William Gilpin's Atmospheric Sympathy

Abstract

The picturesque, especially as imagined by William Gilpin, has long been critiqued as lacking in social conscience. The picturesque tourist is more often considered as detached from both the views and the people he encounters than as being sympathetically involved in either the local environment or its communities. This essay argues that paying closer attention to the importance and prevalence of atmosphere in Gilpin's picturesque provides an opportunity to reconsider such disinterest, as well as to acknowledge anxieties surrounding an embodied environmental sympathy in his writings that bears the influence of eighteenth-century medical thought. As both the aerial and meteorological conditions of a particular place and as a surrounding emotional or moral element, atmosphere is a medium through which Gilpin negotiates physical and emotional distance and proximity, revealing the picturesque tourist as a subject who feels their way into relationship with places and people, but who also negotiates the limits of that feeling.