Maps, Lists, Views: How the Picturesque Wye transformed Topography

Abstract

John Thelwall’s 1801 collection, Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement, comprises three sections, as proclaimed on the title page: ‘THE FAIRY OF THE LAKE, A Dramatic Romance; Effusions of Relative and Social Feeling; and Specimens of THE HOPE OF ALBION; or, Edwin of Northumbria, an Epic Poem’. These generically distinct sections (drama, lyric effusion, and epic) are set off from each other typographically: the romance in all caps, the effusions in italic script, and the epic introduced by the phrase ‘specimens of’ in gothic blackletter (see Figure 1). Font signals the collection’s heterogeneous mixture—something of a Thelwall trademark after the ‘genre salad’ of The Peripatetic—and content specifies the relation between the clearly demarcated sections: the romance turns on the resistance of early Britons to Saxon invasion; the effusions find Thelwall mourning the loss of his daughter Maria on the banks of the Wye; and the epic extends the history begun in the drama while substituting a Saxon for the Briton as hero. The combination of picturesque scenery and lyric subjectivity familiar from William Lisle Bowles’ sonnets and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads mediates between and is hemmed in by the ‘obscurity’ and ‘barrenness’ (as David Hume put it) of antiquarian research into the Saxon conquest of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. Thelwall’s volume may seem to inelegantly splice together incommensurate forms and topics, but I’d like to argue here that his generic parsing marks a specific historical moment in the development of topography as a subfield of the modern disciplines of physical and cultural geography. In the eighteenth century, topography was a field defined by compilation of sources—it was fundamentally bibliographic and could include texts from almost any genre. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the term and the field it designated had both narrowed and deepened. As J. Hillis Miller suggests, rather than an inventory of writing about a place, topography became a technical term associated with a specific kind of graphic delineation, the topographic map. As early as 1808, Benjamin Pitts Capper’s Topographical Dictionary of the United Kingdom legitimated the accuracy of its ‘geographical, topographical and statistical accounts of every district, object and place in England, Wales, Scotland, [and] Ireland’ with ‘forty-six maps, drawn purposefully for this work’ that ‘bear a direct relation to the population of the different places they describe’—a feature, he claimed, new to topographical publications (see Figure 2). In Britain, this shift away from source compilation to statistical and cartographic