Topographical Measures: Wordsworth's and Crosthwaite's Lines on the Lake District

Abstract

Although Wordsworth aspired in Lyrical Ballads to the ‘plainer and more emphatic’ speech of rustics, which he derived from their unmediated communication with ‘objects’ of nature, his Lake District writing also reveals the influence of the tours, maps, and guidebooks that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, articulated picturesque modes of landscape perception and description. In what follows I trace a history of developments within these picturesque representations of the Lakes, showing how they began to feature a productive amalgamation of verse, prose, cartographic notation, and pictorial engraving, so that many effectively became mixed-media publications. Wordsworth’s verse, I argue, was affiliated with the graphic forms of writing and non-verbal inscription found in these publications. The publications that represented the region to tourists deployed poetry and cartography in significant, sometimes intersecting, ways; however, the effects of these intersections are seldom explored. Here I isolate three intersections between mapping and versifying the Lakes with the aim of illuminating the context within which Wordsworth’s poetry was written, printed, purchased, and read. In this context, the matter of measuring the British landscape, and marking it on diagrams and maps, became entwined, visually and conceptually, with depicting that landscape in metre. I aim to reposition Wordsworth’s nature poetry within a critically interrogated inscriptional context – thereby changing our understanding of the graphical features and visual semantics of his verse. I begin by discussing some of the publications that preceded Wordsworth’s in representing the Lakes as a place of aesthetic, moral, and national interest. As Peter Crosthwaite’s maps of the Lakes suggest, these publications directed the attention of readers to visual and verbal encodings of the land. Having considered Wordsworth’s predecessors, I turn to look at several works in which he too addressed the encoding of landscape. These works include poems that discuss map-making, which Wordsworth began in 1811 when he visited the fell in the far west of the Lakes called Black Comb. I investigate these poems in light of their graphic effects, their visual contexts, and their roles in Wordsworth’s self-conception as a poet who speaks for the British landscape. Finally, I turn again to consider how the guidebook tradition was influenced by Wordsworth’s practice. Black’s Picturesque Guide to the Lakes (1841) did not simply publicise spots made significant by Wordsworth and other Romantic writers but also extended the representational interplay between verse