The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820

Abstract

IT IS ONE OF THE IRONIES OF THE LONG HISTORY OF POPULAR AND CRITICAL reception of William Wordsworth's poetry that a writer so remorselessly addicted to travel, to movement of and within self, should have come to epitomize importance of sense of place in English literature. Identified in popular mind with English Lakes, Wordsworth's traditional but long-derided categorization as a nature poet has had a new lease of life in recent years with rise of ecological literary criticism, and with growing interest in geographic and spatial contexts of romanticism and relative autonomy of regional cultures of period. The considerable attention being given to domestic politics of Wordsworth circle has to some extent underscored this emphasis on local, bounded quality of poet's imagination. At their best, these trends have restored material depth and human complexity to criticism of Wordsworth and provided a welcome corrective to theoretical excesses of seventies and eighties; at their worst, they have risked caricaturing Wordsworth studies as a curious and risible offshoot of heritage industry. But however important local landscapes, sensibility of place, and settled domesticity are to an appreciation of Wordsworth's creativity, antithetical investments in freedom of movement, itinerancy, and travel of a poet described by one of his best critics as having a gypsy in his soul (1) should not be underestimated. Before his resettlement in Grasmere at end of 1799, Wordsworth's adult life had been one of continual displacement, between Cambridge, France, London, Dorset, Somerset, Germany, and numerous more temporary residences. It is a mistake to assume that return of native celebrated in writing of Home at Grasmere in 1800 quelled this restlessness: in addition to his constant wandering among his dear native regions, Wordsworth was regularly taking off to various destinations in England in second half of his life, and with members of his family undertook significant tours of Scotland, Isle of Man, and countries in western Europe. I have argued elsewhere for powerful influence of Wordsworth's compulsive pedestrianism on generation of his early poetry up to The Prelude of 1805; on a different tack, Kenneth Johnston has interestingly noted coincidence of Wordsworth's periods of creativity on his unfinished lifetime project, The Recluse, with transitional phases in his domestic existence--when his roots were being disturbed. (2) These are just two indications of close link between writing and mobility in this poet's literary life. The area of Wordsworth's life and work that is least studied in this connection are tours he undertook in second half of his life. As Alan Liu has pointed out, Wordsworth considered itinerary poems produced out of these tours sufficiently important for him to have breached psychological principles underpinning arrangement of 1815 collected edition of his works with this broad and heterogeneous middle zone of topicality: (3) in later collected editions memorials of two tours in Scotland and of two tours on Continent, plus other travel sequences such as Duddon sonnets and Yarrow Revisited, distinctively subvert leading principle of classifying poems according to the powers of mind predominant in production of them. (4) It is remarkable that, until publication earlier this year of John Wyatt's Wordsworth's Poems of Travel, (5) no sustained critical treatment had been made of these groups of poems; indeed, no full-length study of importance of travel and travel literature to Wordsworth generally had been offered since Charles Norton Coe's in 1953. (6) In this paper I want to focus on just one of late tours--the Continental tour of 1820--and to begin to evaluate significance of genre which Wordsworth developed to leave a poetic trace of his itinerary, memorial tour sequence. …