, and where to? Only towards the end of the text, in conversation with the speaker, does his pedestrian purpose become frighteningly apparent: he is going to pay a last visit to his dying son who has been wounded as a marine soldier. These last lines, which possibly were, as Duncan Wu points out in his annotation of the poem, a late addition to the rest of the sketch and were removed from versions published after 1815, generate a radical shift in perspective and tone. The act of walking is thus transformed from an initial exercise in tranquillity and meditative motion to a tragically purposeful necessity. In ‘The Discharged Soldier’ (1798), Wordsworth paints a more emphatic picture of pedestrianism: ‘I love to walk / Along the public way’,30 declares the speaker at the beginning, echoing Wordsworth’s own assertion that ‘I love a public road: few sights there are / That please me more’ in the 1805 version of the Prelude.31 This poem, like ‘Old Man Travelling’, centres on a meeting of two figures along the road. Walking is certainly not always an individual activity; it also has the potential of bringing people together on paths that converge and divide. Yet, at the outset of the ‘Discharged Soldier’, the walker appears to be wholly solitary: he engages in unhurried, leisurely and almost dream-like wandering through the darkness of night, at a time at which the path before him assumes A character of deeper quietness Than pathless solitudes.32

Unlike the pedestrian of the previous text, this traveller is highly cognizant of the sensual and visual impressions enveloping him – impressions which are themselves subject to dream-like and illusory optical transformations: the ‘road’s watery surface’, shimmering and gleaming in the moonlight, seems to turn into another stream Stealing with silent lapse to join the brook That murmured in the valley.33

In this environment, the walker becomes a solitary, microscopic figure within a landscape that is framed by ‘the dark blue vault, and universe of stars’, and he experiences an almost tangible feeling of isolation that is ‘heard and felt’.34 This, then, is the culmination of solitude and self-focus in a text that portrays going on foot as bodily and mental rejuvenation. Despite this sense of stillness and calmness pervading the text, the course of the speaker keeps progressing ‘step by

20

Romantic Localities

step’35 and abruptly shifts its perspective: after a ‘sudden turning of the road’,36 another figure appears in the distance. This stranger represents an image of the lonely traveller that is quite different from the solitary speaker. He appears Forlorn and desolate, a man cut off From all his kind, and more than half detached From his own nature.37

This ‘unnaturalness’ and lifelessness of the soldier is emphasized quite distinctly by the speaker, who is most disturbed by the stasis and ‘fearful steadiness’38 of the figure. The lack of movement and progress characterizing the soldier stands in direct contrast to the slow but constant advance of the speaker on his nightly walk. The stranger seems completely cut-off from experience and is unable to successfully express himself to the outside world, as he ‘sends forth a murmuring voice of dead complaint’.39 As speaker and soldier begin walking together, they move out of the realm of otherworldly, dreamy seclusion that the first part of the poem evokes and into a very harsh narrative ‘reality’ of ‘war, and battle and … pestilence’.40 Their shared journey on foot becomes a search for shelter. On a more abstract level, it also becomes an attempt at intellectualizing what is beyond comprehension. The soldier seems strangely removed from his own past experiences, as if ‘Remembering the importance of his theme / But feeling it no longer’,41 and ultimately, there can only be speechlessness between these walkers. Their contact comes to an end when the exhausted soldier is taken in by a workman, and the two part in an odd silence. The connection between speaker and stranger has only been accidental and superficial, temporarily bringing two paths together that must naturally diverge again. The walking companions in Wordsworth’s ‘Stepping Westward’ (1805) are bound to each other much more intimately by their situation of being ‘In a strange land, and far from home’.42 This sense of a close connection between the two pedestrians, who together brace themselves against an unfamiliar, empty and harsh landscape, is reinforced by the encounter with the female figure: she grants them a sense of security and support, thus counteracting the alienation felt by the walkers as they cross the lonely scenery. The question-and-response structure of the first line already establishes a union between the walkers and the woman. Her voice has a physical effect on the speaker – much as his contact with the ground he walks on is decidedly physical. The power of her phrase ‘What you are stepping westward?’43 is not heard, but ‘felt’,44 in the same way he feels the ‘dewy ground’ beneath his feet to be ‘dark and cold’.45 In contrast to this earthly sensitivity, the poem progresses to open itself up to a kind of transcendental experience, as, for the walkers, ‘stepping westward seemed to be / A kind of heavenly destiny’.46 The focus of the pedestrian switches over the course of the poem from looking down at the earth to gazing at the sky. The sky seems to be, as Jef-

‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’

21

frey Robinson notes in his reading of the poem, ‘growing more substantial than the earth upon which he [i.e., the speaker] walks’.47 Walking is transformed into a spiritual endeavour that carries the walker through a realm without boundaries or restrictions: in the last line of the poem, he perceives himself to be on an ‘endless way’.48 This demonstrates once again the close association between walking and the imaginative act, which can transport the pedestrian far beyond the limits of his actual physical experience. In contrast to this transcendental mode of walking, the pedestrian in Coleridge’s ‘The Picture, or The Lover’s Resolution’ (1802) engages in decidedly physical contact with the spatial environment he passes through. Here, walking turns into an almost violent encounter with nature, as the speaker, ‘with blind foot / Crushing the purple whorts’,49 acts as a destructive and invasive presence within the landscape. His persistent, hasty and aimless movement ‘Through weeds and thorns, and matted underwood’50 clearly correlates to the speaker’s search for imaginative freedom, which he accomplishes by immersing himself completely in ‘this tangle wild of bush and brake’.51 Walking hence presents the necessary precondition for shifting his attention to internal thoughts and feelings. He removes himself further and further from ‘the step of man’ and enters ‘an invisible world’,52 which allows him to perform his imaginative encounter with his muse. This dichotomy between external and internal landscapes, between movement and stasis, is closely related to the alternating mental states of the speaker. As Jarvis observes, his ‘skeptical phases take the form of close encounters with sensuous nature, whereas the reascendancy of the master-passion is marked by moments of arrested motion at which contemplation can loiter’.53 The pedestrian act is thus the prerequisite for the imaginative act, as the walker is searching for ever ‘deeper shades’ and ‘lonelier glooms’54 to submerge himself in remembrances of his love, waiting for ‘the fragments of dim lovely forms’55 to reappear before his inner eye. Fantasy and reality become indistinguishably intertwined as the traveller constantly seems to be one step behind the ‘real’ maiden and must be satisfied only with secondary proof of her existence. The most tangible trace of her is the drawing she has left behind in the woods. This peripatetic text, in which walking and thinking are inextricably connected and interdependent, thus serves as an allegory about love, self-discovery, poetic creativity and reading. This connection between physical and imaginative journeying is even more pronounced in Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison’ (1797). Here, we are confronted with a secondhand account of walking, as the speaker, bound to his home because of an accident that disables him from walking, follows his friends on a walk by force of his imagination alone. Paradoxically, this is one of Coleridge’s finest peripatetic texts – even though its speaker remains completely motionless. The processes of walking and discovery are rendered in such an intense and lively fashion that the speaker is ‘glad / as I myself were

22

Romantic Localities

there’.56 Particularly the spectacular views of the landscape, already mentioned at the beginning of this essay, serve to create an account of travelling on foot that becomes a decidedly spiritual act. The friends are seen gazing round On the wide landscape … till all doth seem Less gross than bodily, and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence.57

This experience is reconstructed in the imagination of the speaker, who creates a re-enactment of the walk. Thus, the walk effortlessly takes on other perspectives and transcends the restrictive bower to (re-)duplicate the pedestrian motion. This necessarily cursory and brief overview of lyrical walkers and their experiences closes with an outlook on Thomas Hardy, whose work features arguably the most widely-varied collection of pedestrian travellers after the Romantic period. Many of Hardy’s major novels commence with a solitary character walking across a vast landscape, and a significant part of his poetry concerns itself with the peripatetic act. Hardy’s walkers are characterized by loneliness and social alienation, and are surrounded by an environment that is often hostile. In ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’ (1909), even the ballad stanza form reflects the seemingly endless, toilsome and monotonous pace of the walkers: From Wynyard’s Gap the livelong day, The livelong day, We beat afoot the northward way We had travelled times before. The sun-blaze burning on our backs, Our shoulders sticking to our packs, By fosseway, fields, and turnpike tracks, We skirted sad Sedge-Moor.58

These pedestrians are not walking for pleasure. The satisfying and often spiritually productive journeying in the poems considered before makes room for wandering that takes place out of bare necessity: The pregnant trampwoman walks to escape moral and judicial repercussions from society, tragically separating herself even more from civilization by causing the death of her lover. In an even more extreme form of isolation, the ‘Dead Man Walking’ (1909) in the poem of the same title is completely removed from humanity, as he is but a shape that stands here A pulseless mould, A pale past picture, screening Ashes gone cold.59

‘How Bursts the Landscape on my Sight!’

23

Paradoxically, the walker in this poem is frozen into a sort of lifeless still life, a ‘corpse-thing’60 that lacks all sense of physical or spiritual motion. On the threshold of modernity, it seems that peripatetic movement is subjected to disruptive and alienating forces that sever the connection between walking and individual progress – a connection that is at the very heart of Romantic pedestrianism.

2 AT THE INTERSECTION OF ARTIFICE AND REALITY Jacqueline Labbe

Poetry writes place, and it writes about place, descriptively; the country house poem, the loco-descriptive effusion rely on evoking locale in order to achieve the poem’s end, whether political, personal, artistic or pictorial, for instance. We read Romantic nature poetry, by contrast, as conveying a Nature that is knowable, rather than simply visible. Alive to the history of poetics, the poet (usually male, and usually Wordsworth) takes up the genre of the loco-descriptive but uses the poem not merely to explore topography; rather, he develops something new. Focusing on the inscription poem, Geoffrey Hartman notes that Wordsworth moved it from a place-bound notation to an evocation of ‘the poet in the grip of what he feels and sees’, ‘contain[ed] … in the act of writing’.1 Thus, in knowing Nature, we know the poet, and vice-versa. The poem becomes topography; the poet, in exercising his physical mobility, facilitates an imaginative peripatetics that institutes travelling and writing as a joined activity, and resting and reading as perhaps its necessary corollary.2 The freedom of movement that characterizes Wordsworth’s poetry, in contrast to, for instance, the anxious homeboundedness of so much of Coleridge’s work, has for many readers established him as the poet of place, and also of pace. In this essay, however, I would like to complicate the consensus that Wordsworth inaugurates a Romantic condition that Jonathan Bate describes as being ‘always aware of himself in relation to the landscape, [and] conscious of his own acts of naming’ by bringing Charlotte Smith into the picture.3 There is something about being embedded in a landscape through poetry that underlies the work of both poets; as they create a poetics of Nature, both poets also think about what it means to write and compose such poetry. They situate their personae at the intersection of artifice and reality: real places, real spaces that in the loco-descriptive operate as scenery but which, for Smith and Wordsworth, act as the machinery for a poetics of spatial and compositional – 25 –

26

Romantic Localities

geographies, where not only the poet’s locale matters, but also how the poet conveys or makes the poem itself. Smith and Wordsworth take the emphasis on describing place that is the point of the loco-descriptive and transfer it to the poet who inhabits the poem – a speaker who is written to suggest, strongly, an identification with the author her- or himself. This is achieved partly through the consistent, although not constant, use of the first-person; settings that evoke the past, or a possible past, of the author; a titular suggestion that someone (the poet?) has physically inscribed the poem. But Smith and Wordsworth understand that geography can be internal as well as external: they use place to access what might be called inner space, meaning not simply the ‘imagination’ or creativity but the topography of the poet. Geography can also be time-dependent as well as place-dependent: the ‘when’ as significant as the ‘where’. It is embodied as real, an actual place, and this very actualizing creates a further layer of imagined engagement with space and place. The poet is the locale; the poet is in the locale. Thus, place is concrete, a location where something happened, and a metaphor, where its realm is enlarged. For Smith and Wordsworth, locale becomes poetic even as poetry becomes localized. More than any other poets of their generation, Smith and Wordsworth attach their poetry to place and suggest that, somehow, the production of poetry is place-dependent. Mark J. Bruhn describes a ‘sense of incommensurateness between our factual being and our fictional role-playing’ and argues that Wordsworth uses place to explore a new form of the bounded sublime; where earlier poets like Gray and Thomson allowed for ‘any number of orientations’ in their representations of place, Wordsworth displays an ‘insistent proximity’ which focuses his poems right here. 4 And it is from the ‘right here’ that we are afforded ‘sublime transportation’ as ‘Wordsworth stretches deictic pointing beyond the limits of space-time and into the imaginative sublime’.5 Bruhn’s examples are ‘Yew Tree’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’, and his point important, especially if Smith’s sonnet ‘Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex’ is considered. Literally underpinned by an exact place deixis in the form of a note (‘Middleton is a village on the margin of the sea, in Sussex …’), the poem moves from life-in-death (waves tear bones from their graves) to death-in-life (the speaker is dead to peace), a transition from the ‘right here’ to the imaginative sublime that suggests where Bruhn might have taken his argument if his examples had not jumped from Thomson straight to Wordsworth. Smith’s poem also fuses the geographical with the compositional – it is, by title, written – which brings into focus the link within these poems between the speaker and the writer, the composed and the real, the abstracted and the embodied. Smith’s repeated use of ‘written’ in her sonnets’ titles finds its analogue in Wordsworth’s contributions to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth’s subsequent

At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality

27

turn to ‘composed’ in many of his 1802 sonnets raises the question of the connotative difference of the terms.6 For both poets, it is evidently important that they locate not only the action of their poems but also their physical creation, and this has to do with their explorations of the relationship between poet – more properly, speaker – and place. ‘Nature, solitude and the imagination are … geographical concerns’, notes Michael Wiley; they grow out of and because of place.7 Smith and Wordsworth transform the description of place into a mapping of the act of poeticizing place. Franco Moretti has shown to great effect that ‘geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history “happens”, but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth … [A] literary geography … may indicate the study of space in literature; or else, of literature in space’.8 Moretti’s concentration on the novel occludes the significant fact that, for Smith and Wordsworth, these are not ‘two very different things’,9 but, rather, mutually dependent aspects of their locale poetry. The spaces they poeticize (geographical place and creative, imaginative space) are contingent on the poems that are written and composed specifically here and now. The temporal suspension is, perhaps, what links them; what Andrew Bennett calls ‘a unique impossibility’ enables this fruitful paradox. As Bennett notes, ‘“written” or the equivalent in the title typically both asserts the contemporaneity of the act of writing and displaces that act to an historical past, to a prior moment of writing’.10 By locating the moment and place of the poem’s beginning (or completion), Smith and Wordsworth merge place and space, creating a new geography that is always there and always already lost, thoroughly mapped and yet, in its poetical state, impossible to find. Although Bennett distinguishes between Wordsworth’s use of the words ‘written’ and ‘composed’ in his inscription poems, he does not explore their differing resultant landscapes.11 But it is an important distinction, all the more so since Smith, in all her work, ‘composes’ only one poem (Sonnet XLII, ‘Composed during a walk on the Downs, in November 1787’), while Wordsworth places most of his ‘written’ poems in the Lyrical Ballads, turning to ‘composition’ mainly post1800. This suggests that ‘writing’ and ‘composing’ are not interchangeable for the poets; they fulfil different effective functions. There is a further distinction made by Smith, in that some of her poems are ‘supposed to have been written’, which opens an additional space to explore. If a poem is ‘written’, who does this? Does a ‘composed’ poem have a necessarily physical shape; is it space more than place? If the act of writing is ‘supposed’, has it actually happened? And how do such questions mesh with the undoubted production of poetry – the words on the page that we read? What, in other words, are Smith and Wordsworth doing when they ‘write’ and/or ‘compose’? In fact, where are they? As Bennett also notes, ‘writing’ is an ‘act’,12 which seems to require an agent as well as certain supplies: paper or some surface, a writing implement. The agent

28

Romantic Localities

is probably still, even if only momentarily (writing while moving is inconvenient at best): sitting, reclining, standing. By contrast, ‘composing’ can take place at any time and any place; it requires no materials and no advance preparation. It can be ‘spontaneous’ or at least have that appearance;13 it can be spoken or purely internal. It does not presuppose the production of a concrete something, where ‘writing’ leaves something behind, an object that has been inscribed. And yet, ‘composing’ leads the reader to the process of putting or pulling something together; it implies an architecture, a system of planning, that belies its apparent spontaneity. Where ‘composing’ is the process, ‘composed’ implies completion: something now exists, something now takes up space: something can now be plotted. Shadowing composition’s free style, then, is an expectation of finality: the ‘composed’ is an object, a kind of embodied imaginary, a mapped internal landscape or geography. An aspect of the poet’s mind and imagination has now been placed.14 There is a similar slipperiness to ‘written’. Bennett argues that the ‘final impossibility’ of the inscription poem is ‘the fact that the poem is not written when it is said to have been written’ and that we, the readers, can’t be there, in the place and space wherein the poem is asserted to have been written, in Geoffrey Hartman’s words, ‘“before our eyes”’.15 But this seems predicated on a supposition that there is a real speaker called Wordsworth (for Bennett) who has really written a poem – or rather, can’t have, and thus the entire scene can only be a ‘fiction of inscription’.16 However, as the immaterial act of composition yields a materialized something, so too the written maps an unexpected space. Its status as agent-led, tool-dependent, locale-bound opens possibilities rather than leading inexorably to the impossible. In other words, again, who writes? The ‘written’ gestures towards the real: a real space, a real place, an actual date, a plotted experience. In the case of the ‘written’, as practised by Smith and Wordsworth, this leads not to the impossible but to art: artifice, artfulness. Locale becomes location, or setting; inscription becomes the scripted. Writing as a creative, physical act is also a feint: one does not need to be the, or indeed a, poet to write, although ultimately a poet is required to clarify the difference. ‘Composed’ and ‘written’, then, each occupy more space than they seem to. The one is invisible yet noticeable; the other is physical yet corporeally indeterminate. When attached to locale, they map both place and space, allowing the emergence of a poetics of geography. When, where, what and how: the locality poem creates a kind of nature preserve within its lines, writing and composing the two places Wiley calls the ‘unrealized world’ and the ‘real one’.17 Topographically precise and compositionally located, this kind of poem serves to enact its own origin. If we consider the scene that is suggested by a poem ‘supposed to be written’, with its simultaneous ‘real’ and ‘unrealized’, then the act of imagination that produces a poem is itself plotted, made into a place where something has

At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality

29

happened while also not-happening. ‘Supposed to be written’, in effect, describes both the ‘composed’ and the ‘written’: the clash between the concrete (or real) and the insubstantial (or imagined) finds play in ‘supposed’. The system of composing and writing, and its reliance on a place and time of creation, coordinates artifice and reality, with the poet acting as mapmaker. By anchoring their poems in a version of reality with titles like ‘Lines composed …’ or ‘Supposed to be written …’, then, Smith and Wordsworth in the first instance link the imaginative process of composition with the mechanical process of writing: the ‘spontaneous overflow’ so famously ‘recollected in tranquillity’. The fiction of actuality thus created links the eighteenth-century loco-descriptive with a Romantic emphasis on the individual creative mind. But this does not recognize the deeper artifice both poets explore. By insisting on the reality of composition and dictation they also promote the reality of the poems’ speakers: that is, if the lines are ‘written September 1791, during a remarkable thunder storm, in which the moon was perfectly clear, while the tempest gathered in various directions near the earth’, then they are by inference the result of the speaker’s experience. The details offered in the title serve to ground both poem and poet. And yet this poem, for instance, lacks the clearest sign of an actual speaker: there is no ‘I’. Smith thus lingers at the intersection of artifice and reality: the speaker is both there in the storm and not-there in the poem. Similarly, when Wordsworth offers ‘lines written at a small distance from my house, and sent by my little boy to the person to whom they are addressed’, the very mundanity of the title assures its readers of the poem’s actuality, encouraging us to believe in ‘Edward’, for instance. But Wordsworth’s familiar manipulations of his past and present in his poetry mean that for him, as well, some of the poetry most seemingly ‘real’ questions its own reality. In examining some of their poems in which the moment of writing is fixed by place, date or both, we can see that for Smith and Wordsworth, locality performs multiple functions: literalized as in some ways responsible for the coming-into-being of the poem, but also figuring the move away from reality that so many of the poems reflect. And in turn reality itself fractures: is that what really happened ‘in Germany, on one of the coldest days of the century’? Was this really ‘written in Bristol in the summer of 1794’? What is gained by this geographical and temporal placement – why focus on the scene of writing or composition at all? It is striking how many of Smith’s poems are located by place and/or time in the title. Of course, what many consider her most mature poem, Beachy Head, is entirely taken up by its locale, past and present, while The Emigrants sets its two Books precisely by date and location to meaningful effect: a morning that is neither bright nor a new dawn in Book I, but is rather a ‘Wintry Morn, [where] the struggling light / Throws a faint gleam upon the troubled waves’; a spring afternoon where ‘the early leaves … fear capricious winds’ and the flowers are ‘timid’

30

Romantic Localities

as the country settles into the ‘horrors [of ] War’. Fully one-quarter of her Elegiac Sonnets (23 of 92), however, are also locality poems, while another four of the ‘other poems’ of this collection are set by place and date, as are two of the ‘other poems’ in the Beachy Head volume. Nine of the sonnets are set by both place and date, nine by place alone, and five by date alone. Altogether, eleven of her poems name their place and date of composition in the title, thirteen offer the place only, and five go by date. Of the dates used, Smith consistently settles on what might be seen as months of transition, spring or autumn; of the fourteen that provide a date, only four fall in different seasons (three summers, one winter). Predominantly, October and November, April and May locate these poems. Further, of the places noted, most are isolated: either uninhabited countryside, or churchyards, or seashores. The major exception is the group of poems written at Brighthelmstone in November 1792, a specificity that also characterizes Book I of The Emigrants, although in that poem the town itself is merely a backdrop for its dramatic cliffs. For Smith, writing rather than composition is key. In her one ‘composed’ poem, Smith presents her poem as having arisen from ‘a walk on the Downs, in November 1787’. Specific to time and place, the poem is also specifically a composition in a way most of Smith’s sonnets are not: it follows the Spenserian rhyme scheme, its imagery plotted onto a poetical map often characterized as the hardest to master.18 The poem is heavily reliant on a poetical, rather than a topographical, locale; its Elizabethan structure is clothed with a Classical dress and invocations of the past that mirror the ‘ruins of the year’ of line 2. ‘Falling leaves and wither’d fern’ are complemented by the ‘shrieking night-jar’ that, a note tells us, ‘is supposed by the peasants to portend misfortune’. The poem’s ending references to ‘Syren Hope’ and a promethean ‘vulture Care – that feeds upon the heart’ belie the token mention of the ‘revolving seasons’ and ‘propitious Spring’. Predicated upon the past, in both structure and imagery, this poem is thoroughly composed: it adheres to its system with the finality of a completed thought. And, being composed rather than written, it seems to exist in the realm of thought until read, until it becomes a poem in a book. Smith plays with notions of composition’s ephemerality in her note to the poem, which not only functions as a kind of anchor to the page, but which also introduces a note of scientific pragmatism that is at odds with the literary character of the sonnet: the ‘shrieking night-jar’ which acts in the poem as a portent transforms in the note to a thing: ‘As I have never seen [this bird] dead, I know not to what species it belongs’. The poet who can walk and compose, lost in poetical musings on death and pain, nonetheless makes sure we know that she will not speculate as to species. The bird, then, both thing and image, signals its author’s composure; the poem is as composed as is possible, tied to its literary landmarks, with a speaker who signals her lack of interest in flights of fancy.

At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality

31

Every other locality poem is either ‘written’ or ‘supposed to be written’. And they are intensely local, by which I mean that Smith uses as her settings places that seemingly function as versions of home. It is not always rural: for every Farm Wood and Arun riverbank there is a Brighton, a Bristol, a Weymouth, an Exmouth – real locations in which Smith has lived. But instead of conveying a sense of belonging and security, they poeticize the dissolution of home: Farm Wood belongs to lost ‘dear days’ (Sonnet XXXI, l. 13), Bristol’s healing waters have no effect on the ‘palsied Fancy’, ‘balmy’ Exmouth is the site for ‘the vigil of the wretched’, the resort of Weymouth is ‘black and gloomy’ in winter.19 Every place that is written, and that sees the poet writing, serves only to signal its own impossibility as a location available to the poet; either imagination, or hope, or joy, or life is stymied. The most desirable location of all, Smith’s childhood home of Bignor Park, features in her final sonnet, Sonnet XCII, but its presence only reaffirms that for the speaker, there is ‘no happy home’.20 One of the few summer poems, this sonnet reflects the ‘written’ poems’ inability to capture the expected nuances of their locations: although set in summer, the poem is invaded by the same ‘leaden vapours’, ‘dark shadows’ and ‘gathering clouds’ of the sonnets’ autumn.21 The ‘Bignor Park in Sussex’ that so markedly announced Smith’s provenance on the title page of the first editions of the sonnets now finally proves to be out of reach: ‘nor for me/ Return those rosy hours which here I used to see!’.22 In being ‘written at’, these poems use the local and the known as springboards for a journey into locations wherein the permanence of writing is used to suggest transience, ephemerality and loss. As noted above, the dates are almost all transitional: months marking seasonal turns, creating a liminal aesthetics and a border tonality to the geographies she specifies. So, for instance, the three sonnets specifically set in October (XII, XXXII and LXXXVII) and the one that could be (XLVI: autumn 1788) poeticize kinds of edges: a ‘solitary seat’ ‘on some rude fragment of the rocky shore’, ‘the banks of the Arun’, the ‘walks obscured’ by decay,23 or a ‘faded’, ‘dejected’, ‘blast[ed]’ stalled Autumn of life without hope of returning Spring. In writing these poems, the poet writes states of mind that arise directly from setting: the pathetic fallacy operates in reverse, since instead of Nature reflecting human moods, it seems that the mood of the poem, and the act of writing it down, proceed from atmosphere and location. And although this group of October poems includes a body, a somebody to write them, that figure is not always an ‘I’, easily associated with the poet. Hence Sonnet XII links its speaking I with a shipwrecked, drowning mariner. Sonnet XXXII pairs its ‘I’ with a ‘shadowy phantom pale’.24 Sonnet XLVI substitutes ‘the musing wanderer’ for an ‘I’.25 The late Sonnet LXXXVII allows itself a writer, but it is one of the few dated poems to lack a year: ‘Written in October’, it could be any October. It functions as a tone poem, encapsulating the waste of an autumn that brings not harvest and

32

Romantic Localities

plenty but ‘stubble sere’ and a ‘half-leafless wood’.26 Writing a poem, then, does not lead to the production of an artefact so much as the enactment of a selfhood who is in the process of, essentially, decomposing. The permanence of the written artfully overturns itself and creates something always on the point of fading away. Where the autumn poems emphasize decay and dissolution rather than fruition and completion, the two poems ‘written’ in spring (XXXI: ‘Written in Farm Wood, South Downs, in May 1784’ and LIV: ‘The Sleeping Woodman. Written in April 1790’) allow for the returning vitality and life of the season, even if neither, unsurprisingly, can be felt or internalized by the speaker: ‘Ah! what to me can those dear days restore, / When scenes could charm that now I taste no more!’.27 But the poems share a writerly image that indicates a function of the written arising entirely from its scribal condition: a ‘thoughtless’, ‘unthinking’ hind, whose taxing springtime labour directly signifies his existence as a body rather than a mind.28 The speaker, of course, is all mind, envious of the ‘respite’ enjoyed by the sleeping woodman (LIV) and the shepherd (XXXI). And yet sleep carries with it a condition of mindlessness, and for the speaker, writing these two poems engages the self who is a writer, for whom the mind and the imagination demonstrate new shoots of life. Remembering how Smith’s ‘composed’ sonnet conveyed a fully formed sense of itself as a composition, these two springtime writings take the speaker-writer in unexpected directions. Sonnet XXXI features one of Smith’s elaborately irregular rhyme schemes – abab baab cdcdee – mapped onto a stanzaic structure that entirely departs from a sonnet’s: sestet-sestet-couplet. Sonnet LIV is laid out as a quatrain-quatrain-sestet, with a rhyme scheme that invokes both the Petrarchan and Shakespearian forms: abab cddc dedeff. Using poetic convention as a seedbed, the writer of these sonnets works carefully through form, which suggests a kind of new growth more appropriate to springtime than the poems’ tone and imagery allow, but which also emphasizes their status as written down, worked out, pieces of poetry. Location in time – the temporal geography of the sonnets – creates a locale wherein the written is concretized and enlarged. As is so common in her sonnets, Smith uses form to query the limits of form, but when she does this in poems that also announce their status as written (down), she moves from merely setting scenes to mapping a new geography of poetry. The state of writing in these sonnets encourages a sense of the reality of the imaginary, which extends beyond the locale-poems to embed a physicality of place as fundamental to the poetry. Indeed, occasionally a poem creates a specificity entirely to anchor its narrative in reality, as when the titular note to the non-specific ‘Elegy’ literalizes its locale of a graveyard:

At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality

33

This elegy is written on the supposition that an indigent young woman had been addressed by the son of a wealthy yeoman, who resenting his attachment, had driven him from home, and compelled him to have recourse for subsistence to the occupation of a pilot, in which, in attempting to save a vessel in distress, he perished. The father dying, a tomb is supposed to be erected to his memory in the churchyard mentioned in Sonnet the 44th [‘Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex’]. And while a tempest is gathering, the unfortunate young woman comes thither; and courting the same death as had robbed her of her lover, she awaits its violence, and is at length overwhelmed by the waves.29

Sonnet the 44th, a gloomy, gothicized poem, in turn has its actuality reinforced by a note: Middleton is a village on the margin of the sea, in Sussex, containing only two or three houses. There were formerly several acres of ground between its small church and the sea, which now, by its continual encroachments, approaches within a few feet of this half-ruined and humble edifice. The wall, which once surrounded the churchyard, is entirely swept away, many of the graves broken up, and the remains of bodies interred washed into the sea; whence human bones are found among the sand and shingles on the shore.30

So we know where we are, but we also see how close we are to dissolution: in ‘Elegy’ the protagonist allows herself to be swept away by the waves, and in Sonnet XLIV the location itself is being claimed by the sea. The decomposition exemplified by the uncovered bones enacts the undermining of the poem’s desire to place itself, for if we turn to the real landscape written of by Smith, the village of Middleton-on-Sea, we learn that despite the apocalyptic tone of the poem, the locale itself still survives, although the glebe, or area of land belonging to the benefice, has been steadily eaten away by the waves. The location, in other words, is there and not-there, just as the poem is fixed – ‘written’ – and in flux, or ‘shrinking’ as it succumbs to the waves. In this light, it is significant that this poem locates itself by place only, and lacks a date; thus the graveyard is suspended at the point of disappearance, but never quite goes. Do these poems act to fix a sense of place, or to destabilize their own actualities? Certainly the churchyard at Middleton seems to function as simultaneously real and imaginary. The factual tone of the note is complemented by the melodrama of a poem which ‘breaks the silent Sabbath of the grave!’, where ‘with shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore / Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave’, and whose speaker is ‘doom’d – by life’s long storm opprest, / To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest’.31 The speaker’s quickstep into metaphor substantiates the poem’s theatricality while also functioning as another form of dissolution. Similarly, one of the most specific of the sonnets, Sonnet LIX, ‘written September 1791, during a remarkable thunder storm, in which the moon was perfectly clear, while the tempest gathered in various directions near the

34

Romantic Localities

earth’, rejects its own physicality by failing to include an agent to do the writing; as noted above, this poem functions without an ‘I’; the closest it gets is the mention of a ‘spirit conscious of superior worth’,32 who only enters after eight lines of disembodied observation of the storm. The poem seemingly thus writes itself, morphing into being almost as a consequence of the storm, while the ‘spirit’ does battle with another metaphorical tempest, ‘the tumult of the troubled earth’.33 It seems that, for Smith, locality can encourage both an absorption of place and a turn towards disintegration, but if we return briefly to two poems most close to home, literally, an interesting reversal occurs. In Sonnet XXXI, ‘Written in Farm Wood, South Downs, in May 1784’, the corporeal figure of the ‘thoughtless’ hind is also rendered as an ‘unconscious spirit’ – that is, insubstantial – while the speaker laments the loss of ‘those dear days … when scenes could charm that now I taste no more!’:34 only a body with a tongue can ‘taste’. And in Sonnet XCII, ‘Written at Bignor Park in Sussex, in August, 1799’, the speaker describes how ‘visions bright and warm / With which even here my sanguine youth begun, / … are obscured for ever!’.35 Obscured vision imply eyes with which to see. As much as the speaker represents ‘mind’ to the labourer’s ‘body’, s/he is still a writer with a physique: ears and eyes and a working brain. Smith’s locality poems do more than simply place a speaker or date a composition. They also encourage an exploration of what it means to insert ‘reality’ into a work of the imagination; they create a landscape wherein poetry is actualized even if the idea of a speaker is not. Locality poems emphasize a sense of a real person writing about real feelings, ideas or things. Smith seems to find it more interesting or fruitful to flirt with the autobiographical as a feint, to set a ‘real’ scene only to decompose it, and to see how far the ‘actual’ can be stretched before it becomes unrealized. Wordsworth, as Smith’s most meaningful poetic ally, has had the benefit of much scholarly investigation of his use of place and time, from ‘Tintern Abbey’ (or the lack of it) through the ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ through London, Calais and Yarrows both visited and unvisited. Likewise, his use of the autobiographical and his sometimes significant departures from fact have been well documented. So observing that Wordsworth makes extensive use of localities of place and date is not in itself new. But in conjunction with Smith certain interesting congruences arise. In poems up to 1807, just after Smith’s death, Wordsworth also sets most of his dated poems in spring or autumn: other than the famous sonnets dated August 1802 we see March, September, October and November. Like Smith, Wordsworth uses specificity to explore the idea of a selfhood rendered subordinate to a place or a date, or a speaker overtaken by the contents of his own poem. His geographies, like hers, are temporal as well as locational. Wordsworth, too, both ‘writes’ and ‘composes’ poems, but he demonstrates an interest in the composed that suggests that, for him, composition is a distinctly different act from writing. Almost all of his ‘written’ poems appear in

At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality

35

Lyrical Ballads, while most of his ‘composed’ poems come later, in the burst of writing leading up to 1807.36 If ‘composition’ lends itself more to a sense of the imaginative and the ‘spontaneous’, as Bennett describes it, then by shifting from the ‘written’ – ostensibly physical, tool-bound and placed – to the ‘composed’ signals as well as a shift in the imaginative process, a move towards a kind of creative unmooring: a map without beacons, in effect. And yet, when Wordsworth appends a specific date, August or September 1802 for instance, it is almost always to a ‘composed’ poem; the ‘written’ poems may emphasize something on which they have been inscribed, as Bennett notices (a slate tablet, a stone), but they are almost always vague in terms of time and place. Wordsworth, then, complicates both styles of recording poetry as much as Smith does. One of the most fully charted temporal geographies is, of course, the late summer of 1802, which is sometimes ‘composed’ and sometimes allowed simply to be (i.e. ‘September 1802’). These are also, of course, among the most clearly autobiographical of Wordsworth’s short poems. If the act of composing is to put something together, then we might see one such composition to be the poet himself, arranging and mapping his response to and understanding of his belated return to France. Wordsworth composes these poems only to unsettle them; the uncertainty and anxiety they express mirrors Smith’s, as does Wordsworth’s use of rhyme scheme and internal structure to suggest discomposure. In ‘Composed by the Sea-Side, near Calais, August 1802’, the declamatory style and patriotic tone imply a need to compose the poem’s voice through the poem itself. The marginalized position – ‘by the Sea-side’ – and the distracting not-thereness of the poet recall Smith, yet someone inhabits the poem and claims the evening star as ‘my Country’s emblem’.37 The poem works to unsettle its speaker from its location, first through its concentration on a distant, sinking star, then through its awkward detachment of the pronoun ‘I’ in line twelve from its physical place in line fourteen: ‘I, with many a fear / For my dear Country, many heartfelt sighs, / Among Men who do not love her linger here’.38 The poem’s rhyme scheme unfolds serenely enough, only to jump modes in line nine: abbaabbacdcede. Two tercets (cdc ede) might combine to a sestet, allowing the poem to be mostly Petrarchan, but punctuation and the flow of ideas create a 6/5/4 declension, the apparent extra line gained by a caesura in line six. The poem’s artfulness overlays its artifice, since for all its apparent candour the poem leaves out the most necessary of autobiographical questions: why? ‘Why’ Wordsworth is in France emerges from factual knowledge of the man; why the speaker is there is occluded by the poem’s bombast. Locality, here, blocks our access to the poem – we remain on the periphery. The temporal specificity of ‘To a Friend, Composed near Calais, On the Road Leading to Ardres, August 7th, 1802’ and ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 2, 1802’ follow the unmapping of the seaside near Calais at

36

Romantic Localities

similar compositional levels. ‘To a Friend’ mixes reminiscence of past happiness with evocations of present trauma but departs radically from its Smithian set-up in the last two lines. The poem is steadily composed: a Petrarchan opening is reflected by two quatrains that blend easily to an octave, while the sestet is only slightly broken, by punctuation, into tercets. Although the speaker troubles his poem when he labels ‘citizen’ ‘a hollow word, / As if a dead Man spake it!’, he then leaps from ‘despair’ to the statement that ‘I fell [it] not: happy am I as a Bird: / Fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair’.39 The poem hangs between joy and sorrow, life and death, then and now, even as its composition takes place en route from Calais, ‘on the road leading to Ardres’. In ‘Westminster Bridge’, the speaker creates a stasis through composition: the city he maps exists only in its poetically depopulated state. It is resolutely unreal, despite its mappable setting; it posits a naturalized urban topography where ‘ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie / Open unto the fields, and to the sky’.40 Unlike ‘Calais’ and ‘To a Friend’, this poem regularizes its outlandish content through rhyme scheme and structure: abbaabbacdcdcd is upheld by a clear octave/sestet. And yet the place of composition, a bridge, implies a suspension between two points, which here could be read as reality and fiction, or artifice: Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!41

The enjambment of line six, quoted above, suggest that ships, etc, lie; the affirmation of line eleven as easily refers to what has not happened, what has not been seen or felt. This poem, so securely composed, plots, like Smith’s Sonnet XLII, a geography of poetic destabilization through composition. If we compare the contemporaneous ‘Written in London, September, 1802’, one of the few postLyrical Ballads ‘written’ poems, what is striking is that the act of writing, here, involves an overwriting: the poem is too full of punctuation, with every sentence broken down into multiple subclauses. Its final sentence, in lines nine to fourteen, is practically impossible to parse: … Rapine, avarice, expence, This is idolatry; and these we adore: Plain living and high thinking are no more: The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws.42

The poem may be ‘written’, but it does not appear to have been read.

At the Intersection of Artifice and Reality

37

The ‘composed’ does not guarantee a purity of imaginative expression, then, and the ‘written’ may unwrite itself. Wordsworth follows Smith in this complex poetical terrain, with the real and the artificial, the placed and the unplaced, in fruitful competition. For instance, in ‘Written in Germany, on one of the coldest days of the Century’, the poem hints at Gothic excess while also, in its subtitle, settling itself thoroughly within the realm of the real: ‘I must apprise the Reader that the stoves in North Germany generally have the impression of a galloping Horse upon them, this being part of the Brunswick Arms’. Not only is this poem ‘written’, it also expects a ‘Reader’; and the movement from the sublime cold of the temperature to the ordinariness of the heat source suggests a speaker for whom hyperbole is a familiar form of expression. The conversational opening – ‘A fig for your languages, German and Norse, / Let me have the song of the Kettle’ – draws the speaker away from the foreign and unfamiliar to the known and comforting, while the poem’s concentration on a freezing fly who, in its disorientation (‘like a traveller bemaz’d’),43 stands in for, albeit temporarily, the speaker, particularizes the poem even further. The poem draws from its locale a sense of actuality compromised, as noted, by the Gothic tinge, but more than that it undermines its own reality by the contrast it draws between the lonely and isolated fly and the speaker’s opportunity to ‘draw warmth from the cheek of my Love, / As blest and as glad in this desolate gloom, / As if green summer grass were the floor of my room, / And woodbines were hanging above’.44 This turn towards the romantic pastoral is also a turn towards the rurally isolated, a shift in genre from Gothic sublime to the beautifully familiar. The poem plays a variety of tricks, then, with the idea of the ‘real’, not the least of which is autobiographical misdirection: although in Germany with his beloved sister, the poem’s gesture is towards a romantic love, and its association of love with green summer grass and hanging woodbines places it firmly in the realm of the imagined, if not the clichéd. I would suggest that this indicates Wordsworth’s development, in this poem, of a speaker for whom the ‘real’ functions merely as fodder for a display of creative limitation; the poem’s actuality is overtaken by nods towards an imaginary alternative reality – the world of the fly, ‘the cheek of my Love’45 – that breaks down both generically and autobiographically. Since ‘the real’ does not guarantee accuracy, it is not surprising that place, for Wordsworth as for Smith before him, does not guarantee an agent. ‘Written in March, while resting on the bridge at the foot of Brother’s Water’, despite the geographical and temporal specificity of the title, lacks a speaker either to write or to rest. Proceeding as a series of impressions or observations – ‘The cock is crowing, / The stream is flowing, / The small birds twitter, / The lake doth glitter, / The green field sleeps in the sun!’46 – the poem, like Sonnet LIX, seems to compose itself, to arise from the landscape it processes. Without an ‘I’ to substantiate a speaker, but written from the point of view of some kind of entity, the

38

Romantic Localities

poem’s reality relies on an absent presence. Where the presence in Sonnet LIX could be said to be spectral, given the darkness of the poem, here we seem to have a fantasy speaker, a playful spirit or sprite of the new Spring. The acts of writing and resting, contingent on an actual human presence, are incongruous in a poem that does little more than list, not what it sees, but what is seen. For Wordsworth, this seems to be a way to give prominence to the setting, to allow it, rather than the viewer, to dominate the poem, but if this is the case in ‘Written in March’ then the question arises of the force of the title. Someone has both written and rested. As with Smith, the actuality of the poem fixes it as permanent while the poem itself destabilizes the reality thus offered. An intersection is usually marked by a signpost; we make a decision and take our road. As the Scarecrow says in the film version of The Wizard of Oz, ‘That way is a very nice way … It’s pleasant down that way, too’. But the Scarecrow also allows for a third way that obviates signposts: ‘Of course, people do go both ways!’ Smith and Wordsworth, in their locality poems, go both ways. They play with the act of creating poetry, inviting readers to associate the speaker with the writer, the author with the compositor. They chart known localities: childhood haunts, homes past and present. The explore landscapes. But they also institute a complex mapping of experience, thought, place and art. They write compositions, and they compose their writing. The result is a poetics of geography that resembles more a globe than a map. Both Smith and Wordsworth treat landscape and locale familiarly, writing what they know from vantage points clearly, biographically marked. In writing and composing, however, they also find points of departure for a poet who sees an intersection as offering more than a one-way choice. The places they write are thus neither real nor artificial, and both.

3 SUBLIME LANDSCAPES AND ANCIENT TRADITIONS: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERARY TOURISM IN SCOTLAND Kristin Ott

In 1801, John Stoddart observed in Remarks on Local Scenery and Manners in Scotland that the man of learning consults his books, to find what the ancients have said upon such or such a country, and how much the moderns have added or fallen short of their information. The man of science inquires how far discovery and system have gone with regard to its products, its manufactures, &c. The picturesque traveller reviews the scenes of nature and the rules of art, with which he is already acquainted, and in imagination adapts to this standard the scenery, which he expects to behold.1

However, as we will see in this essay, at the same time as picturesque tourism became a popular pastime, a different kind of tourist began to explore the world: the literary traveller, who visits places because of their associations with specific texts or authors. Although tourism had been popular in other parts of Britain and on the continent from the late seventeenth century, Scotland became a tourist destination only from the middle of the eighteenth century. Within a short space of time, it received a stream of visitors similar to that of Wales or the Lake District. While literary tourism, with the notable exception of Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, was mainly a nineteenth-century addition in the rest of Britain, in Scotland tourism was book-based from the beginning: the tourists not only read other, earlier tours to prepare themselves for their journey, but also literary texts both from and about the regions they were hoping to explore, and purposefully visited sites associated with these. In the south literary tourism tended to focus on authors, but in Scotland it began as an exploration of space authenticated through literature. The popularity of the Ossianic Collections and the debate about their authenticity ensured that the first vogue of literary tourists went in search of the poems, rather than their ‘translator’, James Macpherson,

– 39 –

40

Romantic Localities

despite the fact that many of them believed him to be their author. Because the Ossianic Collections are not set in any one, traceable spot, the whole of the Highlands gradually became Ossianised, with tourists discovering Ossianic scenes everywhere they went. Burns’s rural Scots poetry, concentrated in his native Dumfriesshire and containing a number of identifiable locations, gave tourists the chance to explore both man and works within a contained physical space. Although, much like the Ossianic Highlands, Burns’s Dumfriesshire became part of the tourists’ itinerary because of its associations with the poet’s poetry, by the time of his death his person began to overshadow his works. Both literary phenomena shaped Scottish identity in a way that is unparalleled before Scotland became Scott-land, and the Lady of the Lake turned the Trossachs from a picturesque into a literary destination. This essay examines the relationship between the real and the fictive in the perception of Scotland. It examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tours to show how the idea of Scotland is based on literary manifestations of the land, from Macpherson’s Ossianic Collections to Burns’s Scots Lowland poetry. It first explores how Scotland was viewed by earlier travellers before the advent of tourism, and before the Ossianic Collections would change the perception of Scotland forever. Then it examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tourists’ journals and travelogues, outlining the influence of Macpherson and Burns and considering how their works changed the perception of Scotland. Lastly it shows how these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary elements of the perception of Scotland are still present in modern criticism on Scottish identity, both literary and historical. Studies on eighteenth-century Scotland, including its literature, tend to view it in relation to a number of dichotomies: Jacobite and Whig, Highland and Lowland, Scots and English, enlightened and primitive. Yet these are not terribly useful for our purposes; they do not as much shape the perception of Scotland as, in fact, serve to highlight existing stereotypes. Instead this essay examines what drew the tourists: their preoccupation with myth and tradition. The ‘myth of the Highlands’ and the ‘invention of tradition’ took hold in public opinion in the 1750s and 60s. Previous scholarship has used these concepts interchangeably, overlapping their meaning to form an encompassing, inclusive and comprehensive idea of Scotland. This essay, on the other hand, views the two concepts as addressing fundamentally different aspects of the idea of Scotland. ‘Tradition’ is what Hugh Trevor-Roper discussed in ‘The Invention of Tradition’: it pertains to the political and philosophical side of the idea, to do with the Union of 1707, Jacobitism and Scotland’s political standing within Britain.2 Tradition is not inventive: it is, for the most part, based on antiquarian and historical research and seeks to understand and propose an idea of Scotland that is firmly based in its traceable past. However, tourists came looking for evidence to support the

Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions

41

‘romantic’ idea of Scotland. This, as we shall see, was derived mainly from literature. By its very nature it is invented and fictive: both the past and present displayed in the works is, and always has been, unreal, and only loosely based on antiquarian or historical sources. ‘Myth’ derives from the Ossianic parts of the perception of Scotland: sublime mountains, mist, ruins, a visionary connection between past and future. ‘Myth’ is invented and tradition is not because it stems from fiction – whether third- or eighteenth-century – it is, ultimately a ‘romantick’ version of the real place, one that the tourists responded to, expected and sought. There are a number of reasons for the sudden interest in Scotland as a tourist destination. The growing nationalism of the eighteenth century, the unavailability of the continent in the last decade of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, and a more affluent middle class all played a part in the growth of tourism within Britain.3 The picturesque vogue that had previously enticed tourists to visit the continent and now enjoined them to visit North Britain offered the middle classes the chance to ‘enjoy… their native land as a series of rustic scenes at little financial or social cost’.4 At the same time it enabled them to approximate the upper classes by appropriating one of their traditional leisure activities. The average eighteenth-century tourist, no longer a well-to-do squire but more likely a member of the rising middle classes, displayed an avid interest in the relationship between art and nature, was keen to discuss the Sublime and the Beautiful, and had a curious fascination with the distant past. The two-fold nature of Scotland – a land of tradition and of myth – made it a locale very suitable for exploration. The four university towns – St Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh – were hailed as cradles of civilization. Edinburgh in particular, as ‘the Athens of the North’, was a bustling metropolis, famous for its thinkers and literati. It represented the modern and enlightened part of eighteenth-century Scotland, on a par with London and Paris. But there was also the other Scotland, the ‘savage’ and ‘wild’ world of the Highlands. Fuelled by stories about ancient warriors and clan loyalty, potential travellers looked upon Highland culture with a longing for cathartic melancholy, for the possibility to recover their own lost past, almost on their doorstep and, after the improvements in roads and security in the wake of the last Jacobite rising, civilized enough to be enjoyable. As Nicola Watson explains, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘reading … becomes progressively and differentially linked to place’, when ‘the practice of visiting places associated with particular books in order to savour text, place and their interrelations grows into a commercially significant phenomenon’.5 Frequently, and increasingly more so over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this association between place and book was replaced by one between place and author, with birthplaces, houses and and tombs attracting tourists as the fictional landscape created by these author’s work had done pre-

42

Romantic Localities

viously. Indeed, while the Highlands were always associated with the Ossianic Collections, and rarely with Macpherson, Burns’s Dumfriesshire developed as a mixture of author-oriented and book-oriented exploration. Before the eighteenth century few travellers ventured into Scotland. One thing they have in common is the notable absence, before 1760s, of references to literary sites or authors’ haunts. At this stage, what the travellers remark on tends to concern ‘tradition’, rather than ‘myth’: pointing out the differences between their home lands and Scotland, and commenting on superstition, politics and foreign dress. Medieval reports tend to involve matters of politics, succession and war, and contain largely lists of places visited: Jean Froissart, a fourteenthcentury visitor, tells us that ‘the Scots are bold, hardy, and much inured to war’, and comments on the practice of making oatcakes to ‘warm their stomachs’ so that they ‘perform a longer day’s march than other soldiers’.6 Prejudices against the Scots followed from such topics: ‘in Scotland you will never find a man of worth: they are like savages, who wish not to be acquainted with any one, and are too envious of the good fortune of others, and suspicious of losing anything themselves, for their country is very poor’.7 Don Pedro de Ayala echoes this: ‘the Scotch are not industrious, and the people are poor’.8 However, de Ayala also comments on the belligerence of the Scots: ‘they spend all their time in wars, and when there is no war they fight with one another’.9 Interestingly, he also remarks on the partial hospitality of the Scots: ‘they like foreigners so much that they dispute with one another as to who shall have and treat a foreigner in his house’.10 Nicander Nucius, a sixteenth-century visitor, adds that ‘the Scotch are more barbarous people in their manner of living than the English’.11 De Ayala’s observations on belligerence are mitigated by a slightly later traveller, Jean de Beaugué: ‘the Scots never take the field unless great and extreme necessity drive them to arms’.12 And finally Fynes Moryson is one of several travellers to link Scotland’s northern situation to its unpleasant weather: ‘Scotland reaching so farre into the North, must needs be subject to excessive cold, yet the same is in some sort mitigated by the thicknesse of the cloudy aire and sea vapours’.13 Seventeenth-century travellers echo these sentiments, even as the later travellers began to venture into the Highlands. However, unlike the post-Ossianic tourists discussed later in this essay, their impressions of the Highlands are neither romantic or mythical. John Taylor, the water poet, was one of the first travellers to venture into the Highlands and describe local customs, such as dress: their habit is shooes with but one sole apiece; stockings (which they call short hose) made of a warm stuff of divers colours, which they call Tartane: as for breeches, many of them, nor their forefathers, never wore any, but a jerkin of the same stuffe that their hose is of, their garters being bands or wreathes of hay or straw, with a plead about their shoulders, which is a mantle of divers colours, much finer and lighter than their

Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions

43

hose, with blue flat caps on their heads, a handkerchiefe knit with two knots about their necke; and thus are they attired.14

Unlike other travellers, however, Taylor quite enjoys this unusual outfit, advising fellow travellers that ‘any man of what degree soever that comes amongst them, must not disdaine to weare it … If men be kind unto them, and be in their habit; then they are conquered with kindnesse, and the sport will be plentiful’.15 Thomas Tucker also reviews the Highlands, although he is more concerned with the geographical and economical situation and less with customs and traditions: he remarks, for example, that ‘the inhabitants beyond Murray land (except in the Orkneys) speake generally Ober garlickh, or Highlands, and the mixture of both in the towne of Invernesse is such that one halfe of the people understand not one another’.16 Richard Franck adds to that an early version of the ‘romance’ of the Highlands (though used in sense of fabrication): he questions the floating island on Loch Ness (usually said to be on Loch Lomond), asking ‘was there a possibility of her sailing from the citadel, to this eminent Lough Ness, when a boat of ten tun can’t force her passage half way up the river? This looks romantick beyond the ingenuity of art, or possibility of invention’.17 John Ray observes that ‘the Scots cannot endure to hear their country or country men spoken against’.18 Thomas Kirke includes a noteworthy pre-Ossianic admonition on the antiquity of Scotland: If all our European travellers direct their course to Italy, upon the account of its antiquity, why should Scotland be neglected, whose wrinkled surface derives its original from the chaos? The first inhabitants were some stragglers of the fallen angels, who rested themselves in the confines, till their Captain Lucifer provided placed for them in his own country.19

Finally, Thomas More devoted a whole section of his account to the Highlands.20 In the first half of the eighteenth-century, before the appearance of the Ossianic Collections, travellers carried on much in the same vein as the seventeenth-century ones observed above. Of course, due to the political situation of the period travel in the Highlands was not always possible, or desirable. One of those visitors who travellers as far as Inverness, however, is Edmund Burt, who, though English, lived in Scotland for some time. His Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London, written mainly in the 1720s and depicting all manner of Highland life, was published in 1755. Although Burt was more of a visitor than a traveller, his insights are nonetheless valuable, and are representative of early eighteenth-century English notions of Scotland. He observes the dangers of travelling in the Highlands: ‘when some extraordinary occasion has obliged any of them to [travel in the Highlands], he has, generally speaking, made his testament before he set out, as though he were entering

44

Romantic Localities

upon a long an dangerous sea voyage, wherein it was doubtful if he should ever return’.21 However, neither Burt nor his contemporaries are much concerned with literature; nor was tourism, as opposed to visiting or travelling, a common pastime in Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century. By 1772, however, after the appearance and popularity of the Ossianic Collections, the Weekly Magazine could write that ‘it is now become fashionable to make a tour into Scotland for some weeks or months’.22 Rackwitz observes that ‘since the earliest tales of travellers to Scotland, the country had been regarded as a land of myth and miracles’.23 He explains that although ‘Scotland was regarded as remote and backward … by the end of the eighteenth century this image had given way to ‘Ossian’ enthusiasm’, with ‘dozens of travellers tour[ing] Scotland every summer season, and particularly the Highlands, to feel the magic of the mountains and to experience the relics of a bygone culture’.24 It was precisely the publication of the Ossianic Collections that ‘turned the Highlands, in less than two decades, into one of Europe’s most popular travel destinations’, and that changed travellers into literary explorers, who prepared for their travels – and, sometimes, felt encouraged to travel in the first place – not by reading travel journals and guide books, but by reading and re-reading texts written and set in the places they were about to explore. Macpherson and Burns, and their works, thus created a myth of Scotland for tourists avid to see for themselves (their works are bolstered by those by Smollett, Beattie and, not surprisingly, Shakespeare, whose Macbeth often features in travel accounts). The Ossianic Collections, in their fictional (re-)invention of Scotland’s martial past, embody the myth, and indeed came to be synonymous with the Highlands, if not with Scotland, for many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tourists and writers. Durie notes the importance of the Ossianic Collections for the rise of Scottish tourism: ‘there was the cult of the Picturesque … and secondly the associated enthusiasm for Ossian’.25 Others put it even more directly: ‘Ossian was the focus of the first wave of ‘literary tourism’’.26 The Ossianic Collections were, Durie argues, ‘a myth – in every sense of the word – that exercised a level of appeal rivalled perhaps only by that of Prester John for the Victorians or the Arthurian legend at Glastonbury’, but certainly not rivalled in Scotland at the period.27 He discusses the obsession of many early travellers with Ossian and the authenticity of the Collections: ‘the search for Ossian preoccupied many an early visitor to Scotland from the 1760s onwards’ (although the examples he cites all post-date Johnson’s and Boswell’s tour of 1773).28 As other critics put it, some tourists ‘set themselves the specific goal of learning more about the fabled poet Ossian and finding out whether or not the poems attributed to him were genuine’.29

Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions

45

Although the authenticity debate may have started Ossianic tourism, it soon gave way to a more familiar kind of literary tourism: to ‘see the landscapes which had inspired Ossian and to tread in his footsteps’.30 For those tourists, Gold and Gold explain, ‘there was another landscape to be found beneath the veneer of modern Scotland; a world untouched by forces of modernity, where simplicity, peace and the culture of antiquity still reigned’.31 Importantly, unlike other, more localized texts and authors, the Ossianic Collections notoriously lacked more specific information, thus opening up the whole of the Highlands to the search for Ossian: ‘it permitted almost any accessible point in the Highlands and Islands to attract literary tourists by claiming some link to this mythic Celtic past’.32 Indeed, as Burns enthusiastically wrote to his brother Gilbert in 1786, ‘[wa]rm as I was from Ossian’s country where I had seen his grave, what cared I for fisher-towns and fertile carses?’.33 The connection between the Ossianic Collections and the Highlands is obvious even to a Scotsman: Burns comfortably uses ‘Ossian’s country’ as a synonym for the Highlands. Johnson was an early famous tourist in Scotland, and also its first published literary tourist. A large portion of his Journey (1776) is devoted to Ossian, bardism and ancient stories, and to a search for authenticity behind the myth. He carefully informs his readers that after what has been lately talked of Highland Bards, and Highland genius … that the Earse never was a written language; that there is not in the world an Earse manuscript a hundred years old … In an unwritten speech, nothing that is not very short is transmitted from one generation to another … I believe there cannot be recovered, in the whole Earse language, five hundred lines of which there is any evidence to prove them a hundred years old. Yet I hear that the father of Ossian boasts of two chests more of ancient poetry, which he suppresses, because they are too good for the English … I suppose my opinion of the poems of Ossian is already discovered. I believe they never existed in any other form than which we have seen. The editor, or author, never could shew the original; nor can it be shewn by any other … He has doubtless inserted names that circulate in popular stories, and may have translated some wandering ballads, if any can be found; and the names and some of the images being recollected, make an inaccurate auditor imagine, by the help of Caledonian bigotry, that he has formerly heard the whole.34

And further: ‘the Scots have something to plead for their easy reception of an improbable fiction: they are seduced by their fondness for their supposed ancestors. A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist, who does not love Scotland better than truth: he will always love it better than inquiry; and if falsehood flatters his vanity, will not be very diligent to detect it’.35 He concludes with the admonishment that ‘if we know little of the ancient Highlanders, let us not fill the vacuity with Ossian’.36 Boswell relates other instances of Ossian discussion in his Journal. At Aberdeen, for example, ‘we spoke of Fingal’, with Johnson once

46

Romantic Localities

again suggesting the ‘originals’ of the poems be put on show’.37 Later he reports Johnson saying ‘I look upon M’Pherson’s Fingal to be as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with. Had it been really an ancient work, a true specimen how men thought at that time, it would have been a curiosity of the first rate. As a modern production, it is nothing’.38 Although Johnson, admittedly, does not tour Scotland in search of sublimity, melancholy and defeat, his Journey nonetheless differs from earlier travelogues and letters because of his preoccupation with the authenticity of the Ossianic Collections. No other published traveller was as occupied with proving or disproving the authenticity of the Ossianic Collections as Johnson. While many were sceptical, most could not help but associate particularly sublime spots in the Highlands and Islands with the Collections and their heroes. Stoddart notes ‘Dun Fion’ as ‘the first trace, that we found, of Ossianic times: it is said to signify, the hill of Fingal, and to have been one of that monarch’s hunting seats’, despite finding himself unable to ‘subscribe to the historical system of Mr. Macpherson’.39 Even Southey, who is critical of Macpherson and Ossian throughout his Journal (1819), has to admit that ‘the effect [of the sunset over the landscape] was such that I could almost have wished I were a believer in Ossian’.40 From Johnson’s Journey onwards, the Ossianic Collections exerted an undeniable presence throughout travelogues of the period – much as the poems were present throughout the Highlands, and much as the dead were present in the poems. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections (1803) are filled with references to the Ossianic Collections – and in contrast to Johnson’s search for authenticity, Dorothy is in search of, and finds, a mythically Ossianic Scotland. The first mention of Ossian occurs in the first week of September: ‘there was a range of hills opposite, which we were here first told were the hills of Morven, so much sung of by Ossian’.41 Indeed, Morven is particularly Ossianic: the sea, or sea-loch, of which we only saw as it were a glimpse crossing the vale at the foot of it, the high mountains on the opposite shore, the unenclosed hills on each side of the vale, with black cattle feeding on them, the simplicity of the scattered huts, the half-sheltered, half-exposed situation of the village, the imperfect culture of the fields, the distance from any city or large town, and the very names of Morvin and Appin, particularly at such a time, when old Ossian’s old friends, sunbeams and mists, as like ghosts as any in the mid-afternoon could be, were keeping company with them.42

Ossian even makes an appearance after the fact of the journey itself: when the Wordsworths are in the Narrow Glen, or Glen Almain, they are unaware of the legends that hold this as Ossian’s burial place. However, ‘on hearing of a tradition relating to it’, William is inspired to write his poem ‘Glen Almain, or, the Narrow Glen’, which begins ‘In this still place, remote from men, / Sleeps Ossian, in the Narrow Glen’.43 By 1803, the time of the Wordsworths’ tour, Ossian had

Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions

47

become an established part of tourist Scotland: at Dunkeld Dorothy and William tour the Duke of Atholl’s pleasure grounds, which included the Hermitage, or Ossian’s Hall: to see the waterfall they ‘were first … conducted into a small apartment, where the gardener desired us to look at a painting of the figure of Ossian, which … disappeared, parting in the middle, flying asunder as if by the touch of magic’.44 And even Coleridge, usually sparse with literary allusions, notes the ‘Glen of Fingal’ – Fionn Ghleann – shortly before he parts ways with the Wordsworths, finding himself ‘lost in reverie’.45 Occasionally references to the Ossianic Collections are less direct. The little Highland boy described by Dorothy Wordsworth, with his ‘half-articulate Gaelic hooting’, is nestled in Ossianism: ‘mists were on hillsides, darkness shutting in upon the huge avenue of mountains, torrents roaring’.46 Indeed, Dorothy observes, the scene ‘contain[ed] in itself the whole history of the Highlander’s life – his melancholy, his simplicity, his poverty, his superstition, and above all, that visionariness which results from a communion with the unworldliness of nature’.47 All of these are, of course, Ossianic features, and contrast strongly with the characterizations of the Scots found in earlier accounts, as noted above. The mythic quality of Ossianic landscapes is repeated later in the Recollections: ‘a high mountain, green in the sunshine, and overcast with clouds, – an object as inviting to the fancy as the evening sky in the west, and though of a terrestrial green, almost as visionary’.48 Because the tourists were unsure about the authorship of the Ossianic Collections – some were firm Macphersonists, others allowed for a more oral poetic approach – Macpherson’s native Badenoch did not receive a great deal of tourist attention. Coleridge was an exception to this: he records passing Balavil, the ‘huge house’ built by Macpherson in the 1780s, which, despite being visible from the main road between Inverness and Perth, was rarely noticed by tourists.49 As the century progressed, however, authors gradually became as important as their texts. By the later eighteenth century, the focus of literary tourism had shifted: while Ossianic tourists were almost solely occupied with Ossianic grandeur and authenticity, but not with Macpherson himself, later tourists began to explore authors’ haunts as well as places associated with their works. For Burns, man and text were inextricably linked. It has been argued that ‘literary tourists came less in search of the landscapes described by Burns than those linked to the events of his life’.50 It was Burns’s early death in 1796, more than his poems, that inspired a number of tourists to add Dumfriesshire to their tours, both to mourn the poet in situ and to quench their curiosity about his disreputable private life. As Gold and Gold point out, by the mid-nineteenth century ‘almost any scene connected with his birth, life or death became a shrine for literary tourists’ – not, we note, connected to his works.51

48

Romantic Localities

Coleridge notes the Wordsworths’ visit to Burns’s house and grave, although he himself did not visit the sites, apparently because he was not well.52 Dorothy records the visit: Went to the churchyard where Burns is buried. A bookseller accompanied us … He lies at a corner of the churchyard, and his second son, Francis Wallace, beside him. There is no stone to mark the spot; but a hundred guineas have been collected, to be expended on some sort of monument … We looked at the grave with melancholy and painful reflections.53

They also visited Burns’s house in the centre of Dumfries: He showed us the outside of Burns’s house, where he had lived the last three years of his life, and where he died. It has a mean appearance, and is in a bye situation, whitewashed; dirty about the doors … The walls were coloured with a blue wash; on one side of the fire was a mahogany desk, opposite to the window a clock, and over the desk an print from the ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’ … In the room above the parlour the Poet died, and his son after him in the same room.54

Their visit to Dumfries is a sobering one. They ‘could think of little else but poor Burns, and his moving about on that unpoetic ground’.55 ‘There is’, they conclude, ‘no thought surviving in connexion with Burns’ daily life that is not heart-depressing’.56 Burns appears again later on in the Recollections, though this time Dorothy reflects on him as a tourist: ‘we rested upon the heather seat which Burns was so loth to quit that moonlight evening when he first went to Blair Castle, and had a pleasure in thinking that he had been under the same shelter, and viewed the little waterfall opposite with some of the happy and purer feelings of his better mind’.57 And they explicitly visit the falls of Bruar ‘for the sake of Burns’.58 Keats also visits Burns’s tomb and house. He is prompted to write ‘On Visiting the Tomb of Burns’ on his visit to Dumfries, which he records in a letter to his brother Tom. The close of the sonnet, ‘Burns! with honour due / I have oft honoured thee..’. 59(ll.12–13), reflects the description of his visit to Dumfries: Burns’ tomb is in the churchyard corner, not very much to my taste, though on a scale, large enough to show they wanted to honour him – Mrs Burns lives in this place, most likely we shall see her tomorrow … In Devonshire they say ‘Well where by yee going’. Here it is, ‘How is it wi yoursel’ – A man on the Coach said the horses took a Hellish heap o’driving – the same fellow pointed out Burns’ tomb with a deal of life ‘There de ye see it, amang the trees; white, wi a roond tap’. … We have now begun upon whiskey, called here whuskey very smart stuff it is – Mixed like our liquors with sugar & water ‘tis called toddy, very pretty drink, & much praised by Burns.60

It is worth nothing here that Keats is more interested in Burns the man than Burns the poet, both in his sonnet and in his travelogue: ‘poor unfortunate fel-

Sublime Landscapes and Ancient Traditions

49

low – his disposition was southern – how sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defence to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not’.61 And in visiting Burns’s birthplace in Alloway: His name of course is known all about – his great reputation among the plodding people is ‘that he wrote a good mony sensible things’ – One of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the Cottage of Bruns – we need not think of his misery – that is all gone – bad luck to it – I shall look upon it hereafter with unmixed pleasure as I do upon my Stratford on Avon day with Bailey – I shall fill this sheet for you in the Bardes Country … I had no Conception that the native place of Burns was so beautiful – the Idea I had was more desolate, his rigs of Barley seemed always to me but a few strips of Green on a cold hill … We came down upon every thing suddenly – there were in our way, the ‘bonny Doon’, with the Brig that Tam O’Shanter cross’d – Kirk Alloway, Burns’s Cottage and then the Brigs of Ayr.62

This clash between idea and reality – between imagined dwelling and actual abode – foreshadows both what Keats learns about Burns the man from the farmer at Alloway, and about himself in the process: in the Cottage he ‘wrote a sonnet for the mere sake of writing some lines under the roof ’ but ‘they are so bad I cannot transcribe them’.63 The farmer reminds Keats that Burns ‘talked with Bitches – he drank with Blackguards, he was miserable – We can see horribly clear in the works of such a man his whole life, as if we were God’s spies’; ‘his misery’, Keats concludes, ‘is dead weight upon the nimbleness of one’s quill’.64 Charles Brown, Keats’ travelling companion, remarks about the tourist industry at Burns’ cottage in Alloway: thousands go there for no other purpose but the happiness of being under the roof, and I was not the least among them in that happiness; we likewise took a survey of the Ruins of Kirk Alloway, where, you will remember, Tam o’Shanter saw the Witches dancing as he peeped thro’ the west window, and we saw the ‘banks and braes o’ bonny Doon’, and ‘auld Brig’ and the ‘new Brig’ in the Town; and every thing we could think of that was connected with Burns’ poetry.65

In the nineteenth century Scott and his works surpassed the Ossianic Collections and Burns as literary tourist destinations. Durie argues that ‘other literary figures had their devotees: Burns and later Barrie; but neither had the generalized impact, or staying power, of Scott in putting places on the map of the literary tourist’.66 However, the Ossianic locations were put on the map first, formed part of the established short and long tours and created a version of the Scotland Scott writes. And it is perhaps Burns who has remained on the tourists’ agenda the most, and it is he who is primarily connected with Scotland as the nation’s ‘bard’. Gold and Gold remind us that ‘the poetry of Robert Burns thrives in Russia, to the extent that the Russians have assimilated Burns Night customs’,

50

Romantic Localities

while people of ‘Scottish descent … keep alive what they regard as their heritage through participation in Burns and Caledonian Societies’.67 It is the myth of Scotland that derives from the Ossianic Collections and the work and legend of Burns that fuels modern criticism on the idea of Scotland, and on Scottish identity. Here, the romance, or the myth, of the Highlands tends to include the following: ‘bens and glens, the lone shieling in the misty island, purple heather, kilted clansmen, battles long ago, an ancient and beautiful language, claymores and bagpipes and Bonny Prince Charlie’.68 This idea of the romantic Highlands, as Peter Womack explains, was gradually extended to include and denote the whole of Scotland – Lowlands and Highlands – and in particular bagpipes and tartan functioned as ‘identifiers of any Scot’ and to ‘represent the Scottish nation as a whole’.69 As this essay has shown, for tourists at least, this romanticization is largely based on literature. Tourists, then and now, see this ‘series of kitsch’ as ‘more or less reactionary ‘inventions of tradition’‘, a tradition in which Duncan et al. include the Ossianic Collections and Scott as well as more modern Scottish cultural phenomena.70 As we have seen, most of these ‘romantic’ notions of Scotland are intimately connected with the Scotland portrayed in literature of the later eighteenth century. Most critics agree that the Ossianic Collections did much to commence, emphasize and perpetuate the Highland myth; tourists, as we have seen, found Ossian in Scotland even when they did not intend to do so. The Ossianic Collections’ ‘comprehensive ethos of politeness’ (Adam Potkay’s phrase), and later representations of the pathos of Burns’s plight, drew travellers to the mythical Highlands – their search for sublimity, mountain grandeur and melancholy eventually becomes part of the myth itself.71

4 ‘PLUMB-PUDDING STONE’ AND THE ROMANTIC SUBLIME: THE LANDSCAPE AND GEOLOGY OF THE TROSSACHS IN THE STATISTICAL ACCOUNT OF SCOTLAND (1791–9) Tom Furniss

Everyone knows that it was Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (1810) that made the Trossachs and Loch Katrine into the epitome of Romantic Scotland for readers, writers and tourists from Britain and Europe. But I want to suggest here that the cultural work of turning these places into an exemplary Romantic locality was begun nearly two decades earlier in the parish report on Callander that was included in the massive twenty-one-volume Statistical Account of Scotland, edited by Sir John Sinclair and published in Edinburgh between 1791 and 1799.1 Although some nineteenth-century writers suggested that the Reverend James Robertson of Callander was the first writer to ‘discover’ the Trossachs, the bulk of academic work on the explosion of interest in the people, culture and localities of Highland Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century has focused on the increasing number of published tours and guide books in the period.2 While some of these tours and guidebooks were written by Scots, they were usually, like the increasing number of English and European travellers to the Scottish Highlands, merely visitors to the localities they wrote about. The distinctive feature of the 938 parish reports in the Statistical Account of Scotland is that they were written by parish ministers who typically combined intimate local knowledge with a university education in one of the centres of the Scottish Enlightenment. As a consequence, in answering the questions put to them by Sinclair many of these ministers produced parish reports that wove together a variety of responses to their localities, commenting on history, typography, geology and mineral resources, agriculture, antiquities, flora and fauna, population, housing, schooling and so on. In this way, the Statistical Account of Scotland

– 51 –

52

Romantic Localities

added up to a massive project of national self-representation in which the local features of all the parishes of Scotland were described and made available to readers. As Donald J. Withrington suggests, The Statistical Account of Scotland provides ‘a complete and at that time unique survey of the state of the whole country, locality by locality’.3 Scotland’s parish ministers were also participating in and contributing to a more general cultural responsiveness to place that developed in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century prior to disciplinary separation and specialization. Noah Heringman has recently argued that this interest in place, manifested in topographical poetry, ‘aesthetic geology’, landscape painting, travel writing, garden design and so on, was intimately connected to national self-fashioning and provided a context in which Romantic and geological responses to landscape mutually constituted one another before separating out as mutually exclusive discourses and disciplines in the early nineteenth century.4 The well-studied propensity for seeking out sublime and picturesque landscapes in the second half of the eighteenth century led to the fashioning of the English Peak District into an exemplary English landscape characterized by geomorphic features that yielded aesthetic pleasure and stimulated geological speculation.5 Similar processes took place regarding the Lake District, Snowdonia and the Scottish Highlands. But while there were several standard itineraries for tours of Highland Scotland, none of them included Loch Katrine and the Trossachs. The discursive intervention that made a visit to these places a crucial part of any tour of the Highlands, I contend, was initiated by the parish report on Callander in the Statistical Account of Scotland. Even given our growing awareness of the mutually constitutive interrelationship between Romantic landscape aesthetics and the emerging science of geology, what remains striking about this report is the way it represents the Trossachs not only as an exemplary locus of the Romantic sublime but also as a landscape that can be read as offering decisive evidence to settle some of the formative controversies in the history of geology. By combining such responses to the landscape of his parish with a multifaceted, interdisciplinary (or rather pre-disciplinary) account of its impact on history, population, housing, agriculture and so on, the Reverend James Robertson can be said to have helped to fashion what we might call, after Michael Bakhtin, a deep ‘chronotopographic’ representation of locality.6

The Statistical Account of Scotland Sir John Sinclair launched the Statistical Account of Scotland by writing to the ministers of the 938 parishes of Scotland, asking them to respond to an initial set of 160 queries concerning the physical and social features of their parishes and explaining that this survey was to be carried out ‘for the purpose of ascertaining

‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime

53

the quantum of happiness enjoyed by its inhabitants, and the means of its future improvement’.7 The twenty-one volumes that emerged out of this nationwide survey constitute perhaps the most important manifestation of Scotland’s selfexamination and self-rediscovery in the second half of the eighteenth century and one of the central achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment. It is revealing to look at the kinds of questions that Sinclair put to the parish ministers. The first forty questions related to ‘the Geography and Natural History of the Parish’. Questions included the following: ‘What is the general appearance of the country? Is it flat or hilly, rocky or mountainous?’; ‘What is the nature of the soil? Is it fertile or barren, deep or shallow?’; ‘Are there any considerable lakes or rivers in the parish?’; ‘What species of fish do they produce?’; ‘Are there any remarkable mountains? and what are their heights?’; ‘Are there any volcanic appearances in the parish?’; ‘Are there any figured stones, or any having the impression of plants or fishes upon them?’; ‘Are there any fossil marine bodies, such as shells, corals, &c. or any petrified part of animals? or any petrifying springs or waters?’; ‘Are there any marble, moor-stone, free-stone, slate, or other stones? How are they got at, and what use is made of them?’; ‘Are there any mines, particularly coal-mines?’.8

Withrington suggests that these questions were designed ‘to determine what was the actual or potential means [the parish] had of supporting the population’.9 But while some of these questions relate to agriculture, fishing and mining, others are purely topographical and some allude to contemporary controversies about the nature and origins of the Earth. Questions 41–100 were concerned with ‘the population of the parish’, and questions 101–16 with the ‘productions of the parish’. The final category of ‘Miscellaneous questions’ also included questions related to local topography and its history: ‘Are there any remains or ruins of monasteries or religious houses?’; ‘Are there any Roman, Saxon, Danish, or Pictish castles, camps, altars, roads, forts, or other remains of antiquity? and what traditions or historical accounts are there of them?’; ‘Are there any barrows, or tumuli? Have any been opened? And what has been found therein?’10 Some ministers were quite prompt in returning their reports, allowing Sinclair to publish the first volume of the Statistical Account in 1791. As Withrington notes, Sinclair’s project seems to have ‘struck a sympathetic chord among a set of clergymen who formed a highly-educated elite, well aware of those emerging economic and social enquiries which they had first learned about in their days in the “Enlightened” Scottish universities’.11 The ministers ‘were, indeed, lively and enquiring men of their time, often contributing descriptions of the flora and fauna of the parishes worthy of the capable amateur botanists and zoologists who wrote them’.12 The general quality of the parish returns resulted in twentyone volumes of information about the localities of Scotland that constitutes an invaluable resource for modern historians.

54

Romantic Localities

Scholarly work on the Old Statistical Account has tended to focus on issues such as the history of statistics, ecology, sociology, population studies, agriculture and economics.13 No one, I think, has focused on the fact that many of the ministers took the opportunity to describe at length the locality and landscape of their parishes in terms of the current aesthetic paradigms of the sublime and the picturesque. In many reports, local topography is not seen simply as a locus of natural resources to be exploited but as of aesthetic value and interest in its own right. In addition, some of the ministers took the hint that lay behind some of Sinclair’s questions to engage in speculations about what the geomorphic features of their parishes seemed to reveal about the origins and development of the Earth. Sinclair’s questions thus stimulated many of the ministers to produce multifaceted accounts of their parishes that coordinated the aesthetic appearance and geological structure of local typography and attended to the effects of that topography on soil, drainage, flora and fauna, agriculture and mining, the history of the parish and so on. Yet before I go on to show how the parish report on Callander might have helped to locate the Trossachs at the heart of Romantic Scotland, it is worth pausing to consider how effective the Statistical Account was in representing Scotland to itself and to the world. As Withrington and Ian R. Grant note, ‘the original Account … is difficult and often exasperating to use. Sinclair published the parish returns just as they came in to him; therefore the reports for one county or for part of one county may be scattered throughout a dozen volumes or more’.14 There is also the question of how many original readers there were for an expensive set of twenty-one volumes of badly-organized information that came out in parts over eight years. There appears to have been a print run of 1,000 copies per volume, but sales were less than Sinclair had anticipated. Out of a total of 21,000 volumes, it seems that more than half remained unsold ten years after the publication of the final volume in the set.15 In 1825, some booksellers were still trying to shift complete sets at reduced prices.16 In assessing the possible impact of the parish report about Callander on travellers’ interest in the Trossachs in the 1790s, then, we need to bear in mind that the Old Statistical Account of Scotland was expensive, difficult to use and relatively rare, and that sales had begun to fall away by the time Robertson’s report was published in 1794.

The Trossachs and Loch Katrine The parish of Callander is located in west Perthshire and shares the Trossachs with the parish of Aberfoyle – the dividing line being Loch Katrine itself.17 Bruce Lenman’s introduction to volume 12 of the modern edition of the Old Statistical Account describes the various ways in which the divide between the Highlands and Lowlands impacts on Perthshire:

‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime

55

Perthshire is a very large county … of which more than two-thirds is to be accounted as Highland – with the Highland Boundary Fault (separating the Old Red Sandstone rocks of the Lowlands from the ancient metamorphic rocks of the Highlands) running in a north-east direction from Aberfoyle, via Callander, Comrie, Crieff, Birnam, Blairgowrie and Bridge of Cally, to Alyth and having a vast importance in determining human settlement patterns in the county.18

The Highland Boundary was also Scotland’s cultural and linguistic fault line: ‘This large and interesting area was before 1745 the seat of several predominantly Gaelic-speaking communities which Lowland Scots and Englishmen tended to regard as both archaic and dangerous’.19 In the early 1790s, the cultural transformations that the Highland communities of the county had undergone were still part of living memory. At the time Robertson was writing his report, then, the parish of Callander, like the other Highland Boundary parishes, was pivoted on historical and cultural, as well as geological, fault lines. A sign and agent of change was the teaching of English in the Highland schools; another was the migration of people from Highlands to Lowlands.20 Alongside, and simultaneous with, these transitions was the transformation of the image of Highland Scotland in general from a barbarous land populated by barbarous people into a key locus of the Romantic sublime and a synecdoche of Romantic Scotland as a whole – a transformation that Scots helped to promote, Tom Devine suggests, in order to refashion Scottish identity ‘amid unprecedented economic and social change and under the threat of cultural conquest by a much more powerful neighbour’.21 Scotland’s self-reinvention responded to Romantic revolutions in taste north and south of the border that affected the outlook and itinerary of published tours of Scotland. Neither Samuel Johnson’s nor Thomas Pennant’s tours of the 1770s were driven by the search for the Romantic sublime. By contrast, in 1799 Sarah Murray sought out and encountered the Romantic sublime at every turn.

James Robertson’s ‘Report on the Parish of Callander’ (1794) The Reverend James Robertson of Callander had been educated at the University of St Andrews and was an expert on agriculture and Highland folklore. In 1794 and 1799 he published works on the agriculture of Perthshire, but his reputation as the discoverer of the Trossachs rests on his account of the ‘Parish of Callander’, which was written in 1791 and first appeared in volume 11 of the Old Statistical Account in 1794 (pp. 574–627) (it appears in volume 12 of the modern edition, pp. 137–90).22 What is particularly interesting about Robertson’s account of his locality is the way it draws together information about climate, natural history and local antiquities, criticism of enclosure and developments in agriculture, comments on population and industry, and responses to mountain

56

Romantic Localities

landscape that combine Romantic celebrations of their sublimity, information about the mineral resources they contain, and speculations about their formation that engage with contemporary debates in the emerging science of geology. Robertson’s report is divided into forty-eight titled sections (with extensive footnotes), including the following: ‘Extent, Situation, and Surface’ (p. 138); ‘Soil, Inclosures, &c’ (p. 139); ‘Romantic Prospects’ (pp. 139–42); ‘Mountains’ (pp. 143–4); ‘Lakes, &c’ (pp. 145–8); ‘Rivers’ (p. 148); ‘Mines and Fossils’ (pp. 148–53); ‘Climate and Longevity’ (p. 154); ‘Population’ (pp. 154–7); ‘Wild Quadrupeds and Birds’ (p. 161); ‘Fish’ (pp. 161–2); ‘Pearls’ and ‘Pearl Fishery’ (pp. 162–3); ‘Trees’ (p. 163); ‘Agriculture’ (pp. 164–5); ‘Mills, &c’ (p. 165); ‘Improvements’ (p. 165); ‘Wild Plants’ (pp. 165–6); ‘Manufactures, &c’ (pp. 167–8); ‘Antiquities’ (pp. 169–74); ‘Language’ (pp. 174–80); ‘Means of Improvement’ (pp. 186–90).

Lenman describes Robertson’s account of the parish’s ‘Romantic Prospects’ as ‘very much an early brochure on the Beauties of the Trossachs and an index of the image of Scotland that was being put abroad’.23 Indeed, Robertson begins his account of the region’s landscape scenery by announcing that ‘The Trosacks are often visited by persons of taste, who are desirous of seeing nature in her rudest and most unpolished state’.24 But while persons of taste may already have been visiting the Trossachs when Roberston wrote this in 1791, none of them appear to have published an account of their experiences. Prior to the publication of Robertson’s parish report on Callander in 1794, the Trossachs and Loch Katrine seem to have been largely unknown to writers of tours and guidebooks to the Highlands of Scotland. Shortly afterwards, however, the Trossachs had become a crucial part of almost every published tour, including those of Sarah Murray in 1799 and John Stoddart in 1799–1800 – the latter of which influenced Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803.25 In each of these texts, the direct or indirect impact of Robertson’s report about Callander is apparent, though it often went unacknowledged. In fact, Robertson may be said to invent the Trossachs’ tourist and the standard itinerary by adopting the point of view of an imaginary traveller journeying westwards from Callander along what is now the A821 towards the Trossachs and Loch Katrine, passing Ben Ledi, Loch Venachar and Loch Achray on the way.26 As Robertson brings his traveller and his reader into the Trossachs, he raises the pitch of the aesthetic response: When you enter the Trosachs, there is such an assemblage of wildness and of rude grandeur, as beggars all description, and fills the mind with the most sublime conceptions. It seems as if a whole mountain had been torn in pieces, and frittererd down by a convulsion of the earth; and the huge fragments of rocks, and woods, and hills, scattered in confusion, for two miles, into the E. end, and on the sides of Loch-Catherine. The access to the lake is through a narrow pass, of half a mile in length, such as Æneas

‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime

57

had in his dreary passage to visit his father’s home, ‘vastoque immanis hiatu’. The rocks are of a stupendous height, and seem ready to close above the traveller’s head, or to fall down and bury him in their ruins.27

Robertson’s use of the aesthetic discourse of the Romantic tourist is heightened here through the trope of ineffability, while the quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid (VI, 237) likens the pass through to Loch Katrine to the ‘vast, gaping opening’ into the underworld that Aeneas descends to meet the shade of his father. Loch Katrine thus becomes a kind of Elysium – a suggestion developed by a guidebook voice: ‘Travellers, who wish to see all they can of this singular phenomenon [Loch Katrine], generally sail W. on the S. side of the lake, to the Rock and Den of the Ghost, whose dark recess, from their gloomy appearance, the imagination of superstition conceived to be the habitation of supernatural beings’.28 Robertson goes on to describe, in minute detail, anticipating later descriptions of Romantic tourists, the aesthetic experience of sailing along the loch or walking westwards along the road that runs along the loch’s northern shore (the Wordsworths made this journey several times on their 1803 tour; it provided the stimulus for ‘Stepping Westward’). Robertson closes his description by informing his readers that the owners and residents of Loch Katrine’s environs were already providing basic services for tourists: ‘The Hon. Mrs. Drummond of Perth has erected booths of wicker work, in the most convenient places, for the accommodation of strangers, who visit this wild and picturesque landscape; and the tenants of the next farm are very ready to show the beauties of the place to travellers’.29 If the Trossachs and Loch Katrine were already being visited by tasteful tourists in search of ‘wild and picturesque landscape’, it seems that Roberton’s parish report was not only the first published celebration of this landscape but also a decisive influence on many subsequent tours and guidebooks. Much of the detail, itinerary and aesthetic response of Roberston’s report were reiterated, for example, in chapter four of Murray’s Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland, which follows Robertson’s imaginary tourist from Callander to Loch Katrine, notices many of the same features, repeats the ineffability trope, figures the pass through to the Loch as a passage to heaven or to hell, and exhibits even more sublime responses.30 Yet Murray did not acknowledge her source and is even said to have told Robertson that it was she who discovered the Trossachs.31 One of the puzzles, though, is how these travellers could have had access to or knowledge of Robertson’s report in the relatively rare Statistical Account of Scotland. One possible link is that tours and guidebooks written by Scots with direct access to The Statistical Account began to appear that quoted directly from Robertson’s report on Callander.32 Another possible link is that Robertson is said to have written a short guidebook to the Trossachs area that may have been

58

Romantic Localities

based on his parish report. There is tantalizing evidence for this missing publication in Wordsworth’s Recollections. While attempting to describe the Trossachs, she recalls ‘a sentence in a little pamphlet written by the minister of Callander, descriptive of the environs of that place. After having taken up at least six closelyprinted pages with the Trossachs, he concludes thus, ‘In a word, the Trossachs beggar all description’ – a conclusion in which everybody who has been there will agree with him’.33 As we have seen, Robertson does say in his parish report that the assemblage of wildness and rude grandeur of the Trossachs ‘beggars all description’, but this report can hardly be called ‘a little pamphlet’. But there was a pamphlet guide to the environs of Callander, first published in 1800, that appears to fit Wordsworth’s description – the anonymous A Sketch of the Most Remarkable Scenery, near Callander of Monteath; Particularly, the Trossachs. This pamphlet is so closely based on Robertson’s parish report that it is either plagiaristic or was written by Robertson himself.34 After about seven closely-printed pages on the Trossachs, the writer does indeed conclude that ‘The Trosachs beggar all description’.35 Wordsworth tells us later that a waiter in Callander ‘presented us with a pamphlet descriptive of the neighbourhood of Callander, which we brought away with us, and I am very sorry I lost it’.36 This lost pamphlet could well have been A Sketch of the Most Remarkable Scenery, near Callander, and the Wordsworths could well have been informed that it was written by ‘the minister of Callander’.

The Geological Sublime Alongside its influential account of the Romantic prospects and sublime features of the Trossachs, Robertson’s parish report also offers equally extended descriptions and analysis of the landscape’s geological structure and the story it seems to tell about the formation of the local topography and the development of the Earth itself. In order to understand the implications of what Robertson describes and how he interprets it, we need to examine the basic contours of geological debate in the second half of the eighteenth century. Dennis R. Dean points out that geological discourse in the period was shaped by two competing paradigms: During the 1770s, … geological theorists throughout Europe had divided themselves into two fairly well defined camps, depending on whether they emphasized fire or water more strongly [as the primary agency in forming rocks and the Earth’s geomorphology]. The fire geologists, called Vulcanists, included all those who … attributed widespread, significant effects to both ancient and present-day volcanoes. … The opposing, Neptunist school generally ignored all but the most immediate effects of volcanoes, which they regarded as recent and largely inconsequential. From their point of view the action of water was far more significant, as it could explain not only

‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime

59

the deposition of practically all the earth’s crustal components but their subsequent shaping as well. To account for both rocks and landforms in this way, Neptunists postulated some kind of universal ocean, which existed either at the beginning of earth’s history (and from which the continents gradually emerged) or at some point in the recent past, within human history. By [the 1780s], the former mechanism had seemed more plausible, because it was known that marine fossils occurred not only at the tops of mountains but at several other strategic levels. This fact embarrassed both Neptunist explanations to some extent, but was more easily reconciled with the eddies of a retreating ocean over time. Inevitably, several who supported Neptunist theories stressed the compatibility of their views with the Creation and Flood passages in Genesis.37

In 1785, James Hutton began to make public an account of the natural history of the Earth that rejected both these paradigms and that laid the foundations of modern geology.38 Hutton first aired his theory in a paper read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and published shortly afterwards as a thirty-page ‘Abstract of a Dissertation Read in the Royal Society of Edinburgh … Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration and Stability’ (1785).39 Hutton’s paper was criticized on religious grounds and for not offering enough empirical evidence in support of the theory. Such criticism prompted Hutton to embark on a number of geological field trips in Scotland between 1785 and 1788 to gather the clinching evidence. Important finds on Arran, on the Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh, in Glen Tilt and Jedburgh, and most famously at Siccar Point on the coast southeast of Edinburgh, confirmed the theory.40 A revised and expanded version of Hutton’s paper was published in 1788 in the first volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh as ‘Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe’.41 Finally, in 1795, Hutton published the first two volumes of his Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations, which restates the theory of the 1788 paper, adds the empirical evidence discovered in the field, partly buries the argument under a mountain of quotations from other authors and, for many commentators, constitutes the foundational text of modern geology.42 Hutton’s work thus made the landscapes of Scotland into crucial sources of evidence in these geological-cum-theological disputes. In his ‘Observations Made in a Journey to the North Alpine Part of Scotland in the Year 1785’, a draft paper intended for the third part of Theory of the Earth but not published in his lifetime, Hutton declared that in the Scottish Highlands ‘is to be found everything requisite for establishing a natural history not only of this, but of every other alpine country’.43 Hutton’s central argument is that the materials of the Earth are in a continuous process of slow-motion recycling that has taken place in a uniform manner over an enormous time-span. Examining the make-up of rocks and observing the continuous effects of running water and other weathering agents over time

60

Romantic Localities

which gradually erode the landmasses and carry the detritus into the oceans, Hutton proposed that the continents would long ago have been eroded away were it not for a counterbalancing process that recreated rock material and lifted it above the oceans. For Hutton, the primary shaping force that continually produces new rocks out of the eroded debris of the landmasses and that powers the uplift of new landmasses is subterranean heat and pressure (which is why he was called a ‘Plutonist’). He thus claimed that the Earth’s topography was not shaped by sudden catastrophes that occurred in the early periods of the Earth’s history but by the regular action of gradual forces over vast timescales. Given that the rocks that make up the present landmasses have evidently been formed out of the debris of earlier landforms, and that those earlier landforms were probably produced in a similar way, Hutton suggested that these processes must have been taking place over an unimaginably long time and that they might continue indefinitely. At the end of his Edinburgh paper and in the first volume of his Theory of the Earth Hutton thus concluded that ‘The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end’.44 By positing that tremendous shaping powers of heat and pressure continued to act in the Earth’s core, and by envisaging that the Earth had existed for a colossal period of time, Hutton produced a geological system that triggered sublime reactions in sympathetic and critical readers alike. It is often said that Hutton’s theories were not well known before John Playfair’s recasting of them into elegant English in his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of 1802. Dean, however, has demonstrated that Hutton’s ideas ‘achieved a broader and fartherreaching dissemination than many historians have acknowledged’.45 A generally positive response to Hutton’s Transactions paper was to be found in the notes of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789), and the paper was reviewed by at least three periodicals – the Monthly Review (79 [1788], pp. 36–8), the Analytic Review (1 [1788], pp. 424–5), and the Critical Review (66 [1788], pp. 115–20). In the Monthly Review, The reviewer doubted that fusion consolidates all rocks, though ‘subterraneous fires are … the most probable causes of the irregularities in the surface of our present earth’ (37). But it was shocking to find Hutton, in the fourth section of his memoir, supposing ‘a regular succession of earths from all eternity! and that the succession will be repeated for ever!!’ (37–7). The reviewer then quoted, as so many others would, Hutton’s already infamous conclusion about finding ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’.46

The Critical Review offered ‘one of the fairest and most perceptive criticisms’ that Hutton was to receive; it also, ‘unlike others, fully appreciated the imaginative grandeur of Huttonian decay and renovation: ‘The mind’, it said ‘cannot

‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime

61

comprehend so vast a system’.47 Thus if the biblical stories of God’s creation and future destruction of the Earth have the potential to generate sublime reactions in readers, then so too does Hutton’s natural history of the Earth. Yet although Hutton was a deist who assumed that the Earth had been created by God in order to provide a stable living environment for animals and human beings, the possibility of interpreting his work as suggesting that the Earth was eternal led to charges of atheism. In the year of the French Revolution, John Williams’s The Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom (1789) insisted that ‘The wild and unnatural notion of the eternity of the world leads first to scepticism, and at last to downright infidelity and atheism’.48 This reading of Hutton was propagated by the fourth edition of George Hoggart Toulmin’s The Eternity of the Universe (1789). Yet the most substantial early response to Hutton appeared in the Monthly Review in 1790–1 in the form of four letters from Jean André De Luc that explained and criticized Hutton’s theories.49 As Dean notes, these letters ‘constituted the lengthiest and perhaps most influential discussion of Huttonian theory before Playfair’.50 Given this intense public debate about Hutton’s Royal Society paper, it is highly likely that James Robertson, writing in 1791, would have been well aware of Hutton’s theories and the controversy they had raised. (In his parish report on Aberfoyle it is clear that the Reverend Patrick Graham was consciously responding to Hutton and using De Luc’s criticism to do so.) The Highland Boundary line that cuts through the parish of Callander is, of course, one of the most prominent and complex geological features in the British Isles, separating the hard Precambrian metamorphic rocks of the Highlands from the much softer, and younger, Devonian and Carboniferous sedimentary rocks of the Midland Valley.51 After the discovery of continental plate tectonics in the twentieth century we now know that the Highland Boundary is a faultline brought about when two land masses adjoined and moved horizontally against each other, forcing up the Grampian Mountains. In the eighteenth century, however, it was something of a puzzle because no theory, not even Hutton’s, could really account for the startling discontinuity between the rocks on the SE side of the fault and those in the adjacent Grampian Mountains. Nonetheless, as Robertson’s parish report shows, there was great interest in attempting to read the Highland Boundary’s geological features in terms of what they revealed about the history of the Earth. Robertson notes that the Highland Boundary divides Scotland into two distinct geological regions and is especially interested in a particular kind of conglomerate rock, which he calls ‘plumb-pudding stone’ (sic), which runs in a long seam along the south-eastern side of the Boundary ‘to the distance of many miles’: ‘the most frequent species of rock, about Callander, is a composition, consisting of a great variety of small stones, of different colours and sizes. They are so firmly cemented together, by a brown substance, as hard as stone itself,

62

Romantic Localities

that, when used in building houses or inclosures, they resist the influence of the weather for ages, without losing a single particle’.52 Robertson’s attention to the ‘plumb-pudding’ conglomerate in his parish was not unmotivated, since the formation of conglomerates in general was one of the pivotal issues in the controversies raised by Hutton’s theory of the Earth. Modern geology tells us that these particular conglomerates within the Midland Valley were formed as terrestrial stormwater sediments in an arid climate during the Devonian period and that the strata were later folded in a vertical direction immediately to the south-east of the Highland Boundary fault.53 In his Edinburgh paper, however, Hutton gives two varying accounts of the formation of ‘pudding stone’, both of which involve the shaping powers of heat and pressure. He refers to ‘the pudding-stone of England’, which he confesses not to have seen ‘in its natural situation’, as possible evidence in support of his claim that the presence of flinty stones in sedimentary strata is due to their being injected by pressure while they were in a molten state.54 While this is a correct analysis of the presence of flint stones in sedimentary rock, it falsely suggests that pudding stone was produced the same way. Later, he offers a different account of the origins of ‘Spanish pudding-stone’: It appears that all these different marbles had been consolidated or made hard, then broken into fragments, rolled and worn by attrition, and thus collected together, along with some sand or small siliceous bodies, into one mass. Lastly, This compound body is consolidated in such a manner as to give the most distinct evidence that this had been executed by the operation of heat or simple fusion.55

In both these accounts of the formation of ‘pudding stone’, Hutton posits the action of heat and pressure – either in injecting molten rock into the surrounding sedimentary material, or in fusing the rock material that binds the pebbles together. In his first letter to Hutton in the Monthly Review, however, De Luc insists that ‘pudding-stones’ show no signs of having been formed through heat: ‘All these facts are so contrary to suppositions of heat, fusion, and softness, that I am sure you would never have formed your hypothesis, had you more opportunities of studying, in their natural position, the specimens you have in your cabinet’.56 For De Luc, such conglomerates, like all other rocks, had been precipitated in a global ocean in the early period of the Earth’s history and exposed with the rest of the world’s landmasses when the Earth’s crust collapsed in his ‘sixth period’. Robertson also speculates about the origins of the ‘plumb-pudding stone’ in his parish, and is inclined to reject Vulcanist and Plutonist explanations of them: Whether the plumb-pudding stone be the Scoria of a vulcano, in a hardened or petrified state, after having gathered a multitude of stones in its progress, while the lava

‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime

63

was in fusion, or whether it be a petrification of stones and earth and gravel, all in one mass, occasioned by the action of some mineral, it is difficult to determine. … The pebbles, which are inclosed in the cement, do not seem to have undergone the action of fire, but of friction. They are of different colours; some white, some blue, and some gray, and mostly of the roundness of field or water stones. The cement itself has the most calcined appearance, being all of one colour, and uniformly brown. This rock does not stand in columns, in the form of basaltic pillars.57

Robertson gives good reasons for rejecting the volcanic and plutonic origins of this rock material. While he is wrong in assuming that there are no ancient volcanoes in the region, it is true that his ‘plumb-pudding’ conglomerate is not the product of volcanic lava or formed like basaltic pillars but a sedimentary rock. What he fails to consider is how such pebbles, perhaps formed by the action of the sea on an ancient beach, could have been raised up into the mountains immediately to the north of Callander. It was Hutton who supplied a coherent, and at least half-correct, explanation of such phenomena. The fact that Robertson discusses his ‘plumb-pudding’ conglomerate at some length and in the terms that he does suggests that he might be taking De Luc’s side in his controversy with Hutton. Yet, in a footnote, Robertson attacks all those modern theorists who attempt to explain every geological feature according to the actions of one elemental agency and thus overlook the ‘wise and great Artificer’ who makes use of all the elements in shaping the world through the ‘unerring and general laws’ of nature: It is strange what whims, under the plausible name of Theories, will enter into the brains of Philosophers. Some will choose to be ridiculous rather than think like other men, or relinquish the distinction of singularity. Some will have every thing to be the effect of water; and others, every thing the effect of fire, as they happen to have a predilection for either of these elements. It is to be hoped, the next theory will ascribe every thing to the power of air, and that we shall arrive at common sense at last. That great naturalist, the celebrated Buffon, could, by the magic of his submarine currents, make continents and islands emerge from the deep, like so many ducks popping up their heads. Others, since his time, fearing that the world should wear the marks of old age, send Vulcan on many a long subterraneous journey, that he may blow up his forge wherever gray hairs appear on the face of the earth, to singe the hoary beard of nature, and to cover the chin afresh with the down of youth. What a pity, that these ingenious men don’t allow fire, earth, air, and water, to be the instruments used by a wise and great Artificer, who forms and executes his own plans, and by unerring and general laws, regulates all the phenomena of nature. Former theorists paid some respect to their Maker, and to his word. They endeavoured to accommodate their waking dreams to the standard of truth. But bolder spirits have now arisen, who usurp the reins of the universe, invent the baseless fabric of cobweb theories, and expect to make the fleeting delusions of their fancy pass for the established laws of nature.58

64

Romantic Localities

Robertson here mocks both Buffon’s version of Neptunism and the Vulcanism of his opponents, and may be targeting De Luc and Hutton as well. He is also indicating his own commitment to a combination of deism and biblical revelation. Yet he is willing to concede that Buffon is at least partially right. He notes that, in the Lowland parts of his parish, ‘oyster shells are found in abundance, several feet below the surface of the earth, betwixt Callander and Stirling’.59 In a footnote, he suggests that ‘This circumstance makes it probable, that the ocean, by its constant flux, forms a mighty current from E. to W., and must, in the course of ages, as Buffon observes, wear away and encroach on the land, in certain places, while it leaves dry ground behind it, where formerly there had been several fathoms of water’.60 These remarks suggest that although Robertson is committed to a modified version of the Neptunist paradigm that can be reconciled with the account in Genesis of the creation and flooding of the Earth, he is equally willing to envisage a dynamic earth in which the erosive action of the oceans is continuously destroying and creating landmasses over potentially vast time scales. Robertson represents the rude landmasses of the Trossachs as indescribably sublime, but he also reads the details of its geology as hinting at the vast workings of deep time that are equally sublime. The minister of Callander, then, took the opportunity offered by Sinclair’s ambitious project in the Statistical Account of Scotland to represent the landforms of his parish in terms of two seemingly different discursive systems – as a landscape that generates the aesthetic effects of the sublime and as a source of geological evidence about the creation and subsequent shaping of the Earth. The discourses of geology and Romantic aesthetics were not entirely incompatible in the period, since both emerged within a cultural context in which a variety of proto-disciplines were concerned with locality and landscape. But to weave landscape aesthetics and geological analysis together in the way that Robertson does, along with an analysis of the impact of geomorphology on human occupation and occupations, resulted in a ‘deep’ and intimate account of a key locality of a kind that was rarely produced by writers and artists who were simply passing through. Robertson’s intervention in current geological disputes reveals a subtle negotiation between his Enlightenment education and his awareness that these disputes had theological implications that bore on his position as a minister of the Church of Scotland. That he defends a version of Neptunism is perhaps unsurprising since that paradigm made it possible to reconcile deist accounts of the operation of the general laws of nature with the teachings of the Bible. Yet one of the consequences of his attempt to read the geological evidence of his local landscape in order to refute Hutton’s ‘atheistic’ reading of Scotland’s landforms was to place the Trossachs at the epicentre of geological controversy. Simultaneously, his representation of the Trossachs as an unsurpassed locus of wild and Romantic scenery seems to have played a significant role in locating

‘Plumb-Pudding Stone’ and the Romantic Sublime

65

the region at the epicentre of Romantic Scotland. In a sense, then, the Romantic ‘discovery of Scotland’ was intimately related to the geological ‘discovery of the Earth’. In the parish report on Callander, the Romantic sublime triggered by the Trossachs’ mountainous landscape is coordinated with what we might call the geological sublime triggered by intimations of the colossal power that produced that landscape and of the dark abyss of time out of which it emerged. Robertson’s parish report thus makes the Trossachs one of the magnetic spots of time in the Romantic imagination of Britain.

5 READERS OF ROMANTIC LOCALITY: TOURISTS, LOCH KATRINE AND THE LADY OF THE LAKE Nicola J. Watson

Loch Katrine has long been recognized as a romantic locality; indeed, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was arguably the most romantic locality of them all. The story of its evolution as a premier tourist attraction describes a major cultural transition in the sorts of pleasures open to the contemporary traveller. From being viewed at the end of the eighteenth century increasingly in visual and generic terms, as a romantic landscape which conveniently melded the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque, Loch Katrine came by the second decade of the nineteenth century to function as a quintessential romantic locality, charged with specific, unique and local meaning. By the middle of the twentieth century, this meaning had decayed and the area was rapidly dwindling back into landscape, perceived as merely a rather pretty, rather out-of-the-way place.1 These successive transformations were bound up with the critical and commercial fortunes of Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake. The publishing sensation of 1810, it grew into a Victorian popular classic, before becoming increasingly unreadable and unread, whether by general readers or scholars, from about the mid-twentieth century. Its six cantos were prefaced with a brief ‘Argument’ stating that ‘The scene of the following poem is laid chiefly in the vicinity of Loch Katrine, in the Western Highlands of Perthshire’ which fixed the name of the remote lake that had previously been known variously as Ketturan, Ketterin, Cateran, Catheine, Catharine and Catherine, and, in providing what amounted to a basic map-reference for an ‘enchanted land’, inaugurated an unprecedented tourist-boom. Accordingly, the publication of The Lady of the Lake has long been recognized by historians of the representation of Scotland and especially of tourism to Scotland as a critical moment in the ‘discovery’ of the Scottish Highlands by Lowlanders, the English, Americans and travellers – 67 –

68

Romantic Localities

from continental Europe. As Holloway and Errington note, ‘all direct enquiries’ into the transformation of the Highlands from depressing to romantic ‘lead straight to one place – the defile of the Trossachs into which the king follows the stag at the beginning of The Lady of the Lake.’2 Yet critics have to date paid rather little attention to how it was, exactly, that The Lady of the Lake wrought this transformation in tourist consciousness, or to what experience it was that tourists promised themselves, or regarded themselves as having had, in journeying to Loch Katrine. The business of this brief essay, then, is to explore in what ways and why Scott’s poem succeeded in transforming this landscape into a romantic locality of such importance in the imaginary geography of Great Britain for readers and travellers from all around the world. To do so, I shall be looking at how this most famous and widely read poem amplified and modified previous representations of Loch Katrine, considering how it incorporated and transformed familiar elements of travel-writing within its romance. By looking at the conventionalized rituals and itineraries of tourism that developed on site that were detailed and retailed in travel-writing both private (in the shape of letters and diaries) and public (in the shape of memoirs, travelogues and guidebooks), I examine the ways Scott’s romance was subsequently re-represented in relation to Loch Katrine, hoping thereby to offer glimpses of why nineteenth-century global culture engaged in such a lengthy collective reiteration of this fiction of place.3

Romantic Landscape Well before 1810, the defile of the Trossachs leading to Loch Katrine was already known as the type of scenery beloved of those hunters after landscape thrills following in the footsteps of William Gilpin and others. Gilpin himself did not include the Trossachs on his otherwise extensive itinerary of 1776, detailed in his Observations, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, made in the year 1776, on Several Parts of Great Britain; particularly the High-Lands of Scotland (1789). The ‘discovery’ of the Trossachs is usually credited to Dr James Robertson, Minister of Callender, a contributor to The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–8), in which he described the area in part in terms of the fashionable paradigm of the sublime.4 There was some contemporary controversy over this; in a conversation with Robertson detailed in 1810 by Elizabeth Isabella Spence, he dated the ‘discovery’ to 1790 and his article for The Statistical Account, noting that ‘except to the natives, and a few individuals in this neighbourhood, this remarkable place, till then, had never been heard of ’.5 Designed as a survey of Scotland rather than a guidebook to it, The Statistical Account did not immediately put the area on the tourist map; John Lettice’s Tour of 1792, for example, did not encompass it.6 The first tourist publication to notice the Trossachs was James M’Nayr’s little

Readers of Romantic Locality

69

book entitled A Guide from Glasgow to some of the Most Remarkable Scenes in the Highlands of Scotland, published in 1797. This details a tour ‘From Stirling, by Callender of Monteath, to the Troshachs, and Loch Catharine’ and advertises it primarily in terms of the sublime, which he makes sound like a rather exhausting course of medication. Visitors are promised an ‘expansion of mind’ deriving from ‘the succession of ideas founded on the constant change of objects’ and a cleansing and health-giving flux of extreme emotions: A scene presents itself to the ravished eye, so sublimely terrible, so stupendously magnificent, as, at once, to fill the mind with reverential awe and admiration … a scene, at all times indescribably sublime, and … most powerfully impressive of enchantment.7

M’Nayr’s account notes the inconvenient absence of a carriage road through from the Trossachs to the lake itself but remarks the presence of two wicker huts ‘for the accommodation of travellers’ erected by Mrs Drummond of Perth.8 This first mention of those two wicker huts hints at the way that Loch Katrine was already part of a landscape conceived by its aristocratic proprietor as having romantic capabilities, and hints, too, that it had already been constructed as the endpoint for an excursion. One traveller who had made the trip before M’Nayr brought out his little book was the intrepid Sarah (Aust) Murray who published her account of her travels in the area in A Companion, and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland … To which is added, a more particular description of Scotland, especially that part of it, called the Highlands in 1799. Her tour of 2,000 miles in the summer of 1796 included a full day to see ‘the wonders around Loch Catheine’, possibly prompted by Robertson’s account. Her expectations of the wild scenery were fully satisfied – the Loch was ‘beyond, far beyond description, either of pen or pencil. Nothing but the eye can convey to the mind such scenery’. Despite torrential rain, she enthusiastically toured the loch in a boat, viewed the ‘Den of Ghosts’, admired ‘the beautiful wooded island’ at the foot of the lake, and, wet through, walked back through the pass of the Trossachs, picking up pebbles in an undamped spirit of geological inquiry. Like M’Nayr, she identified the location principally in terms of its appeal to a sensibility curious for the sublime shudder.9 In 1801, John Stoddart, a friend of Walter Scott, made a point of visiting ‘Loch Ketterine’ on account of what he termed its ‘celebrity’, noting that it had been improved further by the noble proprietor with ‘paths along the sides of the precipices, which overhang the water.’10 By 1802, Patrick Graham, the minister of Aberfoyle, had been galvanized into producing his own little guidebook to the area at the urging of ‘some travelling gentlemen’; indeed, the preface to Sketches descriptive of Picturesque Scenery, on the southern confines of Perthshire, including the Trossachs particularly notes the increase of travellers ‘of taste’, by which he means genteel connoisseurs of the landscape such as Stoddart, and

70

Romantic Localities

remarks that ‘from the beginning of May to the beginning of November, this scenery is crowded with visitors of distinction, from every corner of the kingdom. It is no unfrequent thing to see here six or seven carriages in one day.’11 The number of visitors seems to have been increasing so fast that the accommodation of the two wicker shelters had become inadequate; in between his conventional descriptions of the picturesque, Graham lobbies energetically for some proper accommodation for tourists. This rapid increase in traffic may well have been prompted by the way in which so many of these accounts in different ways insist that the scenery is ‘indescribable’ or ‘beyond, far beyond description’ while indefatigably describing it, a trope and procedure that is calculated to, as M’Nayr puts it, ‘cherish that spirit for visiting’ ‘those scenes … which have been most celebrated for their grand and picturesque beauties.’12 Alongside a patchy but conventional insistence on the sublime and the picturesque capabilities of the local scenery, this indescribability ‘by pen or pencil’ seems often attributable to a sense that the place provided a multi-sensory, three-dimensional, temporal experience. The Trossachs and Loch Katrine seem to have provided unusual opportunities for interaction between visitor and location, whether because the visitor could render the landscape interestingly kinetic by moving about it, or whether s/he could render the landscape vocally responsive to him by setting off echoes. The anonymous author of The Traveller’s Guide; or, a Topographical Description of Scotland, and of the Islands belonging to it … (1798) describes in some detail the visual and aural eventfulness of the experience of walking or sailing along the lake: Sometimes the view of the lake is lost; then it bursts suddenly on the eye; and a cluster of islands and capes appear, at different distances, which give them an apparent motion of different degrees of velocity, as the spectator rides along the opposite beach: at other times, his road is at the foot of rugged and stupendous cliffs; and trees are growing where no earth is to be seen. Every rock has its echo; every grove is vocal … In a word, by both land and water, there are so many turnings and windings, so many heights and hollows, so many glens, and capes, and bays, that one cannot advance 20 yards without having his prospect changed, by the continual appearance of new objects, while others are constantly retiring out of sight.13

Yet, although all these accounts hint at something unusual about the Trossachs as a particularly beautiful and interesting place, and although it is clear that something like a standardized itinerary around viewing stations both on land and on the lake was emerging, the pleasures celebrated are not specific to Loch Katrine other than in the sense that it offers them at especial intensity. That’s to say, Loch Katrine does not offer pleasures that can only be had there, but supplies landscape pleasures that in themselves are generalized, even conventionalized, comparable with pleasures available, for example, in the Lake District or in Killarney. In this sense, Loch Katrine was still a landscape rather than a locality.

Readers of Romantic Locality

71

The romantic shift to conceiving landscape as a unique and specified locality begins to be evident, however, in Alexander Campbell’s expensive and comprehensive survey of the sights of Scotland, A Journey from Edinburgh Through Parts of North Britain: containing remarks on Scotish [sic] Landscape; and Observations on Rural Economy, Natural History, Manufactures, Trade, and Commerce; interspersed with Anecdotes, Traditional, Literary, and Historical; together with Biographical Sketches, relating chiefly to civil and ecclesiastical affairs, from the twelfth century down to the present time … embellished with forty-four engravings, made on the spot, of the Lake, River, and Mountain Scenery of Scotland (1802). On the one hand, Campbell describes the scenery of Loch Katrine in the familiar technical terms of the picturesque (‘foregrounds’, ‘glimpses’, ‘prospects’, ‘side-wings’ and ‘side-screens’); directs the armchair tourist’s eye to especially fine views; and earnestly recommends ‘stations’ for the would-be sketcher, remarking on the virtues of a boat on the lake for this purpose. On the other hand, unlike Sarah Murray, Campbell displays antiquarian urges as well as picturesque sensibilities, and his book, as advertised, includes a number of ‘anecdotes’. In this, he is to a degree developing Gilpin’s suggestion that ‘traditional anecdotes, whether true, or fabled, add grandeur to a scene,’ but, although he is not alone in this exploitation of anecdote, he is newly extensive and expansive.14 Campbell remarks, for example, on the use of the forest of Glenfinglas as a royal hunting ground, identifies ‘Cori-nan-Uriskin’ (Murray’s ‘Den of Ghosts’) as ‘the den of the wild-men or savages’ from a band of marauding outlaws who had made their headquarters there, and identifies ‘the former residence of the famous highland free-booter Rob Roy’. Most strikingly, he includes his own narrative poem evoking a battle between the Highlanders and the Romans, set in what he calls ‘this region of sublimity and historical incident’.15 Adding ‘historical incident’ into the mix presses generalized sublimity into the service of a narrative that is rooted in that place and in that place alone. Landscape viewed in this way is visibly – or rather, invisibly – more local, and it is more ‘romantic’ as a consequence. It displays as a space layered through with time – a place where something once happened – and a space in which it is no longer happening. Campbell’s account performs the beginning of narrativizing landscape, supplying a solution to the problem identified by Stoddart, that ‘the interest … which [picturesque] descriptions excite, is of a kind requiring frequent relaxation and change: it is not bound together, like an historical work, by curiosity; and must, therefore, become tiresome, if not frequently relieved by other kinds of excitement’.16 It displays the beginning of a new way of understanding, possessing and animating a landscape. It was therefore on a surprisingly well-defined, even slightly hackneyed, tourist route, itinerary, and project that Walter Scott travelled on holiday in the summer of 1809, and a well-rehearsed stock of viewing positions supplemented

72

Romantic Localities

with historical and folk anecdote lay ready to his hand.17 Scott was, as Coleridge noted in 1810, ‘a man … familiar with descriptive Poets and Tourists, himself a Picturesque Tourist.’18 If he was suited by reading and habit to the role of tourist, his travels would also be facilitated by the conditions that had already made it possible for others: better roads, middle-class aspiration and affluence, the closure of the continent to travellers in consequence of the Napoleonic wars, and new amenities associated with the new tourist trade springing up. But the verse romance that he began writing while still resident in those scenes would dramatically shift the aesthetic and sensibility of tourist practice.

Romantic Locality The Lady of the Lake was so successful that the publisher Ballantyne was caught out with too small an initial print-run; the total sales for 1810 were 17,250, and publications and derivatives associated with the poem also reached unprecedented levels. The poem was published in May; by August, such was the pressure of visitors to the area that Spence urged the necessity of hiring a carriage in advance out of Stirling or Callender, ‘so many persons are now attracted to this far-famed spot, in consequence of Mr Walter Scott’s beautiful poem of ‘The Lady of the Lake’, as to exceed all calculation’, remarking that 500 carriages had come through that year.19 The phenomenon was also noted in private letters from the local gentry who found themselves playing host to those ‘going to disturb the wood-nymphs and emulate Walter Scott’, as Mrs Grant of Laggan put it.20 Over the next decade, tourists would come from startling distances – William Pearson noted in 1822 that the visitors’ books at the inn now included addresses from Italy, Spain, America, the West and East Indies and China –21 and numbers would expand throughout the century, carried there first by horse and carriage but subsequently by railway, steamer and charabanc.22 To this day, Callander, gateway to the Trossachs, boasts a Waverley Hotel and an Abbotsford Lodge in homage to the writer who brought it so much profit. It is possible to calibrate something of this tourist boom and something of the change in tourist practice and sensibility that the publication of The Lady of the Lake brought about by taking a glance at the fifth edition of Margaret Oswald’s A Sketch of the Most Remarkable Scenery, Near Callender of Monteath; particularly the Trossachs, at the East End of Loch Catherine, and the road by Lochearn-Head to Duneira, which had first come out in 1800. As its title would suggest, in its early incarnations it was principally engaged in selling the visual pleasures of scenery. By 1815, there had been so much demand for it that it had gone through six editions. Of these, the most interesting in this context is the fifth edition of 1811, sold by the vintner at Callender, which advertised itself as ‘improved’ to the tune of some ten extra pages.

Readers of Romantic Locality

73

This edition bears witness first of all to the enormous expansion in visitor numbers. The text is peppered with remarks about the recent increase of visitor amenities which must have delighted the Rev. Graham’s heart: Callander had recently acquired a new hotel ‘for the encouragement of the public’ which boasted ‘nine public rooms, sixteen bedrooms with dressing-closets (some double-bedded), nine servants’ apartments, stalls for thirty horses and accommodation for a further thirty, and pleasant walks in the garden and orchard.’ A new Inn at Lochhearnhead is reviewed, and readers are assured that the road ‘is much improved, so that carriages can travel with safety’. More tourists provided work for more guides: one ‘James Stuart of Ardkenknochan,’ according to Oswald, ‘has engaged to attend strangers, to provide them with a boat, to explore both sides of Loch Catherine, to point out the most remarkable places and tell their names, to recount the traditions, current in the country of the circumstances that happened, and to gratify the inquisitive with every necessary information.’23 This edition also bears witness to the influence of The Lady of the Lake in inspiring and constructing this tourism. The majority of the additional ten pages is taken up with quotations from The Lady of the Lake, sometimes rather crudely dropped in, sometimes more carefully situated in relation to an actual location. The inclusion of those quotations tells of a sense that the visitor’s experience should be fundamentally conditioned by their reading of the poem in situ. This sense was still a little fragile in 1811 when Spence wrote her account of her visit, which flanked long quotations describing the landscape from canto 1 with other remarks on, variously, the ‘Isle of Wits’ and the rebellion of 1745, Rob Roy’s imprisonment of Graham of Killearn on another island, a long disquisition on why the lake never freezes, and the location of the grave of Cromwell’s murdered soldier. Most strikingly, she retails an anecdote which seems calculated to destroy the imaginative effect of Scott’s poem, as it repeats and then deflates the gothic inset stories of Alice and Blanche of Devan, overwrites the setting of the Goblin’s Cave, and incidentally reveals the area to be inconveniently populated by a modern community: A gentleman, who possessed the farm of Glaschoil immediately above the den [i.e. Cori-nan-Uriskin, the ‘Den of Ghosts’ and Scott’s ‘Goblin’s Cave’], going home one evening at a late hour, passing through the den, beheld a figure glide swiftly past him, and immediately drew his sword in an attitude of defence; but the unhappy maniac, who had taken shelter here, ‘So wither’d, and so wild in her attire,’ sprung forward, and exclaimed, ‘Walter of Drunkie, spare my life; it is I.’ He knew this unfortunate and harmless female, and passed on.24

74

Romantic Localities

This type of narrative hiatus in the grip of Scott’s poem upon the tourist imagination would rapidly lessen with time; The New Picture of Edinburgh for 1816 would recommend that ‘The traveller should have with him Scott’s poem of The Lady of the Lake, in which our Scottish bard, with so much beauty, describes many of the interesting scenes at this place,’ including ‘the Goblins’ Cave, Ellen’s Isle, and the Beach of Interview.’25 If Spence was interested in assessing the accuracy of Scott’s famous topographical descriptions in canto 1, noting that ‘even Mr Walter Scott, who in his rich descriptions paints with poetical imagery like a Salvator Rosa, or a Claude Lorraine, falls infinitely short in depicting the sublimity of this scenery’, The New Picture feels that the tourist will mostly be interested in plotting the locations of Scott’s narrative onto physical place. This project made it necessary to have the poem to hand, whether memorized, conveniently available as guidebook gobbets, produced in tourist pocket-editions, or recited by the guide or coachman, for the rest of the nineteenth century.26 By 1822, The Scottish Tourist and Itinerary (dedicated to Scott) could remark: ‘Need we remind the tourist that we are now upon classic ground, and that the characteristic features of almost every object will be recognised by the stranger who is familiar with The Lady of the Lake?’27 The writer probably did not need to remind anyone; as early as 1812, Elizabeth Grant recalled travelling through the area as a child equipped not just with The Lady of the Lake, but also The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion.28 If travelling light, the inn would supply the needful. In 1820, Dr Meissner observed that ‘In the little inn at Callander I found copies of all Scott’s poems, maps of those districts which the bard has rendered classic ground, and a little description of the scenery about Loch Katrine, prepared by the landlord of the inn, and which consisted of quotations from the ‘Lady of the Lake’.’ ‘Travellers,’ he went on, ‘are seen wandering about Loch Katrine and referring to the poem … whenever a person is seen strolling up and down with a book in his hand, one may be pretty certain he is perusing the “Lady of the Lake”’.29 In 1823, one such well-read stranger was Maria Edgeworth, who, in addition to taking a guided boat tour, used the copy of the poem provided by the innkeeper to mark ‘the place where the armed Highlanders started up … [and] the spot of Clan Alpine’s outmost guard, where Roderic Dhu’s safe conduct ceased, and where the king and he had their combat’.30 In 1824, a Frenchman recorded using a map to conduct the same exercise.31 Others had the poem by heart and would recite it at the smallest provocation: in 1825, John Eddowes Bowman took the opportunity ‘to repeople [the landscape] with the ancient Gael’ and ‘to conjure up the frenzied Brian, sending forth the bloodstained emblem’ and in 1842 Queen Victoria herself mentions reciting passages of The Lady of the Lake on site.32 Theodor Fontane, travelling in 1860, reported not only that the breakfast tables of Stirling hotels were piled up with ‘considerable quantities of gilt-edged copies of The Lady of the Lake in red and green

Readers of Romantic Locality

75

bindings’, but that as they drove out to the Trossachs his party of pleasure was alive with ‘all manner of talk about The Lady of the Lake, talk to which everyone contributed from the storehouse of his memory as though the whole thing were a kind of conversational picnic’.33 If all else failed, the local guides were often capable of reciting the poem, and from at least 1820 were touring visitors around the main locations.34 In 1854, one transcribed the captain’s patter on the steamboat: ‘There,’ said the captain, ‘gentleman and ladies, is where Fitz-James blow’d his bugle, and waited for the ‘light shallop’ of Ellen Douglas; and here, where you landed and come up them steps, is where she brought him to the bower, and the very tree’s still there – as you see’d me tak’ hold of it – and over the hill, yonder, is where the gallant gray giv’ out – and breathed his last, and (will you turn round, if you please, them that like’s), yonder’s where Fitz-James met Red Murdoch that killed Blanche of Devan, and right across this water swum young Graeme that disdained the regular boat, and I s’pose on that lower step set the old Harper and Ellen many a time a-watching for Douglas – and now, if you’d like to hear the echo once more –35

This dominance of Scott’s poem as descriptive geography was longlived: in 1887, Baedeker’s Great Britain simply noted that of all guidebooks to the area, the best available was Scott’s poem, and this sentiment persisted until the outbreak of the First World War.36 On this evidence (and this is only to skim the surface of it), Scott’s poem transformed the landscape of Loch Katrine into something rather more than scenery. Tourists and armchair tourists alike would come to see the landscape enhanced primarily by their memories of something that never happened outside the pages of the book shoved into their pockets or portmanteaux. These fictional associations were what made this landscape such an extreme example of romantic locality – it was layered not with geology, not with autobiographical feeling, not with the material mementoes of history, but with a literary memory both personal and collective. As such, it was a place in which the act of consuming literary narrative could be displayed and reiterated. Such reiteration was not confined to visiting the spot and writing about such visits, but informed the collection and subsequent display of souvenirs. It became customary, for example, to pick up quartz pebbles from the ‘Silver Strand’ (Victoria had a bracelet made of them) and to pluck twigs from the oak under which Ellen and the Harper were depicted as sitting. In 1815 one American of French parentage noted that on visiting Ellen’s Isle ‘we did not fail to gather a few leaves and acorns, which will render us an object of envy among the numerous readers of Mr Scott in America’.37 A few years later Szyrma noted this practice, and followed suit.38 The acts of appropriation that tourists indulged in, extending to inscribing their names where possible, bear witness to the ways in which being a reader of Scott’s poem licensed the stranger to be familiar, even overfamiliar with the landscape.

76

Romantic Localities

What was it about Scott’s poem that elicited this tourist desire to reiterate the poem in situ, and indeed, which produced a readership willing not merely to read the poem but to read travellers’ accounts of how they reiterated the poem through their visits? In many ways The Lady of the Lake was an excursion waiting to happen. There had been indications previously of a cultural desire to locate fictive events within real geography. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Hélöise had engendered tourist interest on the shores of Lake Geneva in the 1780s and 1790s; more recently, there had been some effort to locate the legends of Ossian within Scotland, ranging from the showing of Fingal’s Cave to the building of ‘The Hall of Ossian’ at Dunkeld.39 What Murray Pittock has noted with regard to Scott’s oeuvre more generally, that it modified Ossian’s lack of specificity to place and so facilitated tourist itineraries, was spectacularly true of The Lady of the Lake.40 Moreover, Scott’s poem is informed throughout by a discourse plundered and adapted from the genre of the guidebook. As a writer in 1863 with the benefit of hindsight upon the phenomenon put it: ‘His poem described [the scenes] in words which were not only poetry, but were as clear to the dullest comprehension as the plainest prose of a guide book.’41 The elaborate descriptive pictures which Scott drew were in the tradition of such evocations of scenery characteristic of older travel-writing, and in future guidebooks they would indeed often replace further effort to describe the scenery. They were supplemented with a mass of notes that were equally indebted in form and content to the guidebook, containing as they did antiquarian material explicitly drawn from Oswald, Campbell, Graham and others. If the guidebook descriptions were visually, generically, and functionally conventional, the notes were rather less so, efficiently confusing the fictional with the historical and the geographical. Some locate fictional events upon a real map; the note on the route of the sign for the clans to rise in support of the Douglas and Roderick Dhu, the Fiery Cross, reads A glance at the provincial map of Perthshire, or at any large map of Scotland, will trace the progress of the signal … The first stage of the Fiery Cross is to Duncraggan … From thence it passes towards Callander, and then, turning to the left up the pass of Lennie, is consigned to Norman at the chapel of Saint Bride … the alarm is then supposed to pass along the lake of Lubnaig, and through the various glens in the district of Balquidder, including the various tracts of Glenfinlas and Strathgartney.42

Equally, the investment in traditionary anecdote common in different registers to both main text and notes, conferring as they do equal reality on Romans, Rob Roy, Roderick Dhu and Highland customs as on fairies, Ellen Douglas and Malcolm Graeme, elided distinctions between the fictional and the actual. Through these mechanisms, fictional events and personages begin to occupy the same discursive territory and validity as real historical personages and events.

Readers of Romantic Locality

77

This borrowing from the genre of the guidebook accounts for the ease with which it was possible to re-version the poem as a guidebook. By 1813 the everopportunistic Ballantyne and Longman were advertising in the endpapers to Rokeby what may have been the first ever literary tourist map: described as ‘a half-sheet map of the scenery of The Lady of the Lake’, it was designed to slip into the pocket, and was accurate enough, the description suggests, for practical use, being ‘taken from an actual survey and beautifully coloured’. The subsequent publishing history of the illustration of the poem also opportunistically magnified geographical specificity. Although the two sets of illustrations by Westall and Cook commissioned soon after first publication are on the whole uninterested in topography, in 1830, when Scott and his publisher engaged J. M. W. Turner to illustrate the collected Poetical Works (1833), they decided on topographical subjects. This may well have been in response to the success of engravings of the locality made famous by Scott’s poems, sets such as Six Views of Loch Katrine (1822), which had come captioned with Scott’s verses. Turner eventually delivered a view of ‘Loch Katrine’ to act as a frontispiece to volume 8. Illustrations to the poem would thereafter become ever more specifically topographical: Robert Herdman’s Six Engravings in Illustration of the Lady of the Lake (1868), for example, included one showing Ellen ‘with Ellen’s Isle, Loch Katrine, and part of the slopes of Ben Venue behind her’. And while the text of The Lady of the Lake became more specified to location in this fashion, so too Loch Katrine became more specific to the text through judicious improvement. The current owner of the land installed a summerhouse on ‘Ellen’s Isle’ which survived until 1837, especially designed to correspond to Scott’s description of Ellen’s rustic bower: ‘The chairs were made of crooked branches of trees and covered with deerskins, the tables were laden with armour and every variety of weapon, and the rough beams of the building were hung with antlers and other spoils of the chase.’43 Yet this is merely to explain how Scott’s poem came to function successfully as guidebook to Loch Katrine, rather than to explain what tourists promised themselves from their trip. Scott’s narrative proper provided in its protagonist Fitz-James a model for the tourist-experience of the region. His adventure meticulously models and follows the standard route of the eighteenth-century tourist into this landscape, and he himself follows his pleasure as lightly, as whimsically as a tourist. Loch Katrine and Ellen’s Isle are represented as secret, romantic, alternative and temporary, a holiday place in which normal social identity can be cast aside, without forfeiting class privilege. The narrative of Fitz-James’s meeting with Ellen Douglas models the tourist’s relation to the landscape – attraction, flirtation, followed by a wistfully regretful romantic distance; as such, it is a holiday romance. On the other hand, Fitz-James’s adventure morphs into something more serious than a holiday – the sublimity of the landscape turns out to be less aesthetic than thoroughly dangerous, bristling with armed enemies.

78

Romantic Localities

Taken together, the invitation of the lady of the lake and the intransigent threat of the Highlander Roderick Dhu provided a narrative version of landscape aesthetic, supplied a romantic version of travelling into undiscovered places and primitive cultures, and offered, too, romantic versions of super-femininity and super-masculinity which a tourist might occupy temporarily. In penetrating into this landscape, imaginatively difficult to access yet conveniently close to Stirling, the tourist might blend simultaneously into a health-giving landscape and the chivalric past. Enchanting though Scott’s romance was, it was up to the tourist to do the work of enhancing the landscape with narrative power, and this would certainly have been one of the main attractions of the jaunt. Jabez Marrat, amongst many others, describes undertaking this exercise: ‘Standing on the deck of the little steamer which plies on the loch, we think of Scott’s poetical romance, and almost expect to hear the bugle of Fitz-James sound from the groves on the shore, and to see the dark locks, the radiant face, the silken plaid, and the light shift of Ellen mirrored in the waters between the embowered island and the silver strand’.44 The difficulty was, of course, that later tourists had to contend with others on steamboat and shore bent on the same experience, and rather than Fitz-James and Ellen they were more likely to hear cockneys playing French horns or boarding-school misses plaintively reciting on the deck of the steamboat. The experience of the poem was regularly measured against the experience of the landscape, and for every viewer who professed themselves uncomplicatedly delighted, there were some who dwelt on the fissures between poem and landscape. Sometimes this was simply a matter of finding fault with Scott’s landscape descriptions for being inaccurate or overblown. More interestingly, however, many writers defensively open up a space between place and poem in order to assert their own superior literary sensibility. Such writers regularly ascribe particular credulity in the poems’ fictions to groups conceived as inferior. These include on occasion the local Highland guides: Black’s Picturesque Guide (1853) is only one among many to remark sardonically on their patter: Somewhere near the entrance of the defile Sir Walter Scott intended to lay the deathscene of Fitz-James’ over-ridden horse. The guides show the exact spot with true Highland precision. Nay, farther, they will assert, as indeed they truly believe, that the event was no Saxon poet’s dream, but that it happened, and happened there.45

Alternatively, it may be the cockney urbanite who is represented as overly credulous; John MacCulloch contrasts the gullibility of his indignant metropolitan guest with the knowingness of his guide asked to show the Goblin’s Cave: ‘Lord, sir … there is no cave here but what Mr Scott made himself.’ ‘What the d—l, no cave?’ ‘Na, Sir, but we go where the gentry chooses, and they always ask for the goblin cave first.’46 Women tourists, such as Sophia Hawthorne, distanced themselves from the stereotype of sentimentally gushing boarding-school misses

Readers of Romantic Locality

79

by representing themselves as peopling the landscape with the imagined figure of the poet instead of with his creations.47

Just another Picture-Postcard The story of the rise of tourism associated with The Lady of the Lake exemplifies a changing relationship of tourist to landscape. The late eighteenth-century appreciation of the painterly picturesque in scenery was now founded on a romantic sense of the evanescent pleasures of imagining an invisible – and past-tense – narrative. Under Scott’s wide-ranging influence, the Scottish landscape was newly local, saturated with poetic, traditional and historic associations, associations which the well-tuned traveller was now expected to reanimate. But to what ends was this exercise directed? Kathleen Grenier has suggested that tourism to Scotland managed anxieties of rapid modernization, offering the refuges of nature, history and hypermasculinity to a culture unnerved by rapid urbanization and industrialization, but this, although suggestive, only goes so far to tackle the specificity of the appeal of The Lady of the Lake. More useful might be to borrow Benedict Anderson’s work on the production of nation as reading community and Katie Trumpener’s contention that the Waverley novels are critical to the making of the British empire, and note the poem’s insistence upon bringing the romantically local and liminal under the control and surveillance of the national and metropolitan.48 It is not incidental that the narrative of The Lady of the Lake is concerned with the suppression of rebellion rooted in this romantic locality, and the bringing of it under the authority of the king’s court, based in Edinburgh. This reading might well suggest that the visit to the romantic locality, ambiguously real and imaginary, visible and invisible, operated as a ritual description and performance of the borders of modernity, of the modern nation, and of modern national identity for Scottish, English, American and European alike. Today, not much survives of Loch Katrine as romantic locality. The steamer named the ‘Sir Walter Scott’, built in the 1890s, still chugs across Loch Katrine in the summer carrying tourists from the Trossachs up to Stronachlar. Rags of quotation from the poem’s set-piece landscape descriptions adorn the helpful plaques otherwise retailing snippets of history which have been installed in front of all the best views by what is now the presiding genius of the place, the Glasgow Waterworks, and the heroic concrete stag couched as the foreground of the magnificent view from the turreted Trossachs Hotel is captioned with Scott’s famous lines, ‘The stag at eve had drunk his fill / Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill’. There are some pretty postcards to buy on the dock. But, on the whole, the sense of Loch Katrine as a romantic locality has faded along with readers’ passion for The Lady of the Lake, and the nineteenth-century project of nation-making itself.

6 PARADOX INN: HOME AND PASSING THROUGH AT GRASMERE Polly Atkin

This essay explores the paradoxical concepts of home and passing-through in relation to Dove Cottage, in Grasmere, in the English Lake District. Dove Cottage was home to the poet William Wordsworth from 1799 to 1808, during which time he wrote or conceived most of what is considered his finest poetry, much of which is concerned with Grasmere and the Lake District, and with dwelling in place. The cottage was the centre of the ‘Home at Grasmere’ of Wordsworth’s eponymous poem, written whilst living there: the cottage he would name in his poetry ‘our happy castle’,1 and ‘a home within a home’.2 It was the home planned and shared with his sister Dorothy, who recorded it in her Grasmere journal, and to which Wordsworth brought Mary Hutchinson when he married her in 1802, and where their first three children were born. It was a home whose doors were opened not only to the extended family (including William and Dorothy’s brother John, and Mary’s sisters Sara and Joanna), but to many friends, notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the young Thomas De Quincey, who would later make his own home there, and write about it. This story of the Wordsworths’ home at Grasmere, and the creativity it inspired, is a well known one, told originally by the Wordsworths themselves in their poetry, journal-writing and letters, and repeated in biographies, guidebooks and memoirs over the last 210 years. It is also reiterated several times a day within the cottage in question, by tour-guides as they show visitors around: in 1891 the house opened as a museum, only the third writer’s house in England to do so. In 1890 Dove Cottage had become home to the Dove Cottage Trust (now The Wordsworth Trust), a body established to ‘secure’ the cottage, ‘as Shakespeare’s birthplace is secured, for the eternal possession of those who love English poetry all over the world’.3 As such it became, and remains, a site of great cultural and historical significance, and has come to epitomize home in many senses. It was, and is, perceived as the home of Wordsworth’s life, poetry and cre– 81 –

82

Romantic Localities

ativity. Today it is home to the Wordsworth Museum, library and archive; and to the majority of Wordsworth’s manuscripts, books and possessions. The site, extended during the 1980s to incorporate almost all of the hamlet of Town End, subsequently became home to the Centre for British Romanticism. Through this association, Grasmere is home to the Wordsworth Summer Conference, and Winter School: forums dedicated to the study of Wordsworth and Romanticism more generally, and during the conferences becomes temporary home to dozens of Romantic scholars. As a research library and archive, the adjacent Jerwood Centre draws scholars from around the world, just as the Wordsworth Trust’s literary programme draws poets from around the world, for readings, workshops and residencies. As a tourist destination Dove Cottage is branded as the ‘inspirational home’ of the poet, drawing up to 70,000 visitors a year to experience the vision of home it offers. Town End continues to be the actual home of the many staff and associates of the Wordsworth Trust who live and work around it. This essay seeks to explicate this accepted conception of Wordsworth’s home at Grasmere, and to elucidate the paradoxes inherent in both his own home and dwelling there, and its reverberations throughout the building’s history. Although now known predominantly through Wordsworthian connections, Dove Cottage has had many other roles. Parts of its history pre-Wordsworth and pre-musealization are obscure, leading to a biography of the house minutely detailed in multiple representations in some periods, and incredibly vague in others. It is believed, for example, that until 1793 it was a wayside inn, The Dove and Olive Bough (or Branch: even the name is uncertain), but beyond this simple fact this part of the building’s history remains unclear. As Dove Cottage historian Stephen Hebron admits, ‘we know almost nothing of the house in [the inn] stage of its life’.4 Although Dove Cottage lore claims an unconfirmable sighting of a drinking licence dating the inn to 1617, a forthcoming English Heritage architectural report suggests the building may only have been standing for a few decades or so before the Wordsworths took up their tenancy.5 Similarly patchy are records of its uses between 1835, when De Quincey gave up his lease, and 1890, when the Dove Cottage Trust was formed. De Quincey had sublet the house from the Wordsworths, who rented from the Benson family, who in turn continued to lease the house to various tenants, some known, some unknown, until at least the mid-1850s. By 1864 the building had a new life as a lodging house, run by the Dixon family under the name ‘Dixon’s Lodgings: Wordsworth Cottage’. This is the first explicit linkage of the house with its Wordsworthian heritage, and perhaps reflects a renewed interest in the house by Wordsworthian tourists and enthusiasts after the poet’s death in 1850.6 Mrs Dixon ran a supply shop in one of the main living rooms. The building continued to take paying guests under two subsequent lodging housekeepers. It is only during this later part of the nineteenth

Paradox Inn

83

century that the name ‘Dove Cottage’ is first used in association with the building: the Wordsworths knew it only as Town End cottage. There is no evidence of common use of the name beyond William Knight’s 1878 publication, The English Lake District as Interpreted in the Poems of Wordsworth: It had once been a public-house, bearing the sign of the Dove and Olive Bough, from which circumstance it was for a long time, and is still occasionally named, ‘Dove Cottage’.7

Half critical reader, half guide, this work ‘encouraged Wordsworthians to train their eyes on Grasmere’.8 The recentring of ‘Wordsworthshire’9 around Grasmere had now begun in earnest, and the little cottage in Town End becomes increasingly important to Wordsworthians as the home of the poet during his Golden Decade. When Stopford Brooke visits the cottage in 1889, inspiring his campaign to turn it into a Wordsworth museum, it had been recently purchased by an enthusiast (Mr Lee of Bradford) who had written a book on Dorothy Wordsworth. This visit occured a year after the first publication of ‘Home at Grasmere’, as the first book of the uncompleted ‘Recluse’.10 These high-Victorian acts of memorialization and adoration accentuate and perpetuate a mythos of home at Grasmere initiated by the Wordsworths themselves, the effect of which can be seen in twentieth-century appraisals of Wordsworth as ‘the founding father for a thinking of poetry in relation to place, to our dwelling upon the earth’.11 These pre- and post- Wordsworthian roles can be seen to extend or exaggerate functions and uses of the place during the Wordsworth’s residency, which also include elements of dwelling, and of passing-through, as will be examined here. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard asserts that ‘all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home’.12 However, there is a great abyss between something bearing the essence of a notion, and actually assuming that notion and bringing it into reality. I am concerned here with how that notion of home is created, brought into reality, and propagated, and what that has to do with the concept of ‘dwelling’, with its trail of resonances. Within that trail is dwelling’s flipside: the equally powerful notion of passing-through, of perpetual wandering, of homelessness. Both these notions – home-ness and homelessness, or passingthrough – can be seen to play an important role in the creation and perception of Dove Cottage from its beginnings, to the present day. These two states of being seem paradoxical, but operate as intrinsically linked in our understanding of home. Theano S. Terkenli argues that the relationship between dwelling and nondwelling is central to the conception of home, identifying the ‘home-non-home dialectic’ as informing our understanding of home in all its forms: The definition of home rests on a dynamic dialectic relationship between home and the outside, on which people build their everyday geographical understanding of the

84

Romantic Localities world. Consequently, they come to know home much more by its absence from a nonhome perspective.13

The home-non-home dialectic is intrinsic to the conception of home in general, particularly strongly, or notably,