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

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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

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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

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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.

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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:

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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-

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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-

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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 –

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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.

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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

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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-

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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

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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

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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 –

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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

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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

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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

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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’

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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.

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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

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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:

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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 –

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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

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‘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-

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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-

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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’,

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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 –

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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

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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.

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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:

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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 –

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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 –

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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

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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

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The home-non-home dialectic is intrinsic to the conception of home in general, particularly strongly, or notably, for Dove Cottage, where home – contemporaneously and historically – is explicitly linked with non-home and passing-through. In its roles as inn, rented accommodation, lodging house and tourist destination, Dove Cottage offers itself as a place of only temporary refuge, strongly contrasting with its (re)presentation as the eternally-possessable centre of the ‘home within a home’ at Grasmere. This paradoxical nature of home at Grasmere is revealed in the Wordsworths’ writings and activities from the time they first arrived to make their home there, in the snows of December 1799. What follows is divided into two sections, exploring the seemingly conflicting notions of dwelling and passing through at Grasmere.

‘Most Constant and Most Fickle Place!’: Home at Grasmere14 The move to Grasmere marked the beginning of the actualization of a homing process Dorothy and William Wordsworth had been working towards for years: a deliberate move towards the ‘native soil’ of the county they were born in, and a deliberate attempt to dwell in place. This homing process was dynamic and multifaceted, operating on many levels and through many activities: physical and imaginative, phenomenal and literary. It included the mechanical construction of boundaries; it relied on the cultivation and familiarization of the physical environment (through housework, gardening, local walks); and vitally, a period of frenetic poetic activity producing the poems that become ‘Home at Grasmere’, ‘Michael’, ‘The Poems on the Naming of Places’ and the Inscription Poems, amongst others. In these early Grasmere poems William self-consciously names and claims Grasmere and its places as his home, his dwelling-place, and home also of his family, friends, memories and creativity. Through doing so he effectively re-maps Grasmere according to his own emotional topography. At the same time, Dorothy is writing her journal of their lives and work, similarly recording and cementing their home and homing at Grasmere. Here I will explore some of these homing activities, particularly in relation to the poem ‘Home at Grasmere’. ‘Home at Grasmere’ plays a vital part in the making of meaning around Dove Cottage, and gives a vital insight into Wordsworth’s own conception of the role of the place (both cottage and vale) in his life, and for his poetry. It is a poem that revolves around specificity of place, and what that specificity might afford the dweller within place. In Wordsworth and the Lake District David McCracken tells us: ‘Home … as in ‘Home at Grasmere’, is a word charged with more than a technical meaning’.15 This is nothing if not an understatement. Home, as in ‘Home at Grasmere’, is a word that takes on

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the glowing intangibility of a holy grail: and yet it is something both real and substantial. It is located in place (like Dove Cottage itself ), and is also a spiritual state, a state of dwelling with place, of rootedness, which cannot be reduced to stone and slate. It is, essentially, an act of homing. Bachelard sees the house, and the making of it into a home, as an essential part of Being. The house is ‘one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind’.16 Without the house, he writes, ‘man would be a dispersed being’.17 The home is a centre that allows us to travel out, in dreams and in reality, by giving us somewhere to return to, to come together in. This is what Dove Cottage meant to Dorothy and William Wordsworth when they arrived to make their home in it, in December 1799. It was the first time the siblings felt they had a real base, a home which could truly belong to them, and them to it. Later, Dorothy describes this period as the time ‘we were left to ourselves, and had turned our whole hearts to Grasmere as a home in which we were to rest’.18 It was their first adult experience of a ‘a home and dwelling of [their] own’.19 Home as a concept is tightly linked to dwelling. ‘Dwelling’, like ‘home’, is a word charged with meaning, far beyond the merely technical act of living in a certain place, in a defined home. Wordsworth himself recognized the importance of dwelling as a concept, and as a way of life. As quoted previously, Jonathan Bate refers to Wordsworth as the ‘founding father’ of a poetry of dwelling, suggesting in Romantic Ecology that Wordsworth’s aim in his writing was ‘to enable his readers better to enjoy or endure life … by teaching them to look at and dwell in the natural world’.20 Bate writes with Heidegger in mind, and in doing so, evokes the Wordsworth of Dove Cottage, a Wordsworth implicitly writing his surroundings into his work in all their specificity of place and time: For Wordsworth, poetry is something that happens at a particular time and in a particular place … His need to ground the origin of his work would have been understood by Martin Heidegger, for whom human being is distinguished by its temporality and human dwelling by its particularity – by, one might say, its cottageyness’.21

In the most simple sense, the Wordsworths’ home at Grasmere was based at, and centred around, Town End Cottage, now immortalized as ‘Dove Cottage: the inspirational home of William Wordsworth’. However, the initial importance of the cottage was not for its own sake, but because it enabled William to move himself and Dorothy to Grasmere, the focus of his homing-instinct at that time. The availability of this cottage to rent enabled them to make their home in Grasmere, but it was far from their ideal. On a walking trip the previous autumn he had written to Dorothy: … C.[oleridge] was much struck with Grasmere and its neighbourhood and I have much to say to you, you will think my plan a mad one, but I have thought of building a house there by the Lake side.22

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Wordsworth’s first thought was to build, something to which I shall return later when discussing the role of building in dwelling. He wanted to make a home, from scratch, that would best suit his / their purposes. Instead, he finds an existing house that can be made into a home. It is in this letter that he makes first mention of the house that will become so important to him, and to the myth of his life and his poetic life. It is also the first moment the house is written by Wordsworth, the man who will come to define its future. The reference is fleeting and tantalizingly brief: ‘There is a small house at Grasmere empty which perhaps we may take, and purchase furniture but of this we shall speak’.23 This is merely an aside to his madder plans at this point, yet it is this small house on the periphery of his dream that becomes the centre. It becomes the centre not only through becoming the place lived in, but by being the place written in, or from: the base point for the poetic explorations undertaken. The cottage itself barely features in the poem ‘Home at Grasmere’. It appears first as the ‘lowly dwelling’ now the speaker’s home.24 It next appears as proof that the speaker is growing in his relationship with nature as he ages, as proof of the truth of the exaltation he feels. Here again, though, it is only part of the valley: ‘For proof behold this Valley and behold / Yon cottage, where with me my Emma dwells’.25 Later it appears clearly as the centre of the larger home of the valley: Bright and solemn was the sky That faced us with a passionate welcoming And led us to our threshold, to a home Within a home, what was to be, and soon, Our love within a love.26

Later yet, its importance is as a roof to shelter the brothers and sister of the inmates’ hearts. It is clearly a place imbued with love, yet it is also clear that the home celebrated in the poem is decidedly the whole of Grasmere, not merely Town End Cottage. Moreover, in early drafts of the poem, the speaker is fascinated by the other dwellings in the valley, writing of one ‘This dwelling charms me’.27 The charm lies not merely in its aesthetic qualities, but in the level of family activity and dwelling work which seems to the outsider to occur within and around it. Because of this work, ‘the house is filled with gaiety’. This relationship between work and dwelling is vital to understanding both the poem ‘Home at Grasmere’ and the Wordsworths’ homing project. Heidegger reminds us that ‘We do not merely dwell – that would be virtual inactivity – we practice a profession, we do business, we travel and find shelter on the way, now here, now there’.28 So leaving home, working, making a living, is an essential part of dwelling. It is awareness of this, or like, opinions, which seems to provoke a certain anxiety in Wordsworth to prove himself useful in the world.

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The entirety of ‘Home at Grasmere’ can be read as a reflection of this anxiety, as much as an effusion of joy at finally coming to port. He himself writes: ‘’tis not to enjoy, for this alone / That we exist; no, something must be done’.29 Moreover, ‘Each Being has his office’.30 He is convinced that he has within him ‘an internal brightness … That must not die’.31 But he also knows that his poetic work of observation and introspection is not the proper humble work of the shepherds and farmers he admires. This is the problem that ‘Home at Grasmere’ seeks to resolve. It is presented as essential that he lives in Grasmere, the place that he loves, because for him, ‘no where else is found – / no where … can be found – / the one sensation that is here’. It is only by being here, in this environment that he can learn what he needs to learn, develop as he should develop. Only then can he ‘impart it … spread it wide / Immortal in the world which is to come’. The conviction that Grasmere is the source of the poet’s powers is authenticated by the back-story of his first sight of it, as a child. This love-at-first-sight becomes a monumental moment, a turning point in the child’s life. Hartman writes that it is only in Home at Grasmere, ‘his freest poem’, that Wordsworth ‘approaches a personal myth-making’.32 In ‘Home at Grasmere’ Wordsworth certainly creates his own mythos of arrival, and of a home waiting for him, through the years, to come back and claim it. With that mythos of home is the mythos of dwelling, and the vocation implicit in the dwelling. Although for William, the home-making work was a poetic endeavour, achieved by naming and locating home at Grasmere in the synonymous poem, and in multitudes of other references, more practical homing work had to be completed first. A house is not a home unless it is loved, cared for. Wordsworth makes a great deal of the importance of ‘care’ in proper dwelling. The primary crime in the tale of the adulterous husband related in ‘Home at Grasmere’ is not so much his adultery, but his ‘carelessness’ matched by the ‘overlaboured’ and superficially ‘shewy’ housework of his wife.33 Because of his lack of care, his access to home, and therefore his ability to dwell, is denied, in an act of universal justice. It is very important to Wordsworth that ‘The Inmates [are] not unworthy of their home / The Dwellers of their Dwelling’.34 Those who do not appreciate and take care of their home, who do not put effort into their dwelling, do not deserve it. In Bachelardian terms, care put into a house is a transference of love, an act of creation, and a reaffirmation of unity: Objects that are cherished … attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order. From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch. The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.35

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Bachelard’s cared-for house is alive on every level. Similarly, Wordsworth’s Grasmere is alive on every level, ‘instinct with life’, because it is cared-for. The speaker acknowledges that he and his companion ‘do not stand … here misplaced and desolate / Loving what no one cares for but ourselves’.36 Dorothy and William certainly put care and even hard labour into making the cottage a home. Their first letter to Coleridge, written days after they move in, relates how they arrived to find a bare house, without even bed-curtains. Their first weeks in residence were mainly occupied with making this ‘new and almost empty house’ into a ‘comfortable dwelling’, or at least one comfortable enough to live in. They tell Coleridge: ‘we have been overhead in confusion, painting the rooms, mending the doors, and heaven knows what!’37 For Heidegger, the act of building is inextricably linked to dwelling, in a similar way to Bachelard’s understanding of housework. He writes: ‘We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal’.38 Implicit is the kind of care and attention so intrinsic to Bachelard’s idea of making home, and to the Wordsworths. Heidegger tells us: The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word bauen, however, also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine.39

In a Heideggeran sense, therefore, building is not merely the act of physically putting brick on brick or wood to wood, but encompasses ‘building as cultivating, Latin colere, cultura, and building as the raising up of edifices, aedificare’.40 This building is not delimited by our usual ideas of home. The non-locateable space occupied by the imaginative dwelling-place has wider implications: As a double space-making, the location is a shelter for the fourfold or, by the same token, a house. Things like such locations shelter or house men’s lives. Things of this sort are housings, though not necessarily dwelling-houses in the narrower sense.41

In this sense all of the places of importance to the Wordsworths become their dwelling places, and this explains how he can write that the place he names ‘Emma’s Dell’ in the Poems on the naming of Places can also become his ‘other home / my dwelling, and my out-of-doors abode’. In this honeymoon period of life at Grasmere, Wordsworth is finding dwelling and dwelling-places everywhere. Moreover, the Wordsworths’ home-making included all these kinds of building and cultivation – as colere, cultura and aedificare almost immediately. One of the first things the Wordsworths did was build a wall around the cottage garden to ‘make it more our own’.42 During this time they also built what they called an ‘indian shed’43 in the garden (a wooden hut with a seat in it), and set about cultivating (or de-cultivating) the garden into a kind of constructed

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wilderness. Importantly, this work begins in the Grasmere of the mind before it begins in the Grasmere of the earth. William tells Coleridge: in imagination [Dorothy] has already built a seat with a summer shed on the highest platform in this our little domestic slip of mountain. The spot commands a view over the roof of our house, of the lake, the church, helm crag, and two thirds of the vale. We mean to enclose the two or three yard of ground between us and the road, this for the sake of a few flowers, and because it will make it more our own.44

Wordsworth is keen that this dreamt cultivation is not taken as fantasy, but for what it is: an act of love and gratitude, asking am I fanciful when I would extend the obligation of gratitude to insensate things? May not a man have a salutary pleasure in doing something gratuitously for the sake of his house, as for an individual to which he owes so much?

In a letter the following September, Dorothy is able to relate that this planned work is completed. The garden ‘we enclosed from the road and pulled down a fence which formerly divided it from the orchard’, and ‘as it is the work of our own hands we regard with pride and partiality … Our cottage is quite large enough for us though very small, and we have made it neat and comfortable within doors’.45 In Heideggerian terms, such cultivating / building helps gather the world / universe and create definite locations out of mere spaces. Essentially, this kind of productive dwelling makes place. It certainly can turn an unloved house into a ‘beloved abode’. The building of walls and cultivating of garden and indoor spaces is for the Wordsworths an instinctive way of weaving building in the Heideggerean sense into their homing process. The house/houses they might have dreamt of building will remain unbuilt – they cannot own the place or space, or preserve it in that specific way – but they can bring the essence of building, and all its resonances of dwelling and preserving, into their lives through cultivation and care. This makes the loved abode, and thereby remakes it in the image of their dream-houses, which live beyond them. Meanwhile the cottage has through their work become outwardly the iconic image later to be propagated by De Quincey: it looks very nice on the outside, for though the roses and honeysuckles which we have planted against it are only of this year’s growth yet it is covered all over with green leaves and scarlet flowers, for we have trained scarlet beans upon threads …46

Importantly, for this particular kind of home, the beans ‘are not only exceedingly beautiful, but very useful, as their produce is immense’. This is the effective ‘cottagization’ of the building: turning it from an inn into a place not only of living, and dreaming, but of work, of usefulness.

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Heidegger links Dwelling to humanity’s fundamental Being, and to the idea of our lives as a ‘stay’ on earth: ‘dwelling itself is always a staying with things’.47 Heidegger also insists that the act of dwelling preserves the being of the things that we stay with: ‘dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things’.48 A home requires dwelling, just as much as dwelling requires a home. There is a bi-directional feed that must be maintained in order for the proper order to continue in a harmonious way. The term ‘cottage’ itself implies a dwelling, in the live-and-work sense; the origin of ‘cottage’ is as the home of a cottar, a medieval serf, who would have worked the land both for his own family, and for his lord. Naming a building a ‘cottage’, therefore, implies not only post-picturesque rustic charm, but a history of sustaining connection with the land. In the case of Town End Cottage, of course, ‘naming’ is the appropriate word. As noted above, until 1793, six short years before William and Dorothy moved in, Dove Cottage was not a dwelling-place at all, but The Dove and Olive-Bough / Branch Inn. The Wordsworths are the first recorded tenants, and it is quite possible that the ex-Inn actually stood empty for the five years before they moved in, unsettling the image of domestic busyness projected onto its past, today. Town End Cottage may have been the beginning of the Wordsworths’ dwelling-as-living, but in many ways the Wordsworths were the beginning (and making) of the cottage’s being-as-dwelling, turning it from nonhome into home.

‘Wondrous Cold’: Passing through at Grasmere The following section will examine a few studies which reveal the complex anxiety about being unrooted or uprooted which runs through Wordsworth’s poetry and life at Grasmere. I will focus on the poems ‘The Brothers’, ‘When first I journeyed Hither’ (the later sixth edition to the poems on the naming of places), and ‘Benjamin the Waggoner’. ‘Wondrous Cold’ is the phrase used by Wordsworth in ‘Benjamin the Waggoner’ to describe how Benjamin might view the Wordsworths’ home, which he remembers in its previous incarnation as The Dove and Olive Bough. This pre-cottage life of Dove Cottage gives an interesting and easily overlooked resonance to its later (and present) status. It was not a dwelling, not a home, but a wayside inn: a place of community, but also intrinsically of passing-through. The physical memories of this function remain in the building itself: the inn-life gives the house many of its distinctive features, including the heavily panelled walls and slate floors of the ground-floor rooms (the public drinking rooms), and the ‘buttery’ (the ale store), designed with a stream running beneath the slate floor to keep the beer cold. This also accounts for its adjacency to the road – then the main road through the Lakes – an adjacency expedient for a wayside inn, but which, in a private home, seems rather

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too exposed (hence the wall-building). This inn-life also remains in less tangible resonances. During the Wordsworths’ time there, the cottage was temporary home to many more than its official residents. Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson were regular long-term guests; John Wordsworth visited for nine months; Sir Walter Scott visited. It was a ‘centre’, but a ‘centre / come from whereso’er you will’:49 a place for secluded dwelling, but also a place of coming-together, and a place to visit.50 In many ways it could be said that the Wordsworths themselves were only visitors to Town End Cottage, albeit long-term ones. They only lived there for eight and a half years, little more than a tenth of William’s life: not an insignificant amount of time, but hardly the kind of long-term dwelling in place that Wordsworth shows admiration and respect for in ‘Michael’ and ‘Home at Grasmere’ particularly. More importantly, perhaps, it must be remembered that the Wordsworths never owned the cottage – in fact, they never owned any home they lived in. Bate states in Song of the Earth: To inhabit is not to possess. Dwelling is not owning; you may legally own a house without it being a home; you may find a dwelling-place which you do not legally own 51

But it does change the way we think about a home to consider whether it was owned outright or not: whether it was a home in perpetuity, or only a temporary mooring, if you will. This points us to the central paradox of Wordsworth’s home at Grasmere, and the continuing paradox of Dove Cottage through all its temporal and spatial layering. Passing-through is as definitive to Wordsworth’s Grasmere as dwelling. The Wordsworths’ garden wall clearly did not stop the stream of travellers on the road from calling at their door. Dorothy’s journal describes from its first entry caller after caller – many begging, some selling goods – whose histories Dorothy notates in her journal like an ethnographer, as she does the many fellow travellers they meet whilst actually on the road themselves. These figures on the road make it into the pages not just of Dorothy’s journal, but William’s poetry: we see them poeticized as, amongst others, the leech-gatherer, the discharged soldier, the old man travelling, Alice Fell and Benjamin the Waggoner. These are figures whose livelihoods belong to the road, or who have been forced out on the road for lack of the means to settle. In Romanticism on the Road: the marginal gains of Wordsworth’s homeless, Toby Benis notes the wide and confusing definition of vagrant during this time, under which theoretically anyone on the road could come under suspicion of acting unlawfully: From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, people liable to be punished under vagrancy law included persons refusing to work for customary wages; bearwards; unlicensed pedlars; gypsies; wandering scholars; players; persons collecting ends of yarns or cloth; persons possessing tools used in burglaries; poachers; hedge-

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This of course would resonate for the Wordsworths, for whom walking had always been a large part of their lives, and who often found themselves on the road, with no obvious purpose. Critics such as Robin Jarvis and Gary Harrison have focused on the socio-political implications of Wordsworth’s poetry on vagrants and vagrancy, but I would like to draw attention to more personal sympathies. Benis notes that ‘Resolution and Independence’ addresses the new laws’ implications specifically for Wordsworth’s ‘understanding of his poetic vocation as a marginal condition akin to homelessness’.53 Rather than reflecting an aim to force the reader to empathize with the homeless, this suggests the root of Wordsworth’s preoccupation with vagrants and wanderers is their closeness to his own situation. To understand the full implications of this, one must remember the years of rootlessness preceding the Wordsworths’ arrival in Grasmere. Arriving in Town End through the winter storms, as described in ‘Home at Grasmere’, the ‘frosty wind’ drove Dorothy and William ‘like two Ships at sea’.54 Even the rain is made to recognize and address them as ‘wild wanderers’:55 there is a strong sense that they have thus far been ‘at sea’ all their lives. Only when they reach Grasmere do they dock, and find safe harbour. This language of harbouring spreads and propagates throughout Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage era poetry. His favourite copse is described as a ‘commodius harbour’.56 The cottage is analogous to a ‘boat safely anchored by the Shore’, so much so that when William leaves Grasmere he writes: ‘safely she [the cottage] will ride when we are gone’.57 Yet at the same time as he is writing about home at Grasmere as safe harbour, he is also writing about the restless life of the sailor, the call of the sea, and the dangers in it. A common thread running through many of Wordsworth’s tales of vagrancy is the sea, and the particular kind of rootlessness the sea engenders. As Dorothy’s journal tells us, even the real leech-gatherer had his links with the sea: his only surviving child was one ‘of whom he had not heard for many years, a sailor’.58 This preoccupation can clearly be seen in ‘The Brothers’, one of the first poems Wordsworth finished after the move to Town End (by April 1800). Although often appropriated now to talk about attitudes towards tourism in the Romantic era, ‘The Brothers’ shows us much about Wordsworth’s anxiety of return, of being unhomed, even unhomeable. The poem unfolds the story of Leonard Ewbank, once a native of Ennerdale, who left his family occupation of shepherding to make his fortune at sea. He returns to find his old village both changed and paradoxically the same. The kairotic rhythms continue as ever, but features have changed. Wandering in the rustic graveyard, he is spotted by the village priest, who takes him for an idle tourist. We learn very quickly that the

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priest has misjudged the unrecognized visitor, yet the priest at no point realizes the full extent of his mistake. Within the poem this irony serves to add to the pathos, as we realize that the brother Leonard hoped to be reunited with in life is dead and buried in the churchyard. Moreover, it allows us to discount to some degree the priest’s simple anti-touristic sentiments, or certainly discount them as reflective of Wordsworth’s own. Even as Leonard is overcome by emotion at reunion with his native soil, the priest is thinking: ’Tis one of those who needs must leave the path Of the world’s business, to go wild alone: His arms have a perpetual holiday, The happy man will creep about the fields Following his fancies by the hour, to bring Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles Into his face, until the setting sun Write Fool upon his Forehead.59

The irony of this is doubly acute, when we see that the priest is right in many senses. Leonard is on ‘holiday’; he is not at work at sea. He is forced by his needs to ‘leave the path / Of the world’s business’, to tread the less-travelled road homewards, and, through his loss, ‘to go wild alone’. Worse still, this lonely wandering will be perpetual: he has no one else to go to. By the end of the day he does indeed have tears down his cheek, and no doubt also feels a fool, in the most serious sense, for ever leaving his home in the first place. Through Leonard’s careful prompting of the priest, we see that, in the eyes of his lost community, he was once a boy with his ‘soul knit to his native soil’; a natural mountain spirit, who knew the land he lived with ‘as well as … the flowers that grew there’ did. 60 It also unfolds that he left his home not through greedy self-improvement, but because of involuntary destitution, and ‘chiefly for his brother’s sake’.61 He always intended to return and re-plant himself. We learn later in the poem that more than twenty years have passed, years in which Leonard has been uprooted from that native soil, flung out into the world, made a slave, and presumed dead by his old community. By the moment of the poem he appears like a restless spirit, returning home to find where his bones are buried. It is no coincidence that he appears to the still-dwelling, i.e. the living, member of his community amongst the graves of the dead; ‘the dead [men’s] home[s]’.62 Yet it is not his own bones he finds, but those of his beloved brother, leaving him unable to find peace. ‘The Brothers’ is another story of orphans, of separated families, disinheritance and expulsion from the garden: the stories of Wordsworth’s own childhood and youth, repeated and reinvented in so many of his poems. This is where the enfolded concerns of ‘The Brothers’ become particularly interesting. As the story of a sailor, a brother gone to sea who leaves his weaker sibling behind, it mirrors

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William’s status as the original of James Ewbank: the brother who remains, who is left behind and passed from family to family, cared for in their homes rather than his own, pining endlessly for his lost sibling(s). In this parallel poem-world, Leonard Ewbank becomes a cipher for John Wordsworth: the Wordsworth who went to seek his fortune at sea aged sixteen. In ‘The Brothers’ William is, in part, imagining his own death, his lost brother’s return, too late, at just the time when John Wordsworth was in fact coming to visit William and Dorothy in Town End, the first block of time they had spent together in many years. This is a poem about brotherly love, and of the failure of brotherly love, both in the microcosm of the small family unit, and the macrocosm of human society. There are shades of Odysseus in the mariner, and of Cain, doomed forever to wander the earth. Harrison describes Wordsworth’s vagrants generally as ‘Ancient Mariner-like marginals with their tales to tell’,63 and there are certainly echoes in Leonard, ‘a grey-haired mariner’.64 It is a poem which tells us that we can never go home. It says that once we have left, home ceases to be home, it ceases to exist for us, even if it may remain for others. It is a warning, and a working out of anxiety. It is also tragically prescient. Not only does it pre-echo the death of John Wordsworth, at sea in 1805, it also prefigures the Wordsworths’ own retreat from Grasmere village, their two children buried in the churchyard a constant reminder of loss. Wordsworth has Leonard forced to travel on, forsaking his original intention to dwell on his Father’s land, because in grief, ‘This Vale, where he had been so happy, seemed / A place in which he could not bear to live’.65 The similarities between ‘The Brothers’ and ‘When first I journeyed hither’, a poem about John Wordsworth, are unmistakeable. ‘When first I journeyed hither’ (also known as ‘When to the attractions of the busy world’) was begun in 1800, worked on until 1804, and published first in 1815 as an addition to the original five ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’. The place it describes is the aforementioned firgrove where, in the winter snows, when the public road is impassable, the speaker has found a den. This special copse is not just a commodius harbour, but also a ‘sequestered nook / or cloister with an unencumbered floor’.66 It allows solitude, retirement, peace, safety, but also, importantly, space. The floor is unencumbered. Wordsworth loves the copse as he loves Grasmere, exactly for this reason: it allows ‘safe covert on the shallow snow’: shelter in the harshness of winter. Its only downside is that he cannot make out through the densely packed trees A length of open space where I might walk Backwards and forwards long as I had liking In easy and mechanic thoughtlessness.67

This is the way he likes to compose poetry: in effect the wood is useful as a shelter but ultimately fails on functionality, as it does not allow the composition of

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poetry, and so the speaker ‘loved the shady grove / Less than I wished to love a place so sweet’.68 Here enters the brother figure, removed fourteen years earlier from the speaker, and from his native Lakeland, ‘To be a sea-boy on the barren seas’.69 Importantly, the poem was begun during the time that John was staying in Town End, although it later takes on an elegeic status after his death. After the brother has left, the speaker returns to the grove and finds his brother has made a path where he could not: With a sense Of lively joy did I behold this path Beneath the fir-trees, for at once I knew That by my Brother’s steps it had been traced. … he had worn the track, One of his own deep paths! by pacing here With that habitual restlessness of foot Wherewith the Sailor measures o’er and o’er His short domain upon the Vessel’s deck While she is travelling through the dreary seas.70

For this he is dubbed ‘a silent poet’ he has the ‘finer eye’ and ‘heart more wakeful’ that the production of poetry is deemed to require.71 His poem is a literal inscription on the landscape, not in words, but in the form of a pathway, which owes itself to habits acquired at sea. Through making this pathway so, something quite extraordinary occurs. Just as the brother as ‘a school-boy to the sea hadst carried / undying recollections’ of his native landscape, he has now left some of his sea-life in Grasmere.72 In the inverse of a folding of the fells into the sea which occurs in ‘The Brothers’, here, by the close of the poem, we get a sense of the sea enfolded into the Grasmere landscape, or perhaps the paced-pathway as a kind of conduit, through which the poet-brother and sailor-brother are united, although many miles apart. The sailor is pictured pacing the length of his ship, muttering his brothers old verses, as, co-synchronously, the poet paces the path the sailor wore down, on land, muttering this verse perhaps: Nor seldom, if I rightly guess, when Thou, Muttering the verses which I muttered first Among the mountains, through the midnight watch Art pacing to and fro’ the Vessel’s deck In some far region, here, while o’er my head At every impulse of the moving breeze The fir-grove murmurs with a sea-like sound, Alone I tread this path, for aught I know Timing my steps to thine …73

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Grasmere becomes ‘dream-like’, a ‘visionary scene’, whilst the sea becomes audibly manifest in it.74 John, like all the travellers on the roads, has brought his own world into Grasmere, and has left traces of it behind, producing a kind of doubled landscape, where neither place is entirely real, or separate. Instead of the negative effect produced in ‘The Brothers’, however, this poem suggests a redemptive element to this enfolding of places and lifestyles: that the wandering non-dweller in his non-home can teach the homed better dwelling. This takes us to Benjamin the Waggoner. Benjamin is tied to the road for his livelihood – a man who ‘long hath trod this toilsome way’. In the poem, the ale-loving waggoner, Old Benjamin, passes by Town End, and finds the inn he remembers being there closed: For at the bottom of the brow, Where once the DOVE and OLIVE-BOUGH Offered a greeting of good ale To all who entered Grasmere Vale; And called on him who must depart To leave it with a jovial heart; There, where the DOVE and OLIVE-BOUGH Once hung, a Poet harbours now …75

This is a comic poem, but again we see the select use of language: the poet harbours in the ex-inn, safe from the restless sea, the rolling road. All has changed since the old days: instead of good cheer and good ale, the ex-inn only holds ‘a simple water-drinking bard’, and although this poses less of a threat to Benjamin’s workday than the temptations of alcohol, there is a sadness in it: He marches by, secure and bold, Yet, while he thinks on times of old, It seems that all looks wondrous cold …76

Without the busy inn-life in it, Benjamin cannot say if the new inhabitants of the Dove ‘be alive or dead’,77 implying Wordsworth had a level of anxiety about how his plain life of attempted dwelling was perceived from outside. The old Dove and Olive-Bough in this formation ‘used to be a sign of love / And hope’, rather than a place of mere passing-through. This suggests that, while wanting to be solitary, Wordsworth also sees the obvious benefits of the community of which he is not quite part. His presence is almost a ghostly one: he is there, for sure, but whether he is seen, whether he leaves a physical sign, is unclear to him. Again, this is another poem with a land-bound sailor in it, another poem of disinheritance and expulsion. Although light in tone, we are left with a sense of sadness: Benjamin has been expelled, his wagon gone, and the ‘nest within a nest’ he provided – clearly mirroring the ‘home within a home’ of Home at Grasmere’ – is gone with him.78 The reader is left with images of ‘ghost[s] unlaid’,79

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unable to rest or allow their hauntees to rest, until they are recognized; their stories told, which is where the poet comes in. In The Song of the Earth Jonathan Bate argues that the poet is essentially vagrant in character, and always ‘more at home in the logos than the oikos’. As a concept, this relates strongly to Wordsworth’s own later proclamations in ‘The Prelude’, that there can be no home – no dwelling on the earth – at all, only an abode in the imagination, or supranatural consciousness; ‘Our destiny, our being’s heart and home / Is with infinitude, and only there …’.80 This famous revelation is given after the crossing of the Alps, the older Wordsworth describing his younger self as ‘lost’ in his realization,81 the older able to look back and realize the truth in the situation: that on earth, we are always wanderers. This stark philosophy seems to counter his earlier attempts to dwell poetically in place, as revealed by his Grasmere poetry. This occurs in the same book in which he has described himself as a ‘Sojourner on earth’, and tells the reader ‘I too have been a wanderer’.82 Hartman posits that the failure of the poem ‘Home at Grasmere’ rests in its desire to tie the notion of home so strongly to one location, as though to do so almost necessitates failure: ‘Our being’s heart and home, in this exuberant poem, is with nature, and infinity is with nature. Yet the valley is still Grasmere and the poet is too conscious of all his ‘little realities of life ‘.83 Hence, ‘Grasmere becomes a crude omphalos’,84 to the point where the notion of home is utterly confused with the notion of final resting place, although, as Hartman concludes, ‘whether the image of a womb or a grave predominates here is hard to say’.85 I would suggest that the move implied in the 1850 Prelude, from trying to manifest ‘real’ dwelling to realizing its impossibility, is for Wordsworth a reaction against the limitations of the home at Grasmere project: the ever-presence of loss, death and transience even in that home within a home. If there can be no home at Grasmere, there can be no home anywhere. As a museum and visitor centre Dove Cottage today has a different kind of un-dwellability to it. As museum, it has become all past, no future. There are no new families coming to dwell in the house, to make it a home, to dream it into continued being. The irony of this is that, whilst no one may dwell in Dove Cottage, because of Dove Cottage, many people dwell around it, work in it, and work its land. Likewise, it is because of the museum and its visitors that staff and volunteers at the Trust are able to actually make their homes at Grasmere, however temporary they may be. It has in a sense become a peculiar kind of shrine, located within a working dwelling-place (Town End). Similarly, the Wordsworths themselves are still present in the valley, literally interred in its earth, in one corner of St Oswald’s churchyard. Today, then, the image of the grave definitely predominates. When the newly formed Trust bought Dove Cottage in 1890, it was, as I quoted at the beginning of this essay, meant to be ‘for the eternal possession of those who love English poetry all over

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the world’.86 Through the Trust, it was proposed, all those who love English poetry would be able to possess Dove Cottage, to own it, to dwell in it, wherever they might be in the world. Heidegger asserts that the problem of dwelling, what he calls ‘the real dwelling plight’, is that we must ‘ever search anew for the essence of dwelling, that [we] must ever learn to dwell’.87 Dove Cottage has certainly seen its share of learning and unlearning how to dwell, and continues to today. What it has to show us is that these modes of being are not immiscible – a place, palpable or visionary, can be both eternally possessed by all and possessed by no one in actuality, simultaneously. This is the paradox of the Dove and Olive Bough Inn, and one which seems set to stay.

7 ‘O ALL PERVADING ALBUM!’: PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT IN ROMANTIC ALBUMS AND ALBUM POETRY Samantha Matthews

Adieu to Albums – for a great while, I said when I came here, and had not been fixed two days but my Landlord’s daughter … requested me to write in her female friend’s, and in her own; if I go to — thou art there also, O all pervading album! All over the Leeward Islands, in Newfoundland, and the Back Settlements, I understand there is no other reading. They haunt me.1

Writing to Bernard Barton late in 1827, after a modest relocation from suburban Islington to comparatively rustic Enfield, Charles Lamb jokingly associates his decision to flee literary London with the nuisance of being solicited for poems for albums; but albums were at the peak of their popularity in the late 1820s, and there is no escape even in Enfield. Lamb presents this cultural ubiquity in geographical terms, through a catalogue of remote locations: a Caribbean island group, the extreme northeast coast of Canada and the American Back Settlements. Chosen because they are both names of specific places and symbolically resonant (for Lamb) of the furthest reaches of civilization, the locations simultaneously figure the album as a symbol of culture and of cultural debasement, since it constitutes ‘literature’ in comparatively uncultivated settlements. More than a year later Lamb repeats the story of his failed flight from ‘Albumean persecution’ in a letter to Bryan Waller Procter, claiming that ‘If I take the wings of the morning and fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, there will Albums be. New Holland has Albums’.2 Here he invokes Psalm 139 in a startlingly ironic comparison between God’s benign omnipresence and albums’ malign reach to the ‘uttermost’ ends of the world: from Newfoundland in the far north to New Holland (Australia) in the south and, implicitly, everywhere in between.3 Derived from the Latin albus meaning white, an album is a blank book in which heterogeneous texts and objects are collected. Although albums could be – 99 –

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associated with grand houses and institutions, large-format volumes in which visitors recorded tributes to the aristocratic host and their hospitality, the albums I am concerned with are smaller, more personal and produced in genteel and middle-class circles. Known as friendship albums in America, they are typically compilations of original and copied verse and prose, small portrait sketches and landscape watercolours, flower paintings, silhouettes, decoupage, pressed flowers and other mementoes, kept by young women with intellectual and artistic aspirations. While the owner might include her own texts, graphics or souvenirs, her role was more analogous to that of a patron or curator operating in the private sphere, informally commissioning relatives, friends and acquaintances for individual tributes for her collection. The owner is strongly identified with her book; album poems are often directly addressed to her, are formulated as serious or comic celebrations of her looks, character and accomplishments, or explore an extended comparison between the subject’s youth and innocence and the blank book gradually inscribed with experience. Over time, the album accumulates personal texts and associations, becoming a unique record of the owner’s relationships and community, an oblique and fallible individual and group biography. The private and feminized milieu of manuscript albums, associated with autobiography, adolescence and the domestic, at first appears hard to square with Lamb’s recourse to biblical allusion and analogy with a threateningly aggressive colonial expansionism. Yet the album becomes a sign of a growing desire for social and physical mobility among well-to-do young women in the 1820s and 1830s, as women despatched their albums for contributions in London literary society, or carried them to new lives as emigrants in India, America and Canada. Lamb is correct, then, in figuring albums as a cultural force to be reckoned with. His geographical jokes also express the paradoxical significance of place for the album: at once shaped by locality, reflecting the owner’s domestic context and environs; and a sign of literal and figurative mobility, accruing meaning through circulation and transmission. Writing of an album produced by nonAmerican students at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, in 1824, Karen Sánchez-Eppler reflects on the album’s unsettled relation to place and community: ‘Friendship albums could be created gradually by informal networks of friends, their pages accruing over years, but many … are occasional, prepared as a keepsake in anticipation of separations’.4 Locality and mobility, friendship networks and separations, fixedness in place and restless departures: these are the poles around which this study of a small group of albums of the 1820s and 1830s will turn. My consideration of the productive tension between location and dislocation in this case is predicated on the understanding that place is a subjective construction, and that it is temporally as well as geographically specific. As Barbara Bender points out:

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The same place at the same moment will be experienced differently by different people; the same place, at different moments, will be experienced differently by the same person; the same person may even, at a given moment, hold conflicting feelings about a place. When, in addition, one considers the variable effects of historical and cultural particularity, the permutations on how people interact with place and landscape are almost unending.5

Further, since the culture of albums in this period is typically associated with middle- and upper-class feminine culture, and with older girls and young, unmarried women, individual albums become textual spaces for negotiating contemporary concerns about feminine identity in relation to home and society, as the ideological differentiation of separate spheres became more marked in the 1830s. Comparative work across clusters of related late-romantic albums shows simultaneously broad shared tendencies in such matters as constructions of gender, power hierarchies, memory and time, space and place, and the idiosyncratic codes and traits developed within individual volumes. Albums testify to the vigour of manuscript culture and amateur literary activity in a period typically considered in terms of the industrialization of print and publishing, and the professionalization of authorship. The status of authorship in this ostensibly private context has a special resonance for my primary sources, a group of four albums kept by the daughters of the Wordsworth circle: Robert Southey’s eldest daughter Edith Southey (1804–71); William Wordsworth’s daughter Dorothy, called Dora (1804–47; Dora Quillinan after her marriage to Edward Quillinan in 1843); Emma Isola, later Moxon (1809–91), Charles Lamb’s ward; and Quillinan’s younger daughter (Dora’s step-daughter) Rotha Quillinan (1822– 79).6 The albums under discussion are comparatively well-known, visible and accessible examples which, unlike more obscure and ‘private’ albums, dramatize the often strange consequences of differently skilled writers seeking to fulfil the exacting conventions of album culture and album poetics.7 The problematic status of authorship, and the implications for the artistic credibility of album verses in the Wordsworth circle albums, is addressed in Edith’s book in the opening lines of ‘The Album’, dated 17 January 1824, the author of which is identified only as ‘E. C.’: What is an Album? tis a thing Made up of odds and ends, A Drawing here and there, and Rhymes By dear poetic Friends. Wit thinly scatter’d up and down, And lines of every measure, A Tree, a Butterfly, a Flower, Compose the motley treasure. Here you may trace a pigmy hand, And there a Giant strength,

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E. C. emphasizes the album’s heterogeneous character as a ‘motley treasure’,9 mixed both in the sense of using different media and ‘measure(s)’, and in terms of artistic quality. The nicely ambiguous phrase ‘Rhymes / By dear poetic Friends’ associates the album with the lower poetic form of ‘Rhymes’, and characterizes contributors as ‘dear … Friends’ only secondarily defined as ‘poetic’.10 Tolerant as the author is of the album’s ‘motley’ character, she – internal evidence and handwriting suggest E. C. is one of Edith’s female friends – strives to draw distinctions between two classes of contributor. In elaborating the contrast between the mark of ‘a pigmy hand’ and that of a ‘Giant strength’,11 a familiar set of binaries is mobilized: the powerful giants of ‘high renown’ crafting ‘master-strokes of light’ occupy the masculinized public sphere, while the undistinguished poetic pigmies are literally or figuratively feminized ‘younger Aspirants’, parroting sentimental romantic clichés from their place in the ‘shade’.12 The Wordsworth circle albums certainly include contributions from surviving major Romantic poets: Coleridge, Moore, Scott, Southey and Wordsworth; a later generation including Caroline Bowles, Sara and Hartley Coleridge, Walter Savage Landor; and lesser figures like Bernard Barton, Allan Cunningham, Bryan Waller Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’) and Chauncy Hare Townshend. But the debateable reputation of most of these poets in the 1820s and 1830s is additionally destabilized by the many cases like E .C.’s, where the writer’s identity is masked by modest initials or facetious pen-names, and by the levelling field of the album, in which the main criterion is emotional sincerity rather than poetic skill. Professional poets are in some sense at a disadvantage writing for albums, so that obscure and pseudonymous writers are as likely to produce ‘master-strokes’ as the poetic masters. Although E. C. apologizes for her verses being ‘exceeding dull’, she also later blames Edith for asking her to contribute, and charges her ‘sweet Friend’ with the responsibility to ‘guard with jealous care / My humble name from Critics Eye, / And Critics tongue severe’.13 E. C.’s concern that her identity be kept secret from the professionally stringent criticism to which published poets are accustomed indicates the coding of album contributions for different readerships, and suggests that even within a

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culture of private circulation, there is a sliding scale of publicity and privacy. In the Southey family, Edith’s book was jokingly referred to as the ‘magnifico album’, in honour of its quarto size, heavy red morocco binding and gold tooling; it is an object shaped with a sense of audience, while at the same time demonstrating its personal nature by a brass lock and key.14 The need to nuance our sense of the relations between public and private is inseparable from problematizing the physical locatedness and cultural contexts of albums’ creation and reception. While conducting their albums, Edith Southey and Dora Wordsworth lived mostly at home, with occasional holidays to London and visits to friends and relatives.15 It is therefore tempting to define their albums as domestic and local, since the visual and affective significance of home and its environs is clearly reflected in the contents. But ‘home’ was hardly an unambiguously private, domestic space for these young women. Albums are typically circulated in the more public rooms of a house, where visitors are received. Writing of Anna Birkbeck’s contemporaneous album, Patrizia Di Bello observes that it ‘publicises the interiority of the woman of the house by making it visible … represent[ing] culture as performed in a private sphere, but for display to friends and visitors’. Therefore the ‘distinction between private and public’ is a ‘shifting, fluid boundary’.16 The porosity of this boundary and the performed nature of privacy are particularly relevant for the daughters of famous living poets. Within the evolving culture of Romantic literary tourism, the Southey and Wordsworth residences – Greta Hall and Rydal Mount respectively – had a complex public significance as homes of the major poets, shrines to ‘genius’ connoting a spirit of place that went far beyond bricks, mortar and family life. Thus each daughter’s album also became a document of literary pilgrimage, containing poetic and graphic tributes to the poet-patriarch that mediate his association with the surrounding Lake District landscape, which visitors walked, sketched and commemorated in verse and from which they gathered organic souvenirs. The private home of the poet enters the public sphere, and the ‘private’ album becomes a space for performing the pilgrim’s entry into that privileged space.17 In a genre where interiority is performed and the domestic is in the public domain, the ‘private’ might seem a threatened, even an impossible category. Yet the album enables the creation of an interior and secret space through the very site-specific and temporally contingent nature of its texts. The great majority of verbal and graphic texts in late-Romantic albums were autographic, created by the individual hand, not reproduced mechanically. No matter how conventional or derivative the contribution, it retained the capacity for affective and symbolic significance through this mediation by the hand. Album texts are thus autograph records of an individual’s presence in a particular place and moment. They are typically signed and dated, and may identify exactly where they were written; several of Robert Southey’s album poems are signed ‘R. Southey. Cat’s

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Eden’, the family’s name for the poet’s study at Greta Hall.18 The final quatrain of E. C.’s ‘The Album’ concerns the consequences of this autographic medium. Enough for me if thou wilt look With kindness on the day Remembering one who loves thee well When she is far away! E. C. Jany. 17th. 182419

In initialling and dating her poem, E. C. participates in the conventional fiction that album verses are spontaneously composed, light witty verses improvised for an occasion, and commemorating a specific affectionate encounter – as is suggested by the closing direct address to her friend. Yet this framing assertion of presence on a given date is also a confirmation of absence in the moment of reading, as in Derrida’s definition of the signature: By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer. But, it will be claimed, the signature also marks and retains his having-been present in a past now or present [maintenant] which will remain a future now or present [maintenant], thus in a general maintenant, in the transcendental form of presentness [maintenance].20

This tension between actual nonpresence and the record of having been present applies not only to the literal signature or name, but also to the autographic album poem more broadly. Album verses assert an untenable present tense presence, while the text reflects more or less directly upon the contingent physical setting and affective context of the act of writing. ‘I am here’ becomes ‘I was there’ before the ink is dry. The poem therefore invokes not only the three dimensions of writing in situ, but the four dimensions of writing projected into an uncertain future. Readers understand the autograph as a sign of displacement and absence: indeed, the later reader literally inhabits the writer’s place in their physical engagement with the book. We see this substitution anticipated in E. C. asking her friend to ‘look/With kindness on the day’ (the anniversaries of 17 January), ‘Remembering one who loves thee well / When she is far away!’ Many poems in Edith’s album pay homage to Keswick and its environs, but in this case Edith as well as E. C. was soon ‘far away’. The entry was made while nineteen-year-old Edith was staying at Lady Susanna Malet’s house in Gloucester Place in London, during a two-year absence from Greta Hall.21 Thus, while albums typically start life at home, they are as mobile as their owners, and as records of brief encounters, album inscriptions express temporal as well as physical dislocations. Further, as I will argue, the album creates an alternative self-sustaining imaginative space, which uses the contingencies of specific location and presence in an attempt to transcend their limitations. The performance of a site-specific personal encounter and compositional act offers

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the album and its texts as compensation for the passage of time and instabilities of location, in its preservation of and imaginative access to ‘the transcendental form of presentness’. In the remainder of this essay I discuss the dominating influence of Wordsworth on the local landscape as represented in Dora’s album, the gendered implications of the conventional treatment of the female album-owner as a genius loci, fixed in time and space, and conflicting views of the mobility of young women and their albums in the public and private spheres. I argue that while the promise of renewed contact with locations, people and emotions distanced by time and place is held open by the material album and its autographic texts, that contact is necessarily limited and obscured by contextual data unavailable to the modern interpreter of this elusive manuscript form. The centrality of Rydal Mount in Dora Wordsworth’s album might seem to define it as a domestic product, framing its owner with reference to hearth and home. The poem that initiates the volume, Felicia Hemans’s ‘To Rydal Mount’, signed as written at ‘Rydal Mount / June 1830’, opens by celebrating the Wordsworth home as the locus of domestic affections, a ‘Home of kind Voices and of loving eyes, / And Flowers, and Song’. Yet even in the act of asserting the speaker’s own intimate view as guest and observer, those family feelings are reimagined as transient; all must vanish and ‘Yield up their spirits unto changeful hours’.22 It is the poet’s immortal songs that will maintain a ‘sweet Influence’ into the future on ‘blessed Homes like these – tho’ none so fair!’23 Hemans’s figuring of Wordsworth’s poetry as ‘a glorious River, / … Freely and brightly winding on for ever’ is both allusive (recalling Wordsworth’s ‘Composed on Westminster Bridge’, where the Thames ‘glideth at its own sweet will’) and seemingly inspired by local topography.24 Yet as the poem’s address shifts from the Wordsworths’ home to the poet’s literary output (‘Not so thy Song!’), Hemans imagines the future death of the daughter’s family context.25 In the letters Hemans wrote during her visit to Rydal Mount late in June 1830, she testifies amply to her sense of the harmony between the location and Wordsworth’s poetry: ‘when he reads or recites in the open air, his deep, rich tones seem to proceed from a spirit-voice, and belong to the religion of the place; they harmonize so fitly with the thrilling tones of woods and waterfalls’.26 Yet she also articulates a sense of unreality, in which the experience of place and the real is etherealized by preconceptions and the force of fantasy: ‘I seem to be writing you almost from the spirit-land; all is here … so remote from every-day cares and tumults, that sometimes I can scarcely persuade myself I am not dreaming …; there is something almost visionary in [the light’s] soft gleams and ever-changing shadows’.27 Hemans’s privileging of Wordsworth’s enduring poetry over the fleeting ‘gentle and affectionate playfulness in [his] intercourse with all the members of his family’ is perhaps inevitable; yet to open Dora’s album with a poem that negates the daughter’s presence appears a rivalrous gesture, the literary ‘daughter’ trying to

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displace the biological.28 The poem certainly sets a precedent for the appropriation of Dora’s album for tributes to her father: Sir William Hamilton’s ‘Farewell Verses, to William Wordsworth Esqr, on leaving Rydal Mount in August 1830’, R. P. Gillies’ ‘Quatuorzain addressed to Wilm. Wordsworth Esqr. referring to A Sonnet written by him at Eding , in 1814’, and James Montgomery’s ‘To William Wordsworth Esq’. are only the most overt.29 The next contribution, Eliza M. Hamilton’s verse ‘Written for Miss D. W.’, is a comparable reflexive staging of the writer’s temporary presence in ‘the Poet’s home’, but is committed to reinscribing Dora into her own book and landscape: it begins ‘It is not now that I can speak – while still / Thy lakes, thy hills, thy self are in my sight’.30 Here the glamour of a significant location and proximity to genius are more inhibiting than inspiring; in declaring speechlessness in writing, the poem dramatizes its own composition in a state of self-conscious confusion, finally only enabled by projecting an imaginary distance: But far away As life, extends the shadow of today And keenlier present from the past will come Thy sweet laugh’s freshness pure – with all the Poet’s home. E. M. H. Rydal Mount. August 1830.31

Hamilton’s projection of the future is more positive than Hemans’s, as she imagines the ephemera of human interaction – laughs, voices, smiles – retaining a ‘freshness’, and restores Dora as the subject of her own album, although the final image still is of ‘the Poet’s home’. Male contributors to albums often seek to inscribe the feminine subject into the local landscape in part as a function of their own relative freedom of movement. This fixing in place is typically enacted by figuring the feminine subject as a genius loci, the presiding deity or spirit of place. Hemans references this tradition in her identification of Wordsworth’s voice and song with the river and landscape; but where a Wordsworth may define a landscape, the female album-owner is liable to be defined by place. Rotha Quillinan, named after the river Rothay that runs through Grasmere village, her birthplace, is in her album repeatedly idealized as a feminine embodiment of genius loci associated with the river. The motif is introduced in the opening poem by William Wordsworth (her godfather), who describes his own sonnet ‘Rotha, my Spiritual Child!’ as Breathed forth beside the peaceful mountain Stream Whose murmur soothed thy languid Mother’s ear After her throes, this Stream of name more dear Since thou dost bear it32

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Wordsworth’s ‘breathed’ poem affects to echo the stream’s murmuring voice, suggesting through metaphor an analogy between natural inspiration and the mother’s fertility. Robert Southey takes up the genius loci motif in his contribution, ‘Rotha, after long delays’. After admitting that he has struggled to come up with a subject for his poem, Southey reflects: Wiser wish than what thy name Prompts, for thee I cannot frame, No where find a fitter theme Than thy native namesake stream,33

The overdetermined identification of person with place through naming is a key Wordsworthian poetic strategy embodied in his early ‘Poems on the naming of places’, written shortly after the move to Grasmere in 1799. But when taken to its logical extreme, as a homage both to Wordsworth and Rotha, this is one possible result: Say! What is Rotha? Even a brook Of bright, though pensive feature; Of happy, yet of serious look; – A fair and gleesome creature! And, who is Rotha? She! – The Child Of Poesy and Gladness; A breathing type of Nature, wild, Not all untouched by sadness. 1854.34

The pair of mirrored quatrains pretends to compare Rotha the brook with Rotha the woman, but in a queasy blend of personification, animism and pathetic fallacy, blithely suggests that they are one and the same, or different embodiments of a shared principle. We may note that in 1854 Rotha was thirty-two years old. It is arguable that the overdetermined representation of Rotha as genius loci in her own album was less the fault of contributors than her father, Edward Quillinan, in his choice of name. But the awkward gap between the idealized ‘Child / Of Poesy and Gladness’ and the mature Miss Quillinan is also a reminder that the attempt to fix the female subject in place entails an equally unsustainable attempt to fix her in time. Whereas Hemans’ Wordsworth is assured a poetic immortality projected onto, even uttered by the landscape, ‘Say! What is Rotha?’ constructs the subject as dehumanized by a conventional analogy with transcendent nature, and transgresses against a basic principle of album verse, that it is temporally specific. Organic and natural symbols are central to the myth of feminine fixity. Rotha is perhaps fortunate after all in being identified with a river, figured as vital, vocal and mobile. Album poems more commonly identify the feminine subject with flowers, and poems are themselves figured as floral tributes, then accompanied by

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actual leaves and flowers from symbolically resonant sites. In the following poems written to accompany such organic tributes, my interest is in how the flower functions as a synecdoche – the part suggesting the whole – but the ‘whole’ varies: sometimes the flower leads by association to another place through the album’s textual field; sometimes the flower signifies the feminine subject. This importation of place through synecdoche is most commonly effected through organic souvenirs annotated with a description of their source and significance. Writing in Edith Southey’s album in 1827, ‘W. R. M.’ offers a forget-me-not as a memento: Where late on Vaga’s banks I stray’d, And gaily climb’d steep Symond’s glade, Thro’ many a beauteous scene; O’er rocky glen, thro’ copses wild, I sped like Nature’s wayward child, In search of wildings green. And there I found midst many a flow’r, Offspring of passing sunny show’r, This gem, the pride of ev’ry spot, Unfolding charms of brightest hue Which paint in colours azure blue Its humble name ‘Forget me not’. I pluck’d the gem to grace this page, On memory’s part a trifling gage, To mark my wandring lot. For tho’ the flowret’s dead and sear, Its Knell will whisper in thine ear ‘Forget me not’ – ‘Forget me not’ – W. R. M: – Keswick July 20th. 182735

It is characteristic of W. R. M.’s verse that the speaker wavers between a role as ‘Nature’s wayward child’ ‘stray[ing]’ contemplatively through the landscape, and a more pragmatic collector of botanical specimens, speeding along in search of ‘wildings green’.36 The author’s identity and gender are similarly uncertain; the small, neat but embellished orthography is not gender-specific, and the relation between writer and addressee is ambiguously positioned between sentimental courtship and friendship. The forget-me-not’s symbolic transformation as part of a narrative of self-conscious commemoration (‘I pluck’d the gem to grace this page … / To mark my wandring lot’) may suggest a male speaker who would like to swap his ‘wandring lot’ for a more settled existence. 37 However, the parting echo reinscribes a gesture of separation that supports a myth of masculine mobility that requires Edith and her album to occupy a position of static femininity.38 W. R. M.’s ambivalent but conventional pose as sentimental friend or lover is thrown into relief not only by other more frankly flirtatious contributions to

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the album, but by botanical souvenirs presented by Edith’s fiancé John Wood Warter in September 1832 during a short trip home from his clerical appointment to the British embassy in Copenhagen.39 The specimens, tastefully arranged and labelled in Warter’s small neat hand, are fern leaves from Trollhälla Falls, the rocks above Wörterår, Upsala and sweet peas from the ‘Linnian gardens’ and aspen-poplar leaves from where Charles XII fell at Frederickshall, Norway.40 The leaves are mementoes of Warter’s travels abroad, signs of his interest in sites of picturesque, scientific and historical interest, but also delicately understated lover’s tokens of affectionate remembrance during a period of separation. The act of re-presenting the mementoes in Edith’s book, implying Edith’s presence in his thoughts as he visited these places, consistutes a reenactment of the original pilgrimage within the book’s virtual yet material space. The hand that plucked the specimens in Scandinavia is the same hand that painstakingly mounts and labels them in Edith’s book; the autograph symbolically bridges the gap between there and then and here and now (the moment of writing in September 1832), sustaining a tenuous contact with the Derridean ‘transcendental form of presentness’. The masculine project to construct feminine subjectivity as relatively static and defined by a regional landscape centred on home is strikingly re-configured in Sara Coleridge’s contribution to Edith Southey’s album, ‘To Edith during Absence. – On the Lily of the Nile’ (1825), signed ‘S. C.’41 Sara wrote the poem at home at Greta Hall, while Edith was on what began as a brief visit to London, but extended to travels lasting more than two years: Now Phoebus, dear Coz, gives all nature to smile In this mountainous Vale of our birth, And your beautiful nursling, the Pride of the Nile, Again rears her form from the earth. Ah! little we thought, when we mark’d the tear steal Down your cheek, as you bade us adieu, That it’s delicate bosom the plant should reveal, Two summers, unnoted by you. Men tell you that form so attractively fair Appears in the Lily pourtray’d, That the loveliest flower may be proud to compare With the white-arm’d and elegant Maid. And I cannot but own the comparison just, How just I reflect with a sigh When I see your fair image return to the dust, And think all such beauties must die. But your’s is a soul that in purity vies With the requisite flow’r we commend, A soul which, like that, can with dignity rise. – With graceful humility bend.

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In letters written early in Edith’s trip, Robert Southey presents her as homesick and uncomfortable in London society, longing to return home. However, this is likely to be a projection of Southey’s own ambivalent feelings about London; Edith recovered her spirits quickly, acquiring an appetite for evening parties, balls and other worldly amusements, and apparently revelling in her comparative freedom. Sara Coleridge’s poem mildly reproaching her cousin for neglecting ‘home’ also demonstrates an acute awareness of the cultural gendering of domestic and public space, and the gender relations conventional to album verses. Her reflections on femininity and home are rooted in an intimate domestic detail, the ‘Lily of the Nile’ or agapanthus, the ‘beautiful nursling’ Edith had tended with care,43 but which is now neglected. The analogy between Edith and the lily is established from the opening view of the spring sunshine regenerating nature ‘In this mountainous Vale of our birth’;44 the womblike ‘Vale’ has nurtured both the young women and the feminized ‘Lily of the Nile’. The first two stanzas keep the analogy understated; the lily ‘[a]gain rears her form from the earth’ and in summer reveals its ‘delicate bosom’. Home is defined in the terms of feminine community, and Edith’s departure as a rite of passage, the tears of regretful farewell reconfigured with hindsight as an initiation into worldly and sexualized experience. When the conceit of woman as flower is made overt, it is from the perspective of ‘Men’ complimenting Edith, ‘the white-arm’d and elegant Maid’, her attractions surpassing those of ‘the loveliest flower’. Sara Coleridge seeks to undermine the sexualized metaphor of woman as flower, by shifting the terms of comparison from the ‘fair image’ that ‘must die’, to the pure soul. The attempt to privilege spiritual purity reminds the reader of a tension in the symbol; Edith’s lily is not the lilium longiflorum, associated with the Virgin Mary and feminine chastity, but the decorative agapanthus, etymologically related to the Greek ‘agape’, love. Coleridge’s presentation of the lily as a native of the ‘mountainous Vale’, sign of Edith’s neglected domestic affections and responsibilities, is in tension with the title’s assertion of its exotic origins. The agapanthus is, according to the OED, ‘A genus of South African liliaceous plants, having large umbels of blue, violet or white flowers on a stout scape, of which the bright blue and white species are commonly cultivated for ornament’. The South African native is a more expressive symbol of Edith’s subjectivity than first appears: Edith too must be ‘Content … to bloom in the shade, / And spend all your sweetness at home’;45 both would, it seems, prefer to flower in full sun, but must be resigned to domestic obscurity. At least Edith escaped (albeit temporarily) to the world

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from which the lily was barred; it is an exotic that has been domesticated and rooted, she is a local who uprooted herself. The closing plea that Edith return to her roots is intensified by the conditions under which the poem arrived in the album. The poem was drafted in Edith’s absence, but Coleridge only transcribed it into the book (Edith’s constant companion on her travels) when Edith had returned home in 1825. Coleridge’s poem dramatizes the conditions of separation under which it was composed; the insistent direct address and the terms of endearment (‘dear Coz’, ‘dear Maid’) connote both the writer’s longing and regret, and ironically reinforce the intended reader’s absence. That Edith’s first reading of the poem occurred when she was back in Keswick must have given her a forceful impression of being missed; but it also performs the fulfilment of the final stanza’s plea – as the terminal rhymes enact the Maid’s return to the ‘shade’, and ‘roam’ is firmly replaced with ‘home’. The album’s next entry suggests that Edith took Sara’s lesson to heart: a tiny, delicate wreath of pressed leaves, carefully pasted-in and annotated ‘E. M. S’. and ‘Gathered on the top of Grisedale Pike Sepr 23 1825’.46 The ascent to Grisedale Pike, a fell 4 miles from Keswick, was one of the Southey family’s favourite walks (taking in Scar Crags and Causey Pike en route); Edith’s album includes several tribute-poems that mention excursions up Grisedale Pike.47 The gesture of collecting and arranging native leaves – perhaps wild thyme – as a souvenir, shows Edith treating an excursion into her home landscape as though it was an exploration into the unfamiliar. Dora Wordsworth’s album gives a different perspective on the binary of feminine stasis and masculine mobility. One opening pairs an 1831 William Westall watercolour of Rydal Mount featuring a young female figure – probably Dora – on a path in the foreground with a comic poem by Dora’s future husband.48 Edward Quillinan’s ‘To D. W. – The Railroad Mail-Coach’ uses mock-serious poetic diction to ‘celebrate’ the coming of the railway to the Lakes, ending: Shy northern Maid! The laurelled Copse Of Rydal now is no retreat; Up goes a silver cloud, and drops Your southern lovers at your feet. E.Q. Rydal Mount February, 1839.49

Quillinan imagines Rydal as a domestic hideaway for the ‘shy’ poet’s daughter, teasing her that lovers will make the pilgrimage by locomotive puffing a ‘silver cloud’. His irreverent treatment is striking, given Wordsworth’s objections to the railway penetrating into the Lake District, articulated most publicly in his 1844 letters to the Morning Post regarding the Kendal and Windermere Rail-

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way.50 It tacitly figures Quillinan himself as a ‘southern lover’,51 determined to brook the concerned father’s opposition no longer. Yet although albums are so strongly identified with their owners, they are capable of a surprising freedom of movement: Dora’s album was considerably less ‘shy’ and retiring than Quillinan’s sketch of its owner, and had made several trips to London without her, as this March 1835 note from Thomas Moore’s journal shows: 28 to 30 [March 1835] The day I met Wordsworth at dinner, at Rogers’s, the last time I was in town, he asked us all in the evening to write something in a little album of his daughter’s, and Wilkie drew a slight sketch in it. One of the things Luttrell wrote was the Epitaph on a man who was run over by an omnibus.52

Henry Luttrell’s jokey epitaph (‘Crushed by an Omnibus / … Let not his friends lament his lot, / Mors Omnibus communis’) is not the only facetious contribution to Dora’s album, but the laborious Latin pun, with its flavour of the masculine humour of a London literary dinner, suggests the perils of allowing contributions to be added in the owner’s absence.53 The album, like its young female owner, might it seems need to be chaperoned. Luttrell’s risqué verse suggests the perils of feminine roaming beyond the assigned sphere, as well as the difficult responsibilities of standing in loco parentis to a young woman’s album, as Wordsworth does here. Albums’ symbolic association with the characters and morals of young women means that the freely circulating album becomes associated with a cultural anxiety about the social movement of young unmarried women. This is suggested in a covering letter Edward Quillinan sent to Dora Wordsworth with Rotha’s album in 1834: [Y]ou are likely this summer to see more eminent hand-writers than I shall, and I know you will kindly do Rho the favour to enrich her book; continuing as I am sure you will, to be very particular and fastidious as to the persons you ask, and also making them, if necessary, wash their hands before they touch the volume, for some of the poets are no Turks, at least in their ablutions.54

In his ambition to secure prestigious contributions for Rotha’s book, Quillinan assigns Dora an uncomfortable role as procuress and chaperone, commissioned at once to hunt the literary lions worshipping at Wordsworth’s shrine, and to vet contributors’ suitability. Rotha was not quite thirteen in June 1834, so it is reasonable that other adults should act for her; but Quillinan seeks to control remotely even the marks and traces left on the book: yes to poems by ‘eminent hand-writers’, no to dirty fingerprints. It is implied that careless or promiscuous handling of the album would impugn Rotha’s ‘character’. In concluding, I want to consider the broader implications of the feminized album’s troubling mobility, evidenced most strikingly by contributors’ diverse

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strategies for establishing the female album-owner as a fixed, static presence, and to suggest how in practice individual albums and album poems become imaginative and affective – and mobile – ‘locations’. Lamb’s exasperation with solicitations for album verses may be found, variously worded, in the correspondence of most poets working in the 1820s and 1830s. His example of the landlord’s daughter and her friend signifies albums’ identification with the growing influence of female readers and writers on modes of literary production and consumption, most often presented as a negatively effeminizing and degrading influence. There was a growing anxiety in the still male-dominated periodical press that the fashion for albums threatened the privacy, autonomy and working-patterns of professional authors. This concern about the agency of young women is publicly formulated in Lamb’s 1831 essay (and self-review) ‘The Latin Poems of Vincent Bourne’: [S]eriously we deprecate with all our powers the unfeminine practice of this novel species of importunity. We have known Young Ladies – ay, and of those who have been modest and retiring enough upon other occasions – in quest of these delicacies, to besiege, and storm by violence, the closets and privatest retirements of a literary man, to whom they have had an imperfect, or, perhaps, no introduction at all. But the disease has gone forth. Like the daughters of the horseleech in the Proverbs, the requisition of every female now is, Contribute, Contribute. From the Land’s End to the Farthest Thule the cry has gone out, and who shall resist it?55

Albumania, it seems, transforms ordinarily ‘modest and retiring’ young women into ‘unfeminine’ aggressors driven by compulsive greed for album contributions and autographs. Lamb inverts the notional gendering of personal space: here, male authors are private and retiring, while young women besiege and storm their citadels. This role-reversal ironically figures a feminine cultural practice as ‘unfeminine’, and pathologizes female agency as ‘disease’. The figuring of album poems as ‘delicacies’, addictive sweetmeats, presents young women as consumers eaten up by their own appetite, like the insatiable daughters in Proverbs 30:15, ‘crying, Give, give’.56 ‘Young Ladies’ appear to have forgotten their own interiority – and implicitly, their femininity – in quest of the ‘privatest’ traces of the literary man. The selective and subjective nature of Lamb’s vision of harridan album-owners is clear from the frequency with which men act on young women’s behalf, as in Quillinan sending out Rotha’s album, or Wordsworth and Lamb soliciting their friends for contributions to Dora and Emma’s books. The stigmatizing of female agency and movement proposed in his public defence of the literary man’s ‘retirement’ is certainly at odds with Lamb’s personal transactions with album-owners. He wrote many album poems, and took pains to cast a fitting and individual tribute to the subject, without compromising his own artistic or moral integrity (for instance, by flattery or conventional hyperbole). A more

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forgiving and understanding perspective on the album as a real and symbolic indicator of women’s geographical and cultural mobility can be found in Lamb’s album poems welcoming women arriving from overseas (‘In the Album of Catherine Orkney’, ‘To Mrs. F[ield]. On Her Return from Gibraltar’) or marking their departure for foreign climes.57 A letter of late 1833 describes how Lamb was hailed while walking down Snow Hill by ‘Little Barrow’, the youngest child of family friends: Emma knows him,—and [I was] prevailed on to spend the day (infinite loss) at his sister’s, a pawnbrokeress in Gray’s Inn Lane, where was an album, and (O march of intellect!) plenty of literary conversation, and more acquaintance with the state of modern poetry than I could keep up with … (... she is going out to India with her husband).58

The ironic presentation of the pawnbrokeress’s downmarket literary coterie (‘O march of intellect!’) did not prevent Lamb from working hard overnight to make sure the poem was ready in time for Frances Brown to paste the card into her album before boarding the ship to India: Will you accept these poor lines, and curl them into your album, clipping the corners? ... Well-pleased, dear Frances, in your looks I trace Memorials of the loved old Barrow face.— I knew your Mother, Frances, from a child, Upright, sincere, affectionate, and mild. Be you the same! And, whereso’er you go, In climes remote by your behaviour show The honest stock you sprang from. May your fame, And fortunes, Frances, Whiten, with your name. These plain, and unpoetic lines I send, Not from a poet, but a humble friend. C. Lamb.59

The ‘poor lines’ are avowedly modest (‘plain, and unpoetic’), but Lamb finds his subject in family affection and resemblance. The warmth of friendship is expressed in a characteristic tender pun: Frances Brown was to marry a Mr White. Far from spreading a debased, subliterary culture to ‘climes remote’, he imagines Frances transplanting the values of her ancestral ‘honest stock’, character traits like uprightness, sincerity, affection and mildness. In understanding the manuscript album’s mediation of attitudes towards young women and their social ‘place’, it can be difficult to reconcile the authority of private, personal transactions with that of scornful and defensive published representations. In ‘The Latin Poems of Vincent Bourne’ Lamb was addressing his male peer-group of professional writers and readers, confident of a sympathetic hearing; in ‘Wellpleased, dear Frances’ he addressed only one private individual, Frances Brown,

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in a poem explicitly not designed for publication. Rather than accuse Lamb of inconsistency or hypocrisy, it is arguable that a published statement about a feminized manuscript culture conceived as a threat to conventional authorship is not reliable evidence. More authoritative in this context are albums’ autograph records of personal and private transactions and the manuscript letters and other archival materials which document their creation and circulation. Early in 1829 Lamb had asked Bryan Waller Procter to write a poem for Emma Isola’s album: ‘She is Italian by name and extraction. Ten lines about the blue sky of her country will do, as it’s her foible to be proud of it’.60 Procter’s ‘To the Spirit of Italy’, composed and sent almost by return of post, pays tribute to Emma’s heritage by advising the national genius loci to give up mourning for troubled times, celebrate her fame, and remember the eternal natural beauties of the Italian landscape. It ends: Oh! beautiful art thou, & far renowned, Pale Mother with the ruined turrets crowned! Still thy broad Padus flows; thy Tyber runs Past Rome for ever, beneath summer suns; Still are thy mountain summits fringed with pines; Still hang upon thine elms the fond frail vines: Still and (south) the sunny nature lies serene; Still (northwards) the Great Lake+ is smiling seen, O’er whose blue waters hovering, like a dove, Is—Isola Bella,—whom the poets love! B. Cornwall61 + Lago Maggiore

Procter’s tribute culminates in an Italian location, Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore, which in punning on Emma’s surname, gracefully suggests that both the island and the album’s implicitly dovelike owner are loved by the poets. The reader is prepared for this fusing of the geographical and the affective through a series of place-names cited as guarantees of authenticity: the Padus (the Latin name for the modern River Po) and Tiber Rivers, and Rome. In thanking Procter, Lamb indirectly pays a tribute to the poem’s success as an album text, by humorously querying its basis in geographical reality: [T]hy most ingenious and golden cadences do take my fancy mightily. They are at this identical moment under the snip and the paste of the fairest hands (bating chilblains) in Cambridge, soon to be transplanted to Suffolk, to the envy of half of the young ladies in Bury. But tell me, and tell me truly, gentle Swain, is that Isola Bella a true spot in geographical denomination, or a floating Delos in thy brain? … And what if Maggiore itself be but a coinage of adaptation? … my albumess will be catechised on this subject; and how can I prompt her? Lake Leman, I know, and Lemon Lake (in a punch bowl) I have swum in, though those lymphs be long since dry. But Maggiore may be in the moon. Unsphinx this riddle for me, for my shelves have no gazetteer.62

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Shuttling between raised poetic diction identified with the ‘blue skies’ of Italy and Procter’s idealizing ‘golden cadences’, and a bathetic vernacular denoting a mundane reality of chilblains and gazetteers, Lamb registers the problematic nature of literal geography for album representation. The tension in Lamb’s teasing digression between fantastic and exotic geography and the prosaic midwinter fenland locations of Cambridge and Bury St Edmunds, where Emma was returning to her post as a governess, suggests an unexpected gravity to Procter’s fanciful tribute to the ‘Isola Bella’. As governess to a clergyman’s family, Emma felt a moral responsibility as well as empirical curiosity to know whether Lake Maggiore and Isola Bella were real or not. But in mediating between the real landscape of northern Italy, and the conceit of Emma as ‘Isola Bella’, Procter creates a textual interspace typical of the album, itself a mobile site by means of which such encounters can be perpetually renewed through imaginative interaction with the material book.

8 INTO THE WOODS: ROBIN HOOD AND SHERWOOD FOREST IN THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION Stefanie Fricke

Before its presence we pause to do homage and admire; … It was when England was young, her sons wore robes of paint, and Druids lived in her hidden caves, but the heart of a mighty forest, which according to tradition, stretched far north and covered counties; … Who shall say what its shades have witnessed … ? Storms and tempests have careered in fury by since its far off birth – lightnings have cleaved its giant sons, and left it the old and weather-beaten but majestic emblem of the past we now behold.1

Thus writes Edwin Eddison in his description of Sherwood Forest, published in 1854. By this time, thanks to its associations with Robin Hood, Sherwood had become a tourist attraction, marketing its past to Victorian tourists eager to experience the days of the famous outlaw. Individual trees were assigned names and histories associated with Robin Hood (like ‘Robin Hood’s Larder’ and the ‘Major Oak’) and the visitors could buy tourist guides such as James Carter’s A Visit to Sherwood Forest including the Abbeys of Newstead, Rufford, and Welbeck … With a Critical Essay on the life and Times of Robin Hood (1850).2 For Victorian tourists the ancient trees of Sherwood seemed to be living witnesses to the feats of Robin and thus provided a tangible link to the past. For hundreds of years, the stories of Robin Hood have constantly been retold in new forms, contexts and media to an ever more global audience. As Jeffrey Singman states in his survey of the legends, ‘A tale so often told must be profoundly significant to the society that retells it. It would not be revisited so frequently if it did not answer some deep need, nor can it be so many times repeated without having substantial cultural impact’.3 This essay will analyse how writers of the Romantic period such as Joseph Ritson, John Hamilton Reynolds, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock and Walter Scott4 took up the old stories of Robin Hood

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and the greenwood in various literary forms to express their own, often political concerns, and thereby transformed the image of Robin Hood decisively. From the Middle Ages, the forest has been integral to the stories of Robin Hood: At the heart of the Robin Hood tradition, and in structural terms perhaps more important than Robin himself, is the greenwood, identified variously with Barnsdale or Sherwood … in all the surviving stories, the forest setting occupies a central structural position – one can scarcely envision them without it. In the world of Robin Hood, the forest is the spatially organizing principle, the stationary, gravitational center around which the tradition revolves.5

In contrast to medieval romances, where the forest as a space outside human society and civilization normally occupies the periphery, here it is at the centre of the story. Moreover, while in fairy tales and medieval romances the wood is usually a dark and threatening space in which people get lost and dangerous animals, magical creatures and robbers dwell, in the Robin Hood stories it is depicted as a pleasant, often pastoral dwelling space.6 Consequently, this greenwood has little in common with reality (for example most of Sherwood Forest was heath-land during the times in which the Robin Hood stories are usually set)7 but is an imaginary idyll. In this heterotopia it is forever green and forever summer; the forest shelters Robin Hood and his men from their pursuers and supplies them with food in abundance. It also provides the cover under which they are able to rob rich travellers. In its shelter, Robin, clad in green and almost a part of the forest himself, is superior to all figures of authority, because they do not know it as well as he does and are thus never able to catch him. This defiance of authority is emphasized by the fact that the forests and the deer in it are the property of the king. Robin’s residence in the greenwood and his use of the timber and food it provides demonstrate that even though they lay claim to this space, the king and his authorities are not able to effectively impose their power on it. The forest thus becomes a theoretical symbol of royal and noble power which actually turns into an emblem of the defiance of authority. Robin Hood’s forest is also a homosocial space of male bonding and a realm of liberty set apart from the hierarchies and constraints of society. Here, the outlawed robbers are the heroes, fighting against an unjust outside world. As in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, Robin Hood’s greenwood is a space where the rules of society are suspended or defied and in which alternative possibilities can be explored. While the stories of Robin Hood had been popular in various forms from the Middle Ages onwards, the defining year for later literary adaptations was 1795. In that year, Joseph Ritson, an antiquarian, militant vegetarian and staunch radical

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who as late as 1796 believed that revolution in Britain was imminent, published a collection of Robin Hood ballads under the title Robin Hood: Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads now extant relative to that celebrated English Outlaw, to which are prefixed historical Anecdotes of his Life. With the growing interest in the ballad genre in the eighteenth century, the Robin Hood ballads had also attracted attention, and a number of them had been published in collections such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). These ballads, however, had been edited to conform to modern tastes and sensibilities. Ritson’s collection was the first scholarly edition to present the Robin Hood ballads in their original form.8 Even more important was Ritson’s creation of a biography of Robin Hood in the introduction to his collection. From the wealth of traditional material he constructed an authoritative version of a real person, successfully combining the two major strands of the Robin Hood tradition, i.e. his depiction as a social bandit in the ballad material and as a distressed gentleman, a tradition originating from the sixteenth century. This image of Robin Hood proved definitive for the nineteenth century and still lives on today.9 True to his political convictions, Ritson also stressed the subversive potential of the outlaw, presenting him as a man who, in a barbarous age, and under a complicated tyranny, displayed a spirit of freedom and independence which has endeared him to the common people, whose cause he maintained, (for all opposition to tyranny is the cause of the people,) and, in spite of the malicious endeavours of pitiful monks, by whom history was consecrated to the crimes and follies of titled ruffians and sainted idiots, to suppress all record of his patriotic exertions and virtuous acts, will render his name immortal.10

Ritson described Robin as a kind of patriotic counter-ruler who fought against tyrannical authorities from within the greenwood and offered a positive example to the corrupt rulers outside: In these forests, and with this company, he for many years reigned like an independant [sic] sovereign; at perpetual war, indeed, with the king of England, and all his subjects, with an exception, however, of the poor and needy, and such as were ‘desolate and oppressed’ or stood in need of his protection. When molested by a superior force in one place, he retired to another, still defying the power of what was called law and government, and making his enemies pay dearly, as well for their open attacks, as for their clandestine treachery. … These forests, in short, were his territories; those who accompanied and adhered to him his subjects: … and what better title king Richard could pretend to the territory and people of England than Robin Hood had to the dominion of Barnsdale or Sherwood is a question humbly submitted to the consideration of the political philosopher.11

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Ritson furthered the image of Robin as a social rebel by presenting his robbing the rich to give to the poor as a political act and not, as in older texts, as an example of Christian charity.12 In the 1790s, when open political dissent was dangerous, the figure of Robin Hood, set as he was in a conveniently distanced past, provided a medium for Ritson’s radical ideas. After Ritson there were no major literary appropriations of the Robin Hood material all through the Napoleonic wars. The outlaw is just briefly mentioned in works like Wordsworth’s ‘Rob Roy’s Grave’ (1803/1807) and Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (1810). For Robert Southey, who was thinking of writing an English epic in 1804, Robin Hood did not seem an appropriate choice:13 ‘I am afraid there cannot be any worthier hero found for an English poem than Robin Hood, and that lowers the key too much’.14 The subversive potential of Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest was however evoked by the Luddites. In 1811 the Luddites of the North Midlands used the address ‘Ned Ludd’s Office, Sherwood Forest’ on their threatening letters, and a letter to the Prime Minister was signed ‘General C. Ludd, at Shirewood Camp’.15 It was not until 1818 that the legends were taken up by major poets and novelists. On 3 February of that year, John Keats received a letter from his friend John Hamilton Reynolds containing two sonnets on Robin Hood.16 In the octet of the first poem Reynolds asks if Robin Hood and his men are gone forever, only to state that if one goes into the forest in search of them, they can still be found: Go there, with summer, and with evening-go, In the soft shadows like some wandering man, And thou shalt far amid the forest know The archer men in green, with belt and bow, Feasting on phesant, river-fowl, and swan, With Robin at their head and Marian.17

In the second sonnet Reynolds moves closer to describe Robin: With coat of Lincoln-green, and mantle too, And horn of ivory mouth, and buckle bright, And arrows winged with peacock feathers light, And trusty bow well gathered of the yew,Stands Robin Hood: …18

By using the present tense and by asserting that Marian’s ‘sweet fame / Can never, never die’.19 Reynolds again stresses Robin Hood’s immortality and the possibility of experiencing the idyll of the past in the present. The mood of these poems is somewhat nostalgic and Reynolds employs stock elements of the Robin Hood ballads like hunting with bow and arrow and feasting.20 His ‘sweet days of merry Robin Hood’21 are a wistful vision of an idealized,

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fairytale past, devoid of the subversive potential of the Robin Hood material that Ritson and the Luddites alluded to. Keats replied to these sonnets with a poem of his own22 and his answer is – at least at first – emphatically negative: No! those days are gone away, And their hours are old and gray, And their minutes buried all Under the down-trodden pall Of the leaves of many years: Many times have winter’s shears, Frozen north and chilling east, Sounded tempests to the feast Of the forest’s whispering fleeces, Since men knew nor rent nor leases. No, the bugle sounds no more And the twanging bow no more; Silent is the ivory shrill Past the heath and up the hill:23

In his poem, the eternal summer found in the tradition and in Reynolds has succumbed to the passage of the seasons and given way to autumn and winter. For Keats, Robin Hood is gone for good, and he echoes lines from Reynolds’s first sonnet to stress the impossibility of resurrecting the past: On the fairest time of June You may go, with sun or moon, Or the seven stars to light you, Or the polar ray to right you; But you never may behold Little John, or Robin bold [.]24

Keats not only vehemently rejects Reynolds’s nostalgic resurrection of Robin, he also stresses that, even if he should return, the greenwood idyll is irrecoverably gone: All are gone away and past! And if Robin should be cast Sudden from his turfed grave; And if Marian should have Once again her forest days, She would weep, and he would craze: He would swear, for all his oaks, Fall’n beneath the dockyard strokes, Have rotted on the briny seas; She would weep that her wild bees Sang not to her – strange! that honey Can’t be got without hard money!25

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Keats, who wrote to Reynolds that he had written the poem ‘in the Spirit of Outlawry’,26 contrasts the days of Robin Hood with the present in which much of Robin’s forest has been sacrificed to supply wood for British ships. Unlike Reynolds, Keats uses the subversive potential of the Robin Hood material by opposing the idealized, pre-capitalist past when the forest was – according to him – a space outside the cash economy to the capitalist society of his own day which has even taken over the forests.27 For Keats the connection between men and nature exemplified by Robin Hood no longer exists and the woods are now exploited for profit and military and imperial ventures. In spite of this disillusioned answer to Reynolds, Keats ends his poem on a reconciliatory note. Even if the present cannot be changed, he agrees at least to celebrate Robin Hood (and the idealized past he, like Reynolds, constructs in his poem) with his friend: So it is: yet let us sing, Honour to the old bow-string! Honour to the bugle-horn! Honour to the woods unshorn! … Honour to bold Robin Hood, Sleeping in the underwood! Honour to maid Marian, And to all the Sherwood-clan! Though their days have hurried by Let us two a burden try.28

Reynolds replied to Keats’s poem by writing yet another sonnet on Robin Hood.29 Although he acknowledges Robin’s status as an outlaw and symbol of freedom at the beginning of the poem, he eventually returns to his rather apolitical, nostalgic view: Robin the outlaw! Is there not a mass Of Freedom in the name? It tells the story Of clenched oaks, with branches bow’d and hoary Leaning in aged beauty o’er the grass:– Of dazed smile on cheek of border lass, … It tells a tale of forest days – of times That would have been most precious unto thee,– Days of undying pastoral liberty! Sweeter than music of old abbey chimes,– Sweet as the virtue of Shakespearean rhymes,– Days shadowy with the magic greenwood tree!30

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It seems that for Reynolds the nostalgic and idealized elements of the Robin Hood material and the recreation of this pastoral world of ‘the magic greenwood tree’ outweigh any interest in its political relevance. While Keats’s poem was not published until 1820 in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, Reynolds’s three sonnets appeared on 21 February 1818 in the Yellow Dwarf, the magazine run by Leigh Hunt’s brother John.31 The placement of these not overtly political poems in a reformist political magazine shows that Reynolds’s contemporaries were well aware of the radical implications of the Robin Hood material. After the end of the Napoleonic wars internal political tensions were high, and as Nicholas Roe has shown, the radical discourse of those years appropriated the colour green as well as plant and tree imagery in order to convey an oppositional political stance.32 Already in the 1790s so-called Trees of Liberty (usually poplars or oaks) had been planted in France, the USA, Ireland and for a short time even in Great Britain.33 The literary adaptations of the Robin Hood material, which constructed images of freedom, successful opposition to authority and a good livelihood in a pastoral greenwood, also have to be seen in this context. It is hardly surprising then that Leigh Hunt took up the theme as well, publishing four Robin Hood ballads in the Indicator in November 1820.34 In the first poem, ‘Robin Hood, a Child’, which recounts an episode from Robin Hood’s childhood, the political dimension of Hunt’s ballads quickly becomes apparent. Hunt here tells how the friars of a nearby abbey cheat Robin and his mother out of their inheritance, and thus leave the child with an abiding sense of the injustice of church and king.35 The second ballad, ‘Robin Hood’s Flight’, begins with Robin still a member of society, but with a deep-seated resentment against the friars who live in luxury while the poor go hungry. Again, the king is criticized as well: And Robin thought too of the poor, How they toiled without their share, And how the alms at the abbey-door But kept them as they were: And he thought him then of the friars again, Who rode jingling up and down With their trappings and things as fine as the king’s, Though they wore but a shaven crown. And then bold Robin he thought of the King How he got all his forests and deer, And how he made the hungry swing If they kill’d but one in the year.36

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When Robin kills a deer in Sherwood one day to feed the starving Will Scarlet, he is surprised by the Abbot, who sets his men on Robin. He kills the men and the Abbot, and lives as an outlaw in Sherwood from then on. The third ballad, ‘Robin Hood, An Outlaw’ and the fourth ‘How Robin and his Outlaws lived in the Woods’ celebrate the ‘outlaw bold / Under the greenwood tree’37 and his life in the woods in familiar terms, painting an idyllic picture of a happy community which lives in eternal summer and in harmony with nature: The horn was then their dinner-bell; When like princes of the wood, Under the glimmering summer trees, Pure venison was their food. … And story then, and joke, and song, And Harry’s harp went round; And sometimes they’d get up and dance, For pleasure at the sound.38

Of course, Robin also robs the rich and gives to the poor, his favourite victims again being clergymen. Although in Hunt’s ballads the criticism concerning the distribution of wealth and the power of the church are quite apparent, they are also transferred to a ‘safe’ medieval past. Unlike Keats he never makes any overt reference to contemporary society, thus leaving it to his readers to decide to what extent they want to apply his criticism to the present. By contrast, Thomas Love Peacock’s burlesque novel Maid Marian, which was begun in 1818 but not completed and published until 1822, makes much of the story’s implications for the present.39 Peacock himself wrote about his novel in a letter to P. B. Shelley: ‘I am writing a comic Romance of the Twelfth Century, which I shall make the vehicle of much oblique satire on all the oppressions that are done under the sun’.40 The resulting novel is a satire on the cult of Legitimacy as it was practised by the so-called Holy Alliance, the various restored European monarchies, and their nostalgic appropriation of the feudal Middle Ages. Using the Robin Hood setting as a distanced space in which he could comment on nineteenth-century politics, Peacock, as Marilyn Butler has shown, directly engages with contemporary conservative rhetoric, alluding to Burke, Coleridge, Southey and Paine, among others. Another link to the present is provided by the depiction of Prince John’s poet laureate, Harpiton, which turns out to be a rather unflattering portrayal of Southey.41 In Peacock’s medieval world, all power resides in force. Thus the friar argues: ‘we are strongest here. Say you, might overcomes right? I say no. There is no right but might: and to say that might overcomes right is to say that right overcomes

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itself: an absurdity most palpable. Your right was the stronger in Arlingford, and ours is the stronger in Sherwood. Your right was right as long as you could maintain it; so is ours’.42 Therefore Robin is no less legitimate a ruler over Sherwood than any king of England: ‘Robin Hood is king of the forest both by dignity of birth and by virtue of his standing army: to say nothing of the free choice of his people, which he has indeed, but I pass it by as an illegitimate basis of power. He holds his dominion over the forest, and its horned multitude of citizen-deer, and its swinish multitude or peasantry of wild boars, by right of conquest and force of arms … What title had William of Normandy to England, that Robin of Locksley has not to merry Sherwood? William fought for his claim. So does Robin … They differ indeed, in this, that William took from the poor and gave to the rich, and Robin takes from the rich and gives to the poor: and therein is Robin illegitimate; though in all else he is true prince’.43

Peacock undercuts the conservative idealization of the Middle Ages by constructing a burlesque world in which not only the villains, but also Robin and his merry men are satirized. As Roe points out, the declaration of Robin’s forest laws can be seen as a parody on the proceedings at meetings of radical associations such as the London Corresponding Society.44 While Reynolds, Keats and Hunt set up the days of Robin Hood as a nostalgic idyll, Peacock to some extent debunks such constructions of the past. His use of burlesque and satire, however, also lessens the force of his criticism, creating a rather unreal world in which nothing can be taken too seriously. Thus Peacock’s satire on corrupt and worldly friars is gentle; the villains he describes are harmless and never a real threat to Robin. As a result, his construction of the Middle Ages – or at least of the greenwood – seems hardly less unreal and idyllic as the depictions by Reynolds, Keats and Hunt. Again, Sherwood functions as a pastoral retreat in which real justice is served, even if Peacock stresses that this justice is based on naked power just as much as the tyrannical power outside the forest. This function of the forest as an idyllic hideaway is strengthened when, after Richard’s death, Robin returns to the greenwood for good.45 Peacock’s forest is also a space in which a very special kind of heroine can flourish. As the title indicates, his novel focuses on Maid Marian, whom he presents as an independent woman of great intellectual and physical energy and willpower, as skilled with longbow and sword as Robin himself, and just as strongly connected to the greenwood.46 Marian is already a rather emancipated woman outside the forest, refusing to obey her father, shooting an arrow at a priest in jest and fencing with Prince John.47 However, once she takes up residence in Sherwood, she has found her proper dwelling place and her true identity. This is further signalled by her change of name from Matilda to Maid Marian: ‘May I never again have roof but the blue sky, nor canopy but the green leaves, nor barrier but the forest-bounds; … I am no longer lady Matilda Fitzwa-

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ter, of Arlingford Castle, but plain Maid Marian, of Sherwood Forest.’ Gender roles become fluid in the forest as well, with Marian dressing as a young man and taking part in typically male activities such as fighting and hunting. Her crossdressing is so convincing that King Richard even fights with her.48 By presenting such a strong and physically active heroine Peacock ran counter to contemporary tastes regarding the feminine ideal, thus defying authors of books of advice on the upbringing of girls who tended to warn against too much physical exercise for girls. Peacock stresses that Marian’s female appeal is actually increased by her physical as well as her intellectual qualities.49 The idealization of the Middle Ages which Peacock ridiculed was furthered by the second important novel dealing with Robin Hood, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which was written and published in 1819 and thus again shows the topicality of the Robin Hood material in the years after Waterloo.50 Scott uses yet another genre, the historical novel, to create his version of the outlaw’s tale. By incorporating Robin Hood into a historical novel, Scott produced a highly persuasive and very popular image of the outlaw and his times which greatly influenced the nineteenth century and turned Sherwood Forest into a tourist destination.51 Although Robin himself is not a major character in Ivanhoe, he dominates the scenes he features in. Moreover the basic Robin Hood story – a young nobleman who is robbed of his possessions by oppressive rulers and driven into the woods where he finds friends and defends the ‘true’ law until he is restored by the king – is very present in Scott’s novel, although interestingly not with regard to Robin, but to Ivanhoe. Just as the basic structure of the Robin Hood stories suffuses Ivanhoe, the forest here is not only a retreat for the outlaws, but a seemingly all-pervading presence. The novel starts with a description of the wood: In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. … Here haunted of yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley; here were fought many of the most desperate battles during the Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song.52

With the exception of the scenes in York and the Templars’ castle Templestowe, by far the largest part of the action takes place inside or in close proximity to the forest. It might seem strange that a conservative like Scott should take up the outlaw Robin Hood as a subject, but it is important to emphasize that in the tradition Robin, while rebelling against the authority of lords and sheriffs, is nevertheless a loyal subject of the king.53 By setting Ivanhoe in the reign of King Richard and claiming that Robin fights not against authority in general but against the

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perverted authority exercised by Prince John and his minions, Scott manages to some extent to contain the subversive elements. As soon as King Richard appears, the outlaws recognize him as their rightful king.54 Scott’s conservative affirmation of royal authority is however less clear than it might seem. It is interesting to note that he presents Richard as a rather ambivalent figure and repeatedly emphasizes his reckless nature which leads him to embark on irresponsible adventures like the fruitless crusade which caused the problems that England now has to struggle with. Scott also stresses that the restoration of justice that Richard’s return causes is only temporary, and that Richard’s early death shattered many hopes. Moreover, a potentially subversive link to the present is given with the description of the regency of a corrupt, weak-willed and extravagant prince who to contemporaries would have borne a disconcerting similarity to the Prince Regent.55 Another detail which limits the subversive potential of Robin Hood and makes his rebellious behaviour acceptable is Scott’s depiction of Robin as a rebel specifically against tyrannical Norman (i.e. French) lords.56 In Ivanhoe Robin is not a nobleman, but (and this was Scott’s invention) a Saxon commoner who fights against the Norman conquerors, thereby stressing the novel’s main theme of the conflict between Normans and Saxons. Scott turned the struggle between outlaws and authorities into an ethnic conflict between Normans and Saxons, and Robin Hood into a symbol of that struggle. This interpretation, which was taken up by Augustin Thierry in his Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les normands (1825) and thereby given scholarly credence, became highly influential for the rest of the nineteenth century.57 As Scott’s narrator mentions several times, the reason why the woods are teeming with outlaws in the first place is because the Norman feudal system oppresses its Saxon subjects. One means of oppression are the harsh forest laws, which turn the forests into a zone of conflict between (Norman) authorities and (Saxon) subjects.58 But while the Normans are the nominal rulers of the forest, in reality it is the realm of the Saxons. Once the Normans enter the forest, they quickly lose their way, and their superior arms and horses no longer give them an advantage.59 King Richard gets lost in the forest, too,60 but it is when the Norman king enters Robin’s realm that a solution to the antagonism between Normans and Saxons offers itself. Richard, Robin and the Saxon serfs Wamba and Gurth meet in the forest to attack the castle of Torquilston in which the Norman villains hold their friends captive. To liberate them, Robin the Saxon and Richard the Norman have to work together against the Norman nobles who abuse their power. By fighting alongside the Saxons and, at least for a time, becoming a part of the homosocial group around Robin, Richard, the ‘good’ Norman, proves that peaceful coexistence is possible. Moreover, he himself is

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not fully Norman, but has a Saxon great-grandmother.61 Together with the Saxon noble Ivanhoe, who has accepted Norman culture and serves Richard, Richard becomes the symbol for the eventual intermingling of the two peoples which will produce the English culture and language. As in Waverley (1814), Scott in Ivanhoe again shows how originally antagonistic peoples or parties finally mix and merge. By presenting Robin Hood as a defender of ancient Saxon liberty against the feudal tyranny of the foreign Normans, Scott stressed Robin’s role in the discourse of English national identity. From the eighteenth century on, Robin Hood was seen as the embodiment of English liberty, a key element of English and British patriotism and national identity that was used to define themselves against the French, who were presented as slaves to an absolutist regime. Moreover, the genre of the ballad in which the stories of Robin Hood had been transmitted took on new national significance in the course of the eighteenth century and came to be regarded as the key genre in the search for the medieval roots of English national identity.62 Scott not only stresses Robin’s patriotic significance but also constructs the forest as an embodiment of English national history. Inside it, past and present converge in a seemingly timeless natural surrounding: Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green sward; … A considerable open space, in the midst of this glade, seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the rites of Druidical superstition; for, on the summit of a hillock, so regular as to seem artificial, there still remained part of a circle of rough unhewn stones, of large dimensions.63

Scott’s forest spans the ages and connects the past, the present and the future, giving a truly ‘organic’ continuity to English history and symbolizing stability, growth and renewal.64 Another element which ties Scott’s greenwood to concepts of national identity is the prominent presence of oak trees within the forest in general and as meeting places for Robin and his men.65 Oaks carried special national and imperial associations because they were the trees used to build the British merchant fleet and the Navy, the ‘wooden walls’ of Britain.66 Thus Alexander Pope wrote in Windsor Forest (1713): Let India boast her plants, nor envy we The weeping amber or the balmy tree, While by our oaks the precious loads are born, And realms commanded which those trees adorn. … Thy trees, fair Windsor! now shall leave their woods, And half thy forests rush into my floods,

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Bear Britain’s thunder, and her cross display, To the bright regions of the rising day;67

With forests becoming a symbol of maritime strength, the planting of oaks and other trees turned into a patriotic activity. Landholders around Sherwood even named their plantations after famous British war heroes like Nelson.68 Apart from the naval connotations of oak trees, the strength of oakwood was also used as an emblem of the British character.69 Oaks moreover served as symbols of the king as well as the aristocracy, ‘the great oaks that shade a country’70 as Edmund Burke called them in 1772.71 While Scott depicts his greenwood as an organic space of national history and identity in which the future English race is created out of Saxons and Normans, not all people are ultimately integrated into this new English society. All throughout the novel, the Jews, represented by the heroine Rebecca and her father Isaac, are treated by the English as necessary but unwelcome foreigners and finally leave England for good.72 Their presence in the novel serves as a reminder that there is a wider world beyond the boundaries of the forest. Ironically, it is the engagement with this outside world, namely Richard’s participation in the Third Crusade, which to a great extent leads to the abuse of feudal power and thus makes the Saxons take refuge in the woods.73 Without Palestine and the Crusade, there would be no Robin Hood. At first glance, Palestine seems to be set up as the realm of the Other to England and the greenwood. As the presence of the Jews shows, however, the East is no longer a distanced space, but in Ivanhoe is brought back home. Not only do genuine representatives of the Orient, like Jews or Saracen slaves, come to England, but Saxons and Normans alike are more or less involved in and changed by Richard’s misguided imperial adventure.74 The Templars are a political presence in England and references to the crusade and events in Palestine haunt the story, most specifically in the characters of Ivanhoe and his antagonist Bois-Guilbert. Both have been much tanned by the eastern sun, Bois-Guilbert so much that he resembles a Saracen, and both also speak the Saracen language. Bois-Guilbert seems to have taken over some eastern customs as well and keeps black slaves. Even during the famous tournament, the embodiment of English medieval splendour, Saracen music is played.75 However the contrast between England and Palestine collapses not only on the diegetic, but also on the extradiegetic level. In his introduction, Scott compares the episodes in which King Richard walks among his subjects in disguise to similar stories about Haroun al-Rashid. And in the ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ the alleged writer of the novel, Laurence Templeton, explains why he did not create

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a realistic picture of the Middle Ages by comparing his untertaking to Antoine Galland’s version of The Arabian Nights: It is necessary, for exciting interest of any kind, that the subject assumed should be, as it were, translated into the manners, as well as the language, of the age we live in. No fascination has ever been attached to Oriental literature, equal to that produced by Mr Galland’s first translation of the Arabian Tales; in which, retaining on the one hand the splendour of Eastern costume, and on the other the wildness of Eastern fiction, he mixed these with just so much ordinary feeling and expression, as rendered them interesting and intelligible, while he abridged the long-winded narratives, curtailed the monotonous reflections, and rejected the endless repetitions of the Arabian original. The tales, therefore, though less purely Oriental than in their first concoction, were eminently better fitted for the European market, and obtained an unrivalled degree of public favour, which they certainly would never have gained had not the manners and style been in some degree familiarized to the feelings and habits of the western reader.76

Scott here compares the English Middle Ages to the Orient, arguing that both would not be understood or at least would not find a wide audience if they were not familiarized. It is interesting to note that to Scott the English past is to some degree very much a foreign country, and the forests of Sherwood in many respects just as remote as the East.

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

In 1818, John Keats playfully referred to the modish appetite for Ann Radcliffe’s grandiose Gothic landscapes. He warned his friend Reynolds in a letter, ‘Buy a girdle, put a pebble in your mouth, loosen your braces – for I am going among Scenery whence I intend to tip you the Damosel Radcliffe. I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and solitude you’.1 Implicit in Keats’s pleasantry was the criticism that the ‘Damosel Radcliffe’ could not refrain from embellishing each topographical feature that she described within her fiction with qualifying adjectives such as ‘immense’ and ‘tremendous’. This impression of Radcliffe’s hyperbolic tendencies gathered further critical strength with Sir Walter Scott’s 1824 assessment of her career in Ballantyne’s Novelists Library. There, Scott remarked that ‘[Radcliffe] has ... selected for her place of action the South of Europe, where the human passions, like the weeds of the climate, are supposed to attain portentous growth under the fostering sun; which abounds with ruined monuments of antiquity, as well as the more massive remnants of the middle ages’.2 Scott specifically linked the ‘portentous growth’ of human passions with the Middle Ages ‘massive remnants’ offered by Radcliffe’s chosen locations, implying a symbiotic relationship between Radcliffe’s choice of grandiose European relics and her exaggeration of certain human characteristics. He suggests that Southern Europe permitted Radcliffe to critique ‘feudal tyranny and Catholic superstition’ in a way that no other location could. What then emerges from the commentaries by Keats and Scott upon Radcliffe’s work is the perception of her embellishment of landscapes, locations and – 131 –

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human emotion. For Scott in particular Radcliffe’s deliberately exaggerated fictional locations in Southern Europe are yoked to a Protestant, nationalist agenda that concerns England more than southern Europe. Radcliffe’s exotic locations are thus transmuted into localities in the sense of the second definition of ‘localities’ offered by the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘The fact of being local, in the sense of belonging to a particular spot. Also pl. local characteristics, feelings, or prejudices’. Her literary and political agenda becomes defined by what is not present within her fiction, by where her fiction is not located. Scott’s contemporaneous critical relocation of Radcliffe’s literary concerns has haunted subsequent analyses of her work. Critics throughout the twentieth century have continued to analyse her Gothic romances in relation to what they may say about her views of Catholicism and domestic English politics.3 Whilst it is difficult to dispute that these preoccupations are present within her fiction, a reappraisal of what precisely Radcliffe notes about locations and beliefs in the few journeys that she undertook serves both to interrogate assumptions about any partiality that she may have held for England’s system of governance and the persistent readings of her conservatism and hostility towards Catholicism. As early as 1798, Nathan Drake confidently asserted that Ann Radcliffe was ‘the Shakspeare of Romance writers’.4 Drake’s brief reference to Radcliffe’s careful balancing of the terrific and the picturesque presumed that his readership was already intimately acquainted with her Gothic romances, and that it understood her careful and supposedly conservative renditions of exotic locations. By 1798, Radcliffe had published the five romances that secured her reputation, with her penultimate and most successful romance, The Italian, being published in 1797 for the grand sum of £800.5 The largely favourable critical reception which greeted her romances placed her at the head of a particular national tradition. By metaphorizing Radcliffe as the Shakespeare of romance writers, Drake situated her in a specifically English tradition of romance-writing where her frequent use of Shakespearean epigraph served to dominate and diminish the exotic locations and exaggerations of her fiction. As I have argued elsewhere, Radcliffe’s astute and frequent invocation of Shakespeare in chapter epigraphs constantly reminded her readership of her indebtness to English national literary models in spire of her romances’ continental locations. To a lardge extent, her strategic use of English epigraphs was successful. In his Memoir of Radcliffe in 1826 Thomas Noon Talfourd took trouble to observe how Thomas James Mathias’s satirical anti-Jacobin poem The Pursuits of Literature, composed over the course of the 1790s, exonerated Radcliffe from the charge-sheet of female literary subversives who ‘taint’ female heads ‘with democracy’.6 Since Mathias chose to accuse by name Charlotte Smith and others as literary subversives, his unique exemption of ‘Mrs Ann[e] Radcliffe’ was all the more conspicuous. Mathias’s 1793 exonera-

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tion of Radcliffe cemented Radcliffe’s reputation as an author whose exploitation of foreign locations was always in the service of domestic interests. As a consequence of such contemporaneous assessments of her achievements, we continue to associate Ann Radcliffe’s use of, and interest in, foreign locations with her apparent support for a Protestant domestic agenda in England. Her perceived tendency to exaggerate the shortcomings of certain other nationalities and nations, of which, as one severer critic expressed it, ‘she is lamentably ignorant’ was diminished from an informed alert and constant interest in Europe to a concern for the local.7 These assessments, however, overlooked one very substantial work which she composed at the height of her fame, and between her two best-known romances, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). Radcliffe’s travel memoir A Journey made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the western Frontier of Germany, with a return down the Rhine holds a curious and neglected place in the corpus of her works. This work was composed from the sole trip that she undertook to the continent with her husband William Radcliffe. The Radcliffes had wished to travel further still to Italy, yet they were turned away at the border due to a fault with their travel passes. Thus her sole expedition into mainland Europe did not ostensibly inform her subsequent Gothic romance The Italian. The situations and locations that Radcliffe encountered in Germany in particular, however, undoubtedly inspired the more nuanced portrayal of Catholic institutions within this later romance, and provided the springboard for more incisive political commentary within her work. The Radcliffes toured Holland and Germany in the midst of the War of the First Coalition (1793–7). During this time, revolutionary French armies were drumming up opposition to Britain on the Continent. Austria and Britain were eventually forced out of the low countries, and Holland finally declared war on Britain. William Pitt would later justify Britain’s brutal capmpaign by admitting that he ‘had hopes of our being able to put together the scattered fragments of that great and venerable edifice [The French monarchy] in the stead of that mad system which threatened the destruction of Europe’8 Pitt’s public defence of Britain’s participation in this campaign was belated and brief. By way of contrast, Radcliffe’s literary travelogue foregrounds immediately the backdrop of war through both the precise dating of her journey (in the summer of 1794) and the title’s topographical specificty.9 The titular detail that the Radcliffes toured the ‘western frontier of Germany’, the frontline of the war with revolutionary France, was by no means casual. Radcliffe’s Journey describes with considerable detail and compassion the consequences of war. The close political observation that Radcliffe’s Journey exhibits is further enhanced, as I will argue, by her invocation of Shakespeare and his technique of accordant circumstances. As I will demonstrate, however, Ann Radcliffe’s use of Shakespeare and Shakespearean technique during her travels in Germany is by no means indicative of any com-

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placent nationalism upon her part, as authors such as Mathias and Drake had presumed. This substantial journal rewards closer inspection, for it both enhances our readings of certain picturesque and literary tropes in Radcliffe’s later fiction and compels us to revisit some assumptions concerning her religious and political beliefs. Radcliffe’s unblemished contemporaneous reputation rested largely upon erroneous assumptions concerning her nationalism, religious conservatism and anti-Catholicism. Superficially, the Journey through Holland and Germany confirms these assumptions. In the two-page ‘Introduction’ to the work, Radcliffe offers a pre-emptive apologia for her constant references to England throughout her journey in Holland and Germany. In anticipation of criticism, she writes: With respect to the book itself, it is, of course, impossible, and would be degrading if it were not so, to prevent just censure by apologies; and unjust censure she has no reason, from her experience, to fear; – but she will venture to defend a practice adopted in the following pages, that has been sometimes blamed for its apparent nationality, by writers of the most respectable authority. The references to England, which frequently occur during the foreign part of the tour, are made because it has seemed that one of the best modes of describing to any class of readers what they may not know, is by comparing it with what they do.10

Radcliffe’s only use of a direct introductory preface in her oeuvre offers a fascinating indication of what she thinks may be worthy of criticism in her writing. It is clear that she anticipates censure concerning her frequent anchorage of her travel observations in England, and the ‘apparent nationality’ that this betrays. Whilst ‘writers of the most respectable authority’ may judge this to be national prejudice, however, Radcliffe offers a more prosaic explanation for her practice of situating her observations in relation to England. Her argument, that ‘any class of readers’ will benefit from her juxtapositions or comparisons of the landscapes and political practices of Holland and Germany with those of England, has less to do with nationalism than maintaining the interests of her already considerable readership. It is a pragmatic manoeuvre that deflects attention from her use of the foreign locale to critique domestic policy in Britain. Whilst it is clear that she does transform both Holland and Germany into localities (in the sense of the term that I offered above), she does so to render their practices, prejudices and problems more familiar to her readership than to applaud the superior values of Protestant England. The anticipated criticisms of nationalism did not materialize in the reception of her travelogue. Whilst the Journey received as much, if not more, attention in literary journals as her novels, none of the reviews bothered to mention the descriptions of Holland or ‘Western frontier of Germany’ so meticulously detailed in the title. With the comment that ‘Mrs. Radcliffe is not inattentive

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to moral character, and political situation’, the English Review was the most specific, but it undercut this brief allusion to more serious subject matter by saying that ‘the subject on which she most delights to dwell is the effect produced by natural scenery ... These she views, not with the eye of a philosopher, but of a landscape painter’.11 The European Magazine and London Review also focused upon Radcliffe’s artistry, stating that ‘in picturesque description Mrs R is confessedly allowed to excel; and ... accomplish[es] that by the pen which has always been considered as belonging necessarily to the province of the pencil’.12 The reviews unanimously praised the assiduity of her ‘sketch’, equating her work with a visual rather than a literary artistry. What we derive from the critical reception of Radcliffe’s Journey is a general commendation of her artistic unity of picturesque and beautiful description, but no specific commentary whatsoever on the lengthy passages devoted to the political systems, war and poverty that she observes in either Holland or Germany. Such critical elision masks one of the most important characteristics of Radcliffe’s travel writing, a characteristic of which she herself felt justifiably nervous. As she travels through Holland and Germany, her writing progressively becomes more politically engaged as she encounters the consequences of war. This is not immediately obvious in her observations upon Holland. Her whiggish opening descriptions of Holland tend towards the prosaic, with close attention paid to the values of commerce. Rotterdam, for example, prompts the observation that ‘Commerce, which cannot now be long discouraged in any part of Europe ... is the permanent defender of freedom and knowledge against military glory and politics’.13 The observation contains an optimistic note, that the enlightened values of commerce and consumption, associated in the English mind with a particularly Protestant cluster of values, will spread to all parts of Europe. It is quite possibly the case that these passages were penned by her husband William, editor of the republican newspaper the Gazetteer.14 Elsewhere in the Introduction, Radcliffe acknowledged her husband’s assistance, stating that ‘where the economical and political conditions of countries are touched upon in the following work, the remarks are less her own than elsewhere’.15 This certainly appears to hold true for the lengthy descriptions of Holland’s systems of governance, which bear little of the detailed, poetic descriptions of landscape which (for her reviewers and many of her contemporaries) characterized her pen. A cautious note of approval for the complex but fair system of governance in the states of Holland, for example, is sounded carefully on the brief investigation that ‘we could make’.16 Through both the careful use of the plural pronoun, and the caution of the claim, William’s editorial expertise seemingly underscores the commentary. The subsequent reassurance, furthermore, that ‘they, who make the enquiry, may be assured that, under the present government, there is a considerable degree of political liberty, though political happiness is not permitted by

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the present circumstances of Europe’ also bears the qualities of a political editorial with its careful and possibly regretful distinctions between political liberty and political happiness.17 Whereas Holland, for the Radcliffes, is an orderly country with an equitable justice system, a strong tradition of commerce, and a peculiarly Protestant restraint, Germany, by contrast, becomes a location that is almost uniquely populated with convents and castles. This, the most substantial section of the travelogue, is undoubtedly the work of Ann Radcliffe. Germany clearly captures her imagination at the level of literary inspiration, and it is only here that Radcliffe’s prose resumes its hallmark poetic quality. The Radcliffes’ geographical relocation thus is accompanied by a movement in the quality of prose and literary allusion. This shift, however, does not displace the political and social commentary as much as one may expect. What instead emerges from this section of the Journey (one which addresses a poverty-stricken, war-torn, but clearly inspirational Germany) is a more nuanced appreciation of the depth of Ann Radcliffe’s religious toleration than Walter Scott allowed. In Germany, the numerous descriptions of the many convents and conventual towns that the Radcliffes visit provoke far less anti-Catholic scepticism than one might imagine. Whilst passing through the Duchy of Cleves on the Prussian border, for example, Radcliffe approvingly notes that ‘The established religion of the town is Protestant; but here is an almost universal toleration, and the Catholics have several churches and monasteries’.18 This brief observation, remarkable for its economy, suggests that Radcliffe rather nervously applauds the Duchy’s ‘almost universal toleration’. This impression is strengthened by her later observations upon a range of Catholic convents. Whilst in Cologne, for example, she hears a tale of a particularly repressive convent of the order of Clarisse. Radcliffe passes judgement upon this particular order’s severity, observing of the strictures placed upon the novices: Accounts of such horrible perversions of human reason make the blood thrill and the teeth chatter. Their fathers they can never speak to, for no man is suffered to be in any part of the convent used by the sisterhood, nor, indeed, is admitted beyond the gate, except when there is a necessity for repairs, when all the votaries of the order are previously secluded. It is not easily, that a cautious mind becomes convinced of the existence of such severe orders; when it does, astonishment at the artificial miseries, which the ingenuity of human beings forms for themselves by seclusion, is as boundless as at the other miseries, with which the most trivial vanity and envy so frequently pollute the intercourses of social life. The poor nuns, thus nearly entombed during their lives, are, after death, tied upon a board, in the clothes they die in, and, with only their veils thrown over the face, are buried in the garden of the convent.19

Acute as always when writing upon the physical reactions to terror (‘blood thrill[s]’ and ‘teeth chatter’), Radcliffe’s allusions recall both the physiognomic effects that she was famed for creating within her Gothic romances, and the

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compelling invitation to listen that the ghost of Hamlet’s father issues in Act I, scene 5 of Hamlet: ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood’. This passage from Hamlet was used as an epigraph by Radcliffe in two of her previously published romances, A Sicilian Romance (1790) and in the second chapter of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Radcliffe’s prose here recalls these references both to Shakespeare and to her previous works’ Gothic renditions of abduction and unjust imprisonment. This, however, is not mere sensationalism, for here, in the most critical of her observations upon the institutional abuses that undermine religious devotion, she takes care to indicate that ‘such severe orders’ are deviations. Her critique is qualified by the responsibility that she places with the individual: the ‘artificial miseries’ are laid at the door of ‘the ingenuity of human beings’ who choose to seclude themselves, rather than with the institution of the Catholic Church per se. Radcliffe feels compassion for the ‘poor nuns’ who suffer this living ‘entombment’, and her sketch of their unlamented deaths hints at pity for such uselessly wasted lives. This impression is consonant with Radcliffe’s fictional portrayal of the deaths of nuns. As early as 1790, for example, in A Sicilian Romance, Radcliffe describes in close detail the death of the young nun Cornelia. No detailed lament is offered, however, suggesting that for Radcliffe, the tragedy has already taken place with Cornelia’s living entombment. Radcliffe’s heroines consistently resist taking the veil. Julia in A Sicilian Romance offers an early example of such resistance, but her portrayals of convents, and the decisions involved in taking the veil, become markedly more nuanced in her penultimate novel The Italian (1797). This is possibly as a consequence of the different models of convents that she encountered during her travels in Germany. In the Journey Radcliffe takes care to temper the negative example of the order of Clarisse with a better model of Catholic convent in Cologne. This is an order where the nuns are allowed to tend the sick and educate the poor. She remarks of this order that: Some of these ladies we saw in the church of their convent. Their habits were remarkably graceful; robes of lawn and black silk flowed from the shoulder, whence a quilled ruff, somewhat resembling that of Queen Elizabeth’s time, spread round the neck. The hair was in curls, without powder, and in the English fashion. Their voices were peculiarly sweet, and they sung the responses with a kind of plaintive tenderness, that was extremely interesting.20

Here Radcliffe exhibits her self-acknowledged tendency to relate all of her observations on German culture back to England. It is important to note, however, that she does not relate her positive observations upon this convent back to present-day England, but ‘that of Queen Elizabeth’s time’, well over 200 years before. This temporal displacement undermines any accusation that may be

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made of her championing of England, as her comparison of the nuns’ order to the bygone golden age in England is highly ambiguous. She does not champion the values of late eighteenth-century Protestant England above those of Catholic Germany. Instead, she returns to a period prior to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to indicate a collision between the ‘Gothic’ values of untutored ‘olde’ England and the Gothicism of the German North. The polite, commercial, post-Augustan and seemingly tolerant values of late eighteenth-century England are in this way subtly juxtaposed to sixteenth-century England and Germany. Her foregrounding of the simplicity of the nuns’ dress and hair and the ‘plaintive tenderness’ of their song emphasizes a rediscovered Elizabethan tradition that, surprisingly, does not suffer by comparison with the cosmopolitan late eighteenth century. Further, as noted, it is possible to read in the very different Catholic convents that Radcliffe encounters in Germany the models of the two Catholic convents that she later represented in The Italian. Composed in the wake of her travels in Germany (1797), The Italian provides a strong juxtaposition in its representation of two convents. The first, San Stefano, where the heroine Ellena di Rosalba is imprisoned, is described by her as ‘a prison’ and a ‘prophaned’ sanctuary due to the Superior’s disregard for the religious precepts of ‘justice and benevolence’.21 In Religion, Toleration and British Writing, 1790–1830 Mark Canuel rightly argues that it is the ‘deep level of psychological conformity’ that is demanded within this convent that provides the true source of terror for Radcliffe’s protagonist.22 By contrast, the second convent in which Ellena later finds refuge, Santa della Pietà, is praised for the ‘harmony of its society’ and the mutual reciprocity between its inhabitants and its environs. The portrayal of these two fictional convents bears comparison with Radcliffe’s direct experiences of different models of Catholic convent in Germany, for they offer a more nuanced version of institutionalization than in her previous romances. The pervasive anxiety that Radcliffe exhibits throughout her Journey regarding the perceived nationalism in her work no doubt stemmed in part from this being her first attempt at an already well-established genre, that of the travel journal. It is clear from her previous romances (set in both France and Italy) that she had read Tobias Smollett’s earlier Travels through France and Italy (1766), but it is questionable whether she approved of Smollett’s well-documented disdain of all things continental and Catholic. Whereas Smollett exaggeratedly called into question the hygiene, social practices and Catholic devotion that he encountered in France and Italy, Radcliffe’s observations upon the social and religious distinctions of Germany are more measured. Indeed, the detailed attention that she pays to the two Catholic convents discussed above is almost immediately followed by a surprisingly direct critique of writers who choose to denigrate

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Catholic institutions and ceremony within their works. Of these authors, Radcliffe observes: That persons otherwise inclined should adopt these topics is not surprising; the easiest pretences to wit are found to be made by means of familiar allusions to sacred subjects, because their necessary incongruity accomplishes the greatest part of what, in other cases, must be done by wit itself; there will, therefore, never be an end of such allusions, till it is generally seen, that they are the resources and symptoms of mean understandings, urged by the feverish desire of an eminence, to which they feel themselves inadequate. 23

It is impossible to speculate whether this barb was aimed towards travel writers such as Smollett, or whether it was directed at the numerous and increasingly vociferous anti-Jacobin and anti-Catholic commentators in England such as Thomas James Mathias. Here Radcliffe distinguishes her own practices from those of authors who exploit Catholic ritual as an easy target of satire. She thus exempts what she perceives to be her own more careful fictional practices from the charges of what Leslie Fiedler described as the lifeblood of the prurient Protestant Gothic imagination, ‘the ritual and glitter, the politics and pageantry of the Roman Church’.24 Whilst pageantry and politics are clearly central to her Gothic romances, Radcliffe did not view her engagement with them as either sensational or ‘prurient’. That is a charge that she lays at the door of other unnamed authors. Nonetheless, Radcliffe does frequently express commonplace dismay with Germany’s war-torn locales, dismal dirt, and the less-than-hospitable reception that greets her in some towns, but she combines this with particularly poetic renditions of Germany’s landscape. It is the inspiration afforded by the German landscape that permits her to recall her favourite English writers, William Collins and William Shakespeare. Setting out for Xanten, for example, she notes that the road lay through a broad avenue, which frequently entered a forest of oak, fir, elm, and majestic plane-trees, and emerged from it only to wind along its skirts. The views then opened over a country, diversified with gentle hills, and ornamented by numberless spires upon the heights, every small town having several convents. The castle of Eltenberg, on the summit of a wooded mountain, was visible during the whole of this stage and part of the next day’s journey. Yet the fewness, or the poverty, of the inhabitants appeared from our meeting only one chaise, and two or three small carts, for eighteen miles of the only high-road in the country. It was a fine evening in June, and the rich lights, thrown among the forest glades, with the solitary calmness of the scene, and the sereneness of the air, filled with scents from the woods, were circumstances which persuaded to such tranquil rapture as Collins must have felt when he had the happiness to address to Evening. 25

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Radcliffe’s inspiration from the forested landscape varied with castles and convents enables her to imagine how Collins ‘must have felt’ when he composed ‘Evening’. A moment of creative confluence between Radcliffe and one of her sources of literary inspiration thus emerges. What she resurrects in her representations of Germany is Shakespeare’s own technique of ‘accordant circumstances’ when ‘the solitary calmness of the scene, and the sereneness of the air’ accord with a particular moment of inspiration. This inspiration was absent from Radcliffe’s initial journey through the far more organized country of Holland, but Germany’s less orderly, but more inviting landscape permits her to evoke her favourite writers. Later, when visiting the forest of Carlsruhe, Radcliffe evokes Shakespeare’s As You Like It with the observation that ‘on [the] sequestered bank one almost expected to see the moralizing Jacques; so exactly did the scene accord with Shakespeare’s description’.26 With the ‘scenery’ ‘accord[ing]’ with Shakespeare’s description, the German forest becomes a backdrop to recollecting and engaging with Shakespeare’s work. The remembrance of both Collins and Shakespeare render war-torn Germany more familiar to Radcliffe, but again, they are related not to present-day England, but to the authors’ representation of a bygone England. It is the pastoral Forest of Arden that Radcliffe resurrects in the forest of Carlsruhe. Elsewhere, in the town of Goodesberg, the Radcliffes encounter a group of badly-wounded young French prisoners of war, lying by the wayside, passed by carriages carrying revellers to a nearby ridotto. Radcliffe observes that: Misery and festivity could scarcely be brought into closer contrast. We thought of Johnson’s ‘many coloured life’ and of his picture, in the preface to Shakespeare, of contemporary wretchedness and joy, when ‘the reveller is hastening to his wine, and the mourner is burying his friend’.27

Whilst it could be argued that Radcliffe here displaces the immediate situation of a war-torn country with particularly picturesque evocations of her own national literary heritage, I think that her use of ‘accordant circumstances’ is more complex than this. In summoning some of her most cherished English writers, Collins, Shakespeare and Johnson, Radcliffe does not displace the tragedy, dirt and inconvenience of a nation that has been torn apart by this divisive European war. She chooses not to use her travelogue to complain continually (as Smollett had done) about the dirt, inconvenience and inhospitality that she encounters. Deprived of the ability to converse with the soldiers, nuns and poor people that she encounters, Radcliffe instead sympathizes imaginatively with them by invoking her own cherished national icons. Radcliffe clearly does not regard the French people that she encounters in Germany with the suspicion that may have been expected of a straightforwardly loyal Briton. Learning that in France, for example, the younger generation was in favour of the Republic, she

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notes that the former system would never have been overthrown if it had been administered by such mild and benevolent characters as the two French emigrants that she and William encounter in Bingen. Radcliffe’s use of accordant circumstances in Germany is her own way of engaging with a population and a countryside that is otherwise preoccupied with the demands of war and religion. The scenes of conflict, penury and misery that the Radcliffes encounter along the ‘western frontier of Germany’ are not elided in favour of picturesque detail. Radcliffe instead records this conflict and its bloody effects through a discerning blend of literary association, observational detail and sympathy. It is tempting to read in Radcliffe’s evocation of Shakespeare and England’s Golden Age in A Journey a partiality for her own nation to which she herself draws attention in the Preface. This is problematized, however, by the temporally distant nature of the English associations that she uses. The Golden Age of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, and even Johnson’s Shakespeare – collectively, these associations belong to a time which precedes the current revolutionary conflict, and England’s own military participation. When observing the desolation and destruction that the French siege of Mentz caused, Radcliffe comments: An Englishman, walking amidst the ensigns of such artificial and premature desolation, cannot help considering the natural security of his country, and rejoicing, that, even if the strong and plain policy of neglecting all foreign consequence, and avoiding all foreign interests ... should be for ever rejected, still his home cannot be invaded; and, though, the expense of wars should make poverty general, the immediate horrors of them cannot enter the cities or the cottages of an island.28

Tempting though it is to read a self-congratulatory tone in this observation upon the comparative security of England, it is important to bear in mind that what she praises is the ‘natural security’ of England. In contrast to her country’s geographical advantages as an island, Radcliffe deplores and rebukes the ‘expense of wars’ and their ‘immediate horrors’. While she may have been ardently attached to the locality of Britain, she was not politically partial to its military policies. Radcliffe’s journals and final posthumously published novel Gaston de Blondeville bear witness to an increasing difficulty on her part of finding anything of inspiration in England. This is reflected in her introductory essay to Gaston where her ardent and imaginative protagonist Willoughton sets off in search of the true location of the Forest of Arden. But [Willoughton] looked in vain for the thick and gloomy woods, which, in a former age, were the home of the doubtful fugitive, and so much the terror of the traveller, that it had been found necessary, on this very road, to clear the ground,

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Romantic Localities for a breadth of six acres on each side, in order to protect the way-faring part of his Majesty’s liege subjects. Now, albeit the landscape was still wild and woody, he could not any where espy a forest scene of dignity sufficient to call up before his fancy the exiled duke and his court, at their hunter-feast, beneath the twilight of the boughs; nor a single beech, under the grandeur of whose shade the melancholy Jacques, might ‘lose and neglect the creeping hours of time’, while he sadly sympathized with the poor stag, that, escaped from the pursuit of man, came to drop his tears into the running brook, and to die in quiet.29

Radcliffe again uses Shakespeare’s As You Like It for the inspiration of what Willoughton has come to seek in Warwickshire. But whereas she herself was able to summon it at will in the forest of Carlsruhe in Germany, her protagonist Willoughton cannot relocate the play. Contemporary England disappoints; the forest of Arden has been cleared ‘to protect the wayfaring part of his Majesty’s liege subjects’. The demands and intrusions of state have disrupted an organic relationship between location and imagination. Willoughton complains of England that ‘here, on the very spot where Shakspeare drew, I am suddenly let down’.30 The prefatory material to Gaston de Blondeville is suggestive of Radcliffe’s own anxiety about her diminishing ‘fancy’. This diminution of imagination is clearly and radically connected to Radcliffe’s increasing disillusionment with England’s governance. In this historical romance, the English King Henry III is portrayed as a vacillating and malleable leader who is all too prone to persuasion from his closest counsellors and too impatient to hear the complaints and demands of his loyal subjects. Composed in Thomas Talfourd’s assessment between 1802 and 1803, Gaston’s narrative of unpunished murder, imprisonment without trial and weak leadership bears many representational parallels with the British government’s increasingly paranoiac suspensions of habeas corpus and treason trials.31 The political and locational disillusionment with England may have been somewhat less prominent in 1795 than it was towards the close of Radcliffe’s career, but the Journey undertaken by Ann Radcliffe provided her with fictional and political nourishment. The publication of the Journey marked a decisive turning point in her career. Thereafter, her writing became more politically engaged, both in The Italian’s exploration of institutional intolerance, and in Gaston de Blondeville’s prefatory exploration of the reasons for Radcliffe’s own diminishing fancy. Her reviewers, biographers and critics, however, underestimated the impact that this Journey made upon her subsequent work. The Journey may have attempted a synthesis of English and German localities in order to broaden its appeal to a British readership, but it did not do so uncritically. Radcliffe’s consideration and immediate experience of the international consequences of Britain’s inglorious participation in the war of the first coalition sharpened latent political and literary themes within her work, and demonstrated the necessity of connecting them even more firmly. This is perhaps best summarized in her own words.

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Early on in the Journey, she noted the significance of attempting to understand and experience national character: To extend their arms is the flagitious ambition of warriors; to enlarge their systems is the ambition of writers, especially of political writers. A juster effort of understanding would aim at rendering the application of principles more exact, rather than more extensive, and would produce enquiries into the circumstances of national character and condition, that should regulate that application.32

A carefully detailed attention to the small but numerous circumstances of national character and condition epitomizes the literary project of Ann Radcliffe’s Journey. The occasions upon which these circumstances are compared with England, however, do not diminish the national difficulties and differences of Germany. Radcliffe’s use of Shakespeare instead enhanced her ability to sympathize imaginatively with a population, nation and war that was undeniably foreign to her. To compare localities in Germany with scenes from Shakespeare was for Radcliffe a gesture of universal sympathy. In particular, this is indicated by her approving quotation of Samuel Johnson’s version of Shakespeare when encountering the French soldiers. In his 1765 prefatory essay to his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson famously defined him as ‘the poet of Nature’.33 For Johnson and for Radcliffe later, Shakespeare was revered precisely because he transcended the localized and politicized borders of nationality. Radcliffe’s Journey through Germany thus informs her readership of the consequences of war, but it also serves just as much as an elegiac recollection of England’s lost and more glorious past. It is a past which she still glimpses in parts of Germany, but which remains irrecoverable in England itself. Perhaps Sir Walter Scott was not so wide of the mark when, as I suggested at the opening of this essay, he relocated the impetus of Radcliffe’s fiction more in the domestic concerns of England than in those of the continent. Radcliffe’s domestic concerns were not so patriotically loyal and Europhobic as Scott implied, however. The Journey illustrates the penmanship of an author who paid far closer attention to the details, distinctions and similarities in national character than her critics recognized. Too frequently, however, criticism chose to overlook Radcliffe’s serious and sustained engagement with the concerns of continental Europe and the wars which damaged it. One contemporaneous satire of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic hyperbole epitomized these misreadings perfectly: This lady’s husband told a friend that he was going to Germany with his wife, the object of whose journey was to pick up materials for a novel. I think in that case, answered his friend, that you had better let her go alone! 34

10 HENRY CRABB ROBINSON’S INITIATION INTO THE ‘MYSTERIES OF THE NEW SCHOOL’: A ROMANTIC JOURNEY James Vigus

[Paradoxically,] the more closely and scrupulously you follow someone’s footsteps through the past the more conscious do you become that they never existed wholly in any one place along the recorded path. … They are always in motion, carrying their past lives over into the future.1

From April 1800, when he arrived by merchant ship in Hamburg, to October 1802, when he matriculated at the University of Jena, his place of residence until 1805, Henry Crabb Robinson walked through, stayed in, and commented on almost every Romantic locality in the country. To say that he ‘probably knew Germany better than any other Englishman of his day’2 is, if anything, to understate his remarkably ‘personal, lively and immediate relationship to the German literature and culture of the time’.3 Both via translations and informal conversations, Robinson mediated many German literary works to the Anglophone world.4 Above all, he achieved a precise and intimate understanding of the ‘new school’ of (post-)Kantian philosophy and aesthetics. When Madame de Staël arrived in Weimar in late 1803 and requested a tutor to assist her research for the book that would eventually be published as De l’Allemagne, it was ‘der Engländer’ who was summoned to the task from the neighbouring town of Jena. The private lectures he presented to Staël and her circle built on the ‘Letters on the Philosophy of Kant’ that he had recently published, providing an insider’s account of the ongoing revolution in philosophy. Staël’s marginalia reveal the extent to which Robinson’s presentation influenced her polemical appeal to German writing against Anglo-French empiricism.5 Yet despite this historically influential role, Robinson remains an elusive figure: for most scholars of the period he is little more than an observer who offers quotable anecdotes of the greater literary personalities he moved among. Exist– 145 –

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ing accounts overlook the passion with which Robinson pursued his intellectual and social journey; and the published selections of his diary and letters, informative though they are in many ways, seem to confirm the assumption that he was an ‘unromantic, solid’ figure of ‘stodgy temperament’.6 Why has Robinson been so long neglected and misunderstood? One reason is surely that investigations of Anglo-German literary relations fell into decline following World War II (Coleridge studies being the exception that proved the rule). But the other reason is a personal one: Robinson himself was excessively modest, painfully convinced of the worthlessness of his intellectual achievements – despite the protests of friends, who asked him openly how it was possible that he could combine such self-sufficiency and judgement with so little confidence.7 Constantly burdened by a sense of inferiority stemming from ‘the vile Presbyterian education I have suffered’8 as a Dissenter barred from attending university in England, he published all too little of his philosophical work, and often sought anonymity for his translations; while his ‘Reminiscences’, composed late in life, convey almost nothing of the earnest energy of the young student (the tone is muted: ‘I went to Germany, where I remained more than five years, and pursued something like study, and where I was brought into contact with some of the most distinguished men of the age’).9 The majority of Robinson’s letters, travel journals and diaries remain unedited, and it is such manuscripts that reveal – by vivid autobiographical glimpses10 – his progress through Germany and beyond. The present essay briefly addresses one of the intriguing, unanswered questions about Robinson’s career: how did he develop so quickly from a position of relative ignorance to one in which he was able to write essays on philosophy that are unique in English literature of the early nineteenth century – and to command sufficient intellectual and social status to be able successfully to tutor the literary celebrity Madame de Staël? The answer, I argue, is to be found in an energetic pedestrian tour of several months’ duration, during which he walked, talked and read with equal intensity (and when alone, habitually read while walking). It was on this tour that his knowledge of the German language decisively improved, that he struggled through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and that (in short) he became an initiate into what he ironically called the ‘Mysteries of the new school’ – all due to conversation with similarly studious and enthusiastic new friends.11 Robinson left a detailed account of his itinerary in manuscript. After very briefly summarizing this, I will analyse three key aspects of his initiation: the ‘conversion’ to ‘Kantianism’; the encounter with the idealist emphasis on feeling and friendship; and the extension of Robinson’s sympathy to different forms of religion, especially Catholicism. It should gradually become clear that the ‘new school’, as Robinson perceived it, consisted of a mixture of (idealist) philosophy, Sturm und Drang and Romantic poetry, and an increasingly Catholicizing reli-

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gious sensibility; and that what held these elements in solution was the promise of a community of friends. I therefore conclude with an analysis of the ideal of friendship in Robinson’s new social group, and of his aspirations toward participation in such a community.

The Tour By early 1801, Robinson had already improved his German enough to begin translation work, and had made a solitary walking tour of the Rhine.12 But the new friendships that he made in February and March 1801 while staying in Frankfurt proved a true turning point. There, he was for some time a guest of the Serviere family, who were Catholic: a fact that Robinson, always conscious of his Protestant Dissenting roots, related rather apologetically to his brother. Thomas Robinson was still more perturbed when Henry began to hint that he was in love with the twenty-seven-year-old Charlotte Serviere – ‘so pleasing, so intellectual’ – and that he was considering a proposal of marriage, something that would make his return to England unlikely.13 (Henry and Charlotte were to remain lifelong friends; neither of them ever married.) Through the Servieres, Robinson was introduced to the Brentanos.14 Christian Brentano, the precocious seventeen-year-old brother of the poet Clemens Brentano, invited Robinson to accompany him on a walking tour of Saxony. ‘In my entirely isolated state an offer much less agreeable than this would have been acceptable’, reminisced Robinson many years later: ‘I should visit a country which I longed to see’.15 When relating the news to his brother at the time, Robinson adopts an ironic tone which, as so often, barely conceals his excitement and intellectual expectations: In my last letter I gave you some Accot of a German genius Clement Brentano – A few days afterwards I became acquainted with a younger Brother of his – Christian: of whom I had heard nothg And as one Genius in a family is as much as can reasonably be expected I little expected to find a second: C:[hristian] however with fewer pretensions & with less brilliancy will I have no doubt become the greater Man – He has devoted himself to Science Is far advanced into the highest branches of the Mathematicks And is an intelligt & judicious Admirer & Disciple of Kant His zeal for the new Critical Philosophy And my Desire to be informed about it – Brought us together – made us intimate – till at length he proposed my accompanyg him to Grimma in Lower Saxony where he resides with a first rate Mathematician. he is himself an indefatigable student He scolds me for my hitherto desultory mode of life And advises me like him to study seriously & to some purpose.16

No wonder that Christian Brentano’s undisciplined but fervent revolutionary spirit excited Robinson: even Clemens, the brother, was convinced that Christian ‘is the only one of our family who will achieve something’ – adding that along with his good qualities, he ‘is infinitely, tastelessly bizarre’.17

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Robinson set off with Christian Brentano on 14 June 1801. Walking at great speed, they arrived the next day in Marburg, and on 20 June they were already in Göttingen. The whole journey was made on foot, since they had little money to spare for post carriages and were, besides, making the most of ‘good health and sound limbs’18 to visit various towns along the way. In Göttingen they encountered not only the enigmatic and fiery Clemens Brentano once again (‘In spight of the Nonsense [Clemens] Brendano [sic] talks, Nature has stamped on every feature of his face on every limb of his body – Extraordinary Powers’),19 but also the charismatic disciple of F. W. J. Schelling, Stephan August Winkelmann. They then visited the Harz mountains, and in the apparently boring town of Eisleben enjoyed some flirtation in the evening (‘a great deal of embracg & kissing’, notes Robinson’s travel journal).20 They ascended the Brocken, but unfortunately on a cloudy day on which it was impossible to see the famous Brocken Spectre. They moved on to Leipzig and then Grimma, where Christian Brentano went on with his study of mathematics, and Robinson with philosophy; but Robinson soon set off again to Dresden and then all the way to Prague. After several weeks he returned to Grimma, then accompanied Johann Gottfried Seume – ‘one of the most interestg men I ever knew’21 – on the first stretch of the journey that Seume would so entertainingly recount in Spaziergang nach Syrakus: im Jahr 1802 (Stroll to Syracuse: in the Year 1802). Robinson thus found himself in Weimar and Jena, where he first met Goethe, Wieland, and other future friends; and then, in the spring of 1802, he settled back in Frankfurt for a few more months. In outward circumstances this was a typical Romantic Bildungsreise, whose formative quality invites comparison with, say, Clemens Brentano’s much briefer tour with Achim von Arnim in 1802. Robinson’s journal contains the expected accounts of muddy roads, scarcely edible meat, strange conversations, the fear of robbers (Brentano carried a rapier for protection),22 and the descent of a mineshaft (whose vaunted aesthetic appeal left Robinson cold). What is distinctive about Robinson’s journey, however, is that he was a foreigner, making his way in a landscape both physically and intellectually unfamiliar. Christian Brentano seems to have been unforgiving of Robinson’s mistakes in the German language, which meant that the Englishman of necessity learnt fast (he was soon to attain such enviable fluency in the language that, as a student prank, he successfully impersonated Professor Fichte in a pub).23 Indeed, both young men were quick to anger, especially Brentano, and they argued furiously. Robinson often writes in his journal in shorthand, because he didn’t trust Brentano with his most private thoughts, and the latter’s attempt to teach Robinson mathematics was doomed to failure from the start.24 Yet Robinson owed the sudden opening up of new perspectives to the ‘genius’ Christian and his friends, and the progress in his studies is intelligible only in the context of these friendships.

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Kantianism As indicated by the long quotation above, a major attraction of Christian Brentano’s company for Robinson was his fashionable and apparently well-informed adherence to the Kantian philosophy. From English journals, Robinson had gleaned a distorted picture of Kant as a reviver of the doctrine of ‘innate ideas’ that John Locke had long ago exploded; further, at the early date of January 1801, he writes to his brother that ‘Kantianism’ is anti-religious, and that he opposes it.25 When he meets Clemens Brentano for the first time, he happens to be ‘laughing heartily’ and tactlessly over a satire by Friedrich Nicolai against the Kantian school.26 He nevertheless wants to study Kant, it seems, out of curiosity about a revolutionary phenomenon, and because of a ubiquitous social experience (‘all the young Men of Talent do run after the new Philosy’, noted Robinson; just as Samuel Taylor Coleridge reported in Göttingen in 1798 that ‘all are Kantians whom I have met with’).27 During the year of the sporadic walking tour, however, Robinson laboured heroically through Kant’s works. Once he had crossed ‘the Asses Bridge of the Critical Philosophy’, he felt a sense of dawning peace that amounted to a religious conversion experience: in May 1802 Robinson at last declares himself ‘converted’ to ‘Kantianism’.28 Robinson began by reading Jacobi, Mendelssohn and various contemporary philosophical dictionaries rather than Kant himself, and only afterwards tackled the Critique of Pure Reason at the recommendation of Heinrich August Töpfer, Brentano’s mathematics tutor (to whom Robinson referred in the long quotation above): ‘Brentanos Preceptor Magr Töpfer is said to be one of the greatest Mathemats in Europe He is a deep Metaphysician And has helped me much in the laborious Task of studying Kant’.29 Töpfer deplored the vagaries of postKantian metaphysics and insisted on scientific rigour: in particular, ‘Kant was not to be understood without the mathematics’.30 It was probably for this reason that Robinson tried to learn algebra from Brentano during their trip, and the abortiveness of these lessons must have reinforced his sense of inadequacy with regard to Kant. ‘Kant has given me the blue Devils’, he confessed to his journal; again, poignantly, ‘Kant has made me unhappy by shewg me my Want of Talt I cant understd him’.31 On another occasion: ‘Kant has made me unhappy … I want a guiding ffriend My prest feeling of my own weakness strengthened by my acquaint with B[rentano]’,32 whose air of genius Robinson found alternately stimulating and oppressive. Neverthless, Robinson persisted with the reading of Kant day and night, often turning to Brentano for elucidations. He looked to Brentano, in fact, as the ‘guiding friend’ of his hopes, despite the teenage genius’s moody behaviour. This is not the place for a detailed reconstruction of Robinson’s step-by-step ‘conversion’ to Kantianism,33 but I believe that the essence of what ‘Kantianism’

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came to mean for Robinson may be summed up concisely. In keeping with the preoccupations resulting from his upbringing as an orthodox Dissenter, it was with regard to religion that Robinson felt the force of Kant’s arguments most.34 Kant’s sceptical method of argument in his chapter on ‘The Paralogisms of Pure Reason’ demonstrated to Robinson’s satisfaction that the claims of traditional speculative metaphysics – that God exists, that the human will is free, that the world is eternal – can be equally logically proved and disproved. This means that we cannot know whether such propositions are true; and yet all is not lost, for we do have an intuition of the moral law, whose binding force requires the truth of those claims. ‘Thus the seeming Scepticism of the great results of speculative Reasoning’, Robinson told his brother, ‘Are favourable to the interests of Religion & Morality by keeping the Coasts clear: I cannot (says K) demonstrate the Being of G. nor you his non-existence: But my moral principles, the fact that I am conscious of a moral law, is a some thing against which you have nothing’. Thus ‘the Want of Knowledge is supplied by ffaith but a faith that is necessary and to an honest mind sound and inevitable’.35 The ‘elaborated Infidelity’ that Robinson had expected from Kantianism’s rational denial of the claims of religious revelation36 turned out, on deeper reflection, to be the very opposite: Kantianism promised Robinson a rational religion, logically better grounded than what he saw as the inconsistent, incomplete rationalism of Joseph Priestley and the English Unitarians. It was equally important to the increasingly broad-minded Robinson that such a religion should have a minimum of dogma; and indeed he pointed to toleration as one of the defining features of his new ‘Kantianism’37 – a concept that will help (below) to explain his sympathy toward Catholic culture in Frankfurt and Saxony.

The Poetico-Metaphysical Religionists However, even before he had begun to read Kant, Robinson had discovered that the ‘new school’, although unthinkable without Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ (the decisive affirmation that the mind has priority over the objects of experience), actually rejected the boundaries of knowledge that Kant had so carefully set. Taking its point of departure from Kantian rationality and rigorism, this group nevertheless pursued enthusiastic, schwärmerische discourses about the power of love and the inadequacy of the mere intellect to effect a true revolution. As Robinson later reminisced, he learnt this most distinctly from Winkelmann, to whom Brentano introduced him in Göttingen – so the mere two days that Robinson spent there were highly rewarding.38 Winkelmann, ‘a young physician of rare acquisns & talents’39 and a prolific poet, embodied the universal approach to philosophical study that defined Göttingen as a Romantic locality. His highly popular lectures on Goethe and Volkspoesie are often regarded as constitutive

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for ‘Göttingen Romanticism’; it was while attending these lectures, for instance, that the young scientist Achim von Arnim befriended Clemens Brentano and was inspired to literary writing. What Robinson owed to Winkelmann was an insight into the history of philosophy: ‘It was he who first distinctly taught me that the new German philosophy – in connection with which Fichte was the most celebrated living teacher, and Schelling was rising into fame – was idealism’. Robinson elaborates: ‘Winkelmann urged me to study Fichte’s ‘Wissenschaftslehre’, which he said was in its elements the philosophy of Plato, Spinoza, and Berkeley’.40 The Englishman felt reassured and encouraged by the fact that one of the most eloquent spokesmen of the so-called ‘new school’ actually considered its principal doctrines to be ancient ones. It was probably with this advice of Winkelmann’s in mind that Robinson would later, as a student in Jena, study Plato in Greek at the same time as he attended Schelling’s lectures on the Philosophy of Art. At the early stage of the walking tour, however, it was not particular chains of philosophical reasoning that captured Robinson’s interest so much as the general atmosphere of philosophical idealism among friends. This aspect of the initiation was also painful for Robinson, however, since Winkelmann and the other members of the Frankfurt-Göttingen circle repudiated the empiricist philosophy of Locke that Robinson had long admired: to his brother, Robinson reports Winkelmann as saying, ‘I want words to express the Contempt I feel for him [Locke] I read him when I was very young but with difficulty he was so shallow & empty that I was then astonished at his Reputation’. With an astonishment thinly disguised by his habitually ironic tone, Robinson relates Winkelmann’s opinion that England has only ever produced one Great Man, and that he was Shakespeare. He hastens to qualify some of this criticism of English writers: ‘In thus relating to you what I occasionally hear, you will not understand that I am myself convinced by such Assertions – What I have copied is [so] much the general mode of thinking here that it deserves to be known, When our old & fixed Notions are shaken we are led to think ourselves’.41 And in thinking afresh for himself, Robinson was not only making his way painstakingly through Kant’s writings, but also reading Romantic novels such as Clemens Brentano’s Godwi, and listening to discussions led by Winkelmann, who as another observer commented, was ‘enthusiastic for everything beautiful to the point of extravagance’.42 As Robinson describes them in Grimma, all the members of the New School are ‘Religionists that is a sort of poetico-metaphysical religionist – Clemt Brentano defined Religion to be Philosophy taught through Mystery And Winkleman who delivers Lectures on Poetry has for the Title of one – The Virgin Mary as the Ideal of female beauty & excellence’.43 Robinson’s attempt to participate in this aesthetic enthusiasm was partly successful, to the extent that it provided a context in which he could develop his appreciation of the poetry of Goethe; but in other respects he remained

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rather bewildered. He admired many of the works in the great picture gallery in Dresden, but whereas viewing these paintings was formative for several of the early German Romantics, it was puzzling for Robinson, who felt that he lacked a vocabulary to describe and explore what he saw. Further, as a diligent and omnivorous tourist he visited a huge number of churches in Dresden and then in Prague (of which he said, ‘pity I was not Catholic’!),44 but could not easily reconcile himself to the sight of relics, or even to the baroque architecture in which his new friends sometimes delighted.

Catholicism and Toleration This aspect of Robinson’s ‘initiation’ deserves further investigation, however, for it is remarkable that despite his firmly anti-Catholic upbringing in England, he did feel the attraction of the German Romantic turn to Catholicism. On one day during which he is dutifully struggling through Kant, he is also making an ‘Enquiry Concerng the Restorn of the Catholic Religion’.45 This new sympathy owed much to his affection for that intellectually sharp Catholic, Charlotte Serviere. Christian Brentano, too, converted to Catholicism not long after his period of intimacy with Robinson. It was probably under the influence of these friends that Robinson – at first sight incongruously – copied a number of Latin poems on the Virgin Mary into the same notebook in which he drafted his translations from Goethe and Schiller. Around Christmas 1801, it appears that Brentano introduced Robinson to Friedrich Schiller’s play, The Piccolomini; the fact that Robinson then chose to translate the speech of Max Piccolomini’s that begins ‘O never will I chide him for believing…’, reveals much (in my view) about his relationship with Brentano. The speech includes the lines: ‘Th’ enchanting world of miracle alone / Answers the raptures of my beating heart’.46 This could have seemed an apt description of Christian Brentano’s tendency to Catholic belief, and if so, shows Robinson’s typically subtle empathy at work. The Englishman has not entirely forsaken his Dissenting critique of the use of superstition as a tool of social control: especially amongst the poor of Bohemia, he observes ‘the striking danger & evils of Catholm from the power it gives Priests’. One evening, indeed, he notes in his travel diary: ‘Dined with a bigotted catholick priest whose excessive & absurd intolerance reminded me that I was in Bohemia’.47 Yet he is not only emotionally affected by the predominantly Catholic aesthetic sensibility all around him, but is also becoming convinced that, speculatively speaking, ‘Catholicism forms a more consistent theoretical whole [than Protestantism] And as such to a systematical Mind is an object of respect’.48 This remark seems to follow from the lesson Robinson felt he had learnt from the radical ‘sceptical method’ of Kant. Either one should admit no miracles at all, or else take a full leap into the arms of faith.49 Given the religious

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persuasion of his family, it must have required some courage for Robinson not only to entertain this line of thought, but even to explain it to his brother. As one who in England had recently experienced religious intolerance in response to his freethinking,50 however, Robinson consistently emphasized and valued the principle of toleration. A further reason for his growing admiration of Catholic culture, indeed, lay in the fact that its flourishing spoke well for the tolerant religious policy of the government of Saxony. He observed ‘practical toleration’ everywhere he travelled.51 The national religion, he explained to his brother, is Lutheran, and ‘The Letter of the Law is intolerant; but practical toleration or if you will indifference is more striking here than in England … here no Priest thinks himself bound positively to adopt the formal Creed; only not to oppose it’.52 The rational critique of biblical revelation, he notes with apparent relief and pleasure, is almost universal in Germany. In January 1801 he replies to a query from his brother as follows: ‘In what Light is Xtianity here viewed? Has it been rationalized? or is it wholly discarded? I must remain here at least seven Years before I venture to answer this’ – pointing out that it is difficult to generalize about a country divided into so many regions and lacking a centralized government. Just one year later, however, he feels sufficiently informed to give a more definite answer: ‘In Germany at least the Question as to Christiany seems to sleep – All the Philosophers & a large proportion of the divines reject it in toto i e the Miracles But with almost equal unanimy agree to maintain the shadow & name. … The Elector is a Catholic & with laudably scrupulous attention to the Constitution refrains from all interferences whatever in Church Matters’.53 On 6 September 1801, Robinson has an experience that seems to him to typify what he most admires about German flexibility in religious life. Having recently parted company with Christian Brentano, he visits and stays a night with a community of Moravians at Ebersdorf – the followers of Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who famously attempted to unite Protestant, Catholic and Jewish piety in a sexualized mysticism.54 He is initially struck by the similarity of the sermon to the Calvinist discourses he was used to hearing in England; in particular, however, ‘One thing pleased me – & pleased me throughout in the Conversn I afterwards had with my Conductor: that little Stress was laid on dogmatical ffaith But a great deal on Love to the L. Jesus – The ffaith of the Heart An Expressn wch reconciles the pietists with the ffree thinkers’. Robinson is yet further impressed by the fact that all unmarried Moravians live together in one house, with differences of property according to their means, and apparently few ‘Breaches of Chastity’ – a curious observation that Robinson does not elaborate. ‘On the whole all that I saw of the Soc y convinced me that the Brotherhood shod be respectd & honourd as havg made more Provisn for the Worldly Happiness of its Members And for having formed a Society in Society in wch the Equaly &

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Rights of Man are better secured & observd than perhaps in any modern Institutn’.55

Epilogue: The Search for Friendship A ‘Society in Society’: the phrase, unusually written out without abbreviations, reveals much about Robinson’s aspirations during his tour – aspirations that remained only half-articulated despite the prolific extent of his informal writing. The foreigner who had felt relatively little at home in his own country was searching for philosophical understanding, artistic beauty and religious toleration not in a purely disinterested or academic sense, but rather in constant conjunction with the desire of sharing these ideals within friendship. If friendship as many of the German Romantics conceived it was a community, a principle of communio totius vitae that amounted either to a religious tie or a replacement for religion; if it could be unconventional enough to bind a small community against society,56 then these hopes reveal much of what Robinson found so attractive in the ‘new school’. In Winkelmann’s idealist metaphysics, the Absolute itself is even defined as the loving Übereinstimmung (harmonious understanding) between two people that arises through Freundschaft (friendship).57 This is the atmosphere in which Robinson feels the want of a ‘guiding friend’, and in which he regards the Moravian community with admiration. Despite the frequent quarrels with Christian, he continues to write in January 1802 of ‘Brentano my only ffriend’58 (did Charlotte Serviere occupy a different category?). In May 1802 Robinson and Brentano returned via Erlangen and Nürnberg to Frankfurt, where Robinson resumed his old lodgings, while Brentano soon set off again for Marburg. A few months later, however, in August 1802, Robinson received an invitation, or rather an insistent summons. Christian Brentano asks Robinson to join him where he is lodging in the house of Professor Tiedemann in the university town of Marburg. He teases Robinson about enjoying comfortable domestic happiness with Charlotte, urging him to resume his travels and suggesting that Charlotte will always accept him back again.59 Robinson duly walked all the way back to Marburg, arriving on 20 August 1802, where he stayed nearly six weeks, living together not only with Christian, but also with Clemens Brentano and Friedrich Carl von Savigny, a young lawyer currently teaching at the university. Here Robinson once again glimpsed a communitarian ideal – albeit one consciously shaped by fashionable dilettantism. He continued to study German literary works: during this stay he was introduced to the writings of Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck and thus to a new phase of his reception of German writing. What he particularly enjoyed was the fact that in this small group he was under no obligation to shave or dress well. ‘I never before

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enjoyed in such perfection the advantages of society without its restraints’, he told Thomas Robinson. In the same letter he notes that ‘Christian and I … are no longer so intimate as we were’,60 which signals the fact that he is in transition again: it is impossible to fix him in any one place, with any one set of beliefs, with any one friend. It is above all the acquaintance with Savigny that now opens out fresh prospects to Robinson and sets him on a new path of discovery. A ‘philosophical Jurist’, as Robinson describes him, Savigny ‘is a scholar in the true sense of the word, a philosopher of the new school with modesty and the capacity and will to instruct others – an union of qualities which I have not before found united; without him, as a constant corrector and qualifier of the ‘Saucy and audacious eloquence’ of Clements, Clements would be intolerable to me’.61 Besides smoothing awkward relationships, Savigny no doubt reinforced Robinson’s interest in the poetic metaphysics of the ‘new school’. Reflecting on the unsatisfactory course of the French Revolution, Savigny would deplore the exercise of mechanical understanding in philosophy, and demand that reform emerge from the ‘inner holiness of the spirit’,62 a phrase that encapsulated critique of the Enlightenment and of Kant’s moral rigorism: Savigny’s conviction (which he shared with Winkelmann) was that love, not ratiocination, should be the spring of action.63 For a former disciple of Godwin, this message had not lost its freshness over the past year. Robinson was deeply impressed by Savigny’s philosophical approach to his profession, and it may be that Robinson’s own later decision to become a lawyer owed much to this friendship. The immediate result was that Robinson turned his attention to university life. He was already fascinated by the apparent freedom that German students enjoyed, and a couple of years later he would commission Savigny to write an article on German universities, comparing the considerable differences between Göttingen and Jena and giving a brief account of other institutions. Given the connections between Marburg and Jena – Savigny, Winckelmann and Clemens Brentano moved between both towns – it is not surprising that the ever-restless Christian Brentano decided in the summer of 1802 that he wanted to study at the university of Jena. For his part, Robinson had discovered during his previous, brief visit to Jena that this small town was ‘the most fashionable seat of the New Philosophy’,64 and conversations with Savigny must have reinforced the attraction. At the beginning of October 1802, then, Robinson and Christian Brentano walked to Jena, where Robinson would settle for the next few years (whereas Brentano soon wandered off again following further quarrels with Robinson who ‘forbad him publicly my Rooms’).65 Though the university provided Robinson with countless new opportunities, the three preoccupations of the walking tour remained: he continued to declare himself a ‘Kantian’, but studied still more intensively the ‘new’ metaphysics under Schelling; while his preoccupation with finding a socially and rationally tenable form

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of religion remained. When Madame de Staël came to profit from Robinson’s learning, she could hardly have guessed how much of it had been acquired on the move, and how inseparable the physical travelling had been from the intellectual journey. By travelling on foot, by reading as he went, and by indefatigable conversation, Robinson had learned a lesson about Romantic localities that few other foreigners could realize: ‘Philosophy in Germany is an affair of Topography’.66

Acknowledgements For permission to quote from unpublished manuscripts in Henry Crabb Robinson’s Nachlass, I would like to thank the Director and Trustees of Dr. Williams’s Library, London. For the financial support that has enabled my research on Robinson, I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), who supported my work at the Friedrich-SchillerUniversity Jena; and to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, who fund my present research fellowship at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich.

11 ITALY AS A ROMANTIC LOCATION IN THE POETRY OF THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH DELLA CRUSCAN POETS Rolf Lessenich

The Augustans generally disparaged modern Italy as an impoverished and benighted land of physical and moral decay, the mere ruin of a glorious classical antiquity, as in Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), Samuel Sharp’s Letters from Italy (1766) and Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766). Young gentlemen on the Grand Tour were usually accompanied by a tutor or ‘bear leader’ to safeguard them against what passed for Italian vice, seduction by lascivious women or corruption by effeminate male homosexuality.1 The cyclic Augustan view of history imagined a second (French and English) peak of Augustan civilization after the relapse of the first (Latin) Augustan civilization into the ‘dark’ Middle Ages, whereas Italy had not been capable of such a regeneration and the Florentine Renaissance of the fifteenth century had soon decayed into primitive ignorance again, due to the enslavement of Italy by the superstitions of the Church of Rome and the occupation of Italy by the tyranny of other nations: ‘In the last century both arts and literature began to decline. The study of the classics was neglected … Thus ignorance spread little by little, and in the eighteenth century plunged that fine country into the barbarism of the middle ages’.2 About the middle of the eighteenth century, between 1760 and 1770, however, that negative view of modern Italy had begun to change. Preromantic sensibility aroused compassion for Italy’s oppressed inhabitants, accompanied by nostalgia for the soothing mildness of Italy’s sun-drenched weather and admiration for the beauties of Italy’s various picturesque and sublime landscapes.3 Simultaneously the Alps were no longer seen as a mere irregular obstacle or divine punishment for the Fall of Man, but as an enjoyable and terrible landscape inviting the British traveller to Italy as a distant paradise of dreams, of nature as well as art.4 Simultaneously, a process occurred in the imagination of Romantic – 157 –

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Europe that has been described as Italy’s transition from Europe’s museum to its mausoleum, from which a resurrection or risorgimento was to be expected.5 Later, the strategic importance of Italy and Sicily in the Napoleonic Wars led to an increase in the diplomatic and military relations between England and Italy, supported by widespread British sympathies for the cause of the incipient Italian Risorgimento.6 The negative Augustan view of modern Italy remained alive with the antiRomantics of the Romantic Period. In 1821, after the death of John Keats and the publication of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s epicedium Adonais, the aggressive Irish ultra-Tory and ultra-Protestant satirists George Croly and William Maginn published a spiteful parody of Adonais in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in which they put the death of the ‘Cockney poet’ Keats in Rome on a level with the death of a vulgar street cat: ‘Elegy on my Tom Cat’.7 Only Italy, they suggested, could have produced such exalted nonsense as Shelley’s incomprehensible Adonais, paradoxically written in Italy for Keats’s Cockney readers: ‘Adonais has been published by the author in Italy, the fitting soil for the poem, sent over to his honoured correspondents throughout the realm of Cockayne, with a delightful mysteriousness worthy of the dignity of the subject and the writer’.8 In the same invective, Croly and Maginn assigned Shelley as well as Keats and his ‘Cockney School of Poetry’ to the Della Cruscans for their deviations from Neoclassical standards in a cult of triviality, vulgarity, chaos, ruins and fragments. In the eyes of Neoclassical opponents to Della Cruscanism, individual poems published in periodicals were fragments that had no literary status and should not be repackaged in volumes.9 Both ‘schools’ appear as shaped by the decay of modern Italy, a land of fragments and ruins: ‘The Della Cruscan school has visited us again, but with some slight change of localities. Its verses now transpire at one time from the retreats of Cockney dalliance in the London suburbs; sometimes they visit us by fragments from Venice, and sometimes invade us by wainsloads from Pisa’.10 It is small wonder that the same authors, in the first of their facetiously satirical ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’ in the same Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, ridiculed Leigh Hunt, Shelley and Keats in a pseudo-Italian poem, examining and diagnosing their works as excremental dirt produced by jackasses from Hampstead (‘Giacasso’): Signor Le Hunto, gloria di Cocagna Chi scrive il poema della Rimini Che tutta apparenza ha, per Gemini, D’esser cantato sopra la montagna Di bel Ludgato, o nella campagna D’Amsted, o sulle marge Serpentimini Com’ esta Don Giovanni d’Endymini

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Il gran poeta d’Ipecacuanha? Tu sei il Re del Cocknio Parnasso Ed egli il herede apparente, Tu sei un gran Giacasso ciertamente, Ed egli ciertamente gran Giacasso! Tu sei il Signor del Examinero Ed egli soave Signor del Glystero.11

Nor could the Classicist Thomas Love Peacock imagine his friend Shelley staying in Italy for a long time. In a letter from Marlow, he wrote to him: ‘But I deem it a moral impossibility that an Englishman … can live many years among such animals as the modern Italians’.12 As with Addison, Sharp and Smollett, Peacock’s, Maginn’s, John Wilson’s and John Gibson Lockhart’s Italy is no longer the Italy of Horace, Virgil, Ovid and the Classical Tradition of Augustanism. It is an abjectly enslaved country marred by an unhealthy climate, inimical to reason, conducive to a wild imagination and all kinds of political, moral and aesthetic irregularities. Thus, it was not for biographical reasons only that Romantic poets were associated with Shelley’s ‘paradise of exiles, Italy’. What William Wordsworth called ‘links of sympathy’,13 the emotional egalitarian brotherhood and sisterhood of all human beings, passed for the product of integrative imagination, not dividing reason, so that Mrs Hester Lynch Piozzi, in her ‘Preface’ to The Florence Miscellany (1785), could write that the poems collected here had imbibed from Italian sunshine ‘the warmth of mutual Benevolence’. They were written ‘to divert ourselves, and to say kind things to each other’, ‘to keep Tenderness alive, and preserve Friendship from decay’: ‘we collected them that our reciprocal expressions of kindness might not be lost; and we printed them because we had no reason to be ashamed of our mutual partiality’.14 No public academic criticism for quality control, no rivalry, but a small familial circle cultivating the tenderness and kindness of the feeling heart, – this was a programme dissenting from the Classical Tradition, which placed the Della Cruscans in the Preromantic sentimental movement.15 The exchange of tender mutual verse addresses between a male and a female poet, celebrating each other as inspiring muses and wishing each other success in literature and love, devoid of all sharp reflection and all criticism, was initiated by a pair of poems by Mrs Piozzi and William Parsons,16 and was continued in the later London phase of Della Cruscanism, as between Robert Merry and Hannah Cowley.17 Italian scenery, art, and a harmonious circle of friends of good will, Mrs Piozzi wrote to Parsons, are apt to rekindle the poetical fire lost in cold Augustan England: While Venus inspires, and such verses you sing, As Prior might envy and praise; While MERRY can mount on the eagle’s wide wing,

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William Parsons’s second verse epistle ‘To the Marquis Ippolito Pindemonte’ and ‘Ode to Variety’ later published in A Poetical Tour (1787), with their attitude of revolt and conscious search for new themes and forms, for new landscapes and myths, are typical examples of the Della Cruscans’ anti-Augustan programme: O Goddess! To my raptur’d breast Some portion of thy power impart, As through thy tangled paths I range And taste the dear delights of change, In numbers wildly free, And uncontroul’d like thee, To hail thine influence o’er this votive heart.19

In the 1780s and 1790s, modern Italy was again becoming a land of artistic inspiration, in Britain as well as Germany and other European countries. Ludwig Tieck’s painter Franz Sternbald, for instance, the eponymous hero of his historical Romantic artist novel, is sent on a journey to complement the cold and prudery of Dürer’s Nuremberg and Lucas’s Leyden by the warmth and vitality of Raphael’s and Correggio’s Italy.20 These were early instances of the typical esemplastic Romantic mixing of the experience and imaginative representation of frosty Britain and Germany with the experience and imaginative vision of ‘the warm south’.21 Della Cruscanism also anticipated the Romantic view of Italy as the land of rebirth from ruin and oppression (Renaissance and Risorgimento), romantic love (Romeo and Juliet), as well as sun-drenched picturesque and sublime scenes inviting the observer to harmony and visionary dreams: Shelley’s and Keats’s sunny paradise and land of sensations, Edward Bulwer Lytton’s ‘Land of Dreams’, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s ‘vision half divine / Of myriad flowers lit up with summer shine’.22 Laurence Sterne’s derogation of modern Italy’s denigrators Smollett and Sharp as Smelfungus and Mundungus in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) and James Boswell’s advocacy of Italian independence in his Account of Corsica (1768) mark the stemming of the tide of Augustan anti-Italianism, as well as the rediscovery of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso in the Preromantic medieval revival and sonnet revival and the reception of modern Italian authors, Goldoni and Metastasio.23 With the cult of sensibility in England, there arose compassion for the poor enslaved Italians, together with a revived interest in the Italian language and an increase in Italian tutors such as Samuel Johnson’s friend Giuseppe Baretti.24 In Britain, they

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promulgated the myth of natural Italian sweetness and sensibility nurtured by the Italian climate and landscape, as did Baretti in his Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1768), written against the standard Neoclassical image of Italy in Sharp’s Letters from Italy (1766). And, in Italy, they promulgated the myth of Britain as the natural stronghold of freedom, which Providence had geographically isolated from the Continent. Among many others, that myth was advanced in William Collins’s ‘Ode to Liberty’ (1746) with its compassionate reference to Genoa’s ‘bleeding state’,25 then re-conquered by Austria after decades of French occupation instead of a native Italian government. So strong was the Italian Risorgimento belief in the Whig concept of British liberty, that Ippolito Pindemonte wrote a long mythopoetic poem in praise of the successful British defence of Gibraltar against Spanish and French forces during the four years’ siege of 1779–83, Gibilterra Salvata (1783), and included the final Italian ‘Hymn of Calliope’ in The Florence Miscellany, together with Mrs Piozzi’s translation. Britannia was to rule the waves in order to ensure Europe’s liberty, even on Spanish soil: Voi seguite, o Britanni, i vostri fati: Di Sofia meditar quel ch’ è più arcano, E di Marte e Mercurio a l’opre nati Le vele alto levar ne l’Oceano.26

When Mrs Piozzi decided to return to Britain, to publish her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786), Parsons encouraged her to do so, but not in expectation of a happy return to Augustan art and refinement. With the impressions of Italian art and civilization fresh in her mind, she would again enjoy the glorious land of liberty after a sojourn in the land of oppression and slavery. Parson’s typically Whig praise and mythopoetic allegorization of British independence as opposed to Continental subjection is emotionally excessive: Unknown each tyrant prejudice that binds In other Countries subjugated minds, The spirit wide diffused of equal laws Exalts the humble, and the haughty awes, Thro ev’ry rank the liberal flame is spread, And conscious Independence lifts the head.27

Britain thus became the favourite country for Italian refugees (Pindemonte, Ugo Foscolo). And, especially after the Seven Years’ War 1756–63, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Naples, Lerici and Rome again became favourite venues for truly interested and artistically appreciative British travellers abroad, not only antiquarians and archaeologists in search of classical antiquity.28 Now they were equipped with new guides and on the lookout for new values ‘dissenting’ from

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the Classical Tradition: sweet sensibility, poor enslaved human beings, picturesque ruins mouldering into romantic decay yet capable of resurrection to their former classical splendour in the prophetic eyes of poetic imagination.29 English literary circles had been in existence in Italy long before the exiles Byron, the Shelleys and Leigh Hunt settled there after 1816. Throughout the eighteenth century, Tuscany enjoyed much more popularity than most parts of Italy, and Florence as its chief city was increasingly regarded as one of the most agreeable cities in Europe, and one of the three or four cities of Italy that every tourist must visit.30 In the mid-1780s, Robert Merry, William Parsons and Bertie Greatheed, all more or less affluent dilettantes with literary ambitions, accidentally met in Florence on their Grand Tour. Florence then was an Italian city in the Austrian Grand Duchy of Tuscany, with a large British colony, among them Charles Edward Stuart (the Young Pretender)31 and Sir Horace Mann (Robert Walpole’s correspondent and British envoy to the Austrian Grand Duke Leopold). Well read in Preromantic English poetry, James Thomson, John Dyer, Joseph and Thomas Warton, Edward Young, William Collins, Thomas Gray, William Hayley, William Mason, Thomas Percy, James Macpherson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and their sentimental rebellion against ‘the slaves of system’,32 the three dilettantes sought new sources of inspiration and the company of then famous Italian poets who had been members of Florence’s time-honoured Accademia della Crusca. Lorenzo Pignotti first introduced Merry into his literary group called the ‘Oziosi’ or ‘Idlers’. Other Italian poets in and around Florence were Angiolo d’Elci, Marco Lastri, Ippolito Pindemonte (then residing in Verona), Giuseppe Parini (then residing in Milan), and Vittorio Alfieri (then residing in Pisa), mostly admirers of Shakespeare, Milton, Young and Gray in Italian translations.33 Some of these modern Italian poets were already known in Britain through English translations published in London and Paris.34 Shortly after Merry’s arrival in Florence, in 1783, the Grand Duke Leopold, who later became Emperor Leopold II, closed the Accademia della Crusca for its suspected Italian national Risorgimento sympathies, opposition to the Austrian ancien régime and complicity with the spirit of the nascent French Revolution.35 Merry, Parsons and Greatheed identified themselves with their Italian colleagues, whose verses they translated, Merry assuming the pen-name of ‘Della Crusca’. Their first publication, edited by Robert Merry and Allan Ramsay, The Arno Miscellany (1784), posed as light, natural verse easily written by idlers in a holiday spirit. It had little or no resonance and is irrelevant to an investigation of Italy as a Romantic locality, because its focus was chiefly English. This changed when, from June to September 1785, Mrs Hester Lynch Piozzi, formerly Samuel Johnson’s beloved Mrs Thrale, a distinguished literary hostess, came to Florence, accompanied by her new husband, the musician Gabriele Piozzi.36 After her conventional marriage to the rich brewer Thrale, the

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widow had entered on a scandalous love marriage to a Roman Catholic musician and left London for a long Grand Tour, leaving scandal, Augustanism and Johnson behind. Anyway, the eighteenth century was the century of the Grand Tour, and Italy was its primary destination. The English poets in Florence now found a new centre and fresh encouragement in their poetical efforts, animated by a spirit of political, social and literary revolution.37 In less than two months, Mrs Piozzi, Merry, Greatheed and Parsons produced The Florence Miscellany with the help of their Italian poet-friends, published in Florence in September 1785.38 Its mixed English and Italian pieces again bore the marks of ease and spontaneity, although we know that, like later English Romantic poetry, such spontaneity was a mere artifice inherited by Wordsworth and Coleridge and lent itself to Neoclassical ridicule.39 In an illuminating study on Romantic theatricality and performative modes of self-representation which give the lie to the Romantic poetology of naturalness, it has been observed that the artifice and staginess of Della Cruscanism struck Britain at the height of the Siddons craze and that most of its supporters were women associated with the stage.40 Parsons propagated that poetics in his short advertisement to his later collection of verse written in Italy, A Poetical Tour (1787): ‘These little Poems are the effusions of momentary impressions, hastily written on the very spots where those impressions were received, without any intention of future publication, and have undergone no correction, but such as served to beguile the solitary hours of a post-chaise or an inn’. Details of the fortunate career of The Florence Miscellany and the vogue of fashionable Della Cruscanism in Britain are well researched and irrelevant to this context. Reprints of poems from the miscellany, first in the European Magazine (from 1786) and then chiefly in the World (from 1787), sparked off a vogue of popular verse from numerous women and men who obviously held democratic, anti-elitist ideas about literary production and the universality of the poetic instinct, publishing what had come to be called ‘fugitive pieces’41 under pseudonyms in the wake of Merry’s ‘Della Crusca’.42 But only the four original Della Cruscans of 1785 had the immediate experience of Italy, condensed in The Florence Miscellany. ‘The Della Cruscan School’, ‘The Satanic School’, ‘The Cockney School’ and ‘The Lake School’ were originally abusive terms, coined by the Neoclassical enemies of the Romantic movement, like the later term ‘The Romantic School’. Traditionalist Augustan satires on and parodies of Della Cruscan poetry, especially by William Gifford, who identified and christened the group as a whole, expose the movement’s anti-Augustan programme with even more precision than the poems themselves. Gifford’s The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795), Juvenalian satires on the model of Pope, ridiculed the popularization of anti-Augustan moods and techniques that had previously been associated with

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a number of elitist academic scholars and university poets as well as a group of female poets:43 visionary immediacy, solitary wandering, melancholy and the cult of the feeling heart, sudden inspiration and the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, love of all fellow creatures including animals, poetical fragments, literary democracy, nationalism, radicalism, liberalism, free experimental verse and rejection of rules, public exhibition of sensibility and sexuality paving the way to the excesses of the French Revolution.44 What Gifford, and in his wake Byron, chiefly resented was spontaneous writing by the uneducated masses, fragments of verse published in periodicals instead of carefully finished printed books, abandonment of critical quality control in favour of social sensibility, equality and fraternity.45 The Florence Miscellany’s anti-Augustan tendency is evident in its poetological and mythopoetic contributions, pitting Dante, Petrarch and Milton against Dryden and Pope.46 Though in a state of decay and oppression under foreign rule, Italy, which had brought forth a Renaissance of genius and freedom in the past, might do so again in a second Renaissance or Risorgimento (the word risorgimento was coined by Lorenzo Pignotti). In the miscellany’s introductory poem, Greatheed’s ‘A Vision’, the speaker is a Dantesque dreamer of truth, who sees the Muse mourn over Florence’s decay and accost the spirit of bold fiery Milton in his beloved Italy. Milton’s spirit, who had fled England with its Augustan tameness, decides to bring a band of young English poets, both male and female, to Tuscany, there to be inspired by the Muse, together with Pignotti.47 In the above-mentioned second verse epistle ‘To Ippolito Pindemonte’, in which he praised Pindemonte’s ‘liberal mind’,48 and in his above-mentioned ‘Ode to Variety’, Parsons elaborated the myth of Greatheed’s ‘Vision’ in more detail. Augustan civilization is attacked as too tame, regular and uniform: Yet now the Muses cease to smile On Albion’s once illumin’d isle. The fire that glowed on Milton’s page Is quenched in this benighted age.49

With his penchant for monasteries and contemplation, Parsons sought the spirit of Milton in Vallombrosa, near Florence, the more so as the founding myth of that Benedictine abbey supported the fashionable sentimental rejection of the practice of duelling. Milton, who refers to Vallombrosa in Paradise Lost, was thought to have lodged in Vallombrosa, and Wordsworth eventually visited Vallombrosa in 1837, commemorating his long-intended visit in a poem with some echoes of Parsons’s ‘Vallombrosa’. Like Parsons, Wordsworth sought the ‘Spirit’ of Milton, ‘that holiest of Bards’, there in situ ‘to drink inspiration at will’.50 The only unifying element of Parsons’s long, rambling, intentionally diffuse poem is the variety of Italian landscapes and art, which inspires his own poetical variety.

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Parsons’s verse, however, is not Milton’s, but evidently modelled on John Dyer’s Preromantic topographical poem ‘Grongar Hill’ (1726): Since the ardent love of change Thro’ various climates bade me range; For still fresh objects charm my mind, Lavish Nature, Art refin’d, Or countless manners ever new, While thro’ each maze I Man pursue.51

In contrast to British uniformity and darkness, the variety and brilliance of the Italian landscape, cities and arts tend to awaken the enfeebled and depressed English poet’s vigour, firing him with the love of beauty and liberty.52 And here, under the open sky and on the locations where their lines originated, can Latin and Italian authors be rediscovered, much as travellers preferred to read Ossian under the clouds of Scotland rather than in a remote study, turning ‘with fresh delight the classic page / In scenes congenial to the Bard and Sage’.53 In the wake of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–30) and inspired by Preromantic fascination with nature’s dynamism rather than fixities, it is rediscovery, reanimation, rebirth, renewal, renaissance, resurrection that pervade all early Della Cruscan verse, in which the seasons are a central theme, both literally and metaphorically. Percy Bysshe Shelley may well have remembered The Florence Miscellany and A Poetical Tour when he wrote The Revolt of Islam (1817) as well as Prometheus Unbound and ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1820). The rebirth or risorgimento of Italy was a favourite Della Cruscan myth. Vittorio Alfieri, then residing in Pisa, though not a Della Cruscan, dedicated a copy of his formally and politically rebellious tragedies to Robert Merry, and Merry reciprocated by a verse epistle included in The Florence Miscellany, in which he praised Alfieri as the regenerator of powerful Italian tragedy. Melpomene complains of the tame classical regularity of the time of Metastasio, and the River-God prophesies the birth of tragedy’s saviour Alfieri: No trivial Bard, his lays reveal A pathos deep, and warble wild, That bid the starting passions feel: Melpomene receive thy child!54

Back in England, Merry published a tragedy on the model of Alfieri, Ambitious Vengeance, which was included in Edward Topham’s The Poetry of the World (1788), where he blamed the cultural practices of intrigue and vendetta as chief obstacles preventing Italians from rebelling against their worst oppressors, foreign rule and ecclesiastical superstition. Merry’s critical view of Italy coincided

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with Mrs Piozzi’s diagnosis of ‘the depraved Morals & confined Ideas of Religion reigning in this Country’.55 Parsons’s ‘Ode on the Siroc’ featured a speaker who fled the thick fogs of Britain in search of the bright day of Italy, and there found a diseased and weakened country as if visited by a sirocco. But siroccos are temporary, and the political allegory ends with a prayer in full assurance of Italy’s regeneration to its original health, strength, boldness, brilliance and fertility of country as well as mind.56 The Florence Miscellany teems with Risorgimento and Alfieri sympathies, although, to evade prohibition by the Austrian censor, contributors did not include the most outspokenly anti-tyrannical poems in the print. Bertie Greatheed, who inserted such pieces into individual copies for private circulation, was, however, courageous enough to include an ‘Ode on Apathy’, calling upon Italy’s ‘droning subjects’ to rediscover their ancient fire and fertility and to overcome the ‘soft Tyrant’ apathy. On the mythopoetic poem’s allegorical level, the soft tyrant could easily be understood as the Archduke Leopold: O! would the sons of Italy arise, And shake the leaden slumbers from their eyes, Gaze on their fertile plains by nature blest, And rouse the latent fire that warmed their breast.57

The Florence Miscellany with its mixed English and Italian contributions is much better than its reputation, ruined by Neoclassicists such as Richard Mant and William Gifford,58 ‘Gifford, the dread of every snivelling fool, / That loves and rhimes by Della Cruscan rule’.59 Gifford’s and the Tories’ ridicule of Della Cruscanism had a political motivation, as the Italian Risorgimento and the French Revolution threatened the feudal ancien régime throughout Europe. In the political imagination, Italy was feminized both by its liberal sympathizers and by its conservative critics, as a beautiful lady in distress or a base whore in rags respectively.60 Satire aimed chiefly at the later, English phase of Della Crusca, the popular fashion for a whole decade, with non-classical mass contributions by numerous dilettantes (especially women) writing under unidentified pseudonyms to numerous magazines, and at the popularity of Edward Topham’s and John Bell’s collections The Poetry of the World (1788) and The British Album (1790), a popularity and controversy that found its echo even in America.61 Gifford, and in his wake Gifford’s admirer Byron in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), poured ridicule upon such ‘childish’ mass production inspired by the barbarity of modern Italy, ignorant of the rules of Horace and the Classical Tradition, especially upon poems by women: ‘See Thrale’s grey widow with a satchel roam, / And bring, in pomp, her labour’d nonsense home’.62

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In the later, English phase of Della Crusca, however, Italy was no longer the subject, except with the Radical Robert Merry, the only poet among the original Della Cruscans who contributed to that later phase. But the aesthetically and politically rebellious pose was continued, contributing to the further growth of Romanticism. The two-volume British Album contained a portrait of ‘Anna Matilda’ (Hannah Cowley), in a careless and leisurely pose with curly natural hair and open breast. Opposite is an anonymous poetological epigraph, which placed itself in the ‘oziosi’ tradition of The Arno Miscellany, The Florence Miscellany, and A Poetical Tour, and which boasted the genius of woman poets that Gifford and the Classical Tradition were eager to contest, after the role that women and women’s rights played in the French Revolution: Oft from her careless hand the Wand’ring Muse Scatters luxurious sweets, which well might form A living wreath to deck the brows of Time.63

12 THE LOCATION OF VACANCY: POMPEII AND THE PANORAMA Sophie Thomas

Rome is but one vast museum: Pompeii is a living antiquity.1

This paper investigates the way particular locations in the Romantic period can operate as nodal points for the convergence of questions about materiality, representation, and presence. A location can be, in certain instances, a place of dislocation, or of emptiness, and scenes and sites of ruin, particularly, may evoke ideas of vacancy and oblivion even through their material presentness. Visitors to the entombed city of Pompeii, which was effectively frozen in time by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in ad79, have always been struck by the sense of walking back into the past, while at the same time experiencing, in the present, the overwhelming presence of death.2 Time has been, on the one hand, suspended – and history held in abeyance – while on the other, the very transience or vacancy of time is captured. What famously attracted Freud to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1903 novella Gradiva, set in the city of Pompeii, was this very idea of the past locked into and embedded in the present, which provided suggestive spatial and archaeological analogies for the aims and procedures of psychoanalysis.3 For the Romantic traveller, encountering the site in the early decades after its ‘rediscovery’ in the middle of the eighteenth century, the most striking feature of this ‘city of the dead’ was precisely the perception of the past co-mingling with the present. In addition to examining the way Romantic writers responded to the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, this essay will explore some visual representations of those scenes. A plethora of prints and paintings in the period reveal the way Pompeii, especially, presented an exciting new subject, not only as a site of archaeological activity, of antiquity unearthed, but as landscape; other visual forms, such as three-dimensional models and circular paintings also sought to capture more completely the uncanny nature of the place. Representations of – 169 –

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Pompeii at the London panoramas are of particular interest, insofar as the procedures and aesthetics of the panorama are also caught up in the problematic of location. The panorama presents itself as a complete duplication of the real, but its substitutional nature is apparent in a surfeit of detail that underscores the way the appeal of the panorama, like the imaginative force of Pompeii and its localities, is predicated upon absence, and upon an act, or acts, of dislocation. To some extent this is shared by panoramas of antiquity in general, where the experience of ruin is a key feature of the spectacle on offer. But there is also something particular about Pompeii, where questions of dislocation apply not only to the site, but to the wealth of objects discovered there and subsequently carted away. ‘Vacancy’ becomes a literal feature of the town, as well as a function of its uncanny temporal contradictions.

I. ‘There is perhaps no sentiment more generally felt, or more delightful, than that indescribable interest with which we are led to contemplate places and scenes, immortalized in historical renown, or hallowed by genius.’ So begins ‘A Desultory Chapter on Localities’, published in The Mirror of Literature in 1829.4 The theme is pursued through a number of disparate locations that have in some way or another stimulated the imagination of the writer – Rotterdam, Holyrood, Switzerland, Pope’s Grotto – and taken up in a later issue by another writer equally keen to pursue the pleasures of recollection attached to places where the experience of imaginative ‘transport’ is particularly strong. Traditionally, many of these localities were to be found on the continent, and from the moment in 1748 when Pompeii was ‘reawakened’ from its slumbers of nearly two millennia, it quickly became a fixed feature of the grand tour. William Gell’s Pompeiana, a popular account of the ‘Topography, Edifices and Ornaments of Pompeii’ that went through several editions in the early nineteenth century, captures the unique interest of the area, with its combination of natural beauty, classical heritage and sublime volcanic threat: Nature has indeed shed over the face of the surrounding country all her most enchanting beauties, yet not unmingled with her most awful terrors; and whether we look to its ancient traditional story as embellished by all the pleasing fictions of the poet, or contemplate the more instructive narrations of the historian; whether the intellect be refined or delighted with the charm of retrospect, or the eye wander over the endless varieties of its present surface; we find the scene equally enlivened by all the splendour of nature, and dignified by the finest productions of genius: inspired the muse of Virgil, and afforded retirement to Caesar.5

Pompeii was, however, unlike other destinations with antique credentials popular among travellers in the Romantic period, not least because of its resonance

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as a place where ‘Life and Death / [Are] Wedded’.6 It is, as Madame de Staël put it in her 1807 novel Corinne, or Italy, ‘antiquity’s most peculiar ruin’ – a site she implies is distinct and even spiritually superior to Rome, largely because of the more private and domestic nature of the structures preserved. Expressing an acutely historical fascination, Staël reflects that ‘[i]n Rome, it is mostly the remains of ancient monuments that are to be found, and these monuments recall only the political history of past centuries; in Pompeii, however, it is it the private lives of the people of ancient times that are set before you just as they were’.7 Layers of volcanic ash have saved the town ‘from the ravages of time’, and things that could not otherwise have survived, from artworks to the objects of everyday life, are ‘preserved in a frightening way’. Indeed nowhere else is it possible to see ‘so striking a picture of the sudden interruption of life’.8 Because life appears to have been suspended, rather than ended, things are preserved in their disconcertingly pristine beauty. These objects, as Staël notes, appear to have escaped time. And yet, ruin is explicitly layered here, so that ‘there are ruins upon ruins and tombs upon tombs’.9 The history of the world is expressed as the accumulation of successive periods of ruin, and before the visible evidence at Pompeii, the duration and magnitude of human life, suffering and death, can be momentarily grasped. Corinne also conveys the inherent fragility of these relics because of their unbroachable historicity. The traces of past peoples and their accomplishments, although visible, are lost to us and the present is a threat to their survival: ‘as you pass by those ashes which art manages to bring back to life, you are afraid to breathe, in case a breath carries away the dust perhaps still imprinted with noble ideas’.10 Visitors to the excavations would frequently express a sense of transport – as much imagined or desired, one suspects, as actual – through time, so that not only has the past come to us, we have arrived at the scene, the brink, of the past, in its own place: in Corinne, the author informs us that when standing at the centre of the crossroads of the town, ‘it is as if you are waiting for someone, as if the master is about to arrive, and the very semblance of life in this place makes you even more sad at feeling its eternal silence’.11 In a similar vein, Samuel Rogers recounts, in his journals, the experience of standing alone as evening falls, looking up the street of the tombs toward the city gate, and being nearly overcome by the ‘strange silence and deserted air of the place.’12 He imagines he sees the vintner serving his customers; he finds the whole scene ‘preternatural’, as though ‘just dug up’.13 For John Eustace too, there is the (guilty) expectation that one might suddenly encounter a resident – a proprietor, the master, a member of the family – but this is of course an illusion that the visitor ‘may long indulge’: for ‘[a]ll around is silence, not the silence of solitude and repose, but of death and devastation; the silence of a great city without one single inhabitant’.14

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For other visitors, a more pronounced note of ambivalence may be heard. Goethe remarks, in his Italian Journey, that ‘the mummified city left us with a curious, rather disagreeable impression’.15 A second visit to the site however registers more pleasure than disturbance: ‘There have been many disasters in this world, but few which have given so much delight to posterity, and I have seldom seen anything so interesting’.16 Though paradoxical, this disaster’s source of ‘delight’ is palpable in the way it stimulates the imagination to engage with a strong sense of temporal and historical dislocation – one that arises from the ‘wedding’ of life and death, and from a sensation of transport back through time. Moreover, in the many accounts of visits to Pompeii, included in nearly every published ‘tour’ through Italy at the turn of the nineteenth century, the uncanniness of Pompeii also arises from the relationship of human to natural forces, particularly those tending towards death and decay. When Chateaubriand visited in 1804, he remarked of the famous imprint on a piece of earth of a young woman’s breast, on display in the Portici museum, that ‘[d]eath, like a statuary, modelled his victim’;17 and this interrelationship is borne out by the way the landscape as a whole juxtaposes areas of excavation, and its piles of rubble, with tracts of fertile farmland that are cultivated with vines and flowers. Shelley’s descriptions of Pompeii and the surrounding area, in his letters to Peacock of January, 1819, also underscore the way the experience of Pompeii challenges any secure sense of location, temporal or otherwise. He relates first of all his sense of astonishment: ‘I had no conception of anything so perfect yet remaining’, he proclaims.18 This surprise draws not only from the unique interest of the ‘disinterred’ city (as he refers to it in the opening of the ‘Ode to Naples’, written over a year later), with its own specific beauties, but also from its place in a broader landscape in which the ‘wide flat hill from which this city was excavated is now covered by thick woods, & you see the tombs & the theatres, the temples & the houses surrounded by the uninhabited wilderness’.19 Moving from detailed description of the architectural remains, Shelley’s view of the ‘magnificent spectacle’ includes the sea, the islands in the bay, the ‘dark lofty mountains of Sorrento, of a blue inexpressibly deep, & tinged toward their summits with streaks of new-fallen snow’.20 Even more impressively, however, he hears ‘the subterranean thunder of Vesuvius; its distant deep peals seemed to shake the very air & light of day which interpenetrated our frames with the sullen & tremendous sound’.21 Shelley records that he finds the tombs most impressive of all, but clearly this is because of their context, which relates to larger cyclical / historical patterns that are as much natural as human: ‘The wild woods surround them on either side and along the broad stones of the paved road which divides them, you hear the late leaves of autumn shiver & rustle in the stream of the inconstant wind as it were like the step of ghosts’.22 He ends his account of Pompeii, and takes leave of Naples, with the claim that ‘the scenery which surrounds this city

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is more delightful than any within the immediate reach of civilized man’,23 a view echoed by many other travellers to the region. Visitors to Pompeii in the Romantic period saw it as part of an itinerary that included the bay of Naples and its surrounding area (Paestum, Herculaneum), and its key features were in many cases already familiar: for Goethe and Tischbein, travelling from Naples to Pompeii, ‘many views which we knew well from drawings’ now fit ‘together into one splendid landscape’.24 Paintings of Pompeii, such as Samuel Palmer’s The Street of the Tombs (Figure 1), situate it explicitly within this ‘splendid landscape’. Invariably, the traveller’s itinerary included a trip to the crater of Vesuvius, a journey undertaken with some difficulty. Much of the study of Pompeii tended toward a study of Vulcanism, for as Dickens commented in Pictures of Italy, one has ‘the strange and melancholy sensation of seeing the Destroyed and the Destroyer making this quiet picture in the sun’.25 The site of Pompeii is thus experienced as itself an element of a total scene, and the depiction at Burford’s panorama, to which I turn below, draws from this directly: as an article on the panorama in the Mirror of Literature enthused, ‘The surrounding landscape has the grandeur that the eye looks for in a volcanic country. Wild hills, fragments of old lavas, richly broken shores, and in the centre the most picturesque and sublime of all volcanoes, Vesuvius, throwing up its eternal volumes of smoke to the heavens’.26

Figure 1 : Samuel Palmer, The Street of the Tombs © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London [Museum No: P.28-1919].