Census, map, museum: Wordsworth and the writing of the nation.

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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM:
WORDSWORTH AND THE WRITING OF THE NATION
Copyright 1999
by
James Michael Garrett
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
May 1999
James Michael Garrett
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
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LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
vJ^JmeS M, Q ja.rr& t't’
t ______________________
under the direction of hJ.A Dissertation
Committee, and a-pproved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
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II
Table of Contents
Page
Introduction .........................................................................................................................1
Part I: Census
Chapter 1 Counting the People: The Census, Wordsworth, and the
Disciplines of the Imagination................................................................. 20
Chapter 2 The Unaccountable Knot and the Unknowable........................................ 59
Chapter 3 Classifying The People: Classifying Poems and Readers—
Poems, 1815 and the Early British Census............................................. 89
Part H: Map
Chapter 4 Surveying and Writing the Nation: The Black Comb and 1816
Commemorative Poems..........................................................................138
Chapter 5 The Wreck Of Is And Was....................................................................... 189
Chapter 6 A Detailed Local Survey: The River Duddon Sonnets and the
Writing of the Nation............................................................................. 247
Part IE: Museum
Chapter 7 A National Property.................................................................................304
Chapter 8 A Service To The Nation: Wordsworth Country and the
Wordsworth Museum............................................................................. 358
Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 398
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Abbreviations
EY The Letters o f William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-
1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt; 2nd edition revised by Chester L. Shaver
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
Guide Guide to the Lakes, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977).
LB Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797-1800, ed. James Butler and Karen
Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
LY The Letters o f William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, Part 1
1821-1828 Part 2, 1829-1834, Part 3 1835-1839, Part 4 1840-1853, revised
by Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970-1988).
MY The Letters o f William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1806-
1820, Part 1 1806-1811, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. revised by Mary
Moorman; Part II, 1812-1820, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd ed. revised by
Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969-70).
PB Peter Bell, ed. John E. Jordan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
PrW The Prose Works o f William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and
JaneWorthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
PW The Poetical Works o f William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Selincourt and
Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952-9).
P2V Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800-1807, ed. Jared Curtis
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983).
SP Shorter poems, 1807-1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1989).
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Introduction
Bom in the first year of the century, Thomas Larcom typified the confluence of
science, technology, statistics and politics that was so characteristic of the British
governing bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. Following a brilliant career at the
Royal Academy, Larcom was made a second lieutenant in the corps of Royal
Engineers, and in 1824 was selected by Colonel Thomas Colby for work on the
ordnance survey of England and Wales. Two years later he was given the
responsibility of conducting the “great triangulation” survey of Ireland which would
geodetically connect the Irish survey with that already underway in England. In 1828,
Colby appointed Larcom as his chief assistant for the Irish survey, a position which,
because of Colby’s commitments in London, effectively left Larcom in charge of the
ordnance survey of Ireland. Given a free hand in the conduct of the Irish survey,
Larcom transformed the survey’s headquarters at Mountjoy into a center of scientific
education and interest, introducing into the production of maps such innovations as the
electrotype printing process and the use of contour lines to depict relief.
But Larcom’s ideas for the survey went far beyond the mechanical. As Colby
noted, Larcom “conceived the idea that with such opportunities a small additional cost
would enable him, without retarding the execution of the maps, to draw together a
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work embracing every description of local information relating to Ireland” (quoted in
DNB 32: 144). Larcom employed ethnologists, linguists and antiquarians to collect
local history and folklore, delve into the origin of place-names and local customs, and
collect, classify and preserve local artifacts, archaeological materials and monuments.
The result was inevitable. Within a few years the materials collected by Larcom’s
“surveyors” threatened to overwhelm the staff at Mountjoy and progress on the
mapping of Ireland slowed noticeably. Though sanctioned by the Irish government,
Larcom’s casaubonian scheme met with resistance from London, and Larcom was
ordered to terminate the ethnological “survey” and focus exclusively on the
cartographic survey. Only one account of local information was published—that of
Templemore, a parish in Londonderry, in 1837—yet despite orders to the contrary
Larcom’s agents under his direction continued to collect local information. The result
was a vast accumulation of data, a rich store of local information on the history, the
languages, and the antiquities of Ireland. In Larcom’s obituary, published in the
Proceedings o f the Royal Society, the president of the Royal Irish Academy, where
Larcom had deposited many of his manuscripts, observed that “the descriptions and
drawings presented in the collection are now the only remaining records of monuments
which connect themselves with our earliest history, and of the folklore which the
famine [of 1846] swept away with the aged sennachies, who were its sole repositories.”
Larcom put the information to more immediate use, though, in his work with the
then under-secretary for Ireland, Thomas Drummond. He prepared plans for carrying
out the changes required by the Irish Reform Bill and later prepared the topographical
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portion of the “Report on Irish Municipal Reform.” This work led to his appointment
as the census commissioner for Ireland in 1841, where he initiated the first systematic
classification of occupations and general conditions of the population, and formed a
permanent branch of the registrar-general’s office for the collection of agricultural
statistics. His work on the Irish census was so successful that the general plan of the
Irish census was adopted for use in England.
Having completed his work on the Irish survey and census, Larcom was offered a
series of government appointments culminating in 1853 when he was appointed under
secretary for Ireland, a position which made him effectively the bureaucratic viceroy of
Ireland. Larcom held the position, made with his appointment non-political and
permanent, for fifteen years, during which he used his extensive knowledge—gathered
from his work on the census, the survey and his own “repository” of local history and
culture—to govern Ireland. Faced with sectarian conflict, Larcom “undertook to
govern all parties alike with even-handed justice, to remove abuses, and to prevent
disorder, not only by systematic vigilance, but by disseminating the belief in the
ubiquity of government’s power” (DNB 32: 144). Like most colonial governments,
both the ubiquity and the power depended as much upon the possession of knowledge
as upon the ability to use force. The bureaucracy of governance required data. The
population was counted and classified by the census. The land was surveyed and
constructed by the map. The culture was collected and preserved by the museum. That
such work was a service to the nation is clear by Larcom’s honors: he was knighted in
1860 and made a baronet and Irish Privy Counsillor upon his retirement in 1868.
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Bluff empirical men like Thomas Larcom fanned out across Britain at the
beginning of the nineteenth century to construct empirical representations of the nation.
Counting, classifying, surveying, mapping, collecting, and preserving—funded for the
first time by the government—was carried out on a national scale, and the national
institutions of the census, the map and the museum helped to consolidate the available
representations of the nation, and to reduce the nation and its people to abstract
empirical constructs. Benedict Anderson, in an appendix to the second edition of
Imagined Communities, identifies the census, the map and the museum as the three
“institutions of power” which provided a colonial government with the mechanisms to
define the people, territory and culture that it ruled, mechanisms which ironically, or
dialectically and necessarily, “engendered the grammar of the nationalisms that
eventually arose to combat [colonial power]” (xiv). For Anderson, the census provided
a classificatory grid o f the colonial state’s “feverish imagining” of the colonized
people, a counting and classifying that both contained the dangerous multiplicity of the
population and created identities through which that population could imagine itself.
The map demarcated regions (often arbitrarily) into colonized nation-states and thus
created the geographical and political entities it supposedly recorded, putting “space
under the same surveillance which the census-makers were trying to impose on
persons” (173). The museum provided a legitimacy, first for the presence of the
colonizers and later for the claim to rule of nationalists and separatists, through
historical narratives constructed out of monuments and artifacts which performed a
“profane genealogizing” of power (xiv). Anderson concludes that
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the census, the map and the museum illuminate the late colonial
state’s style of thinking about its domain. The ‘warp’ of this
thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be
applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or
contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages,
products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was
always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it
belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate, and
therefore—in principle—countable . . . The ‘weft’ was what one
could call serialization: the assumption that the world was made up
of replicable plurals. The particular always stood as a provisional
representative of a series.” (184)
Without diminishing the power of this Foucauldian classificatory grid, the history of
colonizers and colonized has never quite matched this picture of disciplinary
mechanisms and docile bodies. What it does provide, though, as in the seemingly
endless series of memoranda supplied to lords-lieutenant and m in isters, is the
discursive control of “official returns,” those neatly arranged tables of data
demonstrating in the rhetoric of bureaucracy increased agricultural yields, higher
manufacturing production rates, decreased crime, improved conditions of life, greater
numbers of people—the whole ceaseless narrative of colonial beneficence and
capitalistic progress. The grid made identity visible through the categories of its
imagining and substituted for the particular and local bodies the abstract particular
indexed by a series of coordinates in a multi-dimensional matrix. If the “particular
always stood as a provisional representative of a series,” it was a “particular” created
by the grid itself, a new kind of abstraction made particular by the increasing number
of dimensions in the matrix. The particular was representative of the series because the
series brought the particular into existence.
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While Anderson is primarily concerned with how the colonial state imagines the
“other,” the institutions of power he identifies were first used not on the peripheries of
empire but at its center. The first object of the census, the map and the museum was
not “them,” but “ us,” the citizens, land, culture, and history of the British “nation.”
Before exporting this machinery to the colonies it was tested at home—the British
census originating in 1801, the Ordnance Survey in 1791, and the state-sponsored
British Museum in 1757. To generate the abstract British nation, the local particulars
first had to be collected, sifted, classified and reconstructed into a narrative descriptive
of the British character, the sceptered isle and the legitimacy of its “history.”
Historically situated in the midst of this attempt at national self-definition and self
representation is the career of William Wordsworth, which was itself an attempt at self
definition and self-representation. At the center of this study is Wordsworth’s self-
conscious attempt at mid-career to define and control his poetic identity and position
himself as the poet of the nation. Sharing the common heritage of an Enlightenment
episteme of measurement, classification and control, the institutions of the census, the
map, the museum and the literary institution named Wordsworth demonstrate
dialectically how the attempt to consolidate available representations—of the nation,
the poet, or the national poet—calls counter-representations into existence.
The nation and the poet (as vocation) are two such abstract representations which
have become the focus of New Historicist approaches to nineteenth-century studies.
While New Historicism has typically situated Romantic individualism against a pre
existing social reality, I am interested in the ways Wordsworth participates in, and
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exemplifies, the institutions that prescribed that reality and so made our historical
inquiries possible. The categories of social reality which underlie much recent and
excellent work on Britain in the early nineteenth-century and Wordsworth in
particular—occupation, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, dwelling, locale, regional
characteristics (urban, rural, arable, forested, mountainous, monumental,
archaeological) and local variations (folklore, history, customs, practices)— found their
empirical and institutional manifestations in the act of governance whether it be of the
state or of the poet. These categories like all categories were and are both descriptive
and prescriptive, reflective of what were and are perceived to be the particulars of
social reality, and formative of that social reality. Like all structure, as Foucault notes,
some particulars were made visible and others invisible. That the categories frequently
required supplementation in the form of more categories, unclassiflable categories (the
ubiquitous census category of “Other”), and apologetic or defensive narratives
justifying the categories, while signaling the impossibility of ever “getting it right,”
also are testaments to the undying belief that one can “get it right.” The census, the
map and the museum all represent attempts to create the totalizing classificatory grid
which is desirable (for governments as well as poets and critics) and possible, as
Anderson notes, “in principle.” And while the grid has proven incapable of containing
the proliferation of data, we have retained in our own critical practices a remarkable
faith in our own ability to identify and adjust the coordinates of that grid. From the
census, the map and the museum we have inherited the categories of social reality
which we then hold up to texts as if these categories were themselves social reality and
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not the products, with a history of their own, of some prior attempt to classify social
reality. The grid while ostensibly posing the threat of the totalization of all detail
actually creates the details that it purports to subsume. As we conduct our own
censuses, draw our own maps, create our own curiosity cabinets, we deploy those
procedures which despite their failings, provide a systematic way of dealing with
aggregates through abstraction.
Wordsworth’s classification of his poems in 1815 was not an overt attempt to
conduct his own census, but his use of a mechanism which had proven itself useful on
a wide range of seemingly inassimilable elements. Wordsworth was not influenced by
the census; the census and Wordsworth utilized the methodologies of counting
(unifying) and classifying (re-dispersing) to represent abstractly the body or the self,
methodologies which had proven “successful” in other disciplines. In this procedure, I
appear to be treading dangerously close to what Alan Liu has called the
“embarrassment of the New Historicism” (740), the holding up “to view a historical
context on one side, a literary text on the other, and, in between, a connection of pure
nothing” (743). Where embarrassment is forestalled (or at least temporarily removed
to a higher level of abstraction) is in my focus on the abstract modalities of power and
the institutional methodologies reified by that power as well as on actions of agents,
such as Wordsworth, who both participate in and are subtlety resistant to such
modalities. Unlike Anderson’s apocalyptic humanistic vision of government’s success
in implementing these mechanisms of control, my narrative attempts to recover both
the paranoia of the classified subject as well as the anxiety of the classifying subject.
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The context enacted repeatedly by census officials, cartographers, curators, and literary
critics is that between the global and the local, the sum and the dispersed bodies, the
map and the physical land, the exhibition and the archive, the neatly contained Great
Decade revolutionary turned Tory hireling poet and the complex, contradictory
historical phenomenon named Wordsworth. But this study is not an argument for the
local and the particular, what Liu elsewhere calls the “overdetermination” that “goes
under the name of ‘particularity’,” (177), nor is it an attempt to replace, as David
Simpson suggests, “every use of the word culture with the word subculture” (“Literary
Criticism” 741). Rather my argument is that culture and subcultures are themselves
categories defined principally by the definitional power of the unified sign of the
normative employed by the state, the poet and the literary critic. Further, the
pointedness given to this opposition arises during this period, and the valorization of
the particular emerges out of the threat of subsumption of all particulars under the
unified signs represented and propagated by institutional structures like the census, the
map, the museum and the poet.
However, as the brief biography of Thomas Larcom shows, historical figures do
not line up neatly on one or the other side of this or any other debate. Larcom was
instrumental in conducting the triangulation survey of Ireland—the reduction of land to
abstract triangular space—as well as the census, and yet he was also responsible for
generating reams of local information and was credited with saving culture from the
abyss of forgetting. While all these activities suggest the archiving mentality of the
modem bureaucrat, what remains unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, is the
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incompatibility of these two tendencies o f the archiving mind—more and more
abstractions to contain more and more particulars—the unified and empty sign and the
unaccountable and unclassifiable particular. Wordsworth is both the classifier of
poems, readers and the objects of his poetic vision, and celebrant of the
unclassifiable—the sublime. Some contemporary critics (as well as modem ones)
accuse him of being too abstract, and some accuse him of being too local, parochial
and particular. That he was frequently both is not a testament to some inner artistic
vision or high argument, for his critical statements on the matter are contradictory, but
a reflection of his own (or perhaps anyone’s) inability to choose one over the other.
Wordsworth’s self-presentation and self-preservation and our subsequent re-imaginings
and reclassifications of him are testament to the unending dialectic of detail, category,
inassimilable detail, and proliferating categories. This book is about Wordsworth’s
stories about himself as well as our stories about Wordsworth, about representations of
the nation and the poet who would write the nation and how such representations were
challenged by the local variations both sought to contain. Wordsworth’s “service to
the nation”—a phrase that appears frequently in tributes to and eulogies of him—was
the construction of a theory of the particular, and an abstract representation of the local.
This book is divided into three parts, “Census,” “Map,” and “Museum,” and is
structured mostly along the chronology of Wordsworth’s career. While some texts
published prior to 1815 receive extended treatments (especially in Part I), greater
attention than is usual in book-length studies of Wordsworth is given to poetry
published after 1815. This should not be read as a call for greater appreciation of the
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later Wordsworth, though such attention is necessary if we are to address the idea of
our construction of Wordsworth, but is necessitated by my argument which sees
Wordsworth as active in the creation of his own self-image. Because of my emphasis
on Wordsworth’s “actions” as a public figure, the volumes he set before the public,
especially during what I identify as the crucial period between 1814 and 1820, are read
as rhetorical gestures requiring careful attention to the revision history of individual
poems as well as to the placement o f the poems in the individual volumes. What
emerges from this examination of the purportedly quiescent middle-aged poet is a
figure solicitous for not just his public identity as a poet but also for the national
identity of the nation. To counteract the increasing abstractions of commercial and
governmental London, Wordsworth offered his own idealized particulars—the
sheltered vale, the independent statesman, the republic of shepherds, the local river, the
landscape of tower, hamlet and church spire, the local tales, superstitions and
idiosyncratic names. These particulars were not in opposition to the totalizing
classificatory grid; they were created or made visible by it. The celebration of local
variation always presupposed that the “true” national character could be abstracted
from the local. The particular was still representative of the series, only Wordsworth
posited a different set of particulars to produce a different series.
In Part I, “Census,” I examine the origins of the British census in the late
eighteenth century and how the perception of the census shifted from outright hostility
in 1753 to unopposed acceptance in 1800, from an attempt by the government to
impose order and restraint on physical bodies to the demands of physical bodies which
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imposed duties and responsibilities on the government. Counting the people served as a
mechanism of control, and, for Wordsworth, counting became a way of containing the
“pestilential masses now accumulating in the cities,” a discipline that exemplified both
the power to control the material and—as legitimated in Book X3H of the 1805
Prelude—the power to control the representation of the material. The sum produced by
enumeration is the totalized and empty sign of unity, and is produced by a procedure
which Wordsworth identifies as a key component in his definition of imagination.
Counting is a form of data coercion, the aesthetic counterpart of which is the
“abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination.” Here the legislator of the
aesthetic, like the legislator of the state, is complicit in the establishment of those
structures of discipline necessary to make the world accountable.
Paradoxically, it is this desire to make the world accountable that also makes
Wordsworth so open to the unaccountable, or the sublime, which is the source of much
of his strength as well as much of his anxiety. Wordsworth’s poem “Gipsies”
articulates a national preoccupation with the uncounted and seemingly unaccountable,
the racial otherness of a “knot” of people that is both contained by the knot and yet
seemingly opaque and unavailable for inspection. While, as Benedict Anderson states,
the “fiction of the census is that everyone is in it,” the truth is that every census official
admits to the possibility of undercounting. As recent lawsuits against the United States
government and the extraordinary rejection of the 1991 census figures as unreliable by
the British government attest, the threat of not being counted has proven to be greater
than the threat of being counted. If counting is containment, then not counting is
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dangerous and thus requires a further form of containment. The Kantian aesthetic
sublime represents such an attempt to contain the unknowable within structure, an
abjection of any experience that defies totalization. The sublime then becomes an
aesthetic means of containing unaccountable difference, and it is striking that
Wordsworth invokes the machinery of the entire cosmos to address the purported
idleness of a band of gypsies. This containment of the “other” accounts for the
unaccountable and renders it safe. In Wordsworth’s encounter with a “knot of gypsies,”
the reduction of human presence to a knot and a not is the inevitable outcome of an
encounter between the powerless and the poet’s power of abstraction.
This desire for containment recurs in Wordsworth’s classification of poems and
readers in 1815, a process which mirrors the statistical classification of the people of
Britain in that both processes aim at implementing exploring, breaking down and
rearranging the body in order to subject it to ever more rigorous control and discipline.
But what these processes actually reveal is the diffusion and multiplicity of the poems,
readers, and people that must be defined as abnormal or accounted for by
ever-proliferating categories and ever-increasing justifications. Wordsworth’s purpose
was absolute control over the conditions under which he was read, or rather the
conditions under which his textual self was read. The national census was a similar
attempt at absolute control, but like all classificatory schemes, what came to count and
what counted as difference could only be read through the categories themselves. The
inevitable result was a taxonomy that erased the material object and replaced it with an
object of inquiry visible only through the structure that purported to describe it.
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Perversely for Wordsworth, the classification of the poems became the writing of a life
and the assertion of a subject that was constituted by writing, while the classification of
the readers became the reading of a life and the assertion of a subject that somehow
remained immune to reading.
Surveying, and the “prospect-view” or grand imperial vision it afforded,
provided Wordsworth with a way of writing the nation as if it were an abstract unified
whole, the self-contained and self-similar island nation united in purpose by the war
with France. The Thanksgiving Ode and its accompanying poems mark Wordsworth’s
most overt attempt to write the nation, to assume the bardic voice and explain to the
people the meaning of great national events. Yet, as the dominant critical position
holds, it was at this time that Wordsworth retreated from the cares of the nation into the
seclusion of his native hills and dales to brood over his failures and rejections and
endlessly revise the great poetry of his youth. In Part II, “Map,” I examine this view of
the quiescent middle-aged Wordsworth and demonstrate how Wordsworth’s flurry of
publication activity in the years between 1814 and 1820 marked his self-conscious
emergence as poet of the nation and demonstrated his varied and evolving strategies for
writing a national poetry. The pressing reality of dissension and disunity that marked
post-Waterloo Britain and the uncomfortable linkage between imperial ambition and
Napoleon’s lawless reign rendered the prospect-view both inadequate and suspect and
Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode poems of 1816, while seeking to celebrate the
abstract notion of the nation, instead recount the story of the poet’s own frustration
over his failure to write the nation. Desirous of the grand imperial vision, he
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nonetheless remained confused about what that vision might mean, and what it might
obliterate to gain comprehensiveness. What is clear about this episode is that when
Wordsworth attempted to write the nation, he was himself caught between opposing
visions of the nation which he could not unify nor resolve. The close examination of
local detail which had served him so well in the past seemed to reveal only
contrarieties and fractures, differences and tensions, which could be resolved only
through recourse to an abstract vision, a vision which arguably forsook the very
grounds of his strength.
After the Thanksgiving Ode debacle, Wordsworth’s view of the nation shifted
increasingly towards the local landscape, people, and manners of his native
Westmorland, and like the local surveyors who sought to contain the proliferating
survey data they were collecting, Wordsworth felt that a great deal was elided by the
national map and sought to repopulate the landscape with the monuments and
meanings which the map of the landscape ignored. In short, the abstract vision required
the subsumption of local details, congruous and incongruous, but as the mapmakers to
Britain were discovering at this time, it was the delineation of local detail—not the
impossible mountain top vision—that proved the accuracy, utility and beauty of the
finished map. For Wordsworth, the unending prospect of imperial Britain was only one
possible vision of Britain, and clearly what was needed in the tempestuous years
following Waterloo was an explication of the British national character from the local
details of the imagined British landscape, a character formed by and responsive to the
local. That landscape was his native Westmorland. Wordsworth’s turn or return to the
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local was not a retreat from the politics of the nation, but a conscious attempt to
redefine the nation along the lines of the local. In what might be called an abstract
vision of the particular, Wordsworth holds up local idiosyncrasy as the true exemplar
of the national character, and a local river, the Duddon, as the true representative of the
progress narrative of the Britain nation.
In Peter Bell, The Waggoner, and The River Duddon, all published between
April 1819 and May 1820, Wordsworth presented his rethinking of the nation not as
monolithic totality but as regional ideal. Local identity provided both an idealized
national identity to counterbalance what Wordsworth saw as a troubled nation forgetful
of its past, and a cautionary tale of what was to come when local idiosyncrasies were
subsumed within the national identity emanating from the metropole. For Wordsworth
this return to local traditions recovered the meaning of the landscape by investing it
with human transit and human purposes. Unlike the unpeopled and impossibly abstract
imperial landscape, the local landscape is marked everywhere by a history which
reconnects the present with the past. Imperial dominion is replaced by historical
contingency, as the abstract map is filled in with local detail. The local landscape is not
simply background or picturesque attraction, but revealing in the associations built up
over immemorial time of the ways in which people have observed and interpreted that
landscape. However, despite this effort at reclamation and preservation, the “wreck of
IS and w a s” remains as both a reminder of present and past failures as well as a
recognition of the disjunction between present and past. The wreck is both artifact and
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gap, ruin and abyss, traceable connection and unresolveable distance. It is both the
wreck of is and was and the wreck between is and was.
Increasingly for Wordsworth, local identity was found to rely on local customs,
folklore and history, and so the depiction of the local landscape was itself an act of
preservation, an artifact for the national museum. As early as 1820, Wordsworth had
called for the preservation o f the Lake District as “a sort of national property,” marking
a curious point where the landscape itself becomes an artifact worthy of preservation.
In Part E H , “Museum,” I examine how Wordsworth’s poetry both enacts a type of
museum presentation and becomes one of the bases for the later Victorian preservation
movement. Wordsworth’s “new local poetry” which dominated the 1820 edition o f the
River Duddon, was local in its details but national in its mission. The local geography,
traditions, and people of the Lakes, marked by idiosyncrasy and a narrative of rugged
resistance, stood in a synecdochial relationship to an idealized vision of the nation.
This landscape was both commonplace and exotic, representative and rare,
representative of the nation paradoxically because it was becoming increasingly rare.
As an object of study, isolated yet threatened, as a site of pilgrimage and promised
transformation, as a rituai space set apart from everyday life by geography and the
imagination, the landscape of the Lakes can be likened to a vast national museum space
dedicated, like the contemporary British Museum and National Gallery, to the
education of the modem citizen, the construction of national identity, and the
demonstration of state power. This construction of the landscape as a museum creates
what Svetlana Alpers refers to as “the museum effect,” the transformation of all objects
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into objects of aesthetic interest. This aestheticizing gaze, so frequently the subject of
recent Wordsworth scholarship, finds its parallel in two seemingly disparate debates:
that concerning Lord Elgin’s expropriation of the Parthenon Marbles, and that
concerning a planned railway connecting a large manufacturing town with the Lake
District. While both the marbles and the railway promised widespread access to the
improving influence of aesthetic contemplation, both also threatened to destroy the
objects of contemplation they purported to make available. The seeming paradox of
Wordsworth’s support for access to the metropolitan museum and his opposition to
similar access to the museum of the land cannot be attributed solely to narrow self-
interest, but must be seen as revealing commonly-held ideas concerning who the
“people” were and who constituted the nation.
Ironically, the landscape celebrated by Wordsworth was already under pressure
from “spouting mills,” and the ancient manners which Wordsworth sought to preserve
had already vanished from the land. For the local surveyors attempting to represent the
local landscape, for the antiquarians attempting to preserve the local history, and for
Wordsworth who sought to do both, the preservation of the customs, folklore, history,
and artifacts was a national imperative. National heritage based on local idiosyncrasy
became the basis of national identity. By the second half of the nineteenth century,
Wordsworth himself and the local landscape he celebrated were themselves subsumed
into that heritage, the poet transformed by Victorian editors and scholars into the
“Great Decade” poet of Nature, and the landscape he celebrated combed for and
inscribed by its relation to his poems. This Victorian construction of the consummate
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Romantic poet polished and preserved a version of Wordsworth suitable for display in
the museum of national heritage. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century out of the
plenitude of Wordsworths available, two primary versions emerged: that of the poet of
the Lakes so essential to the British tourist industry, and that of the global competitor
in the international competition of world literatures. Both were nostalgic visions of the
past, of the nation and the land and of poetry and the power of poetry itself. While
seeking to preserve the nation and the poet, both Matthew Arnold’s version of
Wordsworth, and the preservationist movement’s version of Wordsworth preserve a
nostalgia for the possibility of nostalgia itself, for a time when poetry or nature or
history could be seen as salvific. While Wordsworth sought to preserve a landscape of
speaking monuments that would speak the “ancient manners” so needed by a forgetful
nation, the poet and the landscape increasingly came to speak only a single word:
Wordsworth. The landscape, the poet, and his poems had become artifacts in a
national museum that has come to encompass virtually every part of the nation itself.
By the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of the National Trust under
Wordsworth scholar and celebrant H. D. Rawnsley, the great national museum was no
longer the repository of the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles but the land itself and
its ruins, castles, churches, houses, prospects, farmlands, moors, and coastline. The
nation had become the museum and the museum had become the nation.
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PARTI
CENSUS
Chapter 1
Counting the People
The Census, Wordsworth, and the Discipline of the Imagination
“— Stoop from those heights, and soberly declare
What error is; and, o f our errors, which
Doth most debase the mind; the genuine seats
O f power, where are they? Who shall regulate,
With truth, the scale of intellectual rank?”
The Solitary in The Excursion, IV.774-8
In November 1994, a USAir commuter jet crashed in the snowy fields of rural
Indiana killing everyone on board. For two weeks investigators combed the crash site
in an effort to recover the bodies of the passengers and crew members of the plane.
What they found instead of bodies was a chaotic jumble of aircraft debris and human
body parts spread over a large tract of snow-covered farm land. Sixty-eight people
died in that plane crash, but sixty-eight bodies were not recovered from the crash site.
The reported death toll was arrived at not from a physical examination of the victims
but from the names of the passengers and crew members listed on the flight manifest.
For every name listed on this document there had been a corresponding physical body,
but there was no longer a corresponding physical body. In what has become a common
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modem phenomenon, names were substituted for bodies, making irrelevant the
presence or absence of those bodies, and then a count or sum was substituted for a list
of names eradicating even the marginal difference supplied by those names. The result
is an abstract token that marks the site of a forced eradication of difference and the
forced imposition of unity upon multitude. The sum is the universal coercion which
erases all distinctions. The sum is a sign emptied of material content.
The irony of this is that the act of counting is in many ways one of the most
material of linguistic acts, both in its claim to one-to-one correspondence with the
material world and in that it is often a physical act. We count by pointing to objects,
sometimes with a leveled index finger and sometimes with merely a directed nod of the
head. We use our fingers when we count, or we bob our head from side to side, or we
tap our feet.1 However, counting is also a highly abstract linguistic act, in that we use
the same tokens to count anything, whether it be hedgerows or human beings. And
when we have finished counting, a sum is produced, an enumerated total, which is a
sign that represents the unity of some object domain. This abstract number bears a
relationship only to the object domain itself, and not to the individual components of
the object domain. In other words, number is a quality of a group and not a quality of
an individual. Thus counting begins by associating a unique marker (an ordinal
number) with each object being counted, and concludes by erasing those markers. The
imposition of the sum is the reduction of the multitude into a unity. A counting o f the
people is just such an attempt to reduce the multitude into a unity, and the generated
table of statistics provides the mechanism used to account for and control the location
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and movement of bodies. An enumeration of the people begins with the recognition of
the non-identity of any two instances of human beings, a recognition required so that
they may be counted. However, this non-identity is reduced to sameness by the sum
itself which coerces all possibilities into those categories imposed by the enumerator.
In this way, the coercion of enumeration is twofold: that of counting which coerces
each subject into sameness; and that of classification which reinscribes categorical
difference upon the mass of counted subjects.
As Frances Ferguson has pointed out, the encounter between the man and the
little girl in Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” dramatizes the pitfalls of the ostensive
nature of counting. Both the man and the little girl insist on counting what is there,
what can be pointed to, yet because they differ on what they determine to be ostensive
they arrive at different sums. As Ferguson notes the little girl’s “ability to count her
siblings first merely involves her ability to place them despite their physical absence
from this place,”2 and in fact her dead siblings and the proximity of their graves are
more available for ostensiveness than her two other siblings who have “gone to sea.”
The man attempts to explain to her that when counting people the dead do not count.
Acting like a census enumerator, the man insists upon counting only those siblings who
meet his own “pre-established codes of decision,”3 and while his set criterion of living
versus dead seems unexceptionable, her set criterion of near versus far seems equally
unexceptionable. While Ferguson is undoubtedly correct in deriding those readings of
the text that see it as an attempt by the man “to impose his hegemonic system upon an
innocent victim” (165), it is nonetheless important to recall that Wordsworth himself
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characterized the poem as showing “the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood
attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion.”4 While
this encounter ends in a stalemate, the prefatory gloss and the introductory stanza make
clear that while different opinions of what is to count may make for good drama,
ultimately somebody determines what is to count, just as the census enumerator records
his count and moves on to the next village.5
The enumerated sum eradicates all difference, and as the encounter dramatized in
“We Are Seven” shows that difference also involves different criteria for what is to
count. Ferguson states that by the beginning of the nineteenth century numbering “had
come to be just another version of naming” (168), but the number as name is only an
intermediate step. When the numbering ends, when the objects have been counted,
when the enumerator closes his book, the number and name are replaced by the sum
and the relationship between the sum and the parts is eradicated until difference is
reinscribed on the parts through the imposition of categories which define what was
counted to begin with. In place of name and number we have location, occupation, age
and myriad other categories which serve to re-individuate the part of the whole and
render it readable only through the relationships established by those categories. In this
chapter, I examine the debates surrounding the attempts in 1753 and in 1800 to
institute a census in Britain, in order to suggest that the taking of a census is part of the
general movement towards what Michel Foucault calls discipline, in this case a
discipline founded on a mastery derived from the ability to enumerate. I further
suggest that this same coercion which makes possible abstract counting is identified by
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Wordsworth as one of the primary processes o f the imagination. In this way,
Wordsworth’s conception of the imagination is the aesthetic counterpart to the
increasing hegemony of disciplinary control, but as later chapters will explore,
Wordsworth only occasionally adhered to his own model. From the category of the
sublime to the classification of his poems, Wordsworth sought containers for the
diffuse particularity of his experiences and his poems. While never abandoning the
abstract vision, he grew increasingly distrustful of his own ability to record it and
increasingly unsure of his own relationship to the nation he sought to write.
The first proposal to Parliament for the taking of a census was introduced in
1753. Not surprisingly, the debate over the Bill revolved around the issue of
government knowledge, of how much the government (or any government) needed to
know about its people. At issue in this debate was the larger principle of laissez-faire,
supporters of the Bill arguing that government intervention was only useful when that
government was equipped with timely information, and opponents of the Bill arguing
that government intervention itself was almost always inappropriate. Although the Bill
passed through each of the Committee stages, debates and divisions took place over
every clause.6 Eventually, the Bill was rejected by the House of Lords. It would be
forty-seven years before a census would be proposed again, and this second Bill passed
both Commons and Lords without opposition and received Royal Assent on December
31, 1800.7 That these two attempts to institute a census resulted in such widely
different debates and produced such different outcomes raises a basic historical
question: Why was the notion of counting the people controversial in 1753 and
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perfectly acceptable in 1800? To answer this question, we need to examine the
historical circumstances surrounding each of these attempts to institute a census, and
fundamental to these circumstances were the prevailing opinions on the relationship
between population and the state.
In his overview of British economic thought prior to Adam Smith, E. A. J.
Johnson characterizes most seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers on economy as
agreeing on the need for the state “to exert its influences to maximize resources and to
increase people” (287). The underlying assumption of these calls for government action
was the specter of depopulation, a widespread belief that the “population of particular
countries, and of the world as a whole, had fallen since ancient times” (Glass 21). This
notion of population decline can be found in such influential writers as Isaac Vossius in
late seventeenth-century England and Montesquieu in early eighteenth-century France,
both of whom pointed to famine, war, plague, and emigration as factors leading to a
general decline of population in England and on the Continent. In the early eighteenth
century, the population argument in England focused less on these causes of increased
mortality and more and more on what D. V. Glass calls “a desire to demonstrate the
historical truth o f the Bible, a nostalgia for a misconceived and over-glorified antiquity,
and a distaste for the growing importance o f manufacture and commerce” (Numbering
the People 24). This shift in emphasis enlarged the argument from one concerned with
simple statistical curiosity to one concerned with the moral implications of population
decline.
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Shortly before the first attempt was made to introduce a census into England,
Robert Wallace, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church o f Scotland,
published an influential study comparing the relative populousness o f ancient and
modem times. Wallace’s A Dissertation on the Numbers o f Mankind in Ancient and
Modern Times: in which superior Populousness o f Antiquity is maintained appeared
anonymously in 1753. Using the Bible and ancient Greek and Latin texts, Wallace
estimated the population of the ancient world as greater than that of the modem world,
and presented the question of population increase or decrease not simply as a statistical
curiosity but as a gauge of the health of the state. However, for Wallace, what was
gauged was not political health, but moral health. Because “a nation shall be more
populous in proportion as good morals and a simplicity of taste and manners prevail, or
as the people are more frugal and virtuous” (11), the fact that for Wallace the modem
world was less populous than the ancient world indicated to him that the modem world
had fallen away from those just sentiments and proper values that characterized the
ancient world: “Hence, in a debauched nation, addicted to sensuality and irregular
amours, and where luxury and a high taste of delicate living prevails, the number of
people must be proportionately small, as their debauchery will render them less able to
m aintain families” (2 6 ). For Wallace, the relationship between populousness and
virtuousness was direct, the one increasing when the other increased, and decreasing
when the other decreased. He and others attributed this decay in large measure to the
excessive employment in manufacture and the abandonment of the agricultural
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occupations that alone could preserve what one of Wallace’s supporters called “frugal
simplicity of taste and manners” (quoted in Numbering the People 25).
Having seen a copy of Wallace’s argument prior to its publication, David Hume
published a response in 1752 even before Wallace’s book was published.8 In the tenth
discourse of his Political Discourses, Hume challenged the authority of evidence
drawn from Greek and Roman historians and contended that “with regard to remote
times, the numbers of people assign’d are often ridiculous” (219). More importantly,
Hume maintained that “the question with regard to the comparative populousness of
ages or kingdoms implies very important consequences”:
For as there is in all men, both male and female, a desire and power
of generation more active than is ever universally exerted, the
restraints, which it lyes under, must proceed from some difficulties
in men’s situations, which it belongs to a wise legislature carefully
to observe and remove . .. [I]t seems natural to expect, that
whereever there are most happiness and virtue and the wisest
institutions, there will also be most people. (225-6)
Since Hume contended that the population of the world had increased since ancient
times, he concluded that this population increase reflected an increase in liberty and
happiness. Thus for Hume also, populousness was a gauge of the state of the state.
Therefore, since the relationship between procreation and wise legislation was direct,
an enumeration of the people would provide a ready index into the moral health of the
state.
What is finally most interesting about Hume’s and Wallace’s arguments is that
they purport to explain relative populousness by the state of society, when it was the
assumptions about the state of society that gave meaning to the population comparison.
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Perceived population increase became the occasion for Hume’s paean to the modem
state, and perceived population decrease became the occasion for Wallace’s diatribe
against the modem state. In the absence of actual figures, both arguments could
succeed.
It was in the midst of this debate that the first attempt was made to establish a
census. In 1753, Thomas Potter, MP for St. Germans in Cornwall, submitted a Bill
“for taking and registering an annual account of the total number of people, and of the
total number of marriages, births, and deaths, and also of the total number of the poor
receiving alms from every Parish and Extra-parochial Place in Great Britain” (quoted
in Guide to Census Reports 11). Supporters of the Bill sought to distance themselves
from the academic debate of Wallace and Hume and instead chose to stress the utility
of a census. When presenting the Bill, Potter focused exclusively on the information
that a census would supply to the government, information that would aid the
government in exerting increased disciplinary control over the population:
That it would ascertain the collective strength of the nation, and
shew where the inhabitants are too numerous, and where they are
too few . . . It would appear what number of men might, upon a
sudden emergency, be levied for the army, and whether we gain or
lose by sending our natives to settle colonies and plantations
abroad . .. That by pursuing this measure, we should gain a police,
or a local administration of civil government, upon certain and
known principles, the want of which has been long a reproach
peculiar to this nation, the discouragement of industry, and the
support of idleness.9
In language that seems strikingly bald by modem standards, the supporters of the
census contended that an enumeration and registration of the people was needed for
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increased government control of population movement, army conscription, and law
enforcement. Of these the issue which occasioned the greatest debate was the census’
applicability to the restraint or encouragement of population movement. To further the
cause of the census, one supporter, George Grenville, focused on the frightening
prospect of depopulation brought about by a perceived increase in emigration:
[A census], it is said, can answer no purpose but that of an
insignificant and vain curiosity, as if it were no consequence for
the legislature to know when to encourage and when to discourage
or restrain the people of this island, or of some particular part of it,
from going to settle in our American Colonies. Do gentlemen
think, that it can be of no use to this society, or indeed to any
society; to know when the number of its people increases or
decreases; and when the latter appears to be the case, to enquire
into the cause of it and to endeavor to employ a proper remedy. . .
Even here at home do we not know, that both manufactures and the
number of people have in late years decreased in some parts of the
Kingdom? Would it not be of advantage to us to know, whether
this affects the whole, or if it be only a removal from one part of
the island to another?1 0 {Hansard’ s 15.1350-1)
Supporters of the census sought to direct the population debate away from the
“insignificant and vain curiosity” that characterized the Hume-Wallace debate, and
toward matters of social policy. However, this redirection was not without its costs. It
is interesting that these remarks by George Grenville focus on the census as a means of
restraining the people, of providing the state with the statistical information that would
allow control over the movement of bodies. This unaccountable movement of bodies
is threatening because it currently takes place outside the observation, of the state. In
addition, these unaccounted bodies are directly related by Grenville to the
unaccountable decrease of manufactures in some parts of the country, implying that
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economic stability relies on fixed and stable human bodies, and that it was the
responsibility of government to assess and if necessary intervene in the labor market.
This perceived need for government intervention in the movement of bodies is stated
clearly by another supporter of the Bill, the Earl of Hillsborough:
if we knew the numbers of people, and their annual increase or
decrease, no one can say that it would not sometimes be for the
public good, to lay a restraint upon poor people leaving the place o f
their birth without leave from the magistrates of the place . . . and
to such people it would be doing them a service to lay them under
some restraint. (Hansard’ s 15.1363)
Hillsborough’s paternalistic language calls attention to the class basis of this need for
government control. The “service” which government supplied was “restraint” of
movement, though such services were only intended for the poor. For Hillsborough,
government intervention in matters of population movement was not only necessary
but sanctioned by the existing laws governing parish relief. By accounting for the
location and controlling the dispersion of persons, government could regulate the
supply and demand of labor, acting on the needs of production and not on the needs of
the laboring population.
The primary opposition to the census focused on its cost and impracticality, some
seeing it as serving only to “decide a wager at White’s” {Hansard’ s 15.1326), or to
satisfy “the curiousity of those gentlemen who love to deal in political arithmetic”
{Hansard’ s 15.1330). Matthew Ridley spoke of the people’s “superstitious” fear of a
census arising out of the Biblical injunction against attempting to count the people.1 1
There were also concerns that “this new law must be designed as a foundation for some
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new tax, or for increasing the burden of some of those we have already” (Hansard’ s
15.1347). However, the opponents of the census also recognized the subtler
implications of the Bill. William Thornton, MP for the City of York, responded to
Grenville’s use of the word “restrain” with vehement indignation:
It has been said, Sir, that an authentic knowledge of the number of
our people, and of their annual increase or decrease, will instruct us
when to encourage, and when to restrain people from going to
settle in our American Colonies. Sir, our going or not going to
America does not depend upon the public encouragement or
restraint, but upon the circumstances they are in at the time.
(Hansard's 15.1355)
Seizing upon Grenville’s ill-advised use of the word “restrain,” Thornton uses the
census debate as an opportunity for attacking government attempts to control
population movement. Earlier, Thornton had responded to the Bill’s language when he
asked what purpose would be served by knowing “where the kingdom is crowded, and
where it is thin, except we are to be driven from place to place as graziers do their
cattle?” (Hansard’ s 15.1320) Such attempts at control were seen as nothing less than
attempts to control the physical body, an aspect of the census that was implied by
Grenville, baldly stated by the Earl of Hillsborough, and fully exploited by Thornton,
when he stated that he did not believe:
that there was any set of men, or, indeed, any individual of the
human species so presumptuous and so abandoned as to make the
proposal we have just heard . . . I hold this project to be totally
subversive of the last remains of English liberty . . . the addition of
a very few words will make it the most effectual engine of rapacity
and oppression that was ever used against an injured people.
(Hansard's 15.1318-20, 1323)
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Thornton characterizes the census as threatening a vulnerable human body, “an injured
people,” or possibly towards the shell of a human body, its “last remains.” He locates
the threat as originating with a “set of men,” where “set” is used deprecatorily in the
eighteenth-century sense of “party.” But “set” also carries the emerging denotation of a
collection within a classificatory system, and it is ironic that this threat is seen as
originating from a “set of men” that seems to exist outside the set of the “human
species,” a strange source given that the only set criterion for inclusion in the census is
that the element be a member of the human species. The census is seen as the
harbinger of an “engine of rapacity and oppression,” the first mechanism of increasing
state control.
While Thornton did not succeed in defeating the Bill, opposition grew at each
division before it was finally approved by a divided House at its third reading. At its
second reading in the House of Lords, the Bill was referred to committee, but since this
occurred at the end of the parliamentary session the Bill lapsed and was not brought up
again ( .Numbering the People 20).
While the attempt to initiate the census had failed, the controversy over
population continued through the remainder of the century. In articles in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in pamphlets, in books on trade,
medicine, and economics, the debate continued unabated. Political economists,
actuaries, doctors, and amateur demographers all sought to calculate the present
population of Great Britain using methods ranging from detailed studies of selected
parish registers to detailed calculations based on the total number of houses or the
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quantity of bread produced in a given region. Whether the argument was for
population increase or decrease, all these attempts maintained the direct link between
population and prosperity. Richard Price, the prominent actuary and enemy of Burke
who maintained that population was declining, blamed the “great towns” as “nurseries
of debauchery and voluptuousness” (quoted in Numbering the People 54-5) and the
enclosure laws which had led to a decline in agricultural production and the
depopulation of the countryside. Arthur Young, who maintained that population was
increasing, held that “employment creates population, that employment was acting
more powerfully than ever and that, consequently, there could not be depopulation” but
just the reverse, a significant increase in population.1 2
Adam Smith maintained this link between population and prosperity, going so far
as to assert that “What encourages the progress of population and improvement,
encourages that of real wealth and greatness.”1 3 However, for Smith the question of
population increase or decrease was not so much a moral question as it was a market
question and thus the size of the laboring population (which was the bulk of Great
Britain’s population) was regulated by the law of supply and demand. An
understocked labor market led to higher wages which led to larger families which
ultimately produced an overstock of labor which led to lower wages and eventually a
correction of the labor market. Smith states that “It is in this manner that the demand
for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of
men; quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast”
(vol. I, bk. I, ch. Vm, 84). How this correction of the labor market occurs and the
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potential for suffering that Smith’s clinical analysis erases are the questions that would
be taken up by T. R. Malthus two decades later.
It is generally held that the establishment of the census of 1800 was directly
connected with the anxiety occasioned by the publication of Malthus’ Essay on the
Principle o f Population in 1798.1 4 Ostensibly, Malthus wrote his essay in response to
Godwin’s claim that the advancement of education and the elimination o f private
property would lead to the extensive and infinite diffusion of happiness. It is important
to note that Godwin’s claim was based on his assumption that the world’s population
had declined precipitously, and even as late as 1820— despite two censuses which had
shown dramatic population increases—he still contended that “it is in this wreck of a
world, almost as desolate as if a comet from the orbit of Saturn had come too near us,
that Mr. Malthus issues his solemn denunciations, warning us on no consideration to
increase the numbers of mankind.”1 3 In the early decades of the nineteenth century,
population increased at the rate o f 1.5 per cent per annum. This is contrasted with an
estimated rate of increase of 0.5 per cent per annum for the period from the beginning
of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century.1 6 This astounding
and unparalleled population increase did not go unnoticed by Malthus, and while he
did not contend that the world was overpopulated, his theories about population and
sustenance foretold such a day. Indeed, though he had no empirical data to back up his
contention (in fact, he dramatically underestimated the population of Great Britain),1 7
Malthus did accurately gauge the increase in population that was taking place in his
time. For this reason, he disagreed with Godwin’s optimism and with recurrent
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Enlightenment notions of progress and perfectibility. It was his opinion that there were
fundamental natural laws that would ultimately check progress, of which the most
important was that of the relationship between population and sustenance. Malthus’
argument can be summarized from the conclusion to Chapter 1, where he states:
[T]he power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in
the earth to produce subsistence for men. Population, when
unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases
only in an arithmetical ratio .*.. Through the animal and vegetable
kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the
most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing
in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them. The
germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food
and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the
course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all
pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed
bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under
this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any
efforts of reason, escape from it. Among plants and animals its
effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death. Among
mankind, misery and vice. (20)
Adam Smith had earlier stated a similar proposition when he noted that “Every species
of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no
species ever multiply beyond it” (vol I, bk. 1, ch. 8, 84). However, for Smith the law of
the market would correct any such “overstocking” of people, and the great evil was not
the specter of overpopulation, but the laws which restricted the free movement of
labor. Malthus breaks the link between prosperity and population by pointing to the
possibility that overpopulation will lead to ever-diminishing returns. For Malthus,
population increase is restrained either by positive checks (misery and disease) or by
preventive checks (postponement of marriage). In this way, Malthus’ conception of
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population completely inverted that of Hume and Wallace. Where Hume and Wallace
saw population increase as an index of health, Malthus saw it as an index of misery.
Where Hume and Wallace saw population as subject to “wise legislation” or “good
morals,” Malthus saw it as subject to iron necessity. Where Hume and Wallace saw
progress, Malthus saw restraint by the “great restrictive law” of necessity.
While the timely publication of Malthus’ essay certainly had an effect on the
establishment of the census, there were numerous other developments that contributed
to an environment conducive to its establishment. Other countries had recognized the
need for a census. Norway and Denmark each took a census in 1769 and the United
States had instituted decennial counts in 1790. Spain took a census in 1798 and France
had already approved the procedure though the actual census did not occur until
1801.1 8 In addition, D. V. Glass argues that “concern with the increasing burden of the
poor, and the need to import food, began to erode the earlier mercantilist belief in the
advantages of a large and increasing population,” and that “it is doubtful if Malthus’s
Essay was important in persuading Parliament to accept the idea of censuses.”1 9 Glass
argues that John Rickman was primarily responsible for the establishment o f the
census. Rickman published an essay in 1796 on the need for “a general enumeration of
the people of the British Empire.” At that time, the bad harvests of 1793-5 and the
steadily increasing animosities with France, coupled with growing awareness of both
population growth and an increasing dependence on grain imports, had created a
climate of great anxiety. Rickman argued that more accurate information would enable
the government to form more effective policies, especially concerning recruitment for
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the armed forces. In addition, he felt that the census would show a substantial
population increase, thus demonstrating the nation’s growing prosperity and allaying
domestic discontent. Echoing Adam Smith, Rickman maintained that “an industrious
population is the first and most necessary requisite to the prosperity of nations,” but
Rickman’s chief claims for the utility of a census center on appeals to national pride
and the characterization of a benevolent government “anxious for the good o f its
• 7fl
subjects.” As will be seen later, Rickman’s language was picked up and used nearly
verbatim by Charles Abbot when he presented the Census Bill to Parliament in 1800.
The domestic anxiety occasioned by a series of bad harvests and the escalating
war with France was undoubtedly exacerbated by Malthus’ scenario of too many
people and too little food. Animosities with France continued to escalate, the harvests
of 1798-9 were bad, and the harvest of 1800 was disastrous. Rickman’s essay was
republished in 1800, and he was given a position o f importance under Charles Abbot.2 1
On November 19, 1800, a Bill for the taking of a census was introduced by Abbot
during a special session of Parliament called to address “the present high price of
provisions” {Hansard’ s 35.495-6) brought on by the bad harvests and the suspension of
trade with the Continent. It was in this environment of wartime fears, scarcity fears,
and overpopulation fears, that the census was established.2 2
The economic and political situation of Great Britain in 1800 provided an
environment conducive to the establishment of the census. But, do these external
conditions alone explain why the census proposal of 1753 was heatedly debated and
ultimately rejected while that of 1800 was approved without opposition? What in fact
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were the objections raised against the 1753 census, and why were they no longer
applicable in 1800? Recall that George Grenville had used the word “restrain” in his
speech supporting the census, and that William Thornton had seized upon that word in
his response. In the 1753 debate, both sides seemed well aware that a census was a
counting of people, or more specifically of human bodies, and that this act of counting
was somehow related to issues of restraint and control. Since the census of 1800 was
likewise a counting of human bodies, it is tempting to conclude that the association
between counting and control had vanished during those intervening years. Instead,
what I want to suggest is that the association remained, and it was the attitude towards
restraint and control which had changed.
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault examines the emergence of restraint
and control as a mechanism of governance and as a discursive system that naturalizes
governance. He states that during the eighteenth century, the state “discovered the body
as object and target of power.” This power is the domination of relentless discipline,
of a breaking down and subsequent remaking of the body of the subject. Foucault
identifies the first discipline as that which controls the distribution of individuals in
space, and fundamental to this discipline are the ideas of enclosure and partition. To
exert proper control over human bodies, those bodies must be located and fixed in
physical space, such that “Each individual has his own place; and each place its
individual.” In addition,
One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the
uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation,
their unusable and dangerous coagulation; it was a tactic of
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anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, and anti-concentration. Its aim
was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how
to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt
others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of the
individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or
merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering
and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space. (143)
In the 1753 debate, Grenville raised many of these same concerns. He explicitly
complained of the uncontrolled disappearances of individuals, of the perceived
depopulation of Great Britain by emigration to the American Colonies. Or was it, for
he didn’t know for sure, since these unaccounted for bodies may simply have moved
“from one part of the island to another”? The anxiety is thus not an anxiety of decline
but an anxiety of unknowing. To Grenville, the disturbing fact was not that people had
emigrated, but that their movements were unknown; they were diffusely circulating out
of the control of the state.
It was this anxiety that the census was intended to alleviate. For Grenville and
others a counting of the people would locate where those people were, and would serve
as the initial mechanism o f a state apparatus of control. And because a census is a
counting of physical bodies, both sides of this debate recognized that there was no way
of avoiding this form o f control short of eliminating the body. One can see the
difficulty of disobedience in Thornton’s response to Grenville:
As to myself, I hold this project to be totally subversive of the last
remains of English liberty, and therefore, though it should pass into
law, I should think myself under the highest of all obligations to
oppose its execution. If any officer, by whatever authority should
demand of me an account of the number and circumstances of my
family, I would refuse it; and if he persisted in the affront, I would
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order my servants to give him the discipline of the horse-pond.
C Hansard’ s 15.1320)
Beneath the bravado o f this imagined act of civil disobedience which would render one
invisible to the census is the visibility of some (and invisibility of others) that the act
makes available. As the speaker in “We are Seven” insists, a body is either present and
counted or it is absent and not counted. The very exertion of disobedience renders
Thornton visible and thus countable. By defying the enumerator, he participates in the
census, and it is for this reason that he saw the census as potentially “the most effectual
engine of rapacity and oppression.” Of course, as we will see in the next chapter, this
is a problem for Thornton because he belonged to the class, race, and gender that
counted and therefore was visible. While the census is, of course, a representation and
non-compliance would lessen its correspondence value and potentially render the data
useless, undercounting not over-counting has been the charge leveled at virtually every
census conducted since 1800. As the problem of undercounting encountered by every
census ever undertaken shows, the problem for many others was not visibility but
invisibility. This “problem” is the opportunity exploited by the child in “We are
Seven,” where the speaker’s categories prove inadequate to the presence or absence of
bodies.
Opponents of the 1753 census saw it as the forerunner of increasing control of
the state over the bodies of individuals. The ability to enumerate and locate the body in
order to “transform the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered
multiplicities” is the “first of the great operations of discipline” (Discipline 148). The
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taking of a census is the drawing up of a table, the imposition of an order and structure
on dangerously diffuse multitudes. In this way, the census is part of that great
movement of the eighteenth century associated by Foucault with the “drawing up of
‘tables,’” the systematic distribution and analysis which produced supervision and
intelligibility.2 4 One possible explanation for the lack of opposition to the 1800 census
is that the ongoing and systematic diffusion of disciplinary power into social life had
rendered this additional encroachment inoffensive. While this is perhaps true, it cannot
be proven here. Another possible explanation lies in a changed attitude towards the
knowledge and mastery represented by the census, where mastery came to be
represented not as oppression but protection. When Abbot introduced his Bill to
Parliament the central issue of the day was the availability of food. A few days after
the Bill was first introduced, the first report of a commission appointed to consider the
high price of provisions was published. This commission recommended increased
frugality and voluntary rationing.2 5 In this environment, Abbot spoke of the utility of a
census in providing the government with information concerning the state of its
population:
the knowledge of which must be serviceable for so many important
purposes of wise legislation and good government, and without
which no country can avail itself of the full extent of its resources,
or effectually and permanently provide for its wants. (Hansard's
35.598)
Abbot doesn’t speak of restraining the people, but of providing for the needs of the
people, and in this he is merely repeating Rickman’s belief that “No society can
confidently pretend to provide the requisite quantity of food, till they know the number
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O f\
of consumers.” In addition, nowhere does Abbot evince any concern over population
movement, and yet the preceding two decades had seen the most dramatic shift of
population distribution in English history. C. A. Bayly notes that the Board o f
Agriculture was established in 1793 by the Pitt administration and exemplified the
principle that “true patriotism and enlightened policy should be directed towards the
‘wastes which disgrace this country,’” and that emigration was regarded at this time as
a “dangerous diminution of the human resources of the country” (121-122). Despite
these concerns, the question of emigration never arises in the 1800 debate. No mention
is made of the possible military use of census data, despite the very real need
occasioned by the ongoing hostilities with France, and despite the importance attached
to this purpose by John Rickman who was by this time employed as Abbot’s secretary.
The only important purpose mentioned by Abbot that a census would serve is letting
the government know “the extent of the demand for which we are to provide a supply”
(reprinted in Numbering the People 108). In 1800, the census is represented not as
Thornton saw it, a possible “engine of rapacity and oppression,” but as the product of
government concern, an act of protection and the future instrument of state
benevolence, taken by a government which was in Rickman’s words “anxious for the
good of its subjects.”
However, the motives of Abbot or those of the 1800 Parliament are not our
concern here. What is important is that by 1800 the gathering of statistics was seen as
the responsibility of a wise government and not as an encroachment on the rights of the
people. In 1753 the census was characterized by both opponents like Thornton and
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supporters like Grenville and the Earl of Hillsborough as an attempt by the government
to impose order and restraint on physical bodies. In 1800 it was characterized in the
seemingly benign language of the marketplace as the demands of physical bodies
imposing duties and responsibilities on the government. While in 1753, William
Thornton complained that through a census “all distinction is destroyed by universal
coercion” {Hansard's 15.1324), by 1800 the universal coercion of the census promised
the containment of the dangerous multitudes by the ordered multiplicities, and such a
containment was seen as necessary for the better serving of the people.
As noted earlier, the act o f counting itself is a form of coercion. Counting begins
with the recognition of difference, since the objects to be counted must be somehow
differentiated from each other in order to be counted. However, since counting is
impossible without some concept of a set to which the counted objects belong, the
objects must be also at some level of abstraction the same. Each object that is counted
is marked with an abstract designator (usually a number) which during the act of
counting differentiates between one object of the set and another. In this way,
enumeration mirrors the processes of reading and writing. The enumerator “reads” the
distinctive marks of difference which set individual objects apart, and then transfers
that difference into a ledger in the form of a new mark. For example, prior to the 1831
census, the census enumerators were given instructions for conducting their count of
the people.2 7 Special sheets were issued for their assistance. These sheets were
distinguished by horizontal lines. The enumerators were instructed to count the people
by making marks across these lines, thus:
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/ / / / / / / / 1 / / / / / / / / / / / I / /
The enumerators were then instructed to divide their marks into groups of ten for
counting, and then sum the total:
-/ / / / -/ I / / | V / I I I I I / / Vs/ / / I = 2 3
The enumerator began by reading the presence of the objects to be quantified. Once
read, the objects were transferred (or translated) by an act of writing onto the special
sheets. When the enumerator made the mark on the sheet, the mark was in one-to-one
correspondence with a human being, a physical body. In this transcription of the body,
each individual mark was unique, no two marks being exactly the same. The bodies
that were read had become bodies that were written. It is this stage, during the act of
counting, that Ferguson has in mind when she states that numbering has become “just
another version of naming.” But just as the names in the flight manifest became
numbers, and the numbers disappeared under the sum, so too these marks in the
enumerator’s books once subjected to arithmetic manipulation—even when such
manipulation was as simple as marking tens-place and summing— lost their
correspondence to the physical bodies that they represented. The marks became marks,
each one of the same value and undifferentiated from the others. The abstract sum
(“23”) eliminated the marks entirely, replacing them with a figure that represented the
“unity” of the marks.
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The act of counting is thus characterized by an initial recognition of difference
and a subsequent abstraction that coerces the multitude into a unified whole. The final
abstraction represented by the sum confers a new mark upon the group. In this way,
the group is reconceptualized and contained by the sum, and becomes something new.
In the process, the individuals that comprise the group disappear under the new sign.
At the most abstract level, for the people enumerated by the census that new sign is a
national identity. But from the very beginning the census was never simply an
enumeration of the people, for every census has made use of classificatory schemes
that provide categories into which information is sorted. For example, an enumeration
of the people that asks for occupational information creates the numerical relationships
between occupational groups, and confers on occupations a group identity. Such
enumerations do not necessarily reflect the natural division of labor (whatever that may
be), but create the categories by which the division of labor can be quantified and thus
jo
read. These categories are abstractions of human activity which become containers
for that activity, the different occupations coerced into sameness and subsumed under a
totalizing sign.
When the poet repeatedly inquires of the Leech-Gatherer, “How is it that you
live, and what is it you do?” the drama enacted sets the poet’s power o f abstraction
against the particular and individual object that resists categorization, and in this way is
reminiscent of the confrontation between the poet and the little girl in “ We are Seven.”
It is the emphasis on abstraction, coercion, and “creation” that connects the disciplinary
movement of counting to Wordsworth’s conception of the imagination. In the
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“Preface” to the 1815 edition of his poems, Wordsworth states that the “processes of
imagination are carried on either by conferring additional properties upon an object or
abstracting from it some of those which it actually possesses,” so as to produce a
recognition of resemblance between objects, or to so modify the object that it becomes
a “new existence” (PrW 3: 32). Later in the same essay, following a passage taken
from Resolution and Independence, Wordsworth points to the “conferring, the
abstracting, and the modifying powers of the Imagination” in his comparison of the old
man to a stone, and of the stone to a sea-beast.
The stone is endowed with something of the power of life to
approximate it to the sea-beast; and the sea-beast stripped of some
of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone; which intermediate
image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the original image,
that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure and
condition of the aged Man; who is divested of so much of the
indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point where
the two objects unite and coalesce in just comparison (PrW 2:
33-34).
Here the simile drawn between the stone, the sea-beast, and the old man is presented as
an exemplar of the creative imagination. The imagination adds some qualities to the
stone and subtracts some qualities from the sea-beast to coerce these two objects into
the same category. The stone and sea-beast are coerced into sameness for the purpose
of a subsequent coercion of the stone and the old man into sameness. In this way,
stone, sea-beast, and old man are all made objects available for manipulation by the
imagination, a manipulation that proceeds under the tacit assumption of a privilege
conferred by the occupation of poet. Like those counted by the census, the objects of
Wordsworth’s landscape are available for his idiosyncratic reading and writing, a
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reading that strips the old man of that which makes him human and rewrites him as an
object under the totalizing sign o f a “just” (or should I say, accurate and
well-measured) “comparison.” In this example, the unity which Wordsworth
continually sought is achieved only through a reading that coerces difference into
sameness and a writing that contains that sameness with its own categories of
difference.
The exchange between the man and the little girl in “We are Seven” playfully
dramatizes such an attempt at idiosyncratic reading and writing. The conflict arises
because the two speakers insist on the correctness o f their criteria for counting, but as
mentioned before, Wordsworth’s comment on the poem in the Preface and the
introductory stanza attempt to impose on the readers of the poem the criteria that really
count. It is not surprising that Wordsworth even contemplated changing the title of the
poem to “We Axe Seven, or Death” {LB 73n), since such a change would have made
very clear the source of the disagreement. The question seems to be one of attribution
and classification, a battle of competing egotistical sublimes made pointed by the odd
note to the poem Wordsworth dictated to Isabella Fenwick in 1843. After commenting
on the origins of the poem, Wordsworth embarks on a long digression detailing how
the Lyrical Ballads project originated. Even after the lapse of nearly fifty years,
Wordsworth is quite specific and very scrupulous about detailing the ideas and even
individual lines that he supplied for Coleridge’s Rime o f the Ancient Mariner. These
detailed attributions designate what is to count as Wordworth’s and what is to count as
Coleridge’s. Wordsworth also notes that the introductory stanza to “We are Seven”
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was actually supplied by Coleridge, though based on Wordsworth’s ideas. That this
digression occurs in this note seems to imply that “We are Seven” is also about
determining where things belong or rather to whom they belong. The attribution of
characteristics to people or poems thus marks their inclusion in sets, and whether the
criteria is living or dead, far or near, Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s, to belong to a set is
to be marked for ownership. Ownership is the implied privilege of the nation over its
people, and the implied privilege of the poet over his materials.2 9
As Ferguson has pointed out, another form that this privilege often takes is that
of a figurative depopulation. In examining the relationship between the population
debate and aspects of Romantic ideology, she relates the pressure of an increasing
number of physical bodies to an anxiety over an increasing number of consciousnesses.
In this way the cultivation of solitude is in essence a symbolic depopulation of the
landscape which occurs in response to the increased demands of other consciousnesses.
Her discussion of “Tintem Abbey” identifies the ways in which Wordsworth empties
the landscape so as to create a space for himself where he is the “only one who views
the scene in this particular way.” For Ferguson, the turn to Dorothy near the
conclusion is “a function of the territorial imperialism of Wordsworth’s ego, which
incorporates people and things as it pleases” (Solitude and the Sublime 125-7). Thus
there is in Wordsworth an anxiety over the dangerous multitudes and a constant
attempt to organize them so that he may eliminate them. This is the problem of the
Kantian mathematical sublime which I will examine further in the next chapter. For
my purposes now it is enough to point to the juxtaposition between the London found
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in Book VII of The 1805 Prelude, and the country fair that opens Book VUL London
overwhelms Wordsworth because of its chaotic jumble o f signs and faces, none of
which can be read, and none of which can be numbered. This is set against the idyllic
and eminently readable country fair with its safely numbered crowd of “twice twenty”
(Vm.8). This anxiety occasioned by multitude is discussed by Wordsworth in a letter
to Lady Beaumont, written following the publication of Poems in Two Volumes (1807)
.. . who is there that has not felt that the mind can have no rest
among a multitude of objects, of which it either cannot make one
whole, or from which it cannot single out one individual,
whereupon may be concentrated the attention divided among or
distracted by a multitude? After a certain time we must either
select one image or object, which must put out o f view the rest
wholly, or must subordinate them to itself while it stands forth ...
{MY 1: 148)
For Wordsworth, a multitude that is not already subjugated to some totalizing or
synecdochic structure and thus subordinated to the observer generates anxiety. It is
clear to him that to avoid being “distracted” such dangerous multitudes must be
subjected to the discipline of the imagination, a discipline which in this particular
instance takes the form of depopulation. The occasion for Wordsworth’s declaration is
the sonnet “With Ships the sea was sprinkl’d far and nigh.” The poem begins with a
multitude of ships moving through the water, “one knew not why” (line 4). In the
letter, Wordsworth describes his state as dreamy and listless as he looks upon this
multitude. Like the stars in the sky, there is the appearance o f a jumble only of things,
a multitude seem ingly without order or structure. Then, the mind fixes upon one of the
ships, though as Wordsworth states in the letter:
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it is merely a lordly Ship, nothing more:
This ship was nought to me, nor I to her,
Yet I pursued her with a lover’s look (M Y 1: 148)
For Wordsworth, it is a matter of indifference why this one ship was selected and not
the others, but the benign language of selection masks the very real acts of inclusion or
exclusion that comprise the determination of what counts and what does not count. It
is after all a “lordly” ship and so it is marked off from the others as belonging to a class
that counts. This seemingly arbitrary act of the imagination is similar to the
appropriation of the old man in Resolution and Independence, in that the imagination
asserts a privilege to take anything as an object of its manipulation. It is quite telling
that the old man was divested of life and motion, while the “wanton” exercise of power
confers “life and body” on the ship. It would be interesting, though somewhat
facetious, to ask whether a “lordly” man could be divested of life and motion, or a
beggarly ship imbued with life and body. What is more important now is how in both
instances the objects are rendered accountable in that they are made to cohere into a
structure imposed by the discipline of the imagination. Wordsworth’s reading of this
scene eliminates the dangerous multitude of ships by replacing the multitude with a
single body which is then available for inscription. The single ship becomes the
synecdochial sign under which the innumerable are numbered and ultimately
subsumed.
As stated earlier, for Wordsworth the imagination is responsible for the breaking
down and remaking of the material world, a remaking that is based on numerability and
accountability. This conception o f the imagination confers upon the possessor a power
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of domination that is derived from the power to control how the material is inscribed,
how the body is written. Such a remarkable claim to power requires an equally
remarkable legitimation, which Wordsworth attempts in The Prelude. Book XDI of
The 1805 Prelude contains one of Wordsworth’s most extraordinary abstractions, that
which unites Nature and the imagination. Nature is seen to be like the imagination (or
more accurately the imagination is recognized as like a power of Nature) in:
That domination which she oftentimes
Exerts upon the outward face of things,
So moulds them, endues, abstracts, combines,
Or by abrupt and unhabitual influence
Doth make one object so impress itself
Upon all others, and pervade them so
That even the grossest minds must see and hear
And cannot chuse but feel. (XHI.77-84)
The scene witnessed by Wordsworth on the top of Mount Snowden becomes a
metaphor for the imagination because in this scene Nature has given a physical
manifestation of those processes by which the imagination creates perception, through
abstraction, modification, and reinscription. This process is characterized as a
“domination,” and can be seen as a coercion of the material into the categorical. Here
the coercive powers of the imagination are naturalized by their reinscription in Nature,
and legitimated by such a naturalization.
However, while there is nothing necessarily unsettling about the natural world
possessing powers such as these, when these same activities are associated with the
imagination of a single individual, the idea of “domination” becomes much more
unsettling. That an anxiety accompanies this assumption of power is made clear by
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Wordsworth’s elitist assertion that “even the grossest minds must see or hear/And
cannot chuse but feel.” Who are these people characterized as “the grossest minds”?
As Wordsworth makes clear a few lines later, “the grossest minds” are those
unfortunate many who lack the “glorious faculty” of imagination “Which higher minds
bear with them as their own” (Xm.89-90). The “higher minds” possess this power to
break down and remake the world, to abstract, modify, and recreate the world so that it
is a new existence. For Wordsworth then there is a clear distinction between those
passive many who must see and cannot choose but feel, and those gifted few who will
instruct and teach them. There is a clear distinction between those subject to
domination and discipline, and those empowered to dominate and master. For Clifford
Siskin, Wordsworth’s project is nothing less than the making of a new kind of self, one
“rewritten to occupy the center of power.” This procedure effectively “masks the
newly drawn inequities of class by emphasizing not what everyone has passively in
common, but rather what each person can accomplish actively on his or her own” (78).
As Siskin further notes, one accomplished this development by looking steadily at
oneself, “a penetrating gaze revealing, actually making, the depths within” (92). Of
course, what each person can accomplish on his or her own is the question, especially
when this myth of development masks what Wordsworth makes very clear, that there is
a hierarchy of developing selves: those singled out to teach and those obligated to be
taught; those who determine what counted and those who were counted. Domination is
both the power to control the material as well as the power to control the representation
of the material, and here the legislator of the aesthetic, like the legislator of the state, is
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complicit in the establishment of those structures of discipline necessary to make the
world accountable.
Yet to close with this picture of the elitist poet celebrating the Imagination and
the Mind which is lord and master would be to construct our own abstract version of
Wordsworth. While at times he welcomed this dominating Imagination, at other times,
as commentators since Geoffrey Hartman have pointed out, he feared it as well. For
every Snowden there is at least one Simplon Pass or Salisbury Plain where the poetry
records not the triumph of the Imagination but the bare blank resistance of the world
that will not be transformed. The “Preface” to the 1815 Poems might define
Imagination by the powers of the counting and classifying mind, but the poem from
which Wordsworth draws his example records not the triumph of the Mind, but its
failure to classify adequately the phenomena of the world. While this demonstration of
the imagination reveals the power of the mind to shape and create the perception, it
also demonstrates the pitfalls inherent in its schematizing activities. The “dim sadness”
of the poet, and the “lonely place” of their meeting all conspire to present a particular
configuration of the scene, a configuration that will prove to be false. Despite that
initial perception of the old man as something less than human, and the poet’s
continued attempts to make the old man an object of sympathy, the old man will not
stay within the categories of the poet’s imagination. Finally, realizing that the old man
will not be subsumed under his interpretive schema, the poet figuratively laughs at his
own folly. Old man, stone, or sea-beast, the Leech-gatherer ultimately proves resistant
to the classifications of the poet. In attempting to understand how it is the old man
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lives and what it is the old man does, the poem not only demonstrates the process of
enumeration and classification, it demonstrates the failure of it as well—abstractions
inadequate to the particulars they would contain.
Notes
1 For a similar emphasis on the material basis of counting, see Elaine Scarry’s
“Introduction” to Literature and the Body: Essays on Popidation and Persons
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988), vii-x. Wittgenstein is the chief source for the
association between ostensiveness and counting (or naming). See his Philosophical
Investigations, §6-10.
2 Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics o f
Individuation (London: Routledge, 1992), 165.
3 This phrase occurs in the “Advertisement” to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads in
Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797-1800, edited by James Butler and Karen Green
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992), 739.
4 “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800” in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797-1800,
745.
51 am aware that in this formulation I am granting the writer of the Preface a certain
and likely unjustifiable authority over the reading of the poem. One of the rhetorical
purposes of the Preface is to answer those critics who saw Lyrical Ballads as silly and
the poems as inane or “babyish.” However, while we or his 1800 readers may not be
willing to grant Wordsworth control over the interpretation of his poems, our
reluctance does not change the fact that Wordsworth sought to exercise such control.
6 Michael Drake, “The census, 1801-1891,” in Nineteenth-century society: Essays in
the use o f quantitative methods fo r the study ofsocial data, edited by E. A. Wrigley
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972), 7-8. See also D. V. Glass, Numbering the People
(Famborough, England: D. C. Heath Ltd., 1973), 17-20.
7 Great Britain Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. Guide to Census Reports,
Great Britain, 1801-1966 (London: HM Stationers’ Office, 1977), 11. This text will
hereafter be referred to as Guide to Census Reports.
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o
Hume had seen a copy of Wallace’s argument when it was originally presented to the
Philosophical Society of Edinburgh. Wallace added an appendix to his book in which
he attempted to refute Hume’s objections. Glass also notes that Hume helped correct
the proofs of Wallace’s Dissertation (Numbering the People, 38-9n.84).
9 Cobbett’ s Parliamentary History o f England, Vol. 15 (London: T. C. Hansard,
1813), col. 1317. Hereafter, this series will be referred to as Hansard’ s in the text.
1 0 The prominence of Potter and Grenville in the arguments for the Bill could not have
helped its chances. Glass points out that Potter “was apparently known as one of the
profligate twelve who called themselves Franciscans, and held their orgies at
Medmenham Abbey,” and that he at times “behaved rather arrogantly in the House”
(Numbering the People, 18-19). The Dictionary o f National Biography offers this
description of George Grenville: “Stem, formal, and exact, with a temper which could
not brook opposition, and an ambition which knew no bounds, Grenville neither
courted nor obtained popularity. Utterly destitute of tact, obstinate to a degree, and
without any generous sympathies, he possessed few of the qualities of a successful
statesman” (Dictionary o f National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen (London:
Smith, Elder & Co., 1885), vol. 23, 116). The Grenvilles were extremely important
Whigs who stayed at the head of the party for years, and if Potter was at Medmenham
he was an associate of John Wilkes. That means that it was the wing of the Whigs
characterized by progressive notions, by “Wilkes and Liberty”—also tied to the City
and to trade—that pushed for the census. We can see from the beginning of the census
debate a tension between a kind of democratizing impulse (as opposed to a Tory static
landed aristocracy) and the abolition or erasure of the individual in government
legislation.
1 1 The foundation of this injunction is King David’s taking of a census described in II
Samuel, 24 and in I Chronicles, 21.
1 2 Quoted in Glass, 56. In 1771, Young published a pamphlet containing Proposals to
the Legislature for Numbering the People, but it failed to generate any interest in the
idea of a census (Glass 72n.44).
1 3 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes o f the Wealth o f Nations, edited
by James Thorold Rogers, 2nd edition, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1880), vol. I,
book IV, chapter IV, p. 145-6).
1 4 In a certain sense this is the “official” position since it is incorporated into the brief
history of the census presented in the Guide to Census Reports, Great Britain
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1801-1966 produced by the Office o f Population. Censuses and Surveys (11). In
addition, the importance of Malthus is stressed by A. J. Taylor in one of the first
histories of the census, “The Taking of the Census, 1801-1951”, British Medical
Journal, 1951,1 , p. 715., and subsequently by H. J. Habbakuk in Population Growth
and Economic Development since 1750 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1971).
1 3 William Godwin, O f Population: An Enquiry concerning the Power ofIncrease in
the Numbers o f Mankind, Being an Answer to Mr. Malthus’ s Essay on That Subject
(London: Longman, Hurst, Ree, Orme and Brown, 1820), 486. Quoted in Ferguson,
Solitude and the Sublime, 117.
1 6 H. J. Habbakuk, “The Economic History of Modem Britain” in Population in
History: Essays in Historical Demography, edited by D. V. Glass and D. E. C.
Eversley (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1965), 147-158. Habbakuk5 s claim that
“the rate of increase may have been no more than 0.5 per cent5 5 (150) is drawn from D.
V. Glass5 revision of Gregory King's estimate in “Gregory King's Estimate of the
Population of England and Wales, 1695” in Population and History (cited above),
183-220. Glass performed a parish by parish comparison of King's figures against
similar returns from the 1801 census and then calculated from these a realistic growth
rate that would account for the difference between 1695 (5.2 million people) and 1801
(9.168 million people).
1 7 E. A. Wrigley, “Malthus5 Model of a Pre-Industrial Britain,” in Malthus Past and
Present, edited by J. Dupaquier and E. Grebink (New York: Academic Press, 1983),
114. In 1798 Malthus estimated the population of Great Britain to be about 7 million.
The 1801 census set the population of Great Britain at 10.9 million, which means that
Malthus underestimated the population of Great Britain by 56%.
| n
Harald Westergaard, Contributions to the History o f Statistics (London: P. S. King
& Son Ltd., 1932), 85-7; and Ann Herbert Scott, Census, U . S. A. Fact Finding for the
American People (New York: The Seabury Press, 1968), 23-4.
1 9 Glass, Numbering the People, 90. While it is true that Malthus or the subject of
overpopulation never comes up in the debates on the Census Bill or in press coverage
of the debates, Malthus5 Essay did create something of a sensation upon its publication.
Though Glass argues for the important contribution of John Rickman in establishing
the census, Rickman subscribed to the mercantilist population philosophy that Glass
claims was eroding, and Malthus5 work marks a complete break with these earlier
mercantilist views.
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2 0 John Rickman, “Thoughts on the Utility and Facility of ascertaining the Population
of England,” reprinted in Glass, Numbering the People, 106-113.
2 1 Abbot had already distinguished himself by his work on creating tables of expiring
temporary laws and his chairmanship of a committee inquiring into the condition of the
national records. He was later Speaker of the House from 1802 to 1816 (Dictionary o f
National Biography, 1.4-5).
That this was a time of extraordinary anxiety in Britain is made clear by the other
issues debated during this special session of Parliament, the most prominent being an
attempt to establish a separate peace with France, a move to increase penalties for
mutiny and dereliction of duty, a renewal of the suspension of habeas corpus, a call to
evacuate British troops from Egypt (following a series of devastating losses), and the
establishment of a special committee to address the high price of provisions.
2 3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison, translated by Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 136. This discussion makes use of
Foucault’s discussion of discipline, “Docile Bodies,” 135-169.
2 4 “In the eighteenth century, the table was both a technique of power and a procedure
of knowledge. It was a question of organizing the multiple, of providing oneself with
an instrument to cover it and master it; it was a question of imposing upon it an
‘order’” (Foucault, Discipline 148).
2 3 “Parliamentary Intelligence,” The Times [London], 25 Nov. 1800: 3.
2 6 Rickman, “Thoughts on the Utility and Facility of ascertaining the Population of
England,” reprinted in Glass, Numbering the People, 108.
2 7 These instructions are reprinted in Guide to Census Reports, 15.
2 8 The 1801 census provided three categories for “Personal Occupation”: Agriculture;
Trade, Manufacture, Handicraft; and Other. When the returns showed nearly half the
population as “Other,” changes were instituted for the next census. In 1811 and in
1821, “Family Occupation,” was used instead of “Personal Occupation,” though the
same categories were used. In 1831, “Personal Occupation” was again collected,
though only for males who were twenty years of age and older. Ten categories were
provided, and one of the categories (persons employed in retail trade or in handicraft)
listed 100 subcategories and a blank space for those trades not listed. Because of this,
in London some 426 different trades were enumerated (Drake 44-5). The collection of
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occupational statistics and the use of the “Family Occupation” category is further
discussed in Chapter 3.
2 9 For more on the question of attribution and property in Wordsworth, see Jack
Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth o f Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1991), 69-120, and Susan Eilenberg, Strange Power o f Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge
and Literary Possession (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992).
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Chapter 2
The Unaccountable Knot and the Unknowable
If an undercount refers to people who were not counted, how does
anyone know that they exist, let alone their numbers?”
—Harvey M. Choldin, Looking for the Last Percent: The
Controversy over Census Undercounts
If the taking of a national census is an epistemological act aimed at controlling
the people through gaining knowledge of them, it would seem that to avoid being
counted is to escape government supervision and discipline. While appealing to a
certain romanticized view of iconoclastic behavior (and a paranoid view o f
government), such a view neglects the very real use to which the numbers are put. To
be counted in the census is to be someone who counts, someone who matters.
Contrary to William Thornton’s hyperbolic vow to avoid the census, cooperation with
the census was rarely a problem except among those classes of people who historically
have not counted: women, minorities, the poor, the homeless. Michael Drake notes
that only 15 of the 125 London registrars requested police escorts during the 1841
census, and The Times reported that “in most of the parishes in and around the
metropolis very little difficulty was experienced by the enumerators in obtaining
popular returns, with the exception of certain portions inhabited by the lower orders”
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(22). There were of course no reports of prominent citizens or wealthy landowners
instructing their servants to pitch the enumerator into the local horse pond, but there
were also few reports or complaints of undercounting affecting any segment of the
population.
Census officials everywhere admit the possibility of undercounting, but what
they are reluctant to admit is that some segments of the population are more liable not
to be counted than others. The impact of race and class on the seemingly simple act of
enumeration has created a politics of counting which achieved widespread prominence
in the United States when the mayors of Detroit and New York, alleging an
undercount, sued the federal government following the 1980 census. Anticipating
another undercount in 1990, a large coalition of cities, states and minority interest
groups filed a class action lawsuit in 1988. In both cases the plaintiffs alleged that there
existed a knowledge, and a tacit acceptance, of the fact that certain groups—
specifically poor, urban, and minority populations—were undercounted.1 The
implication was that in the eyes of the government certain people did not count, that
some segments of the population could become or remain opaque knots of humanity,
whether it be the faceless slum-dwellers of a modem American city or the
undifferentiated “knot” of gypsies found in Wordsworth’s poem “Gipsies.” However,
while not being counted is tantamount to not counting in the social or political sense,
not being counted also renders one unaccountable, unknown, and in a certain sense
unknowable, a source of power or of panic. Written within a few years of the first
British national census, the “Gipsies” described by Wordsworth are just such a segment
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of the population, differentiated from the mainstream by the color of their skin and
reduced to a “knot” that is both inconsequential and yet dangerous. Contained and yet
ultimately unknowable, these “tawny wanderers” (as Coleridge called them) occasion a
kind of epistemological panic in Wordsworth, who seeks to account for the
unknowable through specificity and measurement and yet simultaneously courts the
unknowable as a source of his power as a poet.
Based on the poem, the poet’s encounter with the gypsies was anything but
fortuitous for either the reputation of gypsies or of Wordsworth. David Simpson, who
has written at length on the poem, states that “Gipsies” has been “judged a terrible
poem by a great poet,” “an embarrassment,” a poem that most critics “might wish had
never been written by Wordsworth” (Wordsworth's 25). The encounter between the
gypsies and the poet occasions a surprisingly elevated meditation on the idleness of
vagrants set against the vast active machinery of the cosmos. While everything that
loves the sun is out of doors and working, while even “the stars have tasks,” the
gypsies “have none.” It is this emphasis on the division between productive labor,
unproductive labor, and outright idleness that Simpson unpacks in a marvelously dense
reading of the poem’s language and context. What seemed to interest Simpson initially
was the hyperbolic, quasi-hysterical tone of the poem. For Simpson, the hyperbolic
tone and the extravagant diction are fractures in the surface of the poem through which
one can examine Wordsworth’s underlying anxieties. In Simpson’s first analysis, these
anxieties center on questions of labor and property. In a subsequent examination,
Simpson points to questions of gender and sexuality as another source of anxiety. In
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both cases the anxiety marks the location where sociohistorical circumstances have
been displaced.
Simpson begins his first extended treatment of “Gipsies” with an examination of
the hyperbolic tone of the poem, a tone which he initially attributes to the presence of a
dramatized speaker, and one no less than Satan himself. Pointing to echoes of Paradise
Lost, Simpson recasts the poem as a Luciferic speech, the poet’s own anxieties
displaced into the convenient form of Satanic outsider: “This reflexively locates the
gypsies as a paradisal society; they occupy the same position for the speaker as do
Adam and Eve for Satan . . . Looking again at the opening of Wordsworth’s poem, we
may now read behind the mood of outrage to notice that the gypsies are an ‘unbroken
knot’ of human beings - a society self-contained, integrated, paradisal. Wordsworth
too thus implies both a contempt for and an envy of a community wherein there is no
sign of restlessness, vaulting ambition, or change . . . But the truly infernal predicament
may well be that of the peripheral narrator . . . For him, the knot is broken”
(Wordsworth's 33). For Simpson, the speaker’s relationship to the gypsy community is
uncomfortably ambivalent in that the seemingly unproductive life of the gypsies, the
life of idleness and wandering that the gypsies represent, approximates the life of the
speaker himself. The gypsies are outside the conventions of normal society and seem
not to share the values of that society. This subjects them to the “self-righteous
bombast” of the Wordsworthian speaker (33), the very ferocity of which marks a
moment of displacement. Simpson unpacks this moment by reading the “unbroken
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knot” used to describe the gypsy community as a figuration for a “self-contained,
integrated, paradisal” society.
Simpson attributes this mixture of fear and desire to Wordsworth’s anxieties over
his “labor” as a poet and the “property” represented either by his labor or his poems. In
short, a poem like “Gipsies” expresses Wordsworth’s uncertainty as to whether he is
laboring man and thus by contemporary standards a virtuous man, or whether he is, as
Hazlitt called him, “the prince of poetic idlers.” Thus Simpson attributes the
overheated rhetoric of “Gipsies” to Wordsworth’s liminality, his occupation of the
precarious territory between the working community and the idle gypsies, and his fear
of being associated with the latter. In a subsequent essay, Simpson attempts to
incorporate the issue of gender into his analysis of the poem. The structure of the
analysis remains the same, with Wordsworth ambivalently occupying a liminal space
between a desired and feared community. The difference is that questions of sexuality
instead of economy serve to distinguish the two communities. Now, whereas Simpson
is undoubtedly correct in identifying vocational concerns in Wordsworth and in stating
that “Sexuality is indeed everywhere in [Wordsworth’s] poetry,”J both his readings of
“Gipsies” rely on reading a knot as a solution to a problem and not as the problem
itself. Only by undoing the knot and making it knowable can Simpson unravel the
mystery and opacity of the “Gipsies.” This is not just an issue of interpretative license,
but one embedded in the historical-materialist method itself and its often torturous and
occasionally ambivalent relationship with the concept of truth and the desire for
knowability.
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Early in Wordsworth’ s Historical Imagination, Simpson argues for the
embeddedness of Wordsworth’s concept of the imagination in sociohistorical
circumstances. Using what he characterizes as a materialist approach, Simpson
attempts to show how the material conditions and positions impinge upon and are
sometimes elided from Wordsworth’s poetry. However, what is of interest here is not
so much the rich and often highly suggestive historical contexts brought forward by
Simpson, but rather the power and privilege accorded to history itself. In language
alternately assertive and uncertain, Simpson proposes history as a counter-term to
theory, and suggests that history might be a way out of theory. He characterizes current
literary criticism as dominated by theory and the theoretical. It is “a ‘theoretical’ time”
in which “commitment to theory has assumed a hegemonic form .. . often
characterized by an aspiration toward totality’ '' (12). What Simpson proposes to set
against this rising tide of hegemonic totalizing theory are facts, both social and
historical. Given this emphasis on facts (and the perceived existence of such facts), it
is not surprising that his description o f his method resonates with the language of
positivism: “A materialist literary criticism must, then, rely always upon an argued
objectivity for its forms of analysis, but it must always resist the temptation to present
them as total, or finished, or beyond modification” (16-17). This formulation is telling
in a number of ways. What is arguably objective about materialist literary criticism are
“its forms of analysis,” forms that presuppose the stability of material facts. This is set
against the “temptation” presented by theory, a temptation—to borrow from one of
Simpson’s own sources—that seems to recall the temptation of Adam and Eve.
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Though patently unfair, it is also difficult not to see this description as gendered, the
“masculine” objective analytical critic attempting to “resist the temptation” and
seductions of a totalizing and potentially emasculating “feminine” theory.
The problems with such an opposition are manifold and are made even more
untenable through a naive association of history with substantial facticity and theory
with empty totality. In this way the material “facts” of history are seen as providing the
stable ground o f textual interpretation. What remains surprisingly unproblematic in
this formulation is the basic epistemological act which associates that which can be
perceived with that which can be known, or ontological presence with epistemological
certainty. In short, Simpson’s opposition between what he calls history and what he
calls theory is founded on the assumption that there exists within an area of knowledge
called history certain fixed and stable entities called facts, and that those facts have
attained an objective status free of an ideological position and independent of an
epistemological structure. While he is always aware of the difficulties, the implication
seems to be that there is a position outside of those many readers and critics who “now
approach literature from the perspective of theory” (17), as if through the objective
world of facts one could approach literature from a perspective free from any theory, or
more accurately, as if the very notion of what constitutes a fact could be cognized
outside of any theory which determined what entity counted as a fact and what entity
did not.4 In effect, while Simpson consistently denies the possibility of totalizing
readings, the strength and assertiveness of his own readings continually risk becoming
totalizing readings, and the argued objectivity of his method implies that this would not
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be a bad thing. If there is a fault here it is in the seemingly inevitable desire of the
critic to undo the knot, and in Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology, we find one
of the most direct recitations of this desire rendered as duty and obligation.
Given his ethical reliance on the concept of false consciousness, McGann’s faith
in the facticity and objectivity of history is striking, and his commitment to a language
of empiricism is often evident. Early in his discussion of current literary criticism,
McGann offers the following synopsis of the problem: “Commentators observe what
appears to be the same subject matter and yet come away from it with conflicting
representations of what they have seen. Sometimes this happens because the critic
neglects to study all the data offered by his subject” (24). Like scientists, literary
critics “observe” the “subject matter” that is being investigated, “and yet” unlike
scientists whose representations of the subject matter supposedly agree, the literary
critics form “conflicting representations” o f the “matter” that “they have seen.” There
is an obsessive concern in this sentence over perception and observation, over seeing
and its relationship to facticity and truth. The literary text is “matter” and is thus
knowable or measurable in some supposedly conventional ways. It is “data” that is
“offered” by the subject of investigation, a curiously benign figuring of the aggressive
and often intrusive practice of literary analysis. Of course, the question remains,
“What is all the data?”
What is more to the point is that this “problem” reads like a fairly normative
description of the reading process. According to this formulation, the “problem” with
current literary criticism is that there are too many readers reading texts in idiosyncratic
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and unscientific ways. Quite simply, the “problem” is one of discipline and
determinism and McGann’s solution is to redefine what counts as criticism: “Because
the persuasive power of criticism rests ultimately on the rigor of its intellectual
operations, its own judgments gain authority only when they are presented in a severe
critical medium of their own. We may take it as a rule, then, that any criticism which
abolishes the distance between its own (present) setting and its (removed) subject
matter—any criticism which argues an unhistorical symmetry between the practicing
critic and the descending work—will be, to that extent, undermined as criticism” (30).
First McGann claims that the true “power” of critical discourse depends upon rigor and
severity, and that it is only through such disciplined discourse that one achieves
“authority.” This emphasis on rigor and severity recalls the language of Paul de Man,
an odd conjunction unless one recalls Frances Ferguson’s provocative discussion of the
way in which McGann and de Man “both resolve interpretative issues in favor of an
insistence on a more explicit (McGann) or a more covert (de Man) empiricism”
(iSolitude and the Sublime 168). Following this disciplinary assertion of “authority,”
McGann interjects a “rule” that effectively will discriminate between good and bad
criticism, a rule that purportedly follows from his first generalization, but which
follows only contingently and not necessarily. Later, McGann follows this
discrimination of good and bad criticism with a disingenuous denial o f the purport of
his own words, when he states that he is “not suggesting here that the ideological
polemic of criticism should be sacrificed to a (spurious) critical objectivity” (30), but
that does seem to be what he is suggesting. Through the invocation of historical
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circumstances and conditions which are somehow objective and free of ideological
material, McGann’s literary criticism purports to provide us “a brief objective glimpse
at our world and our selves” (66).
Clearly, McGann’s call for an escape from Romantic ideology was both timely
and long overdue. What is not so clear is how an historical-materialist method can be
said to be outside of an ideology, or if not outside so aware of its own ideology that it
can account for it and make the necessary adjustments. As Clifford Siskin has pointed
out, “In returning poetry to a human form [McGann, 160], with an emphasis on
‘concrete, human particulars’ ([McGann,] 11), McGann’s kind o f knowledge
reproduces a particular form o f the human” (59), one seemingly with pretensions to
universality. In short, rather than providing a stable foundation of objective facts to
ground literary criticism, the interjection of history into literary criticism creates an
additional level (or kind) of instability and complexity which can only be resolved
through attention to the historicity of those “objective facts.” In the case of
Wordsworth’s “Gipsies,” while untying that unbroken knot into its separate historical
threads provides many insights into the poem, the process of untying transforms the
knot into a «or-knot. What I want to examine here is the effect of leaving the knot as a
knot, an opaque undifferentiated tangle that marks the not of otherness.
“Gipsies” was originally published in Wordsworth’s 1807 edition of Poems, in
Two Volumes, and a careful examination of the placement of the poem reveals that it is
possible that Wordsworth was aware of some of the problems that would face the
readers of “Gipsies,” and that he hoped to soften the harshness of the poem through
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attention to the poem’s context. “Gipsies” was placed in the subsection titled “Moods
of My Own Mind” in Poems, in Two Volumes. As printed in 1807, this subsection
consisted of thirteen poems. In the introduction to the Cornell Wordsworth edition of
the 1807 Poems, Jared Curtis points out that the “Moods of My Own Mind” subsection
initially consisted of only ten poems, and the later addition of three poems into this
subsection caused problems in the ordering of the poems. Thus the order of the poems
as printed in 1807 did not agree with the order intended by Wordsworth, at least as far
as that intent was recorded. The three added poems were “I wandered lonely as a
cloud,” “Who fancied what a pretty sight,” and “Gipsies.” The following shows the
order of the poems as intended by Wordsworth and the actual order of the poems as
printed in 1807:
Intended by W ordsworth Printed in 1807
1. To a Butterfly To a Butterfly
2. [The Sun has long been set] [The Sun has long been set]
[O Nightingale! thou surely art] [O Nightingale! thou surely art]
4. [My heart leaps up when I behold] [My heart leaps up when I behold]
5. Written in March Written in March
6. [I wandered lonely as a Cloud] The Small Celandine
7. [Who fancied what a pretty sight] [I wandered lonely as a Cloud]
8. The Small Celandine [Who fancied what a pretty sight]
9. Gipsies The Sparrow’s Nest
10. The Sparrow’s Nest Gipsies
11. To the Cuckoo To the Cuckoo
12. To a Butterfly To a Butterfly
13. [It is no Spirit who from Heaven] [It is no Spirit who from Heaven]
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One interesting result of this error is that in the printed version, “Gipsies” follows “The
Sparrow’s Nest” instead of “The Small Celandine.” While this change appears minor,
the effect of these different contexts on the reading of the poems is quite startling.
The shift in tone between “The Sparrow’s Nest” and “Gipsies” is abrupt, even
unsettling, and could not have worked in favor of the latter. Like most of the “Moods
of My Own Mind” poems, “The Sparrow’s Nest” begins with a very specific
perception, “five blue eggs are gleaming there,” specific in number, color, substance,
quality, and location. The location receives further specification when we Ieam that
“there” refers to
The home and shelter’d bed,
The Sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by
My Father’s House, in wet or dry,
My Sister Emmeline and I
Together visited. (6-10)
The close conjunction of the sparrow’s nest and “My Father’s House” seems to imply
that this is a poem about domestic arrangements, a remembrance of a past domestic
idyll that would soon be shattered by the death of Wordsworth’s father and the
dispersal of the Wordsworth children. The specificity of the description points to a
need for establishing particulars, as if particular details of location could establish a
place as fixed and rooted.
However, the poem does not end there. The second stanza records Emmeline’s
reaction to the sparrow’s nest, a reaction that mixes desire and fear. Emmeline “look’d
at it as if she fear’d it; / Still wishing, dreading to be near it” (11-12), and this response
seems to recall to the poet the fragility of domestic arrangements. Thus instead of
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closing with a reiteration of the joys of domestic bliss, the poem concludes with a
recognition of the child’s power to be moved by lack of certainty, by the charms of
mystery itself. This theme is picked up in “To the Cuckoo,” the poem that was
supposed to follow “The Sparrow’s Nest,” which praises the cuckoo as an “invisible
Thing,/A voice, a mystery” (15-16), and blesses the bird for making “the earth we
pace” appear to be “An unsubstantial, faery place” (29-31).
Despite what Wordsworth intended, the published volume of 1807 was quite
different. As the manuscript evidence makes clear, Emmeline was Dorothy
Wordsworth, and “The Sparrow’s Nest” closes with one of Wordsworth’s sweetest
acknowledgments of his sister’s care expressed in simple, almost childlike language:
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy. (17-20)
Here Dorothy’s responses are figured as gifts to her brother, the gifts of childlike
responsiveness and of sympathy. In the 1807 printed text, this passage is followed by
the terse and self-righteous opening lines of “Gipsies,” creating a disquieting shift of
language and tone that accentuates the underlying nastiness of “Gipsies.”
Yet are they here?—the same unbroken knot
Of human Beings, in the self-same spot!
Men, Women, Children, yea the frame
Of the whole Spectacle the same!
Only their fire seems bolder, yielding light:
Now deep and red, the colouring of night;
That on their Gipsy-faces falls,
Their bed of straw and blanket-walls.
—Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours, are gone while I
Have been a Traveller under open sky,
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Much witnessing of change and chear,
Yet as I left I find them here! (1-12)
Instead of the specificity of the “five blue eggs” we have an undifferentiated “knot / Of
human Beings,” and in place of the “home and shelter’d bed” we have “their bed of
straw and blanket-walls.” There is here no meditation on the fragility of domestic
arrangements to soften the speaker’s disgust at the gypsy life. The order of these poems
as printed in 1807 serves to isolate and highlight the harshness of the speaker’s
judgment by seeming to contradict the gifts he has received from his sister, the gifts of
humility and sympathy, the gift of “A heart, the fountain o f sweet tears.” Perhaps,
Emmeline should have accompanied her brother on this particular excursion.
When the printed order of these poems is compared to Wordsworth’s intended
order, it becomes clear how important these contexts are. Wordsworth had intended
that “The Small Celandine” precede “Gipsies.” In “The Small Celandine,” the focus is
on the unusual behavior of the celandine or pilewort, and the equally unusual reaction
of the poet. After observing that the pilewort is subject to age, the poet concludes:
And, in my spleen, I smiled that it was grey.
To be a Prodigal’s Favorite—then, worse truth,
A Miser’s Pensioner—behold our lot!
Man! that from thy fair and shining youth
Age might but take the things Youth needed not! (20-24)
Apparently, Wordsworth has forgotten his promise to “think of the Leech-gatherer on
the lonely moor,” for the mood at the end of this poem is surprisingly like the “dim
sadness” and the recurring “fear that kills” that troubles the speaker in “Resolution and
Independence.” The poet is splenetic and fatalistic. In addition, the last stanza is set off
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from the rest of the poem by a sudden elevation in diction and a shift to a more
complex syntactical structure. The stilted imperative “behold our lot! / O Man!” echoes
the impassioned language of many of the 1807 sonnets, particularly the “Sonnets
Dedicated to Liberty,” and approaches bathos when one recalls that this exclamation
was brought forth by a consideration of the pilewort. There is also a peculiar economy
at work here. In the poem “To the Small Celandine” which appears earlier in the
collection, the celandine is praised as “a careless Prodigal” (30), ready to tell “tales
about the sun, / When we’ve little warmth, or none” (31-32). While in that earlier
poem the celandine’s prodigality, its willingness to give, is what makes it the subject of
praise, in “The Small Celandine” age and time eventually reduce the prodigal to
scarcity, the lot of the “Miser’s Pensioner.” The celandine becomes an emblem of a
boom and bust economy, and careless giving leads not to praise but censure when
abundance turns to scarcity.
From this rather perverse enjoyment of the sufferings of the pilewort, it is a very
short step to the petulant uneasiness that marks the beginning of “Gipsies”:
Yet are they here?— the same unbroken knot
Of human Beings, in the self-same spot!
Men, Women, Children, yea the frame
Of the whole Spectacle the same! (1-4)
The negation “not” which closed “The Small Celandine” is picked up the homonymous
“knot” of gypsies. I will examine this negation in greater detail later. For now, it is
enough to notice the consistency of style and tone between the last stanza of “The
Small Celandine” and “Gipsies,” a consistency which seems to imply that both poems
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represent a similar “mood” of the poet’s mind. In addition, both poems reflect the
anxiety occasioned by the economy of prodigality and scarcity. One possible source of
the speaker’s petulance towards the gypsies is that the common perception of gypsies
was that they were both prodigals and pensioners. David Mayall summarizes the early
nineteenth century conception of gypsies as “alleging they did not perform ‘real’ work
but rather occupied themselves with as little toil as was compatible with survival.”
Mayall concludes that gypsies “were thought to be idle, parasitical, and beggarly, with
no belief in the value of work” (46). As I mentioned earlier, it is this disgust at, fear of
being associated with, and secret envy of the gypsies that Simpson identifies as the
source of the harsh and hyperbolic language that marks the poet’s anxieties. Also, that
the speaker has been active for “twelve bounteous hours” while the gypsies have been
idle echoes the fear of waste expressed in the conclusion of “The Small Celandine.”
When I refer to the harshness of “Gipsies,” I am referring both to the unfeeling
and self-righteous attitude of the speaker and to the incongruity between the poem’s
language and subject. Coleridge notes both of these characteristics in his criticism of
“Gipsies”: “the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny wanderers might
probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and
mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves, their
children and cattle, for one whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such
repose might be quite necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was
pleasing and healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a series
of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather above, than below
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the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for
thirty centuries” (Biographia Literaria 2: 137). This latter characteristic was called
“mental bombast” by Coleridge, and not surprisingly “Gipsies” was one of the
examples he selected from Wordsworth’s poetry.5 Coleridge rebukes Wordsworth both
for his ungracious attitude as well as for his diction and imagery. What troubles
Coleridge about this poem is the quantitative mismatch between the rhetorical
machinery of the second stanza and the trivial subject of the poem, a disproportion that
Simpson designates as a sign of displacement. However, the emphasis on the “mental
bombast” of the second stanza has obscured some of the interesting assumptions which
underlie the first stanza, assumptions concerning what is available for poetic
manipulation and appropriation. In addition, the charge of “mental bombast” has
meaning only when the subject matter is trivial, an assumption that appears to apply to
“Gipsies” but which, as Simpson has shown, can be made problematic by closer
examination.
In a letter to Lady Beaumont dated 21 May 1807, Wordsworth attempted to
combat the charge of triviality which had been leveled at Poems, in Two Volumes by
insisting that the various subdivisions of poems be read as integrated units. O f “Moods
of My Own Mind” he thought that “taken collectively” the poems fixed “attention upon
a subject eminently poetical, viz., the interest which objects in nature derive from the
predominance of certain affections more or less permanent, more or less capable of
salutary renewal in the mind of the being contemplating these objects?” (MY 1: 147).
Wordsworth’s emphasis on collectivity over individuality actually runs counter to the
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emphasis on numerability which characterizes the individual poems. What is striking
about this description is the focus on “objects in nature” and the implied opposition
established between such objects and the “mind of the being contemplating” those
objects. Clearly, the object in nature is passive and subject to observation and
appropriation, and in fact only exists for the “salutary renewal” of the contemplating
mind. When that object in nature is a butterfly (or two), or a small celandine, or a
rainbow, or a nightingale, or a cuckoo, or some daffodils (these are some of the
occasioning objects of the “Moods” poems), this process of observation and
appropriation seems altogether natural and benign. However when the object of nature
turns out to be human then the process o f observation and appropriation seems to take
on an insidious quality.
In addition, this emphasis on objects in nature calls attention to the depopulated
landscape of the thirteen “Moods of My Own Mind” poems. With the exception of two
brief appearances by “Emmeline” (the Dorothy figure) and the appearance of laborers
in “Written in March,” the only human presence in this sequence of poems is the poet
himself and the gypsies. This encounter between the contemplating mind and the
gypsies points up the essentially disciplinary nature of contemplation and observation,
and the anxiety occasioned by the recognition of the limitations of observation. What
makes this disciplinary nature suddenly seem present (it always was present), is the
application of the poet’s gaze to other human beings. To get at this anxiety, we can
begin by asking quite simply, how does the poet know that the gypsies have been idle
for “twelve bounteous hours”? For the past twelve hours the poet has been “a Traveller
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under open sky” and has not been observing the gypsies, and unlike a pilewort a gypsy
is not necessarily sedentary. Indeed, the accusation is more often the opposite, as
Mayall points out when he states that antipathy towards the gypsies “was rooted in a
long-standing conflict between the traveling and sedentary ways of life” (3). Thus, part
of the anxiety registered in “Gipsies” is the recognition that observation requires the
continued presence of the observer and the observed.
While this appears to be a trivial objection, it does point out an assumption
underlying the question which opens the poem, “Yet are they here?” This question only
has meaning if this encounter is a repetition of an earlier encounter, an encounter which
has been elided by its repetition. To put it simply, how does the poet know that these
are the same gypsies that he saw earlier? His evidence is given in the first four lines:
Yet are they here?—the same unbroken knot
Of human Beings, in the self-same spot!
Men, Women, Children, yea the frame
Of the whole Spectacle the same!
Identity is established between the two different encounters by the sameness of the
physical configuration of people (“same unbroken knot”), the same ness of the location
(“self-same spot”), and the sameness of “the frame.” In each case the identity is
explicitly marked as the “same” and this insistence on sameness seems to call that very
sameness into question, or at least render it as an experience of the uncanny. And what
does it mean that the “frame” is the same? Does “frame” refer to the delimiting
margins of this observation? the structure of this experience? the cognitive schema? the
state of mind of the observer? It is unclear, though it seems that “frame” refers to the
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observer and not to the observed, so that any sameness attributed to this observation
might be due to the identity of the observer and not to a repetition of the observation.
The intent of this line of inquiry has been to focus on what can’t be known about
the gypsies. If while “a Traveller under open sky” the poet has witnessed a great deal of
“change and chear,” why must the gypsies have remained static, why must they have
remained an unbroken knot? One reason is that they are cognizable only as an
unbroken knot, only as a multitude abstracted into a unity, or perhaps a collectivity like
that represented by the Moods poems, which eradicates the individual members of the
multitude. The knot is the sign of an unreadable distinction between plural and singular
or an absence of form. In other words, when I asked how we know these to be the same
gypsies, I could ask the question only because the poem fails to differentiate adequately
this unbroken knot of gypsies from any other unbroken knot of gypsies. This might be
a subtle form of racism or an overt case of egotism. What is clear is that by collapsing
the “Men, Women, Children” into an unbroken knot, there is no longer any need to
note the number of men, women and children, nor is there any need to mark their
individual “gipsy-faces.” The totalizing sign of the image so completely subsumes the
identities of the individuals that we need to be reminded that they are “human Beings.”
We need to be reminded that this is a knot of human beings because gypsies were
commonly depicted as not human at all. Mayall notes that in racist discourse gypsies
were deemed “nearer to animals” than any other race in Europe (80), and
Wordsworth’s image of this knot of people with their bold fire and their beds of straw
does nothing to contradict this perception. While questions of economy and of
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productive and unproductive labor certainly figure in this depiction, Wordsworth’s
poems are full of beggars who aren’t made the subject of a lecture on idleness. The
story of “The Female Vagrant,” her inability to frame her tongue to “the Beggar’s
language” (189) and the dismal picture of charity “Now coldly given, now utterly
refused” (256), is in many ways a call for greater charity, as are the stories of Goody
Blake and Alice Fell. “The Old Cumberland Beggar” becomes the occasion for the
quintessential Wordsworthian assertion that “man is dear to man” (140), because “we
have all of us one human heart” (146). “The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale” is celebrated as
both prodigal and pensioner, who in good times gave to the poor “the best that he had”
(19), and in bad times, when forced to beg for himself, found others ready to give.
Clearly the problem isn’t the beggarly life, nor is it a question of honest or dishonest
begging. Indeed, despite the fact that the farmer of Tilsbury Vale acquired a great deal
of charity and then “Turn’d his back on his country” (36), Wordsworth admonishes the
reader who would say of the fanner “O the merciless Jew!” (37).6 The farmer escapes
this epithet because as Wordsworth warns his readers, the farmer “was never more
cruel than you” (38). This warning calls attention not to how these beggars differ from
Wordsworth and his readers, but to how they are the same, their shared possession of
English faults and English values, and their shared inclusion in the English race.
The “poor tawny wanderers” that Coleridge attempts to sympathize with and the
“Gipsy-faces” given the “colouring of night” by their bold fires are unremarkable in
their difference from one another and their difference from other travelers. The
darkness of their skin marks them as gypsies and differentiates them from the English
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vagrants that people Wordsworth’s poems. As this brief survey shows, each of these
English beggars is differentiated from the others by their stories, the histories of woe
that render them fit objects of sympathy and charity. However, when gypsies speak,
they lie. The regal gypsy woman with face “of Egyptian brown” who confronts the poet
in “The Beggars,” pours out “sorrows like the sea; / Grief after grief:—on English
Land / Such woes I knew could never be” (14-16). What marks this beggar is her
otherness, her inability to frame her tongue to a proper tale of woe fit for an English
beggar on English land. Unable to be properly English, this gypsy beggar is cast out,
though it is also clear that no matter how she might properly fit her tongue to the
appropriate “Beggar’s language,” she would remain outside because of her race. As
Wordsworth makes clear in the new conclusion to “Gipsies” which he added in 1820,
gypsies “are what their birth / And breeding suffers them to be; / Wild outcasts of
society!” (26-28).
The gypsies depicted in “Gipsies” have no story to tell and it is just such a
silence that Coleridge attempts to fill with his explanation of the gypsies’ idleness. In
their silence and “colouring of night” they have no existence other than as a knot, an
undifferentiated mass of human beings. Lacking individuation they are not available
for the type of government inspection exemplified by the taking of a national census. In
fact, like most people who avoid or are missed by the census, gypsies had every reason
to avoid contact with the government. The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1596 had declared
gypsies as a race to be rogues and vagabonds and thus subject to prosecution. The
Justices Commitment Act of 1743 had extended this prosecution to anyone living the
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gypsy life. While the Egyptians Act of 1783 repealed many of the more draconian
aspects of this persecution, the gypsies and their vagrant life remained the subject of
many local prosecutions, and the Vagrancy Acts of 1822 and 1824 reinstated many of
the harsh restrictions repealed in 1783. One such local prosecution shows clearly why
gypsies would want to remain invisible to the government. In 1799, the Sussex General
Quarter Sessions of the Peace, in response to “the great number of Gypsies and other
Vagrants of different descriptions infesting this County,” ordered “that if any Gypsies
or other Vagrants of whatever description, should be found therein . . . they will be
punished as the Law directs.” The order further specified that “if any Constables, or
other Peace Officers after this Notice shall neglect or refuse so to do, they will be
immediately preceded against and punished with the utmost vigour that may be by Law
for such neglect or refusal” (quoted in Mayall 151). Since to be identified as a gypsy
was to risk being fined or imprisoned, it seems likely that the gypsy population would
want to remain a mysterious and unknown entity despite the government’s attempt to
count the people.
But as the plaintiffs in the recent spate of lawsuits against the United States
government allege, undercounting can also be a government strategy for under
representing or even denying the existence o f certain types of people. If only a cursory
attempt is made to count the homeless population of a large American city, then the
resulting statistics could end up “proving” that homelessness really is not as much of a
problem as people believe it is. If very little attempt is made to count the gypsy or the
migrant or the slum-dwelling or the “unproductive” poor population, then the resulting
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statistics could end up “proving” that such populations are not really as large as people
perceive them to be, or perhaps that such populations do not really exist at all. As
sociologist Harvey Choldin says of recent U.S. censuses, if an alleged undercount
“refers to people who were not counted, how does anyone know that they exist, let
alone their numbers?” (42).
Whether undercounting is produced by the desire o f certain classes o f people to
avoid being counted or by the desire of governments or certain other classes of people
to deny that some people exist at all, the net result is that a certain segment o f the
population is denied an empirical existence. While the 1753 debate on a proposed
census raised concerns over the powerlessness of the people to avoid being counted,
not being counted or not being worthy enough to be counted has come to be the true
mark of powerlessness. But despite their lack of political power, those uncounted
multitudes lay claim to a certain sublime power in that their physical presence (and
statistical absence) produces a space of unknowability on the margins of
epistemological certainty. If, as Benedict Anderson states, the “fiction of the census is
that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear
place” (166), the uncounted and perhaps unaccountable multitude prove that fiction to
be a fiction. If ontological presence maps to epistemological certainty and numerability
maps to accountability, then the possibility of numerical instability produced by the
presence of that which is not or cannot be counted could produce a kind of
epistemological panic. For Michel Foucault, this panic is both creative of and created
by the emerging technologies of “discipline,” of which the census is merely one. In
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language similar to Anderson’s, Foucault notes that discipline assumes that “each
individual has his own place; and each place its individual,” and that the purpose of
such discipline is to make legible such absent and illegible populations as the gypsies:
“One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled
disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous
coagulation; it was a tactic of anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, and anti-concentration.
Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate
individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each
moment to supervise the conduct of the individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate
its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and
using. Discipline organizes an analytical space” {Discipline 143). It is because of the
threat of such diffuse circulation and dangerous coagulation that Wordsworth asserts
the sameness of his two encounters with the gypsies, and it is against such a threat that
he directs his petulance. If the fiction of the census is that it organizes an analytical
space and enables “knowing, mastering and using,” the uncounted gypsies represent
that which remains unstructured—diffuse, dangerous, unknown, and perhaps sublime.
The Kantian aesthetic sublime represents an attempt to contain the unknowable
within structure. The possibility' of such unstructured experiences occasions for Kant
the aesthetic category of the sublime, which by Kant’s definition is the sensation
produced when the classifying and categorizing mind encounters that which exceeds
the mind’s ability to classify and categorize. While Foucault’s disciplines focus on the
paranoid (or ecstatic) fantasies of totalization, Kant’s aesthetic sublime serves as a
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curious abjection of those experiences that defy totalization, those experiences that lead
to a conflict between the Imagination’s attempt “to progress toward infinity” and the
Reason’s demand for “absolute totality as a real idea” (Critique o f Judgment 106). The
Kantian category of the sublime then gives structure to the unstructured experience,
names and locates the “abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself’ (115),
and makes the unaccountable accountable, if only to the idea of unaccountability. The
poet’s encounter with gypsies, while seemingly no subject for the sublime, calls forth
the machinery of the sublime, or more specifically what Kant calls the mathematical
sublime, to defuse the dangerous coagulation and contain the diffuse circulation of a
knot of gypsies.
The desire awakened in Wordsworth by the gypsies is the desire for pattern and
order, for knowability through accountability. Most of the poems in “Moods of My
Own Mind” deal with singular entities such as a particular butterfly or cuckoo bird or
rainbow. These singular entities are knowable because they are countable and thus
fixed and locatable. Even when the poems deal with multitudes, they are fixed
multitudes such as the “five blue eggs” found in “The Sparrow’s Nest,” or they are
countable multitudes such as the daffodils found in the most famous “Moods of My
Own Mind” poems. In “Gipsies” we have no such movement towards increased
specificity. The “knot” of gypsies remains opaque and unavailable for individuation or
counting of its members. It is an absolute totality that contains a multitude, but the cost
is that they remain uncounted and therefore unaccountable. The knot of gypsies is also
always—to pick up the homonymous last word of the poem which was supposed to
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precede “Gipsies”—the “not” of gypsies, the otherness of a community that is outside
of community, and outside of the epistemological control of the poet. It is the “not” of
the “knot” that occasions epistemological panic, as in the ninth book of The Prelude,
where Wordsworth, the newly arrived tourist, encounters a world which his
understanding cannot pierce:
I star’d and listen’d with a stranger’s ears
To Hawkers and Haranguers, hubbub wild!
And hissing Factionalists with ardent-eyes,
In knots, or pairs, or single, ant-like swarms
Of Builders and Subverters, every face
That hope or apprehension could put on,
Joy, anger, and vexation in the midst
Of gaiety and dissolute idleness. (1805, 9:55-62)
The social rifts produced by and producing Revolutionary ferment give rise to the
language of “knots” as negation and confused seemingly undifferentiated difference.
While these faces are differentiated, they remain curiously opaque in that the
differences don’t appear to provide any clue to anyone’s motive, politics or position.
The desire is for increased specificity as Wordsworth notices “pairs” and then “single”
people, but this immediately degenerates back into the undifferentiated mass of the
“ant-like swarm.” The knots of people seem only capable of marking what cannot be
known, the knowledge that remains outside of what the English tourist can understand.
If the “knot” is also the “not” which cannot be known, then perhaps the
epistemological panic produced by the “knot of gipsies” accounts for the elaborate
cosmological machinery of the second stanza. Simpson has provided an excellent
compendium of the sources o f the heightened language and imagery, which he traces to
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Milton. The second stanza is devoted to demonstrating the presence of pattern, order,
and purpose in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, movements that are
carefully coordinated and fixed in time. First the sun sets, then the evening star rises,
then one hour later the moon rises, and then the dangerous multitude o f stars is
rendered safe by the imposition of identities and tasks. If we assume that the idleness
of a band of gypsies is the only occasioning force behind all this, then Coleridge seems
justified in his remark that the elaborate rhetoric “would have been rather above, tban
below the mark, had [it] been applied to the immense empire of China improgressive
for thirty centuries.” If, however, the gypsies occasion both the subtle racism of
undifferentiated “gipsy-faces” and a recognition of the cost in knowability that such
totalizing signs produce, then the elaborate rhetoric can be seen as necessary to contain
the otherness which has been invoked, the otherness of the potential innumerability of
the “knot.” Kant’s description of how one contains such experiences mirrors
Wordsworth’s strategy in the second stanza of “Gipsies,” how one attempts to master
the infinite through the use of increasing scales of reference: “Now when we judge
such an immense whole aesthetically, the sublime lies not so much in the magnitude of
the number as in the fact that the farther we progress, the larger are the unities we
reach. This is partly due to the systematic division in the structure of the world edifice;
for this division always presents to us whatever is large in nature as being small in turn,
though what it actually presents to us is our imagination, in all of its unboundedness,
and along with it nature, as vanishing[ly small] in contrast to the ideas of reason, if the
imagination is to provide an exhibition adequate to them” (C J 113-114). These
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increasing scales of reference are like the categories of the census enumerator, ever
larger and more abstract containers to hold the proliferation of particulars.
The invocation of the vast cosmos, the movement of the sun, moon, and stars, is
just such an attempt to increase the scale and reduce the infinite potential for
multiplicity represented by the knot of gypsies. If Wordsworth believed “Gipsies” to be
a poem of the imagination (and so it was classed from 1815 onwards), it is because
imagination provides the mechanism by which the potentially infinite multiplicity and
the unaccountable otherness of the gypsies are contained and made “vanishing[ly
small]” by the progression towards ever larger unities, a progression which does not
end until we reach the workings of the cosmos itself. The increased scale virtually
eliminates the gypsies, and the extent of this increased scale, which Coleridge termed
bombast, merely points up the danger and the subsequent need for containment
occasioned by this experience. This containment and control accounts for the
unaccountable and renders it safe. The reduction of human presence to a knot and a not
is seemingly the inevitable outcome of an encounter between the powerless and the
power of abstraction.
The common perception of gypsies was of a population that was circulating
dangerously out of control, and yet Wordsworth’s complaint is that these gypsies have
not been circulating enough. But physical mobility should not be confused with
semantic mobility, and so the threat of the gypsies is the movement made possible by
the “not” that makes them unreadable and places them outside the control of the poet.
They remain the unbroken knot, and the knot is simultaneously the totalized structure
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imposed by the observer that eradicates singularity and the unaccountable opacity of
the object that eludes or negates specification. They remain uncounted and
unaccountable, their time remains unaccounted for, and the anxiety they occasion is the
anxiety of not-knowing.
Notes
1 For background on the alleged undercounts and the cases presented by the cities and
the federal government, see Harvey M. Choldin, Looking for the Last Percent: The
Controversy over Census Undercounts (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP,
1994).
2 See “Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender: What Is the Subject of Wordsworth’s
‘Gipsies’?” in Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, edited by Karl
Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993),
154-72 (first published in South Atlantic Quarterly 88:3 (1989), 541-567). I should
note that Simpson’s attempt to study the impact of gender focuses almost exclusively
on the subject of sexuality, and its primarily masculine figurations.
J Simpson, “Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender,” 158. Alan Liu provides a more
substantial reading of Wordsworth’s class and vocational anxieties in Wordsworth:
The Sense o f History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 311-358.
4 See Alan Liu’s review of Simpson’s book for similar criticisms of the reliance upon
particular facts and the denial of theory. As Liu notes, “this may be an anti-theoretical
book, but it is far from being non-theoretical: it is deeply informed at the bedrock level
about deconstruction, Marxism, and so on” (177).
5 It is interesting that Coleridge’s two other examples of Wordsworth’s “mental
bombast” are rarely cited by critics. They are “I wandered lonely as a Cloud,” and the
eighth stanza (“Thou best philosopher”) of the “Intimations Ode.” See Biographia
Literaria, 2: 136-41.
6 This phrase appeared in the first version of the poem published in The Morning Post
(July, 21, 1800), but was deleted in all subsequent versions.
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Chapter 3
Classifying The People
Classifying Poems and Readers:
Poems, 1815 and the Early British Census
But who shall parcel out
His intellect, by geometric rules,
Split, like a province, into round and square?
—The Prelude (1805), U.208-210
Both counting and not-counting can function as strategies of containment.
Counting begins with the recognition of difference and concludes with the eradication
of difference. Not-counting also begins with the recognition of difference, but marks
difference as error and thus casts it out. When William Thornton, MP for York, spoke
out against the attempt to initiate a census in 1753, he expressed disbelief that there
existed “any set of men, or, indeed, any individual of the human species so
presumptuous and so abandoned as to make” such a proposal as a census (.Hansard's
15.1318-9). This is a curious charge in that the only “set” criterion used for a census is
whether the counted subject is an “individual of the human species,” a seemingly
self-evident category that as discussed in Chapter 2 has proven to be not so self-evident
after all. While a census would appear to be a democratic act, fulfilling Thornton’s
hyperbolic fear that “all distinction” would be “destroyed by universal coercion”
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(Hansard’ s 15.1324), in actuality some distinction was produced by the failure to count
some segments of the population. Of much greater importance to the production of
distinction was the fact that the census was never simply an enumeration of the people,
but also simultaneously a classification of the people sorted and arranged in massive
tables under ever-proliferating and ever more specific headings. Classification
produces the modem phenomenon of the abstract statistical person and makes
difference readable only through the categories themselves.
However, if the procedure of counting and classification was always successful at
rewriting difference into safe and neatly delineated differential structures, then the
story of the deployment of government-initiated statistical inquiries would be just
another paranoid fantasy of increasing state hegemony. In this chapter I want to focus
not on Thornton’s anxiety of the counted and classified subject, but on the anxiety of
the counting and classifying subject, and the ways in which enumeration and
classification, instead of containing the dangerous multitudes, produce their own
dangerous multitudes through an ever-proliferating demand for supplementation in the
form of new categories for difference, fresh justifications for procedures, and silent
revision or outright obfuscation of the data. Both the classification of the people and
Wordsworth’s classification of his poems reinscribes categorical difference on counted
empirical objects. These attempts at classification, besides setting in motion the need
for ever-proliferating categories and ever-vigilant justification, also create an abstract
object of inquiry which comes to assume a subject presence of its own, which is for
Wordsworth a textual self that is perversely immune to reading, and which is for the
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national census a political self that appears readable only through the
multi-dimensional matrix of abstract categorical relationships. My question then is:
what does it mean to classify and catalog, to parcel out a body or a body of work into
round and square?
In the preface to the 1814 edition of The Excursion, Wordsworth hinted at his
plans to offer a collected edition of his work. This collected edition would contain his
“minor Pieces” “properly arranged” so that they might be said to constitute a new work
(PW 5: 2). This proper arrangement turned out to be fourteen categories of poems with
the Intimations Ode placed in its own category. By 1850, the scheme had grown to
thirty-one categories with six different full-length works in their own categories.
While it is easy to agree with an early editor of Wordsworth who found the
classification “pedantic, certainly only half-scientific, often irritating and confusing to
the memory,”1 such agreement masks the need to ask certain questions. Rather than
bemoan Wordsworth’s folly, or fix his categories, or praise his method, perhaps it
would be interesting to think about what sort of assumptions are necessary to such a
project in the first place. One initial assumption is the quantitative label of the
collected poems as “minor Pieces,” a label which makes sense only when these poems
are placed in the context of Wordsworth’s massive conception of the never completed
epic poem The Recluse, of which by 1815 only The Excursion had appeared. But
equally interesting is the synecdochial relationship implied. When minor pieces can be
“properly arranged” to create a major work, the seemingly quantitative label of “minor”
can be transformed into the qualitative label of “major” through aggregation and
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arrangement. Also, to be labeled as “minor” in either the quantitative or qualitative
sense makes a poem or a person subject to counting and classification, with the further
implication that such counting and classification is necessary to form the incoherent
and diffuse collection into a unified whole. Thus “minor” marks one for classification,
while “major” marks one as unclassifiable. As early as 1820 major unclassifiable
works were folded into the major work of the collected Poems in a tacit and belated
recognition of the fact that the collected Poems itself was the major work, the gothic
church itself and not “the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses” (PW 5: 2) to
some other major work which had ceased to be something evermore about to be. While
the 1815 edition o f Wordsworth’s Poems began as a supplement to the great body of
work the poet intended to produce, by 1820 and 1827, it had become that body of work
capable of taking everything into itself. From 1815 on, then, classification was not
simply a sorting and sifting critical act for Wordsworth, but a profoundly creative one
as well. While to many this has seemed like so much old wine in new bottles, it
nonetheless raises the question as to what was wrong with the old bottles and why new
ones were needed. While Wordsworth doesn’t concern himself with the problems of
the old bottles, he does offer lengthy justifications for his new ones in the prose
supplements to the 1815 edition of his Poems.
In the preface and the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” included in the
1815 edition, Wordsworth shows an almost obsessive concern with establishing and
maintaining his classificatory scheme. The preface opens with enumerated lists of the
“powers requisite for the production of poetry” and of the “moulds” or “forms” taken
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by these poetic productions (PrW3: 26-27). What is interesting about this particular
subdivision between poetic faculty and poetic form is that it almost immediately
requires supplementation in the form of another category, and this is followed almost
immediately by still more supplementation. This pattern is repeated in the supplement
itself, the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” where Wordsworth’s initial
classification of readers must be supplemented first with further subdivision, and then
with the weight of his own construction of literary history. Thus these two prose pieces
appear as sentries at opposite ends of the first volume charged with the task of
containing the proliferating categories that the process of classification sets in motion.
Wordsworth identifies six “powers” necessary for the production of poetry:
Observation and Description, Sensibility, Reflection, Imagination and Fancy,
Invention, and Judgement. From these six powers, Wordsworth forms three
classifications: “Poems Proceeding from Sentiment and Reflection,” “Poems of the
Imagination,” and “Poems of the Fancy.” What is immediately clear is that three of the
initial powers, observation and description, invention, and judgement, are not
represented in any of the 1815 classifications.2 In addition, Wordsworth has combined
two of the powers (Sensibility and Reflection) to form one of his classifications and
subdivided one of the powers (Imagination and Fancy) to form two separate
classifications. What this makes obvious is that there is no clear and necessary
correlation between the poetic powers identified by Wordsworth and his classifications.
This strange fit between the purported criteria for classification and the classifications
themselves becomes increasingly clear in Wordsworth’s next move. Wordsworth
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divides poetic forms into six classes: narrative, dramatic, lyrical, idyllium, didactic,
and philosophical satire. Oddly enough, the only class that can said to be represented
among the 1815 classifications is the “lyrical” class, though this is by no means clear.
Possibly, the “Epitaphs and Elegiac Poems” classification taken with the Intimations
Ode (in its own classification) can be taken as the “lyrical” class, a class Wordsworth
has defined as “containing the Hymn, the Ode, the Elegy, the Song, and the Ballad”
(PrW 3: 27), but even the most cursory examination o f the arrangement of poems
shows hymns, odes, elegies, songs, and ballads distributed amongst many other
classifications besides “Epitaphs and Elegiac Poems.”
Not content with the six poetic powers and the six poetic forms, Wordsworth
turns to subject matter to supplement his classificatory schemes. This turn occurs in an
either-or syntactical scheme that silently grows from a choice between two alternatives
to a choice among three alternatives.
It is deducible from the above, that poems, apparently
miscellaneous, may with propriety be arranged either with
reference to the powers of mind predominant in the production of
them; or to the mould in which they are cast; or, lastly, to the
subjects to which they relate. (PrW 3: 28)
What begins as a simple choice between the two alternatives he has already described
(“either with reference to the powers of mind . . . or to the mould in which they are
cast”) is transformed into an illogical construction by the solecistic addition of a new
alternative (“or, lastly, to the subjects to which they relate”). The either-or syntactical
scheme proves insufficient to contain the proliferating classificatory possibilities and
must be supplemented by an additional “or.” This addition undermines the logical
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validity of the original structure and replaces it with what can only be called a
ternary-binary structure, a purported binary either-or figuration that contains three
equal parts.
In a matter of a few pages, Wordsworth has presented three classificatory
schemes, the first based on the poetic faculty predominant in the production of the
poem, the second based on the form of the poem, and the third based on the subject
matter of the poem. While such an elaborate machinery for discriminating, sorting,
and arranging would seem to be sufficient, even this must be further supplemented by
further arrangement, so that the classes themselves can then be restructured into a
different order. For this overarching order, Wordsworth uses a particular notion of
time, one associated with human life:
From each of these considerations, the following Poems have been
divided into classes; which, that the work may more obviously
correspond with the course of human life, and for the sake of
exhibiting in it the three requisites of a legitimate whole, a
beginning, a middle, and an end, have been also arranged, as far as
it was possible, according to an order of time, commencing with
Childhood, and terminating with Old Age, Death, and Immortality.
{PrW, 3: 28)
It is at this point that we can begin to see what is at stake in this classification project,
for what is being constructed is not simply a body of work, but a body, a singular
autonomous textual individual who is both origin and subject of a discourse that calls
itself into existence. The textual or discursive self created by an arrangement based on
“the course of human life'’ is tautologically legitimated by its obvious correspondence
to itself. The textual self is taken to be a biological self, and thus the tale told by the
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1815 classification is yet another version of what Clifford Siskin calls the “tale of
individual development” which here is naturalized by its association with the
“biologically inevitable” course of human life (39). Now any project of classification
requires breaking down what once was whole into a collection of base units and then
evaluating and arranging these units into groups or sets. These sets have criteria for
inclusion and thus implicitly for exclusion as well, and while the criteria may have
been formed following the most painstaking investigation and evaluation, as Foucault
notes the criteria nonetheless remain essentially arbitrary marks of difference adopted
solely for the purpose of facilitating classification.3 Wordsworth’s classificatory
project for the 1815 edition of his poems began with the breaking down of the wholes
(in this case the previously published volumes of 1793, 1798, 1800, and 1807) into a
collection of individual poems. Added to this are a number of other poems published
elsewhere or previously unpublished. These poems were then sorted into a number of
categories (and perhaps called certain categories into existence) based on the “most
striking characteristics of each piece” {PrW 3: 29). These categories, or classes, were
then assembled into a sequence so as to form a new whole. That new whole is the life
of the poet and the growth of the poet’s mind “commencing with Childhood, and
terminating with Old Age, Death, and Immortality.” All this is done so as to make the
work “more obviously correspond with the course of human life,” the underlying
assumption being that the work, the poet’s life-work, should more obviously
correspond with the course of human life. Thus every minor piece written during
Wordsworth’s life can be subsumed within a structure that is itself the writing of a life.
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The textual life provides both proof of and supplement for the biological life, and the
biological life that is figured as the origin and center of textual production provides
both proof of and supplement for the textual life. This “natural” arrangement of the
poems confers on the corpus a certain inevitability and becomes nothing less than the
writing of an autonomous and self-referential subject. In this way the very possibility
of personhood is proved by the writing of the self as text, and the very possibility of a
unified text is proved by the writing of the text as a self.
Wordsworth’s emphasis on the unity and integrity of this new arrangement of the
poems and his association of this arrangement with the material facts of a human life
lead to what Terry Eagleton refers to as the “curious idea of the work of art as a kind of
subject” (4), an autonomous, self-referential subject that gives the law to itself. The
use of seemingly natural classifications naturalizes the process of classification itself to
such an extent that breaking up of the whole becomes an impossibility. Because this
body of work has become something of a real body, given a natural life, autonomous
existence and organic integrity, the act of selecting out some poems for separate
publication becomes an act of mutilation. In an 1825 response to a suggestion from
Samuel Rogers to produce a volume of selected poems, Wordsworth writes: “As to
your considerate proposal of making a Selection of the most admired, or the most
popular, even were there not insuperable objections to it in my own feelings, I should
be utterly at a loss how to proceed in that selection” {L Y 1: 328-329). What is finally
insuperable to Wordsworth about selection is that to admit the very possibility of
selection that is not mutilation or dissection is to deny the integrity and necessity of the
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collected poems. If the collected poems had come to represent for Wordsworth his
“whole identity as a poet” (Gill 366), then the possibility of producing multiple and
potentially overlapping subsets of poems not only denied the organic unity and
integrity of the collected poems but raised the possibility of multiple and potentially
overlapping textual identities. The monolithic, totally integrated textual identity of the
poet of the collected poems was threatened by the various historically situated
identities of the poet of Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes, and other
publications, and by the various self-inscribed identities of the poet of Nature, of the
language of common men, of political sonnets, and so forth.
The historically situated identities were folded into the ever-evolving schema
represented initially by the 1815 classification. The youthful Augustan topographical
poetry of Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk was truncated and classed as
“Juvenile.” The seemingly radical poetry o f Lyrical Ballads was contained by
depoliticizing contexts and the overtly radical poetical theories of the Preface to
Lyrical Ballads were explicitly written off as “slight and imperfect” and displaced to
the end of the second volume “to be attended to or not, at the pleasure of the reader”
{PrW 3: 26n). The “trivial” poetry of Poems, in Two Volumes was aggrandized by new
contexts and folded into a vision of continuous development. The wide dispersal of the
poems from Lyrical Ballads and Poems, in Two Volumes assimilated these two
publications to a single story of development. Except for the 1807 sonnet sequences,
virtually every poem in these two earlier collections was moved to a new context. In
1800, Wordsworth had reshuffled the 1798 Lyrical Ballads to provide particular
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contexts for each poem, and the 1807 poems were arranged into classes, though these
were somewhat miscellaneous classes. In 1815, virtually all of these contexts were
rewritten and the scope and determination of this reshuffling is best shown from how
very few sequences (where a sequence is two or more poems) were retained from the
earlier collections. Shown below is a list o f the sequences retained from either Lyrical
Ballads (LB), or Poems, in Two Volumes (P2V), excluding the two 1807 sonnet
sequences.
“We Are Seven” — “Anecdote for Fathers” (LB)
“Ellen Irwin” — “Strange fits of passion” — “She dwelt among the
untrodd’n ways” (LB)
“To the Daisy (“With little here to do or see”)” — “To the same Flower
(“Bright Flower”)” (P2V)
“Stepping Westward” — “Glen-Almain” (P2V)
“Expostulation and Reply” — “The Tables Turned” (LB)
“Lines written on a Tablet” — “The Two April Mornings” — “The
Fountain” (LB)
“Lines written in a Boat at Evening” — “Lines written near Richmond” (LB)
“I am not one of those” — “Incident Characteristic of a Favorite Dog” —
“Tribute to the Memory of the same Dog” (P2V)
“It was an April morning” — “To Joanna” — “There is an Eminence” — “A
narrow girdle of rough stones” — “To M. H.” (LB)
If I were to conduct my own census of the 1815 poems, what would be most striking is
how widely dispersed are the poems from previous publications. The fact that only
nine sequences affecting a total of 25 poems were retained from earlier publications
shows quite clearly how diligent Wordsworth was in recontextualizing previously
published poetry. This wide dispersal is also clear from a rudimentary inventory
showing the publication source of the poems in each of the 1815 classifications.
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1815 Classification
Lyrical
Ballads
Poems, in
Two
Volumes Other New
Poems Referring to the Period of
Childhood
6 6 I I
Juvenile Pieces 1 0
2
1
Poems Founded on the
Affections
11 7 0 3
Poems o f the Fancy 6
13(1) (1)
I
Poems o f the Imagination 9 18 1 4
Poems Proceeding from
Sentiment and Reflection
14 9(1)
(1)
2
Miscellaneous Sonnets 0 23 2 10
Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty.
First Part. Published in 1807
0 25(8) (8) 0
Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty.
Second Part. From the Year
1807 to 1813
0 2 6 24
Poems on the Naming o f Places 5 0 0 I
Inscriptions 2 0 0 5
Poems Referring to the Period of
Old Age
4 3 1 0
Epitaphs and Elegiac Poems 0 2 6
2
Ode.— Intimations, &c. 0 1 0 0
(Numbers in parentheses refer to poems that were published in more than one publication prior to
1815.)
By eliminating the previous contextual setting of the poems, Wordsworth succeeded in
writing over the existence of his earlier collections. Without detailed knowledge of the
contents of those earlier collections it would have been difficult to determine which
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poem belonged to Lyrical Ballads, Poems, in Two Volumes, or to no previous
collection. Because the 1815 edition eschewed information on the date of composition
or publication for each of the poems, it would have been difficult to reconstruct the
historical Wordsworth or fit the poems to a story of the historical development of
Wordsworth. Lacking these cues, readers were left with Wordsworth’s textualized
story of development, the “course of human life” revealed by the classifications. Even
the seemingly innocuous biographical information conveyed by the title “Poems
Composed During a Tour, Chiefly on Foot” given to a group of five poems in 1807, or
the title “Poems Written During a Tour in Scotland” given to a group of nine poems in
1807, was eliminated in 1815 and the poems in these sequences were distributed
among other classes.4
Besides marking the 1815 edition as a supercession of any previous (and
historically situated) Wordsworth collection, the rearrangement of the poems and the
elimination of “personal” groupings was an attempt to eliminate the historically
situated Wordsworth. “To the Daisy (“In youth from rock to rock I went”)” was the
first poem in Poems, in Two Volumes, and served as a sort of introduction to the
collection. With its theme of dissatisfied and restless youth learning humility, the
poem appears to announce a similar sense of contrition on Wordsworth’s part. Given
his earlier denunciation of poetic diction, the use of personification for the seasons in
the second stanza allies the 1807 Wordsworth with a more traditional attitude towards
poetic language, and the rejection of “stately passions” in favor of “lowlier pleasure” is
a decided softening of the polemical language found in the “Preface” to Lyrical
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Ballads. However in 1815, this poem is placed at the beginning of the “Poems of the
Fancy” class, a move which eliminates the role of rhetorical introduction that the poem
played in 1807. Instead o f announcing a change of heart, the poem is refashioned to
take its place in what Judith Herman calls “an established line of Fancy.”3 As Herman
shows, in 1815 the poem was placed in a tradition of poems of the fancy through the
addition of an epigraph from the seventeenth century poet George Withers and the
subtle revision of a few lines to connect this poem both “to future men” and to the “old
time” (Herman, 87).
Another sense of contrition that is lost by the revision and relocation of “To the
Daisy” is the renouncing of radical politics that the poem seemed to signal in 1807.
Before the poem was placed in “an established line of Fancy,” the rejection of youthful
“discontent” in favor of “A wisdom fitted to the needs/Of hearts at leisure” (55-6)
could be read as a rejection of the “turbulent” and “uneasy” pictures of economic
suffering and political discontent depicted in many of the Lyrical Ballads poems.
Early on, Francis Jeffrey had pointed to the Lake poets in general and the poems
Lyrical Ballads in particular as dangerous because they were marked by “A splenetic
and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society” (Reiman 2: 419), and
Charles Burney in his poem by poem review of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads
criticized what he thought to be the radical politics found in many of the poems
(Reiman 2: 713-7). While there is undoubtedly some truth in Herman’s contention that
Wordsworth’s 1815 arrangement “suggested that the real interest of the poems [was]
not political or anthropological but psychological” (83), what is revealed by an
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examination of the shifting contexts is not so much the eradication of politics, but their
rewriting and containment.
Wordsworth attempted to depoliticize the poems using two overlapping
strategies: omission and recontextualization. The seemingly benign An Evening Walk
is depoliticized by the omission of the description of the beggar and her children,
despite the fact that this description was almost universally singled out for praise by
that poem’s early reviewers.6 The poem is further contained by its inclusion in the
class “Juvenile Pieces,” a class of which Wordsworth obviously thought very little
since it is the only 1815 class title not to contain a specific reference to poetry (through
use of the words “Poems” or “Sonnets”). Inclusion in “Juvenile Pieces” also serves to
contain the radical politics of “The Female Vagrant” through this association of the
poem’s sentiments with youthful discontent, an association that effectively neuters the
poem’s indictment of the existing economic institutions of society.
A similar change is effected in “The Last of the Flock” by classification and
repositioning. Wordsworth placed the poem in “Poems Founded on the Affections,” a
class which Gene Ruoff characterizes as concentrating on “the cleaving emotions,”
with the “passions of this section” being “fundamentally possessive” (79). Herman
offers a similar characterization, noting that the poems “may be said to have for their
subject ‘the strength of love,’ whether for a little nook (‘Farewell, thou little nook’), a
flock of sheep (‘The Last of the Flock’), a brother (‘The Brothers’), or a child” (84).
However, while “The Last of the Flock” is undoubtedly a poem about possessiveness
and love (even of sheep), it is also a subtle look at social policies which required that a
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person be abjectly poor and without possessions to be eligible for any sort of relief
regardless of whatever extenuating circumstances (number of children, bad harvests,
high price of provisions) that might be in effect. Indeed the entire question of poverty
is subtly elided by Wordsworth in the poem which Wordsworth placed after “The Last
of the Flock” in 1815. In “A Complaint” the speaker echoes the condition of the
shepherd in “The Last of the Flock” lamenting that now “There is a change — and I am
poor,” but here the change is “a change in the manner of a friend”7 and the resulting
poverty is spiritual and not material. While the speaker is undoubtedly poorer for the
loss of a friendship, his poverty is clearly of a different order from that experienced by
the shepherd, and yet the conjunction of these poems in 1815 seems to imply that one
form of loss is not significantly different from another.
Perhaps the most striking depoliticization is brought about by the placement of
“Michael” in 1815. In 1800, Wordsworth thought enough of this poem to insist on its
placement at the end of Volume 2 of Lyrical Ballads, and in letters written to
prominent individuals to promote sales, he stressed the importance of the poem’s
politics. In a letter to Charles James Fox, Wordsworth lamented the rapid
disappearance of the “statesmen,” the “small independent proprietors of land,” and
implied that the legal attachment to property fostered an independent spirit which he
believed to be absolutely necessary to strengthening the domestic affections that served
as the foundation of the strength of the state. As rootedness to place was being
replaced by the rootlessness of “hired labourers” and “the manufacturing Poor,” the
country was at risk of severing the domestic ties that fostered love of nation (EY
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313-5). While Wordsworth never abandoned these political ideas, he did downplay
them in 1815, when “Michael” was placed in “Poems Founded on the Affections,” a
class which as seen in the case o f “The Last of the Flock” shifts the focus to the issue
of love and loss. More important than this is the fact that “Michael” lost its prominent
placement, for in 1815 it is not even the last poem in its section, let alone the last poem
of the collection. In 1815 “Michael” is the second to last poem in the class, and
“Laodamia,” the last poem in the class, obliquely suggests a telling critique of the
independence and possessiveness of the brothers, mothers, shepherds, and statesmen
who are the subject of so many of the “Poems Founded on the Affections.”
“Laodamia” tells the story of the brief reunion the gods permit between
Laodamia and her husband Protesilaus, who despite the oracle’s warning that “the first
Greek who touched the Trojan strand/Should die” (44-5) sought to be first, succeeded,
and was immediately slain by Hector. During their brief reunion, Protesilaus attempts
to comfort his wife by convincing her of the righteousness of the cause and the nobility
and necessity of self-sacrifice at a time of great national need. Laodamia clings to the
distant hope that Protesilaus may be spared death and allowed to return to the living,
but her hopes are in vain and when Hermes returns to lead Protesilaus back, she falls to
the floor and is “Delivered from the galling yoke of time” (161). Written and
published at a time of great national sacrifice, the poem attempts to account for and
contain personal suffering within a narrative of the “generous cause” (46) and the
“lofty thought” (137). Protesilaus counsels Laodamia to subject her passions to control
and to moderate her grief:
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‘Be taught, O faithful Consort, to control
Rebellious passion: for the Gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul;
A fervent, not ungovernable, love.
Thy transports moderate; and meekly mourn
When I depart, for brief is my sojourn — ’ (73-78)
He instructs her that recognition of the higher cause and the greater sacrifice that
supersedes personal suffering teaches moderation and control, and replaces “Rebellious
passion” with governable love. It is his own recognition of the higher cause that
enables Protesilaus to overcome his own doubts, doubts that are specifically located in
his too fond thoughts of the wife he would be leaving behind and the remembered
associations of specific places, “The paths which we had trod — These fountains,
flowers;/My new-planned cities, and unfinished towers” (131-2). In short, what
Protesilaus must overcome is the independence and possessiveness that were
celebrated in “Michael.” Whereas “Michael” lamented the economic changes which
were breaking the strong associations between people and the places they possessed,
“Laodamia” preaches the need to overcome such associations for a greater national
good. While Michael’s unfinished sheepfold marks the location of an interrupted line
of inheritance, Protesilaus’ unfinished towers mark the location of a personal sacrifice
subsumed within the need for national sacrifice. While “Michael” suggests the
possibility of the individual surviving through the legible marks left on the landscape,
“Laodamia” suggests that pursuit of “a higher object” (146) is necessary for achieving
the most desired goal, “That self might be annulled” (149) in the cause of the greater
good.
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The need for national unity in the face of a great national crisis perhaps partially
explains why Wordsworth chose to eliminate the 1807 classification “Poems Written
During a Tour in Scotland” and redistribute the nine poems into four different 1815
classifications. In the 1807 classifications, the sequence can be read as touristic
postcards from a foreign land recording an encounter with an alien culture, where much
of the power of the encounters lies in the strangeness and unassimilability of the
experience. Undoubtedly it is this sense of the strangeness of the other that prompts
the placement of five of the nine 1803 Scotland poems in the 1815 classification
“Poems of the Imagination,” a classification which, as discussed in Chapter 2, served
to contain the racial otherness of the gypsies. But in 1815 the emphasis is less on the
encounter with another culture than the encounter of otherness itself, and the placement
in 1815 of “Rob Roy’s Grave”—the initial poem in the 1807 Scotland sequence—after
the “Character of the Happy Warrior” aligns the great Scottish national hero with
Wordsworth’s lines ostensibly devoted to the great English national hero, Lord
Nelson.8 Whereas in 1807, the grave of Rob Roy called forth meditations on the
peculiar strengths of the prototypical Scottish leader, in 1815 this recital o f strengths
directly echoes the strengths enumerated for the prototypical English hero. While the
echoes existed in 1807, they are highlighted by the pairing of these poems in 1815, a
pairing that implies a composite picture of the strengths of the British hero at a time
when the need for national unity subsumed interest in local variations.
While these new contexts given to old poems do not eliminate the ability to read
these poems in the old ways, they do suggest the often subtle ways in which
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Wordsworth complicated those old readings. The placement of “Laodamia” after
“Michael” or “A Complaint” after “The Last of the Flock” does not cancel the message
of one poem with the message of another, but instead complicates them both.
Ultimately I am not as concerned with whether Wordsworth is successful in eliding the
presence of other historically situated identities, as with the very fact that such an
attempt was made. The attempt strikes me as an effort to overcome self-difference and
to posit in place of potentially conflicting public identities a self-similarity where
variation was seen as evolutionary seriality and not revolutionary fracture. His
classificatory scheme aims at eradicating self-difference and healing self-division
through the imposition of a totalizing and seemingly natural unity, and as Wordsworth
makes clear, one of his key goals in classifying his poetry is the elimination of the
historical Wordsworth. According to H. C. Robinson, Charles Lamb felt there was
“only one good order—And that is the order in which they were written—That is a
history of the poet’s mind.” Wordsworth’s arrangement made it virtually impossible to
reconstruct such a history, though Crabb Robinson points out that the “dates given in
the table of contents [added in 1820] will be sufficient to inform the inquisitive reader
how the poet’s mind was successively engaged.”9 Beginning with the next edition of
the Collected Works, that of 1827, Wordsworth removed the dates from the contents
page, rendering such reconstructive strategies as Crabb Robinson’s difficult for future
readers. This willful and anxious suppression of the composition and publication
history of the poems was necessary both to detach the poems from the specific life of a
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specific poet and to support the replacement of this specificity with the abstract and
generalized “course o f human life.”
While Wordsworth was able to protect his body of work through exacting control
over its presentation, such protection could not extend beyond the grave, or at least
beyond the term of copyright. Matthew Arnold’s edition of Wordsworth for
Macmillan’s Golden Treasury series was the most influential of the many later
repackagings of Wordsworth’s poems. Arnold also saw selection as a mutilation, but it
was a procedure necessary to afford the patient relief. It was Arnold’s contention that
“To be recognised far and wide as a great poet, to be possible and receivable as a
classic, Wordsworth needs to be relieved of a great deal of the poetical baggage which
now encumbers him,” and “To administer this relief is indispensable” (Arnold Poetry
and Criticism 336). The bloated and distended Wordsworth required the judicious hand
of a skilled critic such as Arnold to cut away the gross protuberances and rancorous
growths to reveal the “great and ample body of powerful work which remains” (337).
As Clifford Siskin notes, Arnold’s language of disease and cure casts the critic in the
role of healer, and his “surgical lyricization of Wordsworth into the Great Decade
cured the poet and institutionally authorized the ongoing production of doctors of
literature” (Historicity 8). Wordsworth’s transformation of a body of work into a body
makes that body available for ongoing diagnoses and cures, cures which often take the
form of dismemberment or mutilation. This is of course a mutilation that purportedly
reveals the body, a defacement that unmasks. Strangely enough, while this mutilation
is necessary to reveal Wordsworth’s “ampler body o f powerful work” (337), it is
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Wordsworth’s ability to survive such mutilation that makes him worthy o f Arnold’s
admiration. “Altogether, it is,” writes Arnold, “by the great body of powerful and
significant work which remains to him, after every reduction and deduction has been
made, that Wordsworth’s superiority is proved” (337). This cathexis on the body of
Wordsworth reveals both an intent to prove that mutilation fixes and revivifies the
body, and a fascination with that body’s ability to undergo mutilation and yet somehow
remain the same. The near pathological insistence on the healthiness of the mutilated
body underscores the persistence of Wordsworth’s model of the text as a writing of a
unitary self.
Despite Wordsworth’s very clear anxiety concerning the presentation of this
textual self, it is a textual self that has been continually rewritten, first by Arnold and
subsequently by a host of editors, anthologizers, compilers, and collectors. Generally
this rewriting has followed Arnold in discarding the classificatory scheme and limiting
the selections to poems written during the so-called “Great Decade.” This has
simultaneously revived the historical Wordsworths that were elided by the
classification of the poems and suppressed certain of those historical Wordsworths that
were then classified as inferior versions of the authentic Wordsworth. Thus when
Siskin points to one critic who has “suggested that the Wordsworth who produced the
1815 system was not really the Wordsworth we all know and love” (114), he is merely
remarking on one episode in the long tradition of Wordsworth scholarship which Gene
Ruoff has compared to “the art of gem-cutting,” which produces two stones “one
which may be a trifle small but has perfect finish and clarity and another which is
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I l l
substantial but deeply flawed” (75). Thus Wordsworth’s fear of selection proved both
prophetic and ironic, since selection produces a new textual self and yet works from the
same initial assumptions that rendered the reclassification of the poems possible in the
first place: the breaking down of wholes into base units which are then sorted using
some evaluative criteria and subsequently recombined. With his denial of historical
context and his desire for a justified enumerative classificatory scheme, Wordsworth
provided the precedent and justification necessary to enable the subsequent
reclassification and reinscription of his body of work.
As seen with Wordsworth’s classificatory scheme which purported to
“correspond with the course of human life,” the naturalness of the analytical categories
tends to naturalize the process of classification itself. However, as Foucault has
shown, classification cannot be the unmediated empirical investigation that it purports
to be, but is instead a structure that allows certain information to become visible and
renders other information invisible. It is here that the classification o f the people
comes to resemble the classification o f the poems, in the way in which both exemplify
Foucault’s explanation of the function of structure:
By limiting and filtering the visible, structure enables it to be
transcribed into language .. . [Structure] reduces the whole area of
the visible to a system of variables all of whose values can be
designated, if not by a quantity, at least by a perfectly clear and
always finite description. (Order o f Things 135-6)
Classification doesn’t merely organize data, it produces meaning, and perhaps more
importantly makes other meanings impossible. Wordsworth’s classification of his
poems and the British government’s classification of the people are similar epistemic
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formations in how they attempt to control the visible. But classification is also
something of a fantasy, a paranoid one for some and an ecstatic one for others. The
classified world described by Foucault is ultimately something of a dream-state, an
ideal utopia (or dystopia) of information. This is at least the dream of Wordsworth and
the dream of the demographer, what Benedict Anderson refers to as “ the fiction of the
census” that “everyone is in it, and that everyone has one - and only one — extremely
clear place. No fractions” (166).
That everyone or everything doesn’t have one and only one clear place can be
demonstrated by the attempt in the 1801 census to record the number of uninhabited
houses. As part of the census the enumerators were asked to specify the number of
houses inhabited in their district, and how many families inhabited those houses. In
addition the enumerators were asked to specify the number of uninhabited houses. The
distinction between inhabited and uninhabited houses was supposed to answer
questions about population density, and more specifically to answer whether Britain
was being depopulated by emigration or decaying through dilapidation. What the
census designers failed to consider is that a house can be uninhabited for a number of
reasons, for example when it is still under construction. Thus because there was no
distinction made between houses uninhabited through desertion or dilapidation and
houses uninhabited because under construction, the information collected on
uninhabited houses in 1801 failed to answer the question it was intended to answer. In
1811 and in every subsequent census, the enumeration of uninhabited houses uses this
further distinction between houses being built and houses uninhabited for other
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reasons, demonstrating how even so innocuous and seemingly unambiguous a category
as “uninhabited houses” can become a container for completely contradictory
information.
The census categories purportedly assigned people and houses one clear place,
but that one clear place frequently proved susceptible to the problems of classification
itself. One of the clear places assigned to everyone enumerated in a census is that of
national identity. National identity is the unifying sign under which the multitude is
counted. In the first four British censuses (1801-1831), the enumerated totals were
assumed to represent a count of all the people of Great Britain. In 1841, the census
designers hoped to gain more exact information about the nationalities that comprised
this citizenry, and so added two columns to the census form under the heading “Where
Bom.”1 0 The first column asked the question “Whether Bom in same County,” and the
second column asked the question “Whether Bom in Scotland, Ireland, or Foreign
Parts.” The instructions given to the enumerators made explicit the distinction
established by these two questions.
'''’Whether Born in same County.”—Write opposite to each
name (except those of Irish, Scotch, or Foreigners,) “K” or for
Yes or No, as the case may be.
Whether in Scotland, Ireland, or Foreign Parts—Write in this
column “S'.” for those who were bom in Scotland', for those
bom in Ireland', and “F.” for Foreigners. (72)
The association of the “Irish” and the “Scotch” with “Foreigners” calls attention to the
perceived difference of the Irish and the Scotch from some unstated and undefined
normative identity. This normative identity is “English,” a term conspicuously absent
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from this list of nationalities. Also absent from this list is “Welsh” as something
different from “English,” there being no differential category available for those bom
in. Wales.1 1 While the Welsh are denied a national identity by the absence of a category
to define them, the Scotch and Irish are marked for difference from the normative
national identity. This mark takes the overt form of the writing of an “S” or an “I” in
the column labeled “Whether Bom in Scotland, Ireland, or Foreign Parts,” and thus
becomes on the householder’s census form a physical mark of difference. Since the
mark is only required to mark difference, a blank space denotes the normative national
identity, an identity that of course cannot be marked since it is the standard from which
difference is derived.
As I suggested earlier, Wordsworth’s elimination of the 1807 class “Poems
Written During a Tour in Scotland” and the recontextualization of the poems in the
sequence could be seen as an attempt to undo the earlier associations of Scotland with
foreignness. In a time of national crisis, the illusion of national unity was a more
congenial view than the distinctness and otherness associated with a touristic view of
Scotland. While this may have seemed necessary in a time o f national crisis, when that
time had passed such illusions of national unity were no longer needed or perhaps
desired. In 1827, Wordsworth reinstated the 1807 Scotland poems in a class which he
titled “Memorials of a Tour of Scotland, 1803,” and he also collected together other
poems that were spread amongst the 1820 classifications and created a new class titled
“Memorials of a Tour of Scotland, 1814.” Since the 1827 edition is also marked by the
elimination of dates of composition for the poems, it seems unlikely that this isolation
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of the Scotland tour poems was driven by any attempt at autobiographical fidelity. In
the absence o f any other information I can only speculate that the conjunction of Rob
Roy and Lord Nelson was no longer required, and that while in time of crisis national
unity between Scotland and England in the higher action overrode regional differences,
absent a crisis what was most remarkable about Scotland and the Scots was not shared
national identity but an essential foreign/jess.
To be marked is to be distinguished from the rest. In the case of nationality such
a distinction is pejorative in that what is being marked is one’s foreigrujejj. In this
sense, the blank that denotes Englishmens marks the absence of nationality where
nationality is considered to be something foreign to the nation. However, when the
category is one which confers a socially validated distinction, the blank space functions
not as the absence of difference but as the absence of any distinction whatsoever. The
enumerators were given strict instructions concerning the completion of the column
headed “Profession, Trade, Employment, or of Independent Means.” The importance
of this category is made clear by the additional instructions provided to the
enumerators for the 1851 census:
It is desirable not only that the Return of the Rank, Profession, or
Occupation of every person in Great Britain should be complete
and accurate, but also that the particulars should be entered on a
uniform plan. To assist the Enumerator, the following detailed
instructions, with numerous examples, have been drawn up. He is
requested to see in every case, before leaving the house, that the
column for rank and occupation, as well as the rest of the
Householder’s Schedule, is correctly filled in conformity with the
instructions.1 2
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As these instructions make clear, the census designers placed a great deal of emphasis
on occupational information and assumed that an occupation would be assigned to each
person listed on the Householder’s schedule, and that the absence of an occupation was
simply a mistake that needed to be remedied by the enumerator. These instructions are
followed by numerous examples of categories and subcategories of ranks, professions
and occupations that would be valid for this column. The last category is one titled
“Women and Children” and contains this explanatory note:
The rules which have been laid down for the return of the rank and
profession of men, apply generally to all women in business, or
following specific occupations. The occupations of the mistresses
of families and ladies engaged in domestic duties are not
expressed—as they are well understood. (46)
In this category the blank space denotes the absence of rank, profession, and
occupation, and the blank space is a valid response only for women and children. As
the instructions and numerous examples and categories and subcategories make clear, a
blank space in this column next to a man’s name is not a valid response and would
undoubtedly be treated as an error. The numbers from 1841 reflect this. Blank entries
were placed in a category suggestively called “Residue of Population.” The table
below lists the gross numbers and percentages of totals for the four “demographic”
classes of people counted by the census.
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Demographic Class Total
Returned with
no occupation
Pet o f Class
Total
Pet o f Total
without
occupation
Males 20 years o f age and older 4,961,045 276,526 5.5% 2.5%
Males under 20 4,301,081 3,434,456 79.9% 31.2%
Females 20 years o f age and
older
5,280,742 3,594,366 68.1% 32.7%
Females under 20 4,301,556 3,692,517 85.8% 33.6%
18,844,424 10,997,865 100.0%
These numbers make it quite clear that when a man is listed with no occupation, the
Householder’s schedule was considered to be in error. And even though only 5.5% of
men over 20 were listed without occupations, and this group comprised only 2.5% of
the nearly 19 million people counted, there was still the perceived need to account for
these few. Thus in the census abstract, the blank space in the occupation column of an
adult male is explained as arising from “sons who continue to reside with their parents,
and perhaps to assist in their business, without being returned as carrying on the same
trades,”1 3 or in other words, as arising from enumerator error. Quite simply, the
instructions for the completion of this column required that every man be categorized,
that every man be assigned a rank or profession or occupation, since in many respects
this designation was fundamental to a man’s public identity. Thus the census was
designed always to confer the public identity of an occupation on a man, even to
require such an identity, while simultaneously denying such an identity to a woman. In
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this case the blank space marked the absence of identity and allowed for the erasure of
certain types of women’s work.
Of course, while the blank space might have designated domestic duties which
were not considered employment, it could also have been a mark of class anxiety.
Sonya Rose speculates that the head of the household, “usually a man,” might have left
blank the space reserved for his wife’s occupation because in “communities where it
was generally a mark of shame for a married woman to have to earn wages” for a
married woman to have an occupation “signified that her husband was unable to
provide for her.”1 4 In addition, work performed at home by women and children, a
traditionally invisible occupation, was explicitly excluded from the 1841 census with
the instruction that “The profession, &c., of wives, or of sons or daughters living with
their husbands or parents, and assisting them, but not apprenticed or receiving wages,
need not be set down.”1 : 5
This instruction merely perpetuated the elimination of women from occupational
statistics which was achieved in the 1811, 1821, and 1831 censuses through the use of
the “Family Occupation” category. The 1801 census attempted to collect information
on “Personal Occupation,” but this failed largely “from the impossibility of deciding
whether females of the family, children, and servants were to be classed as if of no
occupation, or of the occupation of the adult males of the family.”1 6 From its
inception, the design of the census restricted women either to the occupation of their
husbands, fathers, or brothers, or to no occupation at all. The censuses of 1811 and
1821 “remedied” this situation by changing “Personal Occupation” to “Family
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Occupation” thus categorically defining a woman’s occupation as the occupation of the
“adult males of the family.” In 1831, “Family Occupation” was collected and
“Personal Occupation” was again collected, though only for males who were twenty
years of age and older. The 1841 census collected occupational information for men
and women, adults and children, but subject to the limitations discussed earlier.
Despite these attempts to elide the presence of women in the workforce, that
presence is undeniable in the occupational statistics gathered in 1841. In the “Preface”
to the Occupation Abstract for 1841, the presence of women in the workforce is
mentioned only three times by the census compilers. Two of these references attempt
to re-domesticate the work done by women, and the third attempts to obfuscate the
statistical evidence itself. The first comment refers to the large number of women
employed as domestic servants, a fact that “must be matter for congratulation” since
such employment “in a class in which habits of sober industry, of economy, and of
attention to the maintenance of good character are so necessary” both provides
excellent domestic training and effectively utilizes women’s natural domesticity.1 7 A
similar attempt to naturalize a gendered division of labor, this time in lace
manufacture, leads to the conclusion that “no one can be surprised at finding that the
touch of a female hand is preferred in a material so fragile and delicate” (29), a
conclusion that hides the fact that most lace was manufactured by machinery run by
18
“skilled” men and then clipped and finished by “unskilled” women.
At one point in the “Preface” to the 1841 Occupation Abstract the census
compilers attempt to obfuscate their own statistical evidence. Following the
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presentation of tables showing the number of persons employed in the various textile
industries subdivided by gender and age (over and under twenty years of age), the
compilers offer this analysis of the data:
It is gratifying to see that the returns as to sex and age will afford
consolation to those who have regretted the supposed
preponderance of the weaker sex and o f more tender youth in the
number of persons employed in these manufactures. Under the
head of cotton manufacture (all branches), comprehending, as we
have already mentioned, 302,376 persons, the males above 20
years of age are more than double the number under 20, and
considerably exceed the total number of females above 20 years of
age, who, in their turn, exceed by a third the females under 20. 1 9
The torturous comparison of the four demographic classes of workers hides what the
statistics actually show, which is a “preponderance of the weaker sex and of more
tender youth” in the manufacturing workforce. While it is true that in cotton
manufacture “males above 20 years of age are more than double the number under 20,
and considerably exceed the number of females above 20,” the number of males over
20 years of age actually comprises only 36.6% percent of the cotton manufacturing
workforce. Women and males under 20 years of age account for 63.4%, a figure that
would seem to represent a preponderance, and women alone account for 47.8%, a
figure all the more remarkable when one considers the various ways in which women’s
work went unrecorded.2 0 While cotton manufacturing was a particularly bad example
to prove the ascendancy of the adult male in the workforce, the adult male accounted
for more than half of the workforce in only two textile industries, hose (64.5%) and
wool (56.6%), and accounted for only 43.0% of the workforce for the entire textile
industry 2 1 These figures occasion so much anxiety because they actually contradict
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the model household that they are supposed to prove, and this despite the manifold
efforts to elide women from the census’ representation of the workforce.
As Sonya Rose has suggested, the introduction in 1841 of the household
schedule shifted the representational burden from the enumerators to the heads of
household, who were almost always male. This assumption was made clear with the
addition of the “Relation to Head of Family” category in 1851 which included the
instruction “State whether Wife, Son, Daughter, or other Relative, Visitor, or
Servant.” The enumerator would leave the household schedule with the head of the
family who was then responsible for completing the form. While this implies that the
head of the household was responsible for defining the household itself, the definition
of a household was clearly implied by the census categories themselves. As Edward
Higgs points out:
The nineteenth-century census authorities plainly had a clear
picture of what they thought a household ought to look like. It was
made up of a husband and wife, their relations by birth or marriage,
servants and apprentices. The family had exclusive possession of a
house or apartment which they owned or rented from a landlord.
{Making Sense 80)
Many households, especially in urban areas, probably did not meet this definition, and
yet this definition—with its emphasis on a particular family structure with its gendered
roles and its assumptions about class and status—through such constructions as the
census becomes virtually the only representation of the household available.2 3 While
the census cannot be said to call the mid-Victorian family household into being, it can
be said to circumscribe the possible forms such a construction could take.
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The household schedule provided space for the entry of names, ages, genders,
occupations, and birthplace information. When this information was transferred to the
enumerator’s schedule, the surname would be entered only for the head of household
(usually male). All subsequent family members are entered using their first name and
the abbreviation “do.” for ditto. The importance of the name is that it provides further
differentiation for the enumerated subject. The name reinscribes the subject of the
enumeration with difference and identity, a difference and identity that is the basis of
the subject’s numerability. Ultimately countability becomes accountability. Through
the combination of name, location, age, gender, occupation, nationality and later many
other categories, the countable subject becomes accountable to various structures of
responsibility and defined by his or her location within this multi-dimensional matrix
of relationships. The perception of one person’s difference from another comes to rely
on their different locations within this multi-dimensional matrix, and difference itself
becomes perceptible only when elaborated through this matrix. While it is tempting to
view the census as yet another in a series of state mechanisms the purpose of which
was the eradication of difference, such a view fails to account for the curious way in
which the census simultaneously breaks down and reconstructs the subject. The census
actually constructs a self that can be counted and categorized, generalized to the merely
human and then reconstructed based on the necessary attributes of a citizen of the
modem industrial state: nationality (assumed English); gender (assumed male);
occupation (assumed to have one). Part of the irony of all this was that to be counted
as a subject and constructed as a citizen was not the same as being a citizen and
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possessing the rights of a citizen. Thus the census was part of both the increasing
disciplinary structure required to control bodies and selves, and part o f the ongoing
discourse that created bodies and selves that required discipline. Once accounted for
and located within a matrix of relationships, the political subject was now accountable
for fulfilling the responsibilities entailed by those relationships. At least this is the
fiction of the census, that everyone is in it and that everyone has one and only one very
clear location. If this is true, it is true only because any classification works in this way
and that which proves resistant to classification is treated as error and discarded. Thus
women with occupations and men without occupations represent aberrations that
require statistical “analysis” and narrative obfuscation. The “Family Occupation”
category of the 1811-1831 censuses made it impossible for women to have any
occupation outside that of the “family” where “family” was taken to be the male head
of household. Despite the change to the householder’s form in 1841, this view of
women’s work remained in force in the many ways in which male heads of households
could choose not to assign occupations to the women in the households. It is just such
attitudes that allow William Wordsworth to include a handful of Dorothy
Wordsworth’s poems in his 1815 Poems with only the nominal, below the title,
attribution “By my Sister.” The name on the title page, the head of this household
collection of poems, was always “William Wordsworth.” When earlier in his career
Wordsworth had published the poems of a male poet who at that time was essentially a
member of his household, the collection was initially issued anonymously, and when
“William Wordsworth” was placed on the title page of the second edition of Lyrical
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Ballads, Wordsworth was very specific in noting the contributions of a “Friend” in the
Preface. Dorothy Wordsworth’s contributions to the 1815 edition of the Poems
received no mention in the Preface to that collection. Acknowledgment of her
contribution consisted only of “By my Sister” placed below the title of each of her
poems, her only public identity available being her “Relation to the Head of Family,”
and the attribution seems no stronger than if Wordsworth had subtitled “The Thom” as
“By a prolix and Adhesive-minded Sea Captain (Retired).” In essence, the peculiar
cottage industry of William and his “three wives” (as Crabb Robinson referred to Mary
and Dorothy Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson), its erasure o f the labor and produce of
these domestic contributors, amanuenses, critics, and scribes, was perhaps not so
peculiar after all when measured against the statistical mechanisms used by the
government to measure (and mismeasure) women’s work. This household was in
many ways a normative census household in that many bodies were required to
produce a single occupation, which in this case was that of the male poet.
The national census provided the means of constructing a national populace
whose differences from one another could be read through their differential positions
within a matrix formed by a superimposed grid of categorization. However, this
construction often required supplementation in the form of changing categories,
changing values, and outright obfuscation. Wordsworth’s classification of his poems
was a similar attempt at producing a unified textual subject whose self-divisions could
only be read through the superimposed grid of such categories as “Poems of the
Fancy,” or “Poems Referring to the Period of Old Age.” In 1815, the justification of
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the proliferating and overlapping categories required the supplementary explanation of
the preface. In addition, the preface required its own supplement, in the form of an
essay appended to the first volume of the collection. While the preface attempted to
construct through classification a textual self that corresponded with “the course of
human life,” the supplement to the preface attempted to construct through classification
a reader capable of reading that textual self. Just as one o f the ironies of the 1801-1831
British censuses was the mismatch between being counted as a citizen and actually
being a citizen with full voting rights, Wordsworth’s classification of his readers
produces an essentially null “normal” set. In both cases the small size of the “normal”
population seems to have little effect on the definition of the normative subject.
In the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” Wordsworth attempts to account
for his literary life as represented both by the volumes of his collected works and by the
nexus of historical events named Wordsworth. What Wordsworth attempts to account
for is his lack of popularity, and once again his initial response is to create
classifications. Wordsworth begins by describing two classes of readers. For the first
class of readers, poetry begins as a passion, but later gives way to other concerns as
thoughts are “occupied in domestic cares, or the time engrossed by business.” For
these readers, poetry eventually becomes a secondary concern which provides either
“occasional recreation” or “luxurious amusement.” However, for the second class of
readers poetry begins in passion as well, but in maturity is “comprehended as a study
(PrW3: 62). The distinction Wordsworth makes here is between readers for whom
reading is a luxury or recreation outside occupation and readers for whom reading is an
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occupation. The first class of readers is essentially the same as the normative census
subject, the mature man engrossed in family and occupation. In many ways this first
class of readers consists primarily of middle-class readers who have probably taken up
a book “after an escape from the burden of business, and with a wish to forget the
world, and all its vexations and anxieties” (PrW3: 64). Wordsworth characterizes
their relationship to serious literature as entirely frivolous, literature serving them as
recreation, luxury, or amusement. Therefore, while in each of these classes of readers,
“critics abound,” only from those critics who are found in the second class of readers
“can opinions be collected of absolute value” (PrW 3: 62).
As soon as these classes of casual readers and serious readers are distinguished,
the class of serious readers is further subdivided.
At the same time it must be observed - that, as this Class
comprehends the only judgments which are trust-worthy, so does it
include the most erroneous and perverse. For to be mistaught is
worse than to be untaught; and no perverseness equals that which
is supported by system, no errors are so difficult to root out as
those which the understanding has pledged its credit to uphold.
(PrW3: 66)
The purpose behind Wordsworth’s initial distinction between casual and serious
readers of poetry was to limit whose opinions were considered legitimate. However,
the classification of serious reader does little to support Wordsworth’s argument
because it is undeniable that serious readers of poetry disagree with his opinions (as
well as in the estimate of his worth as a poet). Wordsworth’s solution is to create
further subclassifications within his classifications. Thus, serious readers are further
divided into those whose opinions are “trust-worthy” and those whose opinions are
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“erroneous and perverse.” According to Wordsworth, this further subdivision leaves a
very small group of readers whose opinions are “trust-worthy,” a small and exclusive
cadre of distinguished readers. This process of subdivision and reclassification
reproduces what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the distinction between
pure taste and barbarous taste, between “two ‘antagonistic castes’, those who
understand and those who do not.”2 4 The caste of “pure taste” consists of those
trust-worthy serious readers, a small set, perhaps even a null set, which for
Wordsworth stands for his normative reader. Such a distinction enables the continued
control of access to the cultural capital represented by pure taste, and represented here
specifically by Wordsworth’s poetry. Now, if such has been the case, then literary
history should be a story of initial neglect for the finest works and undue praise for the
most popular. In short, Wordsworth’s argument is that contemporary popularity must
be the overt sign of inadequacy and contemporary neglect must be a necessary
condition of genius. Such a figuration would be in line with John Guillory’s
description of the “High Canonical works” (of which Wordsworth would certainly
include his own) which are characterized by the fact that their prestige “as cultural
capital is assessed according to the limit of their dissemination, their relative
exclusivity” (133). Not surprisingly this is the story Wordsworth proceeds to tell. Of
interest here is how he is forced to deal with Shakespeare, one of the cases of
acknowledged merit that he raises.
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Wordsworth admits Shakespeare’s popularity among his contemporaries, but
implies that Shakespeare was not as popular or at least as subject to popular opinion as
some other writers.
Yet even this marvellous skill appears not to have been enough to
prevent his rivals from having some advantage over him in public
estimation; else how can we account for passages and scenes that
exist in his works, unless upon a supposition that some of the
grossest of them, a fact which in my mind I have no doubt of, were
foisted in by the Players, for the gratification of the many? (PrW 3:
68)
Like a census classification that elides difference as error, Wordsworth locates the
“error” in Shakespeare in the adulteration which he attributes to Shakespeare’s
domestic laborers, the players, the many bodies whose silent (and inferior) work has
been mostly elided by the autonomous genius. Wordsworth uses popularity as the
cause of some perceived lapses in Shakespeare. In this way, popularity remains the
corrupting term which has contaminated even the genius of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s popularity is figured as actually leading to his further adulteration,
which subdivides Shakespeare’s texts into two classes, the pure and perhaps unpopular
authentic Shakespeare and the adulterated popular inauthentic Shakespeare. Just as
Arnold was forced to cure Wordsworth by cutting away the inauthentic to reveal the
authentic Wordsworth, Wordsworth is forced to eliminate surgically the inauthentic
parts of Shakespeare to reveal the authentic Shakespeare.
While this division enables Wordsworth to maintain his argument and explain
Shakespeare’s popularity, his strategy has forced him to create two Shakespeares. He
attempts to remedy this division later when he complains of the characterization of
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Shakespeare as the “wild irregular genius.” Wordsworth looks forward to the day
when “it becomes universally acknowledged that the judgment of Shakespeare in the
selection of his materials, and in the manner in which he has made them,
heterogeneous as they often are, constitute a unity of their own, and contribute all to
one great end” (PrW 3: 69). Earlier, Wordsworth has invoked the presence of authentic
and inauthentic Shakespeares to make his point that Shakespeare was not as popular as
he could have been and is thus exempt from Wordsworth’s null set of popular and
meritorious writers. Here, Wordsworth abandons the two Shakespeares in favor of the
self-similar Shakespeare. This is a curious rhetorical move in that it undoes the
subdivision and reclassification of Shakespeare that only a few paragraphs before
enabled part of Shakespeare to be isolated and ultimately cast out. However, it is also
a necessary move since Wordsworth must return to the assertion of a unified textual
self, an assertion that is fundamental to the entire project of the collected poems.
In Wordsworth’s version of literary history, popularity is equivalent to
inadequacy and neglect is a condition of genius. Reader resistance is both necessary
because without it there would be no mark of distinction and ultimately futile because
in this model true merit eventually rises above the rest. What makes this figuration
curious is the manner in which Wordsworth concludes his argument. Working from
the assumption that he possesses a fit audience though few, Wordsworth sets out to
prove first that few readers are qualified to judge poetry and then that literary history is
nothing less than repetitions of this fact. Thus presumably Wordsworth has proven his
point, and yet he then embarks on a discussion o f how “every author, as far as he is
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great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is
to be enjoyed” {PrW 3: 80). Part of this task is in establishing “dominion over the
spirits of readers,” and necessary to this task is the possession of genius, which
Wordsworth defines as “the introduction of a new element into the intellectual
universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which
they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to
produce effects hitherto unknown.” From this unsurprising definition of genius,
Wordsworth proceeds to this unusual figuration of the relationship between poet and
reader:
What is all this but an advance, or a conquest, made by the soul of
the poet? Is it to be supposed that the reader can make progress of
this kind, like an Indian prince or general — stretched on his
palanquin, and bome by his slaves? No; he is invigorated and
inspirited by his leader, in order that he may exert himself; for he
cannot proceed in quiescence, he cannot be carried like a dead
weight. {PrW 3:82)
The creation o f the taste by which a poet is judged is represented as a conflict, a battle,
an “advance, or a conquest.” Given Wordsworth’s construction of literary history, the
continued success of a poet, the increasing number of conquests made, if made
immediately, would eventually invalidate the claim of the poet to genius. Because
originality and genius are set in opposition to popularity, the original poet’s attempt to
create the taste by which he is judged must by definition fail at first. To cultivate
successfully the appropriate taste without a long battle and thus achieve immediate
popularity is to invalidate one’s claims to genius and originality. But the poet as
Napoleon quickly gives way to the poet as slave, and the reader as conquered foe is
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recast as an idle and luxurious figure carried in triumph. This figuration is immediately
replaced by one that again casts the poet as “leader,” the powerful exhorting figure who
is now no longer the reader’s foe. The relationship between poet and reader has moved
from that of conqueror and vanquished to slave and master to leader and follower in
such a quick succession that the mobility of the terms seems to challenge the very
stability of the opposition itself. And what is most prominent in this series of images is
the idle and seemingly lifeless body of the reader, “stretched” like a corpse on a
palanquin or “carried like a dead weight.” Like the specter of Wordsworth’s mutilated
body that haunts Arnold, this lifeless body of the reader haunts the landscape of the
poet’s triumphal conquest, and reinforces Wordsworth’s notion that the poet’s
campaign must be initially marked by failure if it is to prove ultimately successful. At
the center of this campaign is the body of the “Indian prince or general,” a symbol of
luxury and idleness that links contemporary racist ideas of the “habitual dissipation and
corruption of the people of India” (quoted in Bayly 115), with the class biases against
the men of business who comprise Wordsworth’s first class of readers, those who
sought in poetry only “luxurious amusement.” The “advance, or conquest” made by
the soul of the poet is a colonization of the mind, a conquest that frees slaves so that
they may be set to work.
Wordsworth rewrites the whole of literary history to supplement his contention
that the class of serious readers consists of very few members. With each case of
neglected literary merit or misplaced praise the class is divided between those
privileged few whose opinions are “trust-worthy,” and the unfortunate many whose
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opinions are “erroneous and perverse.” Like that of the national census, Wordsworth’s
project of 1815 was a project of abstraction. The national census produced abstract
statistical subjects marked by differences inscribed by the very analytical categories
used to measure them. The classification of the poems produced an abstract poet and
erased the historical poet, while the supplementation required to justify the
classification produced an abstract reader and virtually erased the possibility of any
actual readers. When near the end of the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface”
Wordsworth asks the rhetorical question “Is it the result of the whole, that, in the
opinion of the Writer, the judgment of the People is not to be respected?” (PrW 3: 84),
despite his objection the only answer available is “Yes.” The invocation of the abstract
personification “the People” only calls attention to the systematic exclusion of people,
the people the census most wanted to count, from his category of serious and
trust-worthy readers. When Wordsworth ends his essay by invoking the “Vox Populi”
it is a vox curiously empty of voices. Wordsworth warns that one must be foolish to
“mistake for [the Vox Populi] a local acclamation, or a transitory outcry — transitory
though it be for years, local though from a Nation” (PrW 3: 84). The extension of the
meaning of “transitory” to encompass years and “local” to encompass the nation
broadens the terms so much that they become meaningless. Both the “vox” and the
“populi” have been rendered so abstract that they are empty of meaning and content,
and thus are capable of becoming their opposites. By this reckoning, the voice of the
people is characterized primarily by its silence and its desolation and the Nation that
Wordsworth invokes is “trust-worthy” only after it has been symbolically depopulated.
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Wordsworth’s “readers” and Wordsworth’s “Nation” are both classifications
which verge on nullity, and thus they come close to fulfilling what Benedict Anderson
called the “fiction of the census.” The demographer’s dream is the accounting which
both counts and accounts for everyone, all-inclusive and yet capable of such
fine-grained analysis that every individual can be located in a multi-dimensional matrix
through specification of enough coordinates. Wordsworth’s classification of poems
and readers mirrors the process of the statistical classification of the people of Britain
in that both processes aim at implementing, exploring, breaking down and rearranging
the body in order to subject it to ever more rigorous control and discipline,2 3 but what
these processes actually reveal is the diffusion and multiplicity of the poems, readers,
and people that must be defined as abnormal or accounted for by ever-proliferating
categories and ever-increasing justifications. Wordsworth’s purpose was absolute
control over the conditions under which he was read, or rather the conditions under
which his textual self was read. This control extended beyond the artifact of the book
itself to the refashioning of literary history and the construction of the reader and the
Nation itself, constructs which turned out to be curiously empty of material content.
The national census was a similar attempt at absolute control, though in this case the
object being read was the Nation itself and the political subject, the normative and
deviant possibilities of both being restricted to the categories of difference made
available by the census classifications. As with all classificatory schemes, what came
to count and what counted as difference could only be read through the categories
themselves, and the inevitable result was a taxonomy that erased the material object
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and replaced it with an object of enquiry visible only through the structure that
purported to describe it.
The abstracting power of Wordsworth’s mind produced such an abstract series of
distinctions and classifications that the “course of human life” which formed the basis
of the arrangement of the poems bore little resemblance to any human life, and came
dangerously close to fulfilling Protesilaus’ desire to lose himself in the abstract cause
so “That self might be annulled.” The “Cathedral of St. William,” as James Heffeman
refers to Wordsworth’s vision of his body of work as a gothic church,2 6 is eerily
sepulchral, haunted by the very possibility of the individual vanishing into the abstract
classification and thus annulling the self. It is a curious paradox that the abstract
statistical man created by the census and so despised by Wordsworth should find a
parallel form in the abstract life of the poet constructed by the 1815 Poems. It is
equally paradoxical though strangely inevitable that the abstracting power of his mind
produced such an abstract classification for the reader that it ran the risk o f being a null
set, and thus despite protestations was a mechanism for invoking the Nation while
excluding the People. Perversely, the classification of the poems became the writing of
a life and the assertion of a subject that was constituted by writing, while the
classification of the readers became the reading of a life and the assertion o f a subject
that somehow remained immune to reading.
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Notes
1 Nowell C. Smith, “Preface” to The Poems o f William Wordsworth, 3 vols. (London:
Methuen and Co., 1908), x.
2 In “Poems ‘Bound Each to Each’ in the 1815 Edition of Wordsworth” (The
Wordsworth Circle 12:2 (Sp 81), 133-140), Donald Ross Jr. attempts to account for the
omission of some of these categories and the unmarked presence of others. However,
even if his argument succeeds in partially rescuing Wordsworth’s classification by
“powers,” the fact remains that Wordsworth did not in 1815 or at any other time
choose explicitly to designate a class of “invention” or “judgment” poems, choosing
instead other labels which made no reference to these “powers.”
3 See especially The Order o f Things (New York: Random House, 1970), 125-165,
and The Archaeology o f Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 21-70, for
detailed discussions of the relationships between naming, classification, structure and
knowledge.
4 The 1803 Scotland poems were reassembled in 1827 and given the title “Memorials
of a Tour in Scotland, 1803.” This reinsertion is discussed later in this chapter.
3 Judith Herman, “The Poet as Editor: Wordsworth’s Edition of 1815,” Wordsworth
Circle 9:1, 82-90.
6 The Critical Review noted that “The beggar, whose babes are starved to death with
cold, is affecting” (Reiman 1: 298), and the European Magazine and London Review
thought the “description of the fate of the Beggar and her Children” was “very
pathetically delineated” (Reiman 2: 501).
7 This is taken from the Fenwick note on “A Complaint,” reprinted in P2V, 423.
8 Of course, Wordsworth confessed to Isabella Fenwick that John Wordsworth was
probably more the model than Nelson. It is interesting that in the same Fenwick note,
Wordsworth recalls how his brother John “greatly valued moral and religious
instruction for youth, as tending to make good sailors” and that John felt that the best
sailors “came from Scotland” ( P 2 V 405).
9 Henry Crabb Robinson, The Correspondence o f Henry Crabb Robinson with the
Wordsworth Circle (1808-1866) in 2 volumes, edited by Edith J. Morley (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1927), 1: 151.
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1 0 The householder’s census form for 1841 is reproduced in a note to the “Enumeration
Abstract” by Edmund Phipps and Thomas Vardon, reprinted in British Parliamentary
Papers: Population, Volume 3 (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1971), 72.
1 1 This sense of an independent national identity for Ireland and Scotland remained an
assumption of the census (despite changes in the actual form of the questions) until
1951. See Guide to Census Reports, 160-72.
1 2 “Forms and Instructions, 1851 Census” reprinted in British Parliamentary Papers:
Population, Volume 6 (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970), 44-45.
1 3 Edmund Phipps and Thomas Vardon, Occupation Abstract, 1841, originally
published in 1844, reprinted in British Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 5
(Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970), 9.
1 4 Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 81.
1 5 “Enumeration Abstract” in British Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 3
(Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1971), 73. See also Edward Higgs,
“Women, occupations and work in the nineteenth century censuses,” History Workshop
Journal, 23 (1987): 59-80.
1 6 John Rickman, “Comparative Account of the Population of Great Britain in the
Years 1801, 1811, 1821, 1831,” originally published in 1831, reprinted in British
Parliamentary Papers: Population, Volume 1 (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University
Press, 1968).
1 7 Phipps and Vardon, Occupation Abstract, 1841, 27.
1 8 Rose, Limited Livelihoods, 24-26, 83-93. Rose draws the further conclusion that the
“skill” required to perform a task was used as both a determinant of wage and a bar to
women’s employment.
1 9 Phipps and Vardon, Occupation Abstract, 1841, reprinted in British Parliamentary
Papers: Population, Volume 5 (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970), 28.
2 0 Edward Higgs believed the reporting of female factory workers to be “fairly reliable”
{Making Sense o f the Census, 82), while Rose cites oral histories compiled by
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Elizabeth Roberts as showing that “the census underrepresented the number of women
who were wage earners” (Limited Livelihoods, 230n.25).
2 1 What is actually most interesting about these workforce statistics and what is also
ignored by the census compilers is the large percentage of females under 20 years of
age employed in the textile industry. The ratio of males over 20 to males under 20 is as
much as 6 to 1 in some industries and over 3 to 1 for the entire textile industry. The
ratio of females over 20 to females under 20 is 3 to 2, and the ratio of females under 20
to males under 20 is 4 to 3 for the entire textile industry.
“Forms and Instructions, 1851 Census” reprinted in British Parliamentary Papers:
Population, Volume 6 (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970), 44.
This mutual reinforcement of classificatory schemes and perceived differences is
noted by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in relation to the academic construction of
“distinction”: “The official differences produced by academic classifications tend to
produce (or reinforce) real differences by inducing in the classified individuals a
collectively recognized and supported belief in the differences, thus producing
behaviours that are intended to bring real being into line with official being.”
Distinction: A Social Critique o f the Judgement o f Taste, translated by Richard Nice
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 25.
2 4 Bourdieu, Distinction, 31. Interestingly, Wordsworth follows Bourdieu’s example,
Ortega y Gasset, very closely: “One only has to read Ortega y Gasset to see the
reinforcement the charismatic ideology derives from art, which is ‘essentially
unpopular, indeed, anti-popular’ and from the ‘curious sociological effect’ it produces
by dividing the public into two ‘antagonistic castes’, those who understand and those
who do not’. ‘This implies’, Ortega goes on, ‘that some possess an organ of
understanding which others have been denied; that these are two distinct varieties of
the human species. The new art is not for everyone, like Romantic art, but destined for
an especially gifted minority.’ ” As discussed later, Wordsworth is “anti-popular” and
clearly believes that this “destined for an especially gifted minority,” which implies
that y Gasset’s conception of “Romantic art” is decidedly more Romantic than that
possessed by Wordsworth.
2 3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison, translated by Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 135-41.
2 6 James A. W. Heffeman, “Mutilated Autobiography: Wordsworth’s Poems of 1815”
Wordsworth Circle 10:1, 107-112.
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PART II
MAP
Chapter 4
Surveying and Writing the Nation
The Black Comb and 1816 Commemorative Poems
Know, if thou grudge not to prolong thy rest,
That, on the summit whither thou art bound,
A geographic Labourer pitched his tent,
With books supplied and instruments o f art,
To measure height and distance; lonely task,
Week after week pursued!
—Wordsworth, “Written with a Slate-pencil, on a Stone, on the
Side of the Mountain o f Black Comb”
In the summer of 1811, William Wordsworth surveyed the nation from the
summit of Black Comb. Surrounded by failure and the specter of loss, Wordsworth
surveyed the nation from the summit of Black Comb and sought to impose order on the
personal, social, and political chaos forming around him. Like contemporaries
involved in the national mapping project, he sought to create a map of the nation that
transcended local differences by subjecting the landscape to the “prospect view,” the
abstract imperial gaze available from the mountain summit. The “prospect view,” like
the novel and the newspaper, marks what Benedict Anderson refers to as a shifting
mode of “apprehending the world, which, more than anything else, made it possible to
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‘think’ the nation” (22). The “prospect view,” the novel, and the newspaper participate
in the project of national formation by creating the sense of space and time needed to
imagine a coherent community that transcends the local—that is, that transcends a
community that an individual can see. On two occasions, in the midst and aftermath of
the Napoleonic Wars, Wordsworth tries to imagine such a community. In the Black
Comb poems written between 1811 and 1813, surveying, and the “prospect view” or
grand imperial vision it affords, provides Wordsworth with a way of writing the nation
as if it were an abstract unified whole, the self-contained and self-similar island nation
united in purpose by the war with France. In the Thanksgiving Ode written and
published after the war, Wordsworth made his most overt attempt to write the nation,
to assume the bardic voice and explain to the people the meaning of great national
events. As national poetry, both the Black Comb poems and the Thanksgiving Ode are
failures, though it is precisely their failure that makes them interesting. What emerges
from an examination of these attempts at national poetry is Wordsworth’s inability to
fuse the idealized abstract nation with the press of discordant local details.
Wordsworth retreats from a totalized vision of the nation that would risk loss of
perception of the local. Through Wordsworth’s “failure,” we sense the dangers of a
nationalistic vision precisely as Wordsworth aspires to it. Similarly, it is the failure of
national vision in the Black Comb poems that allows us to see the similarity between
the “prospect view” and the “lawless reign” of Napoleon. In their failures,
Wordsworth’s national poems do not give us the “homogeneous, empty time” that
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Anderson associates with narratives of nationalism, but instead a temporality full of
pregnant moments.
In August 1811, William and Mary Wordsworth took two o f their younger
children, Thomas and Catharine, on a seaside excursion which ended with a prolonged
stay in an unfinished house at Bootle on the Cumberland coast. The choice of Bootle
was necessitated by two increasing worries pressing on the Wordsworth family in
1811: the health o f Thomas and Catharine, and dim inish in g financial resources
(Harper 197). Besides worries about his family and finances, Wordsworth was
troubled by the continued deterioration of his relationship with Coleridge (Gill 288).
While a partial restoration was effected in April 1812, in August 1811 the confusion of
miscommunications, coupled with other anxieties, would have rendered perhaps even
the most edenic spot as dark for Wordsworth as the shadow cast each morning by the
massive eminence o f Black Comb.
Amidst all this turmoil, the Wordsworth family descended on Bootle in search of
the restorative waters of the sea. In a personal sense, this was a fateful grouping in
that, by the end of the following year, both of the children who were to benefit from
this trip would be dead—Catharine in June, and Thomas in December 1812. In a letter
written at Bootle but never sent, Wordsworth tells Beaumont that “We cannot say that
the Child for whose sake we came down to the sea-side has derived much benefit from
the Bathing” (MY 1: 507), a painful admission for a parent to make, perhaps painful
enough to account for the letter remaining unposted. This admission was suppressed in
a later letter sent to Sara Hutchinson:
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Everybody thinks Catharine greatly improved; all cry out how
much she is grown during her less than six weeks absence, and
Dorothy and everybody else says confidently that her lameness is
very much relieved. Mary and I think so too . . . We are . . . very
thankful for the advance she has made, and I cannot but hope with
encreasing confidence, that she will outgrow all visible traces of
this infirmity (MY 1: 509).
Surely differences would exist between statements made in an unsent letter to a friend
and statements made to a family member, but it is interesting that in reporting
Catharine’s improvement Wordsworth focuses first on other people’s comments and
adds his own and his wife’s concurrence almost as an afterthought. On this very
personal issue of his daughter’s health, Wordsworth is tom between a clear-eyed vision
of a desperate truth, and the hope, seemingly against all hope, o f restoration and
recovery—between total revelation and the press of conflicting details.
The letters from Bootle continually evince a tension between idealized vision and
observable fact, whether the subject be the hoped-for recovery o f his children or the
moral implications of the surrounding landscape. In the same unsent letter to Sir
George Beaumont, Wordsworth’s account of a walk he and Mary took to see the estate
of Sir John Pennington, a prominent local landowner, reveals irresolvable tensions
between an idealized vision of the nation and the observable facts of class division and
economic power. The Wordsworths had hoped to be able to see the Pennington estate
at Muncaster, “but the noble Proprietor has contrived to shut himself up so with
Plantations and chained gates and locks, that whatever prospects he may command
from his stately Prison, or rather Fortification, can only be guessed at by the passing
Traveller” (MY 1: 507). No artistic vision can soften or unify the stately prison or
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fortification the wealthy estateholder has self-defeatingly created for himself and
himself only. As Wordsworth goes on to suggest, what Pennington has succeeded in
doing is nothing less than a selfish usurpation of the land itself, as well as the ability to
see the land.
In the state of blindness and unprofitable peeping in which we were
compelled to pursue our way up a long and steep hill I could not
help observing to my companion that the Hibernian Peer had
completely given the lie to the Poet Thomson, when in a strain of
profound enthusiasm he boasts;
I care not, Fortune, what you me deny:
You cannot rob me of free Nature’s grace;
You cannot shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns by living streams, etc.
The windows o f the sky were not shut, indeed, but the business was
done more thoroughly; for the sky was nearly shut out altogether
{MY, 1:507).
The Hibernian Peer had succeeded in securing not merely possession of property, but
the ability to see the property as well as ail the views such a property affords. Because
no amount of imaginative representation can reclaim what cannot be seen, dogmatic
assurance gives way to petulant irritation, and the vision of a “Happy England” with its
endless prospects dissolves into a vision of a divided and enclosed England where a
noble proprietor, and notably not an English one, can contrive to build his private
fortification and shut out the very sky. The picturesque landscape, so important to the
imaginative representation of the British nation, was not one of free Nature’s graces,
but private property to which access could be controlled and even denied.1 The
precariousness of the picturesque, its dependence upon the availability of a physical
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landscape, partially accounts for the emergence of the sublime, which does not require,
and in fact is defeated by, objective correlatives. Wordsworth wanted to believe in the
power of the artist to shape the landscape imaginatively, yet he was also aware that
wealth and power could more profoundly alter the land, even to the point of taking it
out of circulation.
The discordance between the vision of “Happy England” and the often
unpalatable reality of a divided and heterogeneous England was not a new concern for
Wordsworth. Many of the Lyrical Ballads and most of the political sonnets of
1801-1802 explore the divergence between idealized versions of the nation and its
people, and the often unpleasant reality of that nation and those people. However, by
the summer of 1811, in the midst of a long and costly war, such criticisms of the nation
or its people no longer seemed acceptable. Given the conflicting demands and tensions
in his own life and the life of the nation, it is not surprising that the task that occupied
Wordsworth’s thoughts was how to go about reconciling the tension between the
idealized unified nation and the various divided nations in a new national poetry. This
concern is evident in the attempts to characterize the nation in the poems begun or
completed around the time of the trip to Bootle. In the two poems on Black Comb
which Wordsworth began probably in late August or early September 1811, this
tension between idealized vision of the nation and the reality of a nation that seemed to
resist imaginative unification finds expression in two very different treatments of the
view from the top of the mountain. One is a sun-drenched vision of the unending
prospect of the nation, the imperial British Isles, laid out before the observer like a
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surveyor’s map; the other is a dark prophecy of the limitations of vision and the
potential failure of the map to represent anything at all.
“View from the Top of Black Comb” is a celebration of a unified vision of
Britain. Contrary to the blindness and unprofitable peeping the Wordsworths
encountered around Pennington’s estate, from the top of Black Comb “the amplest
range / Of unobstructed prospect may be seen / That British ground commands” (3-5).
What one sees from this clear and sun-drenched height is a prospect of united Britain:
England, Wales and Scotland.
low dusky tracts,
Where Trent is nursed, far southward! Cambrian Hills
To the south-west, a multitudinous show;
And, in a line of eye-sight linked with these,
The hoary Peaks of Scotland that give birth
To Tiviot’s Stream, to Annan, Tweed, and Clyde (5-10)
Like a surveyor perched upon the peak, the observer sees in the directions of the
compass the unified landscape of Britain, and “in a line of eye-sight,” like that afforded
by the mounted telescope on a surveyor’s theodolite, the Scottish highlands. Black
Comb itself is called “the imperial Station” (12), and when the poet looks to the ocean
“visibly engirding” the Isle of Anglesey, the ascent up the mountain is figured as an act
of colonization with Anglesey as the conquered realm:
And .. . Mona’s Isle
That, as we left the Plain, before our sight
Stood like a lofty Mount, uplifting slowly,
(Above the convex of the watery globe)
Into clear view the cultured fields that streak
Its habitable shores; but now appears
A dwindled object, and submits to lie
At the Spectator’s feet. (16-23)
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By choosing to refer to Anglesey as “Mona’s Isle,” its name under Roman occupation,
Wordsworth invokes an earlier time of forced subjugation. In the first century AD,
when the Romans occupied virtually all of Wales, Anglesey was one of the last
strongholds of the Celts and their druidic priests. Because the Druids were successful
in maintaining native resistance against the Romans, the imperial governor of Britain
decided that it was vital to invade Anglesey and destroy the Druids. In 60 AD, the
Romans crossed the Menai Straits, and conquered and garrisoned the island. The
Roman historian Tacitus notes that one of the first actions of the imperial governor was
the destruction of the “groves devoted to Mona’s barbarous superstitions” (327). It is
this destruction of the Druids’ sacred groves, and the barbarous activities associated
with them, that makes possible the “cultured fields that streak” Anglesey’s now
“habitable shores.” However, if this reference to Anglesey’s colonial past describes a
movement from barbarous ritual to civilized culture, the ascent up the mountain
contains this movement within a recurring pattern of imperial domination. From the
plain Anglesey appeared to be a “lofty Mount,” which, like Imagination in Book VI of
The Prelude or the Celestial City in Book II of The Excursion, is imbued with a kind of
agency “uplifting” itself. But unlike Imagination or the Celestial City, the agency
attributed to the lofty Mount passes quickly to the spectator. From the summit
Anglesey is merely a “dwindled object,” the movement up the mountain corresponding
to an increased sense of the spectator’s dominion over the landscape. The landscape
marked by human presence and activity, by culture and habitation, is reduced to an
“object” that “submits” to the spectator’s imperial vision. Anglesey is a site of
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colonization, first by the Romans, then by the British, and finally by the gaze of the
poet.
In an earlier version of this poem another colonial entity, Ireland, is mostly
absent from this vision, but in the published version of 1815, it too is brought, though
not without problems, within the vision of unified Britain.
Yon azure Ridge,
Is it a perishable cloud? Or there
Do we behold Erin’s Coast?
Land sometimes by the roving shepherd swain,
Like the bright confines of another world
Not doubtfully perceived. (23-28)
Here the Wordsworthian surmise transforms a doubtful perception into an actual
vision, though the transformation is marked by the equivocation of a perception “not
doubtfully” perceived, and the romantic view of Ireland remains like that of “another
world.” This sense of otherness, that Ireland is another world distinct from the English
one of Black Comb, is reinforced by the immediate injunction to the observer to “Look
homeward now!” away from Ireland back to the known prospect of England, Wales
and Scotland. The phrase “Look homeward now” is also an allusion to Milton’s
“Lycidas,” thus linking Wordsworth’s vision of the nation with that of the consummate
English poet who nearly two centuries earlier had looked across this same sea which
had claimed the life of his friend, Edward King. Curiously, the Ireland available to the
poet’s imagination is not Ireland itself, but the pastoral invention of Milton. This is an
Ireland mediated through books, through the “works / Of mighty Poets” (Prelude,
V.594-5), and the sudden appearance of the drowned young Englishman, like the
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bloated body of the drowned man of Esthwaite (also described in Book V of The
Prelude), is reminiscent of what Hartman calls Wordsworth’s fear of engulfment
(Wordsworth's Poetry 232). Just at the moment when Wordsworth moves towards the
grand gesture of presenting the nation unified by a single spectator, the nation itself, or
perhaps the danger inherent in the totalized nation, surfaces and threatens to engulf the
poet.
Despite the somewhat problematic inclusion of Ireland in the imperial vision, the
poem’s conclusion passes over these difficulties in a paean to British power.
Look homeward now!
In depth, in height, in circuit, how serene
The Spectacle, how pure!—Of Nature’s works,
In earth, and air, and earth-embracing sea,
A Revelation infinite it seems;
Display august of man’s inheritance,
O f Britain’s calm felicity and power. (28-34)
The spectacle here is virtually subject to a measurement of “depth,” “height” and
“circuit,” and that measurement is nothing less than “man’s inheritance” the land itself,
a distinctively Burkean view of the British landscape. The view from the top of Black
Comb is a view of the British nation, and the geography that “seems” to represent the
very strength and power of the nation. As John Barrell has noted, these “prospect”
views, with their open and unending panorama, are not available to everyone; the
prospect and the capability to see all that the prospect allows are clearly tied to
questions of political power:
Those who can comprehend the order of s o c ie ty and nature are the
observers of a prospect, in which others are merely objects. Some
comprehend, others are comprehended; some are fit to survey the
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extensive panorama, some are confined within one or other of the
micro-prospects which, to the comprehensive observer, are parts of
a wider landscape, but which, to those confined within them, are
all they see.2
As Sir Philip Sidney wrote in New Arcadia, “a pretty height. . . gives the eye lordship
over a good large circuit” (quoted in Cosgrove 193). Like the map drawn from the
imperial height, the prospect view reveals no boundaries that are not attached to the
land—England, Wales, Scotland, and somewhat problematically Ireland—all
subsumed into a totalized vision of the British nation-state.
“View from the Top of Black Comb” attempts to write that nation as if it were
something designed for its destiny, as if it could be mapped in all directions and unified
by that map. But the problems raised by the problematic placement of Ireland in both
the observer’s vision and on the surveyor’s map, while elided by the poem’s
conclusion, return in full force in the other poem written at this time, “Written with a
Slate-pencil, on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Comb.” In his headnote
to the poem, Ketchum conjectures that Wordsworth intended this poem as a companion
to “View from the Top of Black Comb,” but changed his mind before the 1815 Poems
were sent to the printer (SP 98). In 1815, while these two poems were placed apart
from one another in different classes of poems, Wordsworth did include footnotes
cross-referencing these poems to one another. When these poems are read as
companion pieces, they expose the tension between the grand imperial vision and the
underlying doubts that Wordsworth encountered in his own attempts to survey and map
the British nation.
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“Written with a Slate-pencil” takes the form of an inscription to the passing
traveler. It details what may be seen from the summit of Black Comb, but concludes
with a curious cautionary tale. Wordsworth relates the story, told to him while at
Bootle, o f the experience of one of the surveyors employed by the Trigonometric
Survey.3 While taking triangulation data on the summit, the surveyor—usually
identified as Colonel William Mudge, then head of the Survey—had been suddenly
overcome by darkness and clouds so thick that even the map in his hands disappeared
from his sight. A literal reading of the poem would summarize it as a caution to
travelers not to expect to gain the grand overview of the countryside promised by such
a felicitously placed mountain peak, especially one which is “from blackness named”
because of the frequency of storms. Such a reading is right as far as it goes, but the
anxieties of the poem are occasioned by more complex concerns.
In the drafts leading up to the first published version of the poem, Wordsworth
reworked its dramatic structure. In the first published version, the inscription is for a
spot below the summit of the mountain, while in earlier drafts the inscription is
intended for the mountain’s summit. While in the first published version the
inscription serves as a cautionary word to some future action, in the earlier drafts the
action is completed, the mountain already conquered. One subtle change reveals the
importance of this shift. In the earlier drafts, the poem begins:
Glad welcome, bold Adventurer, who hast clomb
This speculative Mount, from blackness named (“Reading Text 1”
1-2)
In the first published version, the poem begins
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Stay, bold Adventurer; rest awhile thy limbs
On this commodious Seat! for much remains
O f hard ascent before thou reach the top
O f this huge Eminence—from blackness named (1-4)
The shift from “Glad welcome” to “Stay” points to an important shift in the tone of the
poem, from that of a communal sense of mutual endeavor to that of epitaphic
confrontation. While a glad welcome might be given to a fellow traveler, the forceful
injunction to halt given in the first published version makes the reader a passing
traveler seized for a moment by an epitaphic otherworldly voice. This is more in
keeping with the form of address that follows in which the traveler is called “bold
Adventurer,” a designation that Wordsworth had earlier used to describe a very
different climber: Napoleon. In a sonnet written a year or two earlier and published
along with the Black Comb poems in 1815, Wordsworth referred to Napoleon as “that
Adventurer” and enjoined his readers to look for a moment at what Napoleon had
accomplished and how it was accomplished:
Look now on that Adventurer who hath paid
His vows to Fortune; who, in cruel slight
Of virtuous hope, of liberty, and right,
Hath followed whereso’er a way was made
By the blind Goddess;—ruthless, undismayed;
And so hath gained at length a prosperous Height,
Round which the Elements of worldly might
Beneath his haughty feet, like clouds, are laid. (“Look now on that
Adventurer” 1-8)
In the opening octet of this sonnet Napoleon is likened to a mountain-climber who has
gained the peak, ambition overriding any pretense to comprehension. From this
“prosperous Height” Napoleon sees and possesses all that lies within sight, “the
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Elements of worldly might,” just as the observer in “View from the Top of Black
Comb” saw all of “Nature’s works / In earth, and air, and earth-embracing sea.” To see
is to control. But obviously to be likened to Napoleon in 1811 Britain was not without
its downside, and the literary association Wordsworth makes here links Napoleon with
Milton’s Satan, who is described in Paradise Lost as “the great adventurer” (X.440). It
is therefore fitting that in the concluding sestet to this sonnet, Wordsworth invokes the
historical precedent of divine wrath to right the chaotic order which Napoleon has
inaugurated:
O joyless power that stands by lawless force!
Curses are his dire portion, scom and hate,
Internal darkness and unquiet breath;
And, if old judgments keep their sacred course,
Him from that Height shall Heaven precipitate
By violent and ignominious death. (9-14)
Besides the “ignominious death” which Wordsworth calls down on Napoleon,
Wordsworth envisions “internal darkness” as overcoming Napoleon, just as Mudge
was blinded on the peak by darkness and storms. The caution here is not that Mudge
or any surveyor or even any mountain-climber is akin to Napoleon, but rather that the
ambition to conquer the mountain and survey the world is not distinct from Napoleon’s
imperial ambition. The literal prospect required by the surveyor’s task is directly
mapped to the figurative prospect assumed by the imperial conqueror. Both represent
the desire for absolute control and possession.
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In describing Mudge’s experience on the summit, Wordsworth is careful to
ennoble the enterprise sufficiently to remove it from direct comparison with Napoleon.
He tells us that on the summit
A geographic Labourer pitched his tent,
With books supplied and instruments o f art,
To measure height and distance; lonely task
Week after Week pursued!—To him was given
Full many a glimpse (but sparingly bestowed
On timid man) of Nature’s processes
On the exalted hills. (14-20)
The surveyor bivouacs like a soldier (Mudge was a commissioned officer), but, like the
poet, brings with him instruments of art, not war. He is given insight through his
studies of Nature’s processes, insight which allies him closely with the Wordsworthian
poet, and which appears to be available only to those who are not “timid,” those who
are ambitious enough to brave the elements. Curiously enough, the ambition necessary
to be granted these insights is the same ambition that makes one susceptible to future
chastisement, for though he is able to see and map what he sees, once while he worked:
Within that canvas Dwelling, suddenly
The many-coloured map before his eyes
Became invisible: for all around
Had darkness fallen—unthreatened, unproclaimed—
As if the golden day itself had been
Extinguished in a moment; total gloom,
In which he sate with unclosed eyes
Upon the blinded mountain’s silent top! (22-29)
Just as Sir John Pennington had succeeded in limiting what could be seen to the point
of shutting out the sky itself, the darkness that descends on Mudge succeeds in limiting
what the surveyor can see. Like the allusion to “Lycidas” in “The View from the Top
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of Black Comb,” the image of engulfment emerges just at the moment of total vision,
darkness engulfing Mudge and making the visible world invisible. But what makes
this darkness even more curious is the fact that Mudge is in his tent and the darkness
renders the map invisible. It is the representation of the land that disappears: the
measuring of height and distance, the lonely task pursued week after week, is canceled
in a moment by the vagaries of the weather. The “grand terraqueous spectacle” seen in
the “View from the Top of Black Comb” is the ideal picture of the land that the map is
supposed to represent, yet as Mudge’s experience makes clear, it is a remarkably frail
picture purchased at the expense of other representations that would try to account for
and include the darkness. As the Wordsworths discovered after being reduced to
“unprofitable peeping,” no amount of imaginative activity could represent landscapes
which had been taken out of circulation.
But the caution goes further, for in many ways the map is Britain, certainly at
least one of the few representations of a unified Britain available to the imagination.
The map is a record of the vision of Britain presented in “View from the Top of Black
Comb” but here it is subject to total obliteration by sudden darkness, a darkness like
that of Napoleon’s rise to power. The darkness that threatens the map of Britain is the
darkness that has already enclosed continental Europe.4 Napoleon is in that darkness,
but so too are the imperial British, the bold Adventurers who have climbed the peak to
survey the world and seek to possess the land by measuring it. The caution is not
simply against the weather, but also against the darkness that threatens the nation from
without as well as the darkness that threatens from within. If the “View from the Top
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of Black Comb” is the imperial gaze of the complacent Briton or that of the noble
proprietor of Muncaster, then the inscription warns of the cost of complacency and
cautions of the “blinded mountain’s silent top” where Britain may be led by its own
blind goddess.
These two poems on Black Comb re-enact a very old contest over the
imaginative meaning of the mountain summit, whether it be the top of Black Comb,
Snowdon, Mont Blanc or Mont Ventoux. In the ancient and medieval imagination, the
mountain top wreathed in clouds was a trial chamber of the spirit, an intersection of the
physical and spiritual domains, a place of terror and epiphany. It was the height of
human ambition and the depth of worldly denial, favored spot for monasteries, retreats
and hermit cells. When Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux in April 1336, he was
purportedly the first person to climb a mountain simply for the sake of doing it, “to see
what so great an elevation had to offer” (quoted in Schama 419). In a letter describing
the ascent, Petrarch recounts his struggles to gain the mountain peak, and how he is
driven still further in his ascent by his own desire for knowledge. When he reaches the
peak he surveys the grand spectacle that lies all around him, drinking in the landscape
and feeling filled with the sense of power which his ambition has gained for him. He
then takes out and opens at random his copy of Augustine’s Confessions, alighting on
this suspiciously apt passage: “And men go about to wonder at the heights of
mountains and the mighty waves of the sea and the wide sweep of rivers and the circuit
of the ocean and the revolution of the stars but themselves they consider not” (quoted
in Schama 421). Rebuked by his own false ambition and chastised for his imperial
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desires, Petrarch’s experience provides a model for the contested meaning of the
mountain top.
But imperial desires and the potential for knowledge exerted a powerful
attraction to later generations and, while at the beginning of the nineteenth century
Shelley could write of his fears of self-annihilation upon seeing Mont Blanc, such
attitudes were all but replaced by the muscular, quasi-military determination of
soldiers, “Adventurers,” and the curious to conquer the mountain. It was this shift that
Ruskin lamented later in the nineteenth century when he addressed the mountaineers:
“You have despised nature, that is to say, all the deep and sacred sensations of natural
scenery . . . The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you
look upon as soaped poles in a beer-garden” {Sesame and Lilies 89-90). Wordsworth,
earlier in the century, was more ambivalent about the potential for comprehension
which the mountain top affords. Desirous of the grand imperial vision, he nonetheless
remained confused about what the vision might mean, or whether it could have any
meaning at all. If the subjugation of the mountain yields the potential for
comprehensive vision, what might that vision elide or obliterate to gain
comprehensiveness? Wordsworth felt that a great deal would be elided, and sought to
repopulate the landscape with the monuments and meanings which the map of the
landscape ignored. In the years surrounding Waterloo, he continued to seek the
comprehensive vision though he never forgot the darkness that had overcome the
geographic laborer on the summit of Black Comb.
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During the period when the Black Comb poems were being written and revised
(1811-1813), the map had already assumed a place of prominence in the national
imagination. Primitive woodcut maps could be found in virtually every magazine that
treated national and international affairs, showing military actions on the continent or
fortification efforts in the south of England.5 The systematic mapping of Britain,
which officially began in 1791, was slowly progressing, and by 1811 most of the
Trigonometric, or by then Ordnance, Survey maps of the south had been published.
The detailed one-inch scale maps were part of a larger effort to create a u n iform and
unified representation o f the nation. Based upon a network of triangulation data
gathered from throughout Britain, the Ordnance Survey maps represented the
application of rigorous scientific methods to the measurement of the land. As has been
true of virtually all national mapping enterprises, from its inception the Trigonometric
Survey was essentially a military operation. William Roy, generally credited with
having founded the Trigonometric Survey (though it was not officially funded and
named until after his death), began as a m ilitary cartographer attached to the British
Army in Scotland. Following the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, Roy, himself a Scot, was
appointed to head a survey needed for an extensive program of fort building and road
construction to aid the further pacification of the Scottish Highlands (Seymour 4). But
colonial war in North America shifted the focus of mapping away from Scotland, and
Roy’s later work on coastal surveys was also superseded by another colonial war in
1775.
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Roy repeatedly advocated a national survey, complaining about the deficiencies
of the many privately created county maps, which could not be accurately fitted
together and which failed to cover all of Great Britain (Harley, “Re-mapping”). While
his petitions to Parliament and the King focused on the military advantages that such
maps would afford, his own interest was primarily scientific. This compromise
between military and scientific purposes would plague the Trigonometric Survey until
well after Waterloo. When William Mudge, Wordsworth’s geographic laborer, was
appointed director of the survey in 1798, he inherited a military operation which
functioned under the Board of Ordnance, was staffed by military personnel, and was
primarily responsible for producing military maps of the south of England for
defensive purposes. As the threat of invasion increased, Mudge was pressured to
sacrifice scientific accuracy and certain features (such as field boundaries) thought
inessential for military purposes (Seymour 47).
Despite the ostensibly benign purpose of the survey, not everyone found the
presence of surveyors comforting. Simon Woolcot, a field surveyor working in South
Malton, wrote to Mudge in 1804 to complain about the lack of the armed military
escort that had been supplied to other surveying teams.
I must say, I feel a considerable degree of uneasiness, as I have not
received the favour of a similar indulgence [protection by warrant
officers], since the authority of a warrant is now become necessary
to guard me, particularly on the coast, from those insults and
interruptions, in the execution of my business, which I have so
frequently and so lately experienced (quoted in Close 50).
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While the government pursued the survey for the supposed protection o f the people,
the survey itself needed protection from those same people. The presence of armed
military personnel reconnoitering English soil was taken as an affront in the
countryside remote from the Tower of London Drawing Room, and popular fears of an
armed occupation by the nation’s own army, and the increased taxation that many
thought was the real purpose of the survey, brought the surveyors into confrontation
with the local people.
The meliorist justifications of the survey, that it would provide geodetic accuracy
for future mapping, that it would benefit transportation and therefore commerce, and
that it would aid in the protection of the nation against invasion, seemed to be lost on
the local populations who suspected the military surveyors were involved in a
government plan to extort higher taxes or an even more insidious effort to pacify and
subjugate the British people. These fears were not completely unfounded since, up to
the end of the eighteenth century, detailed systematic surveying had been either a local
county undertaking or a colonial enterprise. The Down Survey of Ireland, administered
by William Petty at the end of the seventeenth century, had been used for taxation and
pacification, as were the surveys of North America in the middle of the eighteenth
century and that of India in the 1770s. The only real model of a national survey was
that undertaken by the French government in the eighteenth century and used by the
Revolutionary Council and later Napoleon to reconfigure local administrative
boundaries along “rational” lines.6 This was hardly a comforting precedent to the
British people during the Napoleonic Wars.
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While the unified mapping of Britain seemed to promise much, it undoubtedly
struck others as an unnecessary intrusion into local affairs and, like the
contemporaneous national census, seemed to provide central government with more
information than was either necessary or desirable. And because it was administered
entirely by the military, the survey was free (at least until after the war) from
Parliamentary intervention or local control. The national Ordnance Survey map
promised a grand overview of the nation like that seen from in “View from the Top of
Black Comb,” but as “Written with a Slate-pencil, on a Stone, on the Side of the
Mountain of Black Comb” suggests, such aspirations bore an uncomfortable proximity
to those of that “Adventurer” Napoleon and his imperial ambitions and centralizing
tendencies. The darkness that envelops Mudge and his map might then be seen as
something of a fantasy of local and natural resistance to the abstractions of the
mapmaker. While the engulfrnent that Hartman associates with infinite revelation
threatens the perception of the particular, this engulfrnent imagined by Wordsworth
serves to protect the particular and the local from eradication at the hands of the
totalizing map. While it was anachronistic for Wordsworth to place in Mudge’s hands
a “many-colour’d map”—for Mudge was collecting triangulation data so his map
would have been merely a series of interconnected triangles with heights and distances
marked—such a map, the topographical map, the political map, the military map, was
the true representative of the loss of local differentiation.
In 1815, however, Wordsworth was uncertain of his own loyalties in this tension
between the imperial prospect view with its “grand terraqueous vision” and the detailed
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local survey with its careful attention to local difference. In the 1815 classification of
his poems, the clear-sighted view o f a unified Britain depicted in “View from the Top
of Black Comb” was separated from its companion poem and placed in the prom inent
classification “Poems of the Imagination,” while the dark prophecy of limited vision
and chastisement of imperial ambition was placed in the less prom inent and more
prosaic classification “Inscriptions.” The year 1815 was prom inent for other reasons,
and at the end of the year Wordsworth turned his attention to trying to understand the
meaning of the victory at Waterloo, and the tumultuous decades that had preceded it.
He sought to write the nation from a vantage point like that of the “View from the Top
of Black Comb,” but this attempt to write an explicit nationalist poetry, the “Ode on
the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving” and its accompanying poems, is not so
much a celebration of the British nation as it is a record of Wordsworth’s failure to
write such poetry.
In a March 1816 letter to his brother Christopher, Wordsworth revealed his own
anxieties about the soon-to-be-published volume of poems containing the
Thanksgiving Ode:
The state of the public Mind is at present little adapted to relish any
part of my poetical effusion on this occasion.—There is too much
derangement in the taxation of the Country; too much real distress,
and above all too much imaginary depression and downright party
fury. But all this I have disregarded as I write chiefly for Posterity
(MY2: 292).
Wordsworth’s concerns proved prophetic, for the volume was virtually ignored by the
reviews, and those few reviews it did receive were, at best, mixed. Posterity has been
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even less kind. The title poem and its companion pieces have been virtually ignored
and, when referred to at all, usually held up as the nadir of Wordsworth’s career, ample
proof of the poet’s declining power: unoriginal, derivative, or as Carl Woodring calls
them, “mismanaged” pieces which “parallel, in allegorical trappings and static
positioning, the monuments to military glory that crowd the aisles of Westminster
Abbey” (140). Indeed, if we take Wordsworth at his word that these poems owe their
existence “to a patriotism, anxious to exert itself in commemorating that course of
action, by which Great Britain, has, for some time past, distinguished herself above all
other nations” (“Advertisement” reprinted in SP 177), the volume must be deemed a
total failure, for a close examination of the contents of Thanksgiving Ode, January 18,
1816, With Other Short Pieces, Chiefly Referring to Recent Public Events reveals not a
commemoration, but a vacillation between celebration and chastisement, and an
imaginative struggle between the pressure of contemporary events and the ability of the
poet to transform those events into poetry. A careful examination of these
commemorative poems of 1816 reveals a poet intent upon writing the nation but unable
to overcome the internal divisions and “downright party fury” that everywhere
fractures the abstract unified nation. Ultimately the victor proves to be Nature, an
abstraction as well, but one capable of annihilating the grids of the mapmakers and the
identity of nations. It is clearly no accident that the volume opens with a paean to the
sun and closes in “darkness infinite.”
The title poem of the volume, the “Ode: The Morning of the Day Appointed for
a General Thanksgiving, January 18, 1816,” is supposed to commemorate the national
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day of thanksgiving set aside by Parliament to mark the end of the continental wars. It
opens with a high impassioned tribute to the sun:
Hail, universal Source o f pure delight!
Thou that canst shed the bliss of gratitude
On hearts howe’er insensible or rude (1-3)
“Hail” personifies the Sun, yet personification here serves the purposes of abstraction.
The repetition of absolutes in the first line—“universal,” “Source,” “pure,”—initially
sets the tone of the poem as an impassioned through curiously abstract celebration of
the Thanksgiving Day. Yet amidst this celebration and pure light, there is already the
hint of a darker tone, for the bliss offered by the sun is only a possibility, not an
actuality. The sun “canst” but does not necessarily “shed” its light on the people, and
those people are oddly qualified as “hearts howe’er insensible or rude.” If this is
intended as a tribute to the British people and their triumph, it is a decidedly
ambivalent tribute. Later, this opening apostrophe to the sun is further qualified by the
recognition that the sun itself is in subjugation to a higher power, “Framed in
subjection to the chains / That bind thee to the path which God ordains” (16-17). Thus
early in the poem Wordsworth prepares us for the shifts and odic reversals that will
characterize the complex response that this poem seeks to articulate.
Following this opening apostrophe, the poem turns to the personal and local, and
ultimately the sun is rejected as the “source” of the “quickening spark” that marks this
day. But if the sun is not the “source” then what is? Only God knows:
He knows that from a holier altar came
The quickening spark of this day’s sacrifice;
Knows that the source is nobler whence doth rise
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The current of this matin song;
That deeper far it lies
Than aught dependent on the fickle skies. (51-56)
This resignation to God’s control completely subverts the opening apostrophe,
rejecting the sun as “source” and further characterizing such a view as falsely
subservient to the “fickle skies.” While the day opened in brightness and the sun’s
“ "Naked splendour, clear from mist or haze” (9) revealed the landscape in clear view, it
is not to such vagaries of the weather thai a vision of Britain depends, but upon a faith
in God. Throughout the entire volume, this faith in God will be pushed to its logical,
challenging, and disturbing conclusions.
The poem then shifts to an attempt to understand the war, and Ketchum is
undoubtedly correct when he refers to this passage as “leading [Wordsworth’s]
complacent readers up the garden path” (15). The passage begins with a question
followed by a response, “Have we not conquered?— By the vengeful sword? / Ah no,
by dint of Magnanimity” (57-58), and then paints a chivalric picture of the “loyal band”
following “their liege Lord” whose actions “Shall live enrolled above the starry
spheres” (66), a curious location for a monument given the earlier denouncement of the
fickle skies. We are then presented with the possibility o f a bardic voice that will tell a
very commonplace tale of martial struggle and triumph, the conventionality of the tale
hinted at by the long string of cliches celebrating those “whose spirit no reversal could
quell” (70), who “mid the failing never failed” (71), who “struggled and prevailed”
(72), who “clothed with strength and skill” (75) stood “Firm as a rock in stationary
fight” (77) and who were “In motion rapid as the lightning’s gleam” (78). The passage
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concludes with an impassioned, bloodthirsty celebration of British martial skill: “Woe,
woe to all that face her in the field! / Appalled she may not be, and cannot yield”
(81-2), that actively plays on popular jingoistic assertions of British fortitude and
perseverance.
Immediately following this exhortation, the poem takes a sudden and unexpected
turn. It is this turn that Wordsworth referred to in a letter to Southey as being ‘The
passage which I most suspect of being misunderstood” {MY 2: 324). The previous
passage had built up to a nationalist, martial frenzy, but that frenzy may blind others as
to what Wordsworth considers the true meaning of the war.
And thus is missed the sole true glory
That can belong to human story!
At which they only shall arrive
Who through the abyss of weakness dive:
The very humblest are too proud of heart:
And one brief day is rightly set apart
To him who lifteth up and Iayeth low;
For that Almighty God to whom we owe,
Say not that we have vanquished—but that we survive. (83-91)
Thus is the question “Have we not conquered?—By the vengeful sword?” answered. It
is the very emphasis on the glory of victory which leads many to miss the “sole true
glory,” the lesson of deep humility that even victory in war teaches. If we had read
with pleasure the chivalric, romanticized depiction of war, we might be unprepared for
the trap Wordsworth has set. The invocation of the chivalrous past, the romanticizing
of war, sets the trap for the unpleasant lesson of humility which is curiously figured as
a “dive” through an “abyss,” a Dantean surrender to what amounts to annihilation.
That this is a difficult lesson unavailable to everyone is made clear by the italicization
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o f "they” which places the emphasis on those undergoing what amounts to ritual
baptism in order to understand the meaning o f the war. That Wordsworth continued to
worry over his meaning being lost is made clear by the fact that when he revised this
poem for republication in 1836, the typography was changed so that “they” was no
longer italicized and the first line was set as “And thus is missed the sole true glory.”
This subtle typographical change marks Wordsworth’s surrender to the judgment of
history, his belated recognition that “they,” the British people, would never make that
dive into the abyss and both then and in 1836 had “missed” the lesson.
This sense of deep humility is the lesson because the British nation has not so
much triumphed over the French as it has outlasted them: a realistic appraisal, though a
curious one in a poem ostensibly written to commemorate “that course of action, by
which Great Britain . . . has distinguished herself above all other nations.” What has
distinguished the nation is that it has survived. For Wordsworth, humility is necessary
because the British triumph came only after a long and costly war which devastated
Europe and threatened at times the very shores of Britain. To celebrate the triumph and
ignore the twenty-two years of war that preceded it is to miss the point. Surely God
was in the triumph, but as Wordsworth reminds his readers, the “impure” had their
“dominion” too (93). The war was not simply the chivalric triumph of good over evil,
but a painful, lengthy process characterized by “—Wide-wasted regions—cities
wrapped in flames—” (98) which could not but shake the foundations of one’s beliefs,
challenging one’s faith in a just God:
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But the foundation, of our nature shakes,
And with an infinite pain the spirit aches,
When desolated countries, towns on fire,
Are but the avowed attire
O f warfare waged with desperate mind
Against the life of virtue in mankind (101-6)
If this were simply a battle between good and evil, why did it take so long and cost so
much? How does one see a purpose in the growth of such unrepentant and unchecked
evil? The answer is one that Wordsworth had rehearsed many times before, dating
back to his essay on the Convention of Cintra and presented here in the Thanksgiving
Ode in a fourteen line passage that is nearly an embedded sonnet:
A crouching purpose—a distracted will—
Opposed to hopes that battened upon scorn,
And to desires whose ever-waxing hom
Not all the light of earthly power could fill;
Opposed to dark, deep plots of patient skill,
And celerities of lawless force
Which, spuming God, had flung away remorse—
What could they gain but shadows of redress?
—So bad proceeded propagating worse;
And discipline was passion’s dire excess.
Widens the fatal web—its lines extend,
And deadlier poisons in the chalice blend—
When will your trials teach you to be wise?
—O prostrate Lands, consult your agonies! (111-24)
For Wordsworth, the growth of Napoleon’s power, the widening of the “fatal web” like
the widening of France’s boundaries across the face of a map, was made possible by
the lack of purpose and the distracted will of Britain and its allies. Wordsworth
directly attributes the length and cost of the war to the partisan opposition politics that
sought appeasement with France instead of rigorous prosecution of the war. However,
though he is quick to blame the opposition for being taken in by the seductiveness of
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Napoleon’s power, the beginning of this passage re-enacts that seduction. Britain’s
passive and conciliatory “crouching purpose” is opposed to France’s active and defiant
“hopes” that grow fat feeding upon Britain’s scorn. France’s ambition, which earlier in
the poem Wordsworth had characterized as “insane,” is here presented in the generic
terms of gothic allurement—the seemingly benign image of the “ever-waxing” moon.
This initial, almost seductive, characterization of Napoleon’s power explains, if not
justifies, the conciliatory stance of Britain’s crouching purpose. The second
characterization tears away the veil and casts Napoleon as a Miltonic Satan, executing
his “dark, deep plots of patient skill,” triumphing through “lawless force,” and
ultimately “spuming God.” Given that Wordsworth attributes the length of the war
directly to those who were seduced by Napoleon’s power, it is curious that Wordsworth
is even willing to acknowledge, let alone re-enact, that seduction which in his view
could only gain “shadows of redress.”
The “lawless force” of Napoleon is the same bemoaned by Wordsworth in the
sonnet “Look now on that Adventurer,” and the sense that European governments
contributed to their own woes can be found in virtually all the political sonnets of
1808-1811, most notoriously in “On the Final Submission of the Tyrolese” where
Wordsworth praised those who opposed Napoleon and criticized those who sought
appeasement:
It was a moral end for which they fought:
Else how, when mighty Thrones were put to shame,
Could they, poor Shepherds, have preserved an aim,
A resolution, or enlivening thought? (1-4)
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In the conclusion of this sonnet, this moral end is contrasted with the “guilt and woes”
(12) of Europe, guilt occasioned by the compromises made by European governments
to Napoleon. Here in the Thanksgiving Ode, Wordsworth brings that guilt closer to
home and suggests that the long war was punishment for a “crouching purpose” and
“distracted will” in the face of unrepentant evil.
Opposition to the war thus lengthened the war, increased its cost, and allowed
Napoleon’s “fatal web” to extend across all of Europe. These then are the “deadlier
poisons” awaiting the British people. What is difficult to understand, however, is why
Wordsworth refers to “poisons” in a “chalice.” While the use of the word “chalice”
could be attributed to the high diction that is used throughout the ode, it is difficult not
to associate “chalice” with its specialized liturgical meaning. In an early poem,
Coleridge had made use of the liturgical meanings attached to “chalice” when he wrote
in “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” of the doomed young poet foolishly seeking
his salvation and redemption in his own death. In that 1794 poem, the poet warned
Chatterton to “dash the poisoned chalice from thy hand!” (93), the poisoned chalice of
self-love and self-pity. Perhaps Wordsworth intended to invoke a similar irony:
appeasement to Napoleon was perceived by some to hold the promise of salvation, but
that promise was always a false one, poisoned from the start. Such irony may have
been intended, but the ultimate irony and the ultimate heresy is that the liturgical
chalice could be poisoned, that the most significant symbol of the promise of human
redemption could be the means of massive human destruction. While with diligence
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the seductions of Napoleon’s power could have been resisted, conceivably there is no
way to differentiate the poisoned chalice from the cup of salvation.
In addition, the chalice reminds us of what is missing in the poem. Just as the
liturgical function of the chalice is to enable the “physical” manifestation of the
missing God, so the chalice in the ode invokes the missing Christ, and the missing
message of redemption and salvation. Perhaps the chalice is poisoned because the
possibility of redemption no longer exists, the relationship between God and his
people, especially the British people, inexorably altered by the conduct of the nation
during the war. In struggling to find meaning in the war, Wordsworth finds that the
only God he can invoke is not the New Testament Christ but the Old Testament
Jehovah. Thus, while logical, the conclusion the poet reaches is to say the very least
challenging, if not—as one reviewer put it—“strange and revolting” (.Eclectic Review
in Reiman 1: 380). If God is in the victory, then God is in the defeat as well. If God is
with the vanquisher, then God is with the vanquished as well. “He guides the
Pestilence” (262), controls the rains, “Springs the hushed Volcano’s mine” (266), and
rules the earthquake, flood, tornado, and sun. And why does God exact such violence
on the earth?
For Thou art angry with thine enemies!
For these, and for our errors,
And sins . . . (274-6)
For the poet, Napoleonic France is clearly God’s enemy, but God is also angry for
“our” errors and sins, the long war just punishment for the crouching purpose and
distracted will. If Napoleon’s ascendancy shakes the “foundation of our nature” it is
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only because we cannot understand how God “cloth’st the wicked in their dazzling
mail, / And by [his] just permission they prevail” (283-4). Therefore just as Britain is
made the instrument of God’s vengeance upon France, so is France the instrument of
God’s vengeance upon Britain.
But thy most dreaded instrument,
In working out a pure intent,
Is Man—arrayed for mutual slaughter,—
Yea, Carnage is thy daughter! (279-282)
This is a logical if abhorrent way of working out the questions raised by the long war.
How else can one explain God’s “pure intent” in “mutual slaughter” other than as
punishment and retribution? It is also unclear whether “pure intent” refers to God’s
beneficent plan or to the sheer instrumentality of God’s unknowable will. Of course,
God’s most important “instrument” in “working out a pure intent” was, for Christians,
not “Man,” but the Son of Man, Christ himself. While in this passage, “Man” may be
the sacrificial offering, there is no hint that sacrifice will lead to redemption or
salvation or anything, except perhaps appeasement of an angry God. The relationship
between God and the British people has reverted to the Old Testament’s pre-national
model: that between God and the Israelites before the founding of the Hebrew nation.
The implication seems to be that the British nation is not yet fully a nation, but a
wandering tribe beset by conflicting interests, crouching and distracted, sinning and
erring, struggling towards nationhood. In addition, this clearly challenges the righteous
patriotism that national victories tend to unleash by suggesting that Napoleon’s
victories as much as Britain’s were part of God’s “working out a pure intent.” To
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Wordsworth, these “ghastly sight[s]” (292) of war are, to this Old Testament God,
merely “Links in the chain of [his] tranquillity” (299).
The “soft cadence of the church-tower bells” (316) breaks the odic revelry and
recalls the poet to the present. The poet imagines some of the zealous commemoration
services that will mark this day, but turns away from them to “humbler ceremonies”
(330). There, surrounded by silence and bowed down in humility and prayer, one
Shall simply feel and purely meditate
Of warnings—from the unprecedented might,
Which, in our time, the impious have disclosed;
And of more arduous duties thence imposed
Upon the future advocates of right;
Of mysteries revealed,
And judgments unrepealed,—
Of earthly revolution,
And final retribution (343-351)
Again the paradox is that the “impious” have been found on both sides of the battle.
The “earthly revolution,” the French Revolution which is placed at the origin of all
these troubles, has brought about “final retribution,” but it is retribution visited upon
all. If this language is, as the reviewer for the Eclectic Review said, “utterly at variance
with the language of truly Christian devotion” (Reiman 1: 380), it is the product of an
inexorable logic that seeks to explain not merely Britain’s triumph, but Napoleon’s
earlier triumphs as well.
In addition, the sound of the church-bells reminds us of the singular and yet
communal nature of the thanksgiving day commemoration—the bells tolling together
all across Britain at nine o’clock on the morning of January 16, 1816. This state-
mandated ritual creates a powerful sense of an imagined community, and
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Wordsworth’s movement from public commemoration to private prayer parallels
Anderson’s description of the function served by one of the necessary rituals of the
nation-state— the reading of the modem newspaper:
It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each
communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being
replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of
whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not
the slightest notion. (35)
Like Anderson’s newspaper readers, Wordsworth’s contrite citizens will perform
actions in silent privacy that will be replicated simultaneously by millions of others
across the nation. The imagined community of the nation is realized in that moment of
independent and simultaneous action.
This moment of simultaneous and shared endeavor created by government
proclamation forces both the nation and the poem to resolve temporarily the conflict
between the crouching purpose and the idealized nation. However, the sudden and
frequent reversals of the Thanksgiving Ode accentuate the powerful, almost
irresolvable, tension between the ghastly sights of war and the wished-for vision of
England “dearer far than life is dear” found by the poet in his volume of “gallant
chivalry” held in youth upon his “sleepless bed” (139-40). The poem essays two such
attempts to write a chivalrous history of the war, but both efforts founder when the
loyal band gives way to the dead “conducted home in single state” (256), and while
these attempts seem to be failures, perhaps failure is the intent. The commemoration
that the ode attempts to enact in language continually proves resistant to abstractions,
as the poem repeatedly returns to the physical realities of the war. Wordsworth looked
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at his troubled nation and its ambivalent conduct in the just concluded war and sought
to convince himself and others of the nation’s righteousness, fortitude and
perseverance. This tension between abstract commemoration and the actual cost recurs
in the Thanksgiving Ode when the poet considers the question of raising a monument
in commemoration of the battle, a monument which is first immediately rejected and
then considered necessary to preserve the memory of the war’s cost. We are conducted
into Westminster Abbey, where are laid “Kings, warriors, high-souled poets, saint-like
sages, / England’s illustrious sons of long, long ages” (234-5), and presented with an
imagined “Commemoration holy” (239) in honor of “the valiant of this land” (230).
But this picture of national commemoration shifts gradually from the empty national
sepulcher of Westminster Abbey to the crowded country churchyard to which many
returned from war. The commemoration then is
For them who bravely stood unhurt—or bled
With medicable wounds, or found their graves
Upon the battle field—or under ocean’s waves;
Or were conducted home in single state,
And long procession—there to lie,
Where their son’s sons, and all posterity,
Unheard by them, their deeds shall celebrate! (253-9)
The celebration of national victory is drawn morbidly and inexorably back to the
recognition of the cost of that victory. The abstract nature of a national
commemorative service in Westminster Abbey proves strangely hollow, and requires
the presence of the actual dead, the individuals “conducted home in single state.” This
repeated return to the cost of victory revives the questions about the meaning of the
victory and the long struggle which led to it: the humility demanded by one’s belief in
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God’s presence in all of these, and the abhorrent logic necessary to attribute to God
such calamity and destruction. The comprehensive vision proves to be
uncomprehending, and leads one to miss “the sole true glory.” The abstract
monument—“saturated,” as Anderson puts it, “with ghostly national imaginings” (9)
precisely because it is abstract—finds its fitting, if disturbing, counterpart in the named
and solitary grave.
Surely Wordsworth had reason to fear that these sudden and frequent reversals
would lose his readers. One review praised the “awful strain of piety that pervades the
whole” {British Critic in Reiman 1: 149), while another criticized the “expression”
which “according to the author’s happy theory of familiarity in the language of verse”
is “often of the most conventional cast” {Monthly Review in Reiman 2: 744). The
Eclectic Review probably came closest to identifying the underlying cause of the
difficulties of this poem in particular and the poems of the 1816 volume in general.
Mr. Wordsworth, always metaphysical, loses himself perpetually in
the depths of abstraction on the simplest subject. . . It is only at
intervals that he comes within reach of the sympathy of ordinary
readers. We never think of claiming kindred with Mr. Wordsworth
as a man of the same nerve and texture and heart’s blood with
ourselves. He looks on nature with other than human senses.
(Reiman 1: 378)
The underlying logic and dramatic structure of the poem is abstract, as is much of the
content. But the poem also oscillates between the abstract and the particular, between
an apostrophe to the sun and the “deep quiet of this morning hour” (36) where the
poet’s “Apt language” comes to him “ready as the tuneful notes” of “birds in leafy
bower” (39, 41). The problem is not that Wordsworth loses himself in abstraction, but
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that the abstractions and the particulars are frequently opposed to one another. In fact,
it is only in abstraction that he can celebrate the nation and its victory, for the particular
details of that nation reveal not a unity but wandering and disparate tribes, and the
particular details of that victory reveal not righteous triumph but tolerated survival.
Another mistake the reviewer makes is in taking Wordsworth at his word and
reading this poetry as if it was intended to be “within reach of ordinary readers.” To
Southey, Wordsworth confided this disclaimer about the universality of the poem:
I am much of your mind in respect of my ode. Had it been a h y m n . ,
uttering the sentiments of the multitude, a stanza would have been
indispensable. But though I have called it a Thanksgiving Ode,
strictly speaking it is not so, but a poem composed or supposed to
be composed on the morning of the Thanksgiving, uttering the
sentiments of an individual upon that occasion. It is a dramatised
ejaculation .. . {M Y2: 324)
While Wordsworth seems to be splitting hairs here, he is actually admitting something
quite extraordinary. In choosing the ode, he recognizes that he is speaking in a public
form upon national events, but he also asserts that it was not his intention to speak for
the “multitudes” but rather to utter “the sentiments of an individual upon that
occasion.” If such was Wordsworth’s intention, then the Eclectic Review was correct
in identifying the difference between Wordsworth’s response to the Thanksgiving Day
and that of “ordinary readers,” for Wordsworth apparently never intended to speak the
public mind. While this disclaimer might salvage the strangeness of the response
represented by the Thanksgiving Ode, it does so at the expense of any claim to write a
national poetry that would utter the sentiments of the multitude and reach the sympathy
of the nation. By focusing on “the sentiments of an individual,” Wordsworth chooses
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to dissociate himself from the community formed by the simultaneous tolling of the
bells on that third Sunday of 1816. To avoid being engulfed in this moment of national
commemoration, Wordsworth turns back to the particular and individual. The
“homogeneous, empty time” necessary to create the imagined community of the nation
is sacrificed to Wordsworth’s desire for a temporality available for individual utterance
and for a space in the lair of the skull that is exempt from usurpation.
The remaining poems in the 1816 volume re-enact these tensions and record
Wordsworth’s own frustrations over his failure to write the nation, though we can read
these frustrations less as signs of a personal failure and more as a generic one, the
inevitable outcome of the abstraction of commemoration. When the twelve poems that
follow the Thanksgiving Ode in 1816 are read in sequence, they describe the poet’s
struggle to write a public national poetry on contemporary events. The “Ode,
Composed in January 1816” begins with an epigraph from Horace which eschews the
“marbles inscribed with public notices” (SP 53 7n) for the praises of poetry. A
picturesque setting o f pastoral Britain is invoked as the background to a vision of St.
George, “Guardian o f this Land” (25), uttering words that vivify the poet’s “patriotic
heart” (24). The picture is a chivalrous and romanticized one of the end of war, where
virgins adorn the heads of victorious soldiers with “Fit garlands for the Brave” (33),
amidst streaming banners, throngs of “rosy boys” (55), and smiling “grey-haired Sires”
(57). But in the midst of this celebration, “on the verge / Of busiest exultation hung a
dirge” (70-1), a somber reminder of the costs of war even in victory, and a recognition
of the transience of this outward show which usurps the pageantry of the spectacle.
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—But garlands wither,—the festal shows depart,
Like dreams themselves, and sweetest sound,
Albeit of effect profound,
It was—and it is gone! (78-81)
The shift in tense moves the poem out of the Spenserian past into Wordsworth’s
present. Now the work of commemoration must begin: monuments, statues, sculpture
and art that will fix “Expressive records of a glorious strife” (94). But more than all
these, poetry is needed, and so the poet hopes
That I, or some more favoured Bard, may hear
What ye, celestial maids! have often sung
Of Britain’s acts,—may catch it with rapt ear
And give the treasure to our British tongue! (115-8)
No such song of “Britain’s acts” is caught in this poem, functioning as it does as an
invocation to the Muses for such a song. But that wished-for song never materializes,
certainly not in the next poem, an “Inscription for a National Monument in
Commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo.” While the epigraph from Horace
eschewed such public monuments and while the “Ode, Composed in January 1816”
seemed to set the stage for a bardic poetry that would celebrate the nation, Wordsworth
seems unable to proceed to such poetry.
The sonnet following the inscription rehearses the same invocation to the Muses
and thus enacts the same failure to get started. In “Occasioned by the Same Battle,
February 1816,” Wordsworth describes the bard who will be able to write the poetry
that Wordsworth seems desirous of writing, the poet “to whom, in vision clear, / The
aspiring heads of the future things appear, / Like mountain-tops whence mists have
rolled away” (6-8). Thus, what Wordsworth desires is a vision like that gained in “The
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View from the Top of Black Comb,” the imperial prospect-view that creates a unified
nation out of a unified field of vision. This desire is repeated in the next poem, “Siege
of Vienna Raised by John Sobieski, February 1816,” which recounts the glories of
Vincenzo da Filicaia’s depiction of Sobieski’s deliverance of Vienna. The poet asks
“for a kindling touch of that pure flame / Which taught the offering o f song to rise”
(1-2). But that the poet still feels the need to ask for inspiration in this, the fifth poem
of the volume— the fourth consecutive poem to express such a desire— only reinforces
the fact that no such inspiration has been granted and that the commemorative poetry
still remains unwritten. This difficulty of writing on recent public events appears
painfully clear to Wordsworth, who states in a note to this sonnet that Filicaia’s poems
commemorating the Siege of Vienna “are superior perhaps to any lyrical pieces that
contemporary events have ever given birth to, those of the Hebrew Scriptures
excepted” (SP 173). Given Wordsworth’s depiction of God in the Thanksgiving Ode,
it is not surprising that he envisions his task as comparable to that of writing the Old
Testament. Nonetheless, such a comparison makes it clear how difficult he perceived
this task to be, and perhaps explains why he appeared to have so much trouble getting
started. The four poems following the Thanksgiving Ode circle around the task of
writing poetry to celebrate the British nation’s great triumph, without ever actually
writing such poetry. Indeed, through the first five poems, this volume, which is to
present Wordsworth to the nation as a national poet, was a painful record of what he
felt to be the enormity of the undertaking he was confronting as well as his own sense
of failure in completing it.
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This record of failure is followed by three personal sonnets which on first sight
seem oddly misplaced. The first, “September 1815,” appears to be a brief celebration
of autumn and the renewal promised by winter and the subsequent spring. But as the
title instructs us, this is not just any September, but “September 1815,” the first
September free of war in over two decades. By September 1815, the war was over, the
treaties were signed, and Napoleon himself was bound for St. Helena, so this particular
autumn which announces “a season potent to renew” (12) promises to renew the
war-ravaged world. Here, Wordsworth attempts to recapture the optimism felt
immediately following the war, before “present distresses” appeared to “interpose a
veil sufficiently thick to hide, or even to obscure, the splendour of this great moral
victory” (“Advertisement” in SP 178). This attempt to recapture the initial post-war
optimism is picked up in “November 1, 1815” which celebrates that hopeful time in the
image of a “marvellously bright” (1) mountain top that “Shines like another Sun—on
mortal sight / Uprisen, as if to check approaching night” (4-5). Almost of more
importance is the check to Napoleonic ambition in the poem:
Who now would tread,
If so he might, yon mountain’s glittering head—
Terrestrial—but a surface, by the flight
Of sad mortality’s earth-sullying wing,
Unswept, unstained? (6-10)
The sight of the glittering mountain top seems to invite its subjugation by bold
“Adventurers,” but Wordsworth warns against defiling the site with “earth-sullying
wing,” a curious though apt figure for the ambition that both raises human endeavor
and yet is so susceptible to abuse and debasement. The ambition rejected is the
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imperial ambition of history’s Napoleons, but it could also be the bardic ambition
yearned after by Wordsworth himself earlier in the volume. Thus the goal shifts from
the mountain top vision to what Wordsworth calls in the following poem, “To B. R.
Haydon, Esq.,” “The whispers of the lonely Muse” (7).
These three poems placed at the center of the volume mark a brief shift away
from the theme of the nation and back to the natural world. This shift enables
Wordsworth momentarily to rediscover the source of his poetic strength, a rediscovery
which seems to affect the remainder of the volume. In the ninth and tenth poems of the
thirteen poem collection, Wordsworth returns to the subject of war, not to depict a
pitched battle between armies of men, but rather to describe a battle between an army
of men and the natural world. Both “Composed in Recollection of the Expedition of
the French into Russia, February 1816” and “Sonnet On the Same Occasion, February
1816” describe the experience of the French Army in Russia during the Winter of
1812-1813. Writing of war not as a confrontation between nations but as a
confrontation between nations and Nature enables Wordsworth to proclaim Nature
itself as victor over France, thus allowing him to forget the “crouching purpose” and
“distracted will” of his own nation. The defeat of Napoleon’s army is not attributed to
Wellington or to the British people or even the British nation, but to Winter, that
“season potent to renew.” “Composed in Recollection of the Expedition of the French
into Russia, February 1816” contains the only depiction of battle in the entire volume,
a vicious, awful Miltonic picture of war with Nature and the ultimate folly of such an
encounter. Here the victor is not a nation, but a personification of “dread Winter,” the
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natural equivalent of the vengeful Jehovah, who wreaks confusion and destruction
greater than any army could on Napoleon’s forces. The concluding stanza opens with
abstract, highly figurative language but like the Thanksgiving Ode returns as with an
obsessive gaze to the sight of lifeless human bodies:
Fleet the Tartar's reinless steed,—
But fleeter far the pinions o f the Wind,
Which from Siberian caves the monarch freed.
And sent him forth, with squadrons of his kind,
And bade the Snow their ample backs bestride,
And to the battle ride;—
No pitying voice commands a halt—
No courage can repel the dire assault,—
Distracted, spiritless, benumbed and blind,
Whole legions sink—and, in one instant, find
Burial and death: look for them—and descry,
When mom returns, beneath the clear blue sky,
A soundless waste, a trackless vacancy! (26-38)
The first six lines present a personified Winter setting loose his army of winds and
storms. When we are actually shown the battlefield, it is not the conventional picture
of blazing guns and wild clashes, but a scene of eerie silence where “No pitying voice”
is heard. This annihilation of the French Army by natural forces is almost a fantasy of
a “clean” war, a war where the enemy is destroyed, but without the messy presence of
dead and mutilated human bodies. The resulting scene, “A soundless waste, a trackless
vacancy,” is a prototypical Wordsworthian encounter with Nature’s negative sublime,
though one which is figured as a kind of renewal by annihilation. The scene is
morning, the sky is “clear blue” and the vision is prospect-like, but what the eye sees is
not so much Nature as the blankness that is beyond Nature. The “trackless” land is the
land untouched by human presence, unmarked and unmapped, not France, Poland, or
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Russia, but Nature itself, and the mind that turns to silence and blankness is the mind
that dissolves the borders and grids which nations and maps construct. The nation that
Wordsworth set out to celebrate and the great war o f nations that he sought to explain
are finally reduced by the greater forces of the natural world to a silent and unreadable
waste, an unmarked absence that the map sought to make present through
representation. In the end, France had been defeated and Britain has merely survived;
only Winter has been victorious.
Wordsworth had struggled to write about the war and found in Nature the only
subject he could write about. While he sought to sing praises to the British nation and
its people, the only praises sung are to the personification of Winter in “Sonnet On the
Same Occasion, February 1816.” In this sonnet, the festivities that could not be
sustained and which eventually passed away in the “Ode Composed in January 1816”
return in full force, as the poet finally finds something worthy of song. The
personifications of natural elements and the emphasis on imperatives—“Sing ye,”
“Knit the blithe dance,” “report your gain,” “Whisper it”—recall the declamatory style
of the eighteenth century nationalist verse of Thomson and Dyer. But it is not a nation
or a people who find praise and are accorded victory, but Nature itself, for it is Winter,
not Britain, who has conquered “That Host,” Napoleon and French nation. It is Winter,
Nature, and what the Thanksgiving Ode called the God of the storm and “fierce
Tornado” who have triumphed.
The final two poems of the 1816 volume return to the attempt to understand that
working out of justice. In the ode which begins “Who rises on the banks o f Seine,”
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Wordsworth returns to the issue of Napoleon’s rise to power and the failure o f Britain
and Europe to engage him with something other than a crouching purpose and a
distracted will. As Woodring points out, the poem curiously begins in present tense, as
if to highlight the immediacy of the poem’s concerns, and perhaps allude to the
possibility of continuing imperial ambitions (142). In addition, the poem opens with a
strangely elaborate Spenserian figuration of France as a woman, initially alluring but
transformed into something of a dragon lady. Initially a temptress, she is transformed
into “an armed Creature” (16) of a “portentous nature” (18), monstrous and
uncomfortably phallic.
My soul in many a midnight vision bowed
Before the meanings which her spear expressed;
Whether the mighty Beam, in scorn upheld,
Threatened her foes,—or, more pompously at rest,
Seemed to bisect the orbit of her shield (22-26)
Before this phallic queen, nations fall down in impotence, imploring “How long shall
vengeance sleep?” (41), but this question is dismissed by the poet in a curious sexual
figuration as an “Infirm ejaculation” (42). The distracted will shows itself in nations
seeking help in everything but action. Such nations “must sink down to languish / In
worse than former helplessness” (56-7), reduced to “imbecility / Again engendering
anguish, / The same weak wish returns—that had deceived [them] before” (58-60).
Here the call for humility that characterized the recognition of error and sin in the
Thanksgiving Ode is transformed into righteous indignation at those errors. Unlike the
Thanksgiving Ode, which was circumspect in its blame and communal in its regret,
this poem is direct in its placement of blame on the “Weak spirits” and the “Nations
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wanting virtue to be strong” (43), who have dared “not to feel the majesty of right”
(45). However, it is difficult not to see in this highly charged polemic against the
“infirm ejaculation” of Napoleon’s opponents a similar self-chastisement of the poet’s
own “dramatised ejaculation,” and the dramatized failure to proceed with the national
poetry he sought to write:
Weak spirits are there—who would ask,
Upon the pressure of a painful thing,
The Lion’s sinews, or the Eagle’s wing;
Or let their wishes loose, in forest glade,
Among the lurking powers
Of herbs and lowly flowers,
Or seek, from Saints above, miraculous aid;
That Man may be accomplished for a task
Which his own Nature hath enjoined .. . (46-54)
Wordsworth too has failed to act under pressure of “a painful thing,” the task of writing
public poetry commemorating the nation. He too has let his “wishes loose, in the
forest glade” and sought “from Saints above, miraculous aid,” whether it be St. George
descending to deliver a glorious paean to victory, or the power of the bards, or the help
of the Muses, or the touch of some kindling flame from above. In seeking to produce
poetry to commemorate the great victory, Wordsworth has encountered first hand the
crouching purpose and distracted will that he blames for the length and cost of the just
concluded war. When Wordsworth attempted to write the nation, he was himself
caught between opposing visions of the nation which he could not unify and resolve.
The result was a purposeful recourse to the prospect-view of the nation, an abstract
vision which seemed to dissolve upon close examination.
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Fittingly, the volume closes with an elegy, but it is a strange and dark elegy like
the “dirge” that is heard underneath the celebration in “Ode Composed in January
1816.” The “Elegiac Verses, February 1816” which Wordsworth later referred to as “a
second Part” of the Thanksgiving Ode (SP 537), are in the form of an address to the
Earth, that “doleful Mother of Mankind” (2), by an otherworldly spirit. Here in the
final poem of the volume, the consolation offered is Christian, as the spirit comes “thy
stains to wash away, / Thy cherished fetters to unbind” (5-6). However, this spirit is
not simply a consoling spirit but a righteous and accusing one as well, for the Earth is
later addressed not simply as the “Mother of Mankind” but as a false parent:
False Parent of Mankind!
Obdurate, proud, and blind,
I sprinkle thee with soft celestial dews,
Thy lost maternal heart to reinfuse! (19-22)
In the much earlier Intimations Ode, the earth was referred to as the “homely Nurse”
who did all she could to help “her Inmate Man” forget the glories he had known, and
yet that Earth could be figured as a “False Parent” capable of losing “maternal heart” is
a shocking revelation akin to Wordsworth’s perception of Carnage as the daughter of
God, one which perhaps shocks the foundation of our nature. The tensions which
troubled the Thanksgiving Ode and made impossible the task of writing the nation
reassert themselves in the contradictory depiction of earth as both “doleful Mother”
and “False Parent.” Divine will is both invoked as explanation and recognized as
explaining little at all, for how can one explain the oxymoronic image of “rivers in
their secret springs .. . stained so oft with human gore” (25-6)? The source of the
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redemptive waters remains hidden from the surveyor’s view, which is too large and too
abstract to pierce through the confused particulars of the local landscape. Indeed, after
the Thanksgiving Ode debacle, Wordsworth’s view of the nation shifted increasingly
towards the local landscape, people, and manners of his native Westmorland, and like
the local surveyors who sought to contain the proliferating survey data they were
collecting, Wordsworth felt that a great deal was elided by the national map and sought
to repopulate the landscape with the monuments and meanings which the map of the
landscape ignored. In Peter Bell, The Waggoner, and The River Duddon, all published
between April 1819 and May 1820, Wordsworth presented his rethinking of the nation
not as monolithic totality but as regional ideal. Local identity, formed primarily from
local idiosyncrasy, provided both an idealized national identity to counterbalance what
Wordsworth saw as a troubled nation forgetful of its past, and a cautionary tale of what
was to come when such local idiosyncrasies were subsumed within a unified national
identity.
In 1816, the abstract vision of the nation proved inadequate to the nation itself,
and the prospect view, like Mudge’s abstract triangulation map, proved false to the
dense textuality of the landscape. At the conclusion of the Thanksgiving Ode volume,
the comprehensive vision is denied, and the volume closes with perhaps the most
elegiac verses of all:
The Spirit ended his mysterious rite,
And the pure vision closed in darkness infinite. (3 5-6)
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From the sun-drenched landscape of the radiant sun as “Source of pure delight” to the
radiant form of St. George, from the distant mountain’s glittering top to the trackless
vacancy beneath the clear blue sky, Wordsworth had sought the all-embracing vision of
the “Revelation infinite,” the “display august of man’s inheritance.” But if such a
glimpse of Nature’s processes upon the exalted hills was momentarily granted, it was
just as quickly extinguished, the “Revelation infinite” changed into “darkness infinite,”
and the pure light transformed into pure darkness and total gloom, where perhaps like
the geographic laborer we sit with unclosed eyes upon the blinded mountain’s silent
top.
Notes
1 For more on the discipline of the picturesque and the conflict between representation
and property, see Alan Liu, The Sense ofHistory (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1989), 61-137 and passim.
2 John Barrell, "The public prospect and the private view" in Projecting the Landscape
(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1987), 23-4. Working within an area
of geography known as “habitat theory,” social geographer Jay Appleton distinguishes
between “exploring” and “seeking shelter”: “Where [one] has an unimpeded
opportunity to see we can call it a prospect. Where [one] has an opportunity to hide, a
refuge” (73). For a Freudian interpretation of the prospect (phallus) and the refuge
(womb) see Paul Shepard Jr., “The cross valley syndrome” in Landscape, 10:3 (1961),
4-8. For a related discussion of the prospect view and its relation to history, see
Stephen Bann, '"Views of the past': reflections on the treatment of historical objects
and museums of history" in The Inventions o f History: Essays on the Representation
o f the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).
3 “The circumstance alluded to at the conclusion of these verses was told me by Dr.
Satterthwaite, who was Incumbent of Boodle, a small town at the foot of Black Comb.
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He had the particulars from one of the engineers, who was employed in making
trigonometrical surveys of that region” (Fenwick note quoted in SP 518).
4 For more on the importance of the figure o f Napoleon to the nineteenth century
imagination and Wordsworth’s conception o f the imagination, see Theresa M. Kelly,
Wordsworth’ s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
and Alan Liu, The Sense o f History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 3-31
and passim.
3 E. A. Reitan identifies 1739 as the approximate date when maps began to be
commonly used in English periodicals. For more information see his “Expanding
Horizons: Maps in the Gentleman s Magazine, 1731-1754,” Imago Mundi 37 (1985),
54-62. Mark Monmonier argues that accurate and timely maps did not become
common until the development of photo-engraving in the later part of the nineteenth
century. See his “The Rise of Map Use by Elite Newspapers in England, Canada, and
the United States,” Imago Mundi 38 (1986), 46-60, for a qualitative study of map use
in the late nineteenth century.
6 Konvitz, 43. J. B. Harley notes that as early as 1756 there were calls from
commercial interests for a systematic survey of Britain, and the national cartographic
projects of France were held up as models (“Society of Arts” 112).
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Chapter 5
The Wreck Of Is And Was
Oh, ’tis the heart that magnifies this life,
Making a truth and beauty of her own!
And moss-grown alleys, circumscribing shades,
And gurgling rills, assist her in the work
More efficaciously than realms outspread,
As in a map, before the Adventurer’s gaze,
Ocean and earth contending for regard.
— Wordsworth. “To the Same” (Second Ode to Lycoris)
It has been easy if not requisite for critics to dismiss the Thanksgiving Ode and
its accompanying poems as failures, whether that dismissal is in the form of Amoldian
condescension—he confessed that he could read “even the Thanksgiving Ode” with
some pleasure—or modem neglect. However, none of this goes very far towards
explaining either why Wordsworth took on this project or why this project failed.
What is clear about this episode is that when Wordsworth attempted to write the
nation, he was himself caught between opposing visions of the nation which he could
not unify and resolve. The close examination of local detail which had served him so
well seemed to reveal only contrarieties and fractures, differences and tensions, which
could be resolved only through recourse to an abstract vision, a vision which arguably
forsook the very grounds of his strength. While abstractions could serve as either
prelude to or culmination of more detailed exposition, by themselves they tended only
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to confuse and distract readers. This is the objection raised by a contemporary
reviewer, who isolated the largest and most problematic abstraction attempted in the
Thanksgiving Ode volume, that of the unified nation:
We cannot approve of the avowed object of Mr. Wordsworth’s
publication, whatever credit may be due him for the patriotism to
which it owes its existence. When he speaks of Great Britain
having ‘distinguished herself above all other nations for some time
past,’ by a course of action so worthy of commemoration, we wish
to know more definitely to what course of action he refers; and as
we are always fearful of being imposed upon by abstractions, what
portion o f the nation is intended by Great Britain,—the cabinet, the
army, or the people” {Eclectic Review in Reiman 1: 379).
When one considers that the reviewer is responding to the very first sentence of the
“Advertisement” prefixed to the poems, it becomes clear why the reviewer failed to
note or account for the oscillations and reversals that actually characterize the
Thanksgiving Ode and the volume as a whole. From such an inauspicious start, it is no
wonder that the reviewer “cannot approve of the avowed object” of the 1816 volume.
However, the reviewer has hit upon the central problem of these poems. While
Wordsworth sought to present a vision of a unified nation, where military, cabinet, and
all the people are unified in common cause, the divided nation characterized by a
“crouching purpose” and “distracted will” cannot be entirely suppressed. Though
Wordsworth succeeds in unifying the nation through personification—it is a nation
with a single purpose, though crouching, and a single will, though distracted—the
Eclectic Review points to the difficulties raised by such abstractions, and Britain’s
political divisions that render a single personification for the nation impossible.
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Whatever Wordsworth’s avowed object was, the 1816 volume constitutes a very
different response. Stephen Gill is perceptive in noting that Wordsworth “in
attempting a generalizing utterance . . . forsook the very ground of the success of most
of his poems, which is that they are realized in and through the matter-of-fact, the
everyday, the human” (319). Yet while such an observation pinpoints what most
concede to be the “failure” of the 1816 poems, it fails to note how those poems actually
record and enact that failure, and more importantly how the attempt itself is the
culmination (or, for some, nadir) of Wordsworth’s distance from the desire expressed
in the Wanderer’s exhortation to the Pastor to “Give us, for our abstractions, solid
facts; / For our disputes, plain pictures” (V.637-8). The problem in the Thanksgiving
Ode poems, as in the two poems on Black Comb, is that the “solid facts” don’t always
support the abstractions but often oppose or undermine them. In this “failure” to
subsume the “solid facts” in a totalizing vision, these poems re-enact the “failure” of
The Excursion, where the need for “solid facts” to clothe the Wanderer’s abstractions
pushes the narrative well beyond the avowed conclusion, where despondency is
corrected, to the point where the pressure of those “solid facts,” those many
“ill-constructed tale[s]” (V.432), threatens to reveal not unity, but division.
A brief examination of The Excursion points up these tensions and the
difficulties they occasioned for Wordsworth. The composition of the poem occupied
Wordsworth for nearly two decades, parts of Book I dating back to 1795 and his
residence at Racedown. Besides Book I, which was mostly complete by 1800, short
passages in Books II, III, VI, VIII, and IX can be found in manuscripts dated between
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1797 and 1804.1 But the bulk of the composition took place in two, or if we follow
Moorman’s conjectures three, main periods. Much of Books n, HI, and IV was written
in the Summer of 1806, and a large portion of Book IV, the Wanderer’s exhortation
intended to correct the despondency of the Solitary, was written prior to the delineation
of that despondency contained in Books II and El. For over three years, Wordsworth
seemed to do no work on the poem until he returned to it in the winter and spring of
1809-10, seldom writing “less than 50 lines every day,” according to Dorothy
Wordsworth {MY, I, 392). This activity produced Books V, VI, and VII, which
introduce the character of the Pastor and include the numerous “authentic epitaphs”
(V.651) that attempt to provide “solid facts” and “plain pictures” for the Wanderer’s
abstractions. Moorman then posits another year away from The Excursion before
Wordsworth began composing Books VIII and IX in the spring of 1811, completing
them by the end of the year (Moorman, Later Years 174-175). Revision of the entire
poem occupied Wordsworth for the next two years, including a brief period of intense
activity when, following the deaths of Catharine and Thomas, large additions and
subsequent deletions were made in the narrative of the Solitary’s history (Gill
294-295).
It is impossible to know what Wordsworth’s overall conception of the poem was
when he began serious work on it in the summer of 1806, but it is interesting to note
that the poem seemed to grow by accretion and supplementation. The first four books,
mostly completed by 1806, form a unit, as do the subsequent three books completed by
1810 and the final two books completed by 1812. The first four books trace a
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trajectory from the model of response offered by the Wanderer in the tale of Margaret
and the ruined cottage through the delineation of another’s sorrows and consequent
despondency to the culminating exhortation of the Wanderer in Book IV, unabashedly
titled “Despondency Corrected.” But clearly by the winter of 1809 Wordsworth felt
that despondency had not been corrected by the Wanderer’s abstract musings, and so
these abstractions were supplemented by the Pastor’s narratives. However, the Pastor’s
“words of heartfelt truth” (VT1.1054) apparently did not satisfy Wordsworth either, and
further supplementation was required, supplementation which curiously took the form
of a disquisition on the state of the nation. In both this large scale need for
supplementation and in its small scale windings and turnings, the poem is characterized
by an uneasy tension between the grand totalizing overview and the often intractable
details that refuse to be subsumed in that overview.
In Book H, the Poet and the Wanderer move steadily towards the Solitary’s
house. In language reminiscent of the ascent of Snowdon in The Prelude, the Poet
finds the ascent difficult and dispiriting until he reaches the summit and gains a
breathtaking view of the land below.
We scaled, without a track to ease our steps,
A steep ascent; and reached a dreary plain,
With a tumultuous waste o f huge hill tops
Before us; savage region! which I paced
Dispirited: When, all at once, behold!
Beneath our feet, a little lowly vale,
A lowly vale, and yet uplifted high
Among the mountains; even as if the spot
Had been from eldest time by wish of theirs
So placed, to be shut out from all the world!
Um-like it was in shape, deep as an urn;
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With rocks encompassed, save to the south
Was one small opening, where a heath-clad ridge
Supplied a boundary less abrupt and close;
A treeless nook, with two green fields,
A liquid pool that glittered in the sun,
And one bare dwelling; one abode, no more! (11.323-339)
The vale is rendered with topographical accuracy, its contents enumerated and mapped
by an overview that is both like and unlike that seen from the top of Black Comb, for
here the vale is “Um-like” and “shut out from all the world,” not part of a large
imperial landscape. This is the first hint that something is different here, and soon this
imaginative prospect gives way beneath the pressure o f details. The Poet and
Wanderer descend into the vale and upon closer inspection, the site loses the sublimity
that could be attributed to it from the surveyor’s mount.
Homely was the spot;
And, to my feeling, ere we reached the door,
Had almost a forbidding nakedness;
Less fair, I grant, even painfully less fair,
Than it appeared from the beetling rock
We had looked down upon it. (11.638-643)
This spot is “homely” yet “forbidding,” and not simply “less fair,” but “painfully less
fair,” as if the disjunction between the prospect view and the actual details of the vale
could generate a physical response of pain. This possibility of pain is even read back
into the prospect view when the mountain-top is re-figured as “the beetling rock,” a
reminder of the dangerous and sublime landscape, the “tumultuous waste of huge hill
tops,” that initially confronted the poet. While from the mountain-top prospect the
Poet could imagine the sound of the crowing cock filling the vale and the cuckoo
shouting “faint tidings of some gladder place” (11.348), he finds upon closer inspection
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only silence, “save the solitary clock / That on mine ear ticked with a mournful sound”
(11.645-646).
This contrast between the prospect view and the actual details of the valley below
is repeated by the Solitary in his narrative. Sickened by the turn in the French
Revolution and his own personal trials, he seeks to escape them all and journeys to
America where he believes “Man abides, / Primeval Nature’s child” (IH.918-919).
Again it is the prospect view that provides the fuel for these abstract musings, as he
imagines that “contemplations worthier, nobler far / Than her destructive energies,
attend / His independence” (DI.928-930), when an explorer like the Solitary,
having gained the top
Of some commanding eminence, which yet
Intruder ne’er beheld, he thence surveys
Regions of wood and wide savannah, vast
Expanse of unappropriated earth,
With mind that sheds a light on what he sees;
Free as the sun, and lonely as the sun,
Pouring above his head its radiance down
Upon a living and rejoicing world! (111.935-943)
However, when he comes down from the mountain into the valley, he discovers no
such man, finding instead
A creature, squalid, vengeful, and impure;
Remorseless, and submissive to no law
But superstitious fear, and abject sloth. (10.953-955)
The fanciful abstractions possible from the surveyor’s mount are shattered by the
specific details that are not visible from the height. While the mountain top enables the
visionary glimpse it is also subject to its own peculiar kind o f blindness that threatens
to render invisible the map in one’s hand.
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Despite these cautionary tales, the Wanderer does not willingly relinquish the
mountain top vision. He too relates a tale of being “stationed on the top / Of some
huge hill” (IV. 112-113) and glimpsing the sublime vision, though his is more of a
metaphysical one, which filled his soul “with bliss / And holiest love” (TV . 120-121).
Though “those fervent raptures are for ever flown” (TV. 123):
Yet cease I not to struggle, and aspire
Heavenward; and chide the part of me that flags,
Through sinful choice; or dread necessity
On human nature from above imposed.
’Tis by comparison, an easy task
Earth to despise; but, converse with heaven—
This is not easy. (IV. 126-132)
The Wanderer’s exhortation to the Solitary is such an attempt to “aspire Heavenward”
through acquisition of knowledge of the world. The sources of knowledge include the
folk traditions and superstitions rejected by the Solitary as well as the scientific
investigations that “assign / To every class its stations and its office, / Through all the
mighty commonwealth of things” (IV.340-342). Another source proves to be the
“authentic epitaphs” which are intended to illustrate the Wanderer’s abstractions, but
which in their proliferation and multiplicity threaten to overwhelm any attempt at
totalization.
The Pastor’s narratives are intended to illustrate “Forgiveness, patience, hope,
and charity” (V.727), but as the Solitary warns, a person’s life is “an ill-constructed
tale” (V.432) that often “deviates from the line” (V.259), a spatial figuration that
reminds us of the disjunction between the trigonometer’s gaze and the local surveyor’s
detailed survey. While the Solitary is undoubtedly far too pessimistic, the Wanderer
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and the Pastor are probably far too sanguine about the uses to which narratives can be
put once they are circulated, and underestimate the possibility that these narratives
could prove “incongruous, impotent and blank” (V.317). Hazlitt’s review of The
Excursion, which ran in three separate issues of the Examiner, points up the dangers of
exemplary narratives. The first part of the review is unstinting in its praise and seems
to correspond to the first four books of the poem, as if Hazlitt had only read that far at
the time he wrote the first installment. The second and third parts are less full of
praise; the second part begins with a note o f disappointment over the failure of the last
five books to fulfill Hazlitt’s expectations.
We could have wished that Mr. Wordsworth had given to his work
the form of a philosophical poem altogether, with only occasional
digressions and allusions to particular instances .. . But he has
chosen to encumber himself with a load of narrative and
description, which, instead of assisting, hinders the progress and
effect of the general reasoning . . . It is only by an extreme process
of abstraction that it is often possible to trace the operation of the
general law in the particular illustration, yet it is to supply the
defect of abstraction that the illustration is given (Reiman, II, 524).
For Hazlitt, the function of “the particular illustration” is “to supply the defect of
abstraction.” However, what he finds in The Excursion are particular illustrations that
can be coerced under the “general law” only by an “extreme process of abstraction.”2
Like the squalid, vengeful creature encountered by the Solitary when he came down the
mountain, the particular details of Wordsworth’s “narrative and description”
continually works against the totalizing abstractions they were intended to support.
Spread throughout Books V, VI, and VII are approximately sixteen narratives
ranging in length from the fifty or so lines on the miner of Patterdale, to the nearly
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three hundred line tale of Ellen. These narratives constitute what Geoffrey Hartman
calls a “heaping up of exempla in the medieval manner” (Wordsworth’ s Poetry 319),
each narrative supposedly serving as an illustration to Wordsworth’s high argument.
Initially the stories focus on how various individuals have overcome adversity and
sorrow to achieve peace, but following the Solitary’s querulous demand for stories that
must exist of those “cut off / From peace like exiles on some barren rock” (VL533-4),
the Pastor recounts the story of a woman of keen intelligence, but over-ambitious for
recognition and zealous for protection of her household power, who even on her
deathbed was vexed by the thought of her ministering sister-in-law usurping her place.
The Pastor concludes the story with the weak hope that something may be learned from
this tale.
And her uncharitable acts, I trust,
And harsh unkindnesses are all forgiven,
Tho’, in this Vale, remembered with deep awe. (VL775-777)
The hope is that this woman’s story has served the people of the vale as an
admonishment, but forgiveness by the people of the vale is left to the Pastor’s
conjectural “I trust.” From this point forward, we are asked to “trust” that the implied
lessons are learned and the particular instances conform to and support the general
laws. Frequently this trust is misplaced.
The Pastor then tells the story of Ellen, a tragic tale of a woman seduced and
subsequently abandoned, first by her seducer, then by the death of her child, and finally
by the self-righteous hard-heartedness of the community. Moved by her own sense of
being a burden, Ellen leaves her child with her parents and takes employment as a
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wet-nurse. But “ungentle minds can easily find means / To impose severe restraints
and laws unjust” and soon Ellen is denied by her employers the right to visit her child.
Shortly afterwards her child dies. Her employers nearly prevent her from attending the
funeral and confine her within their house and garden to keep her from visiting the
child’s grave. Eventually Ellen “passed / Into that pure and unknown world of love /
Where injury cannot come” (VI.1049-1051), calling forth from the Wanderer this
interpretation:
Blest are they
Whose sorrow rather is to suffer wrong
Than to do wrong, albeit themselves have erred.
This tale gives proof that Heaven most gently deals
With such, in their affliction” (VI. 1069-1073)
But tills certainly is not the only interpretation available. The narrow-mindedness of
Ellen’s employers and the tremendous trials to which she is put seem not to prove that
Heaven deals gently with the afflicted, but rather the complete opposite. Perhaps, as
Susan Wolfson argues, the Wanderer’s interjection is a purposeful “exposure of [his]
limitations,” a reminder of how frequently he “serenely exploits” such tales “for his
didactic ends” (115). However, despite occasions when “the Author’s sensitivity to his
mentor’s penchant for sententious summary . . . shadows his regard for the Wanderer’s
wisdom” (115), these moments mark what Wolfson calls “the anti-interrogative mood”
of the later books, where “‘mystery’ may be subsumed under the workings of a
‘controuling Providence’ and entertained chiefly to advance opportunities for Faith to
meet all mysteries (6.560-65)” (118).
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It is this section of The Excursion that Hazlitt refers to as showing the “ depraved
and inveterate selfishness” only to be found “among the inhabitant?; of these boasted
mountain districts,” and which occasions his acerbic disquisition on how “All
country-people hate each other” (Reiman 2: 528). Despite the Wanderer’s assertion
that these tales adhere to the general message of the Pastor’s other stories, they actually
work against that message to prove Hazlitt’s allegation that only by an “extreme
process of abstraction” can they be brought back in line. Wordsworth is a victim either
of his own inability or unwillingness to suppress contrary views and narratives which
undermine the central progress of the poem, or of the inherent tendency of narratives to
generate multiple and incongruous interpretations. Of course to characterize these
stories as deviations is to assume that there is a single line of development in the entire
poem, an assumption that unquestionably oversimplifies Wordsworth’s own moral
vision, which here as elsewhere cannot be reduced to a single monolithic purpose. If
this is a “failure” then it is a failure of an ambitious kind.
The remainder of Book VI and much of Book VII consist of more conventional
stories of goodness triumphing over adversity, but the pressure of “solid facts” intrudes
into the narrative in other ways. The Pastor’s narrative is interrupted by the sight of a
waggoner hauling timber. This sight occasions from the Pastor a curiously ambivalent
response.
I feel at times a motion of despite
Towards one, whose bold contrivances and skill,
As you have seen, bear such a conspicuous part
In works of havoc; taking from these vales,
One after one, their proudest ornaments. (VH.590-594)
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The Pastor’s lament is for the disappearing forests of Britain, a condition exacerbated
by wartime demand for ship timbers and industrial demand for machinery. This
waggoner, denuding the hills to supply “the enormous axle-tree / That whirls (how
slow itself!) ten thousand spindles” (VH.606-607), is nothing less than a “keen
Destroyer” (VII.631), one o f the “haughty Spoilers of the world” (VII.630). What
began innocently enough as an appearance of a genuine rustic full of “gaiety and
health, / Freedom and hope” (VII.560-561), ends with an appearance of the death’s
head amidst this supposed arcadia. While the Pastor tells tales of forbearance,
perseverance, hope and charity, the demands of the world outside the vale intrude upon
the wished-for peace. A close examination of even the most peaceful glade seems to
reveal the timberman with his axe in hand.
It is to the world outside the vale that the poem turns in the final two books.
Both hymn and dirge are sung to this “inventive Age” (Vin.87) which has so altered
the landscape and the people, almost with “the speed of magic” (Vffl.88). Yet while
the Wanderer laments the changes that have come over people, the loss of intercourse
with nature and the freedom and liberty that such intercourse nourishes, the Solitary’s
rejection of either change or Nature’s salutary influence goes unanswered. Ostensibly
the answer to the Solitary’s “ardent sally” comes in the form of the Pastor’s children,
who appear as a confirmation of all that the Wanderer has said, but when the Wanderer
closes his exhortation at the end of the poem, it is impossible not to be struck by the
fact that this abstract vision is available not to everyone, but only to “this little band” of
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people perched upon a solitary mountain top in the most sparsely populated county in
England.
What makes this final vision possible is a recourse to abstraction, an abstracting
imagination free from the confusion of petty details. The Wanderer, in asserting his
right to speak, compares increasing age not to a descent into a vale, but to an ascent up
to a mountain top.
Rightly it is said
That Man descends into the V a l e of years;
Yet have I thought that we might also speak,
And not presumptuously, I trust, of Age,
As of a final E m in e n c e ; though bare
In aspect and forbidding, yet a point
On which ’tis not impossible to sit
In awful sovereignty (IX.48-55)
The mountain-top is a sublime landscape, the peak “bare / In aspect and forbidding.”
The Wanderer’s earlier enthusiasm for the mountain-top vision, however, seems
dampened and his belief in its availability seems more circumspect. He tells the others
that “ ’tis not impossible to sit” upon this peak, the litotes implying that it is difficult
and perhaps unavailable to some, or perhaps most. From this surveyor’s mount one
might see all the land that lies around, a topographer’s view:
Faint, and diminished to the gazing eye,
Forest and field, and hill and dale appear,
With all the shapes over their surface spread: (IX.60-62)
What such a vantage point offers is not simply a view of the surface, but a view
beneath the surface of things. Such a view is possible only when the surface
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perturbations of the world are dismissed, the local details ignored, all subsumed within
an imaginative totalizing vision.
For on that superior height
Who sits, is disencumbered from the press
Of near obstructions, and is privileged
To breathe in solitude, above the host
Of ever-humming insects, ’mid thin air
That suits not them. The murmur of the leaves
Many and idle, visits not his ear:
This he is freed from, and from thousand notes
(Not less unceasing, not less vain than these,)
By which the finer passages of sense
Are occupied; and the soul, that would incline
To listen, is prevented or deterred. (IX.69-80)
The “thousand blended notes,” that Wordsworth characterized in “Lines Written in
Early Spring as providing access to and evidence of Nature’s secret impulses, are here
representative of all that distracts one from contemplation. The world outside the vale
is the world that must be left below, and the people that comprise that world are simply
“ever-humming insects.” The abstract vision is only possible when local details are
ignored. But the mountain top vision is always susceptible to darkness, and despite the
Wanderer’s staunch belief in the “one maternal spirit” of which all partake (IX. 111),
his brutally realistic depiction of the current state of the nation, begun in Book VIII and
continued in Book IX, seems to belie any hope or foundation for such a belief; and the
solutions offered—state mandated education and increased emigration—seem
incongruously pragmatic for a visionary exhortation. When the entire party ascends a
mountain for one last look at the vale, they see a different vision of Britain than that
seen from the top of Black Comb:
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far off,
And yet conspicuous, stood the old Church-tower,
In majesty presiding over fields
And habitations seemingly preserved
From all intrusion of the restless world
By rocks impassable and mountains huge. (IX.574-579)
Unlike the unending prospect of imperial Britain, this is a vision of an isolated and
endangered Britain, rocks and mountains like Sir John Pennington’s fortress walls
keeping away “the restless world.” Like the Wanderer’s mountain top vision, which
required freedom from the confusion of voices in the valley below, this vision of
Britain is only possible once the distractions of the outside world, the local details and
incongruous stories that cloud the prospect are ignored like the buzzing of so many
insects, and yet this vision relies on the presence of idealized local details. In short, the
abstract vision requires the subsumption of local details, congruous and incongruous,
but as the mapmakers to Britain were discovering at this time, it was the delineation of
local detail—not the impossible mountain top vision—that proved the accuracy, utility
and beauty of the finished map.
As argued in Chapter 4, when Colonel Mudge stationed himself on the top of
Black Comb, his purpose was not to gather information for a detailed mapping of the
land but to gather triangulation data necessary for establishing the geodetic accuracy of
the survey as a whole. As J. B. Harley has pointed out, it is important to remember that
the survey was originally called the Trigonometrical Survey—the published maps were
not designated Ordnance Survey maps until after 1810— and that “the idea of making a
national topographical map was not determined upon until several years after 1791”
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(“Error and Revision” 116). As J. E. Portlock, the nineteenth century biographer of
Mudge’s successor Thomas Colby, wrote in 1859, the topographical survey was
“grafted . . . upon an independent scientific work, was local, and detached in order of
performance . . . and . . . the importance of a great national survey was at first only
partly recognised” (quoted in Harley, “Error and Revision” 116). As Harley makes
clear, “it was the trigonometrical operations (rather than the work of the detail survey)
which not only captured the imagination of the layman, but also commanded the
attention of the scientific world.” Mudge’s observations were “reported alike in the
Philosophical Transactions and in the Gentlemen’ s Magazine” (“Error and Revision”
117). When William Roy commenced final measurements of the Hounslow Heath
base3 in 1784 as part of an international project to connect geodetically the royal
observatories of Paris and Greenwich, the King himself “deigned to honour the
operation by his presence, for the space of two hours, entering very minutely into the
work of conducting it,” and no doubt partook of the hospitality of Joseph Banks, then
president of the Royal Society, who repeatedly visited the operation and “ordered his
tents to be continually pitched near at hand, where his immediate guests, and numerous
visitors whom curiosity drew to the spot, met with the most hospitable supply of every
necessity, and even elegant refreshment” (quoted in Close 17). While the
trigonometrical work often took on the form o f a scientific carnival, “hidden by the
lanes and hedgerows of the English lowland the topographical surveyor plotted away
unnoticed” (Harley, “Error and Revision” 117).
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While the scientific work of the trigonometric survey retained its prominence, the
detailed survey remained a poor relation, always short of funds and personnel, and
constantly forced to justify its utility against a prevailing attitude that such work was
better left to private surveyors, draftsmen, engravers, and printers. For example, the
Commissioners of the Board of Ordnance—under which the survey operated—had
concluded in 1811 that “after the public objects of the Trigonometrical Survey were
attained, it might have been left to individual speculation to fill up the Triangles with a
local Survey” (quoted in Harley, “Error and Revision” 116). While it is tempting to
place the Ordnance Survey within a larger episteme of nationalist consolidation, the
actual operation of the survey was carried out with at best the lukewarm support of
government and at worst the outright resistance of government to finance the work. It
is interesting to note that when more detailed local maps were required by the New
Poor Law (1834), the Tithe Commutation Act (1836), the various sanitary reform
initiatives of the 1840s and the various transportation projects of the 1830s and 1840s,
each of the government commissions or private entities set up to look into these issues
initially rejected the Ordnance Survey maps and initiated their own mapmaking
projects.4
While the Ordnance Survey maps attempted to create a uniform series of
accurate topographical maps of Britain, uniformity of the symbols, contents, and
topographical representation was not achieved in the Old Series (those produced
between 1801 and 1870). Instead, changing ideas about what should be represented on
the maps and how they should be represented produced an incremental movement
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towards uniformity. For example, there were three methods used for representing
changes in elevation. Hachuring represents hills by uphill strokes, with the thickness
of the line corresponding to the steepness of the slope. Hill-sketching represents hills
through the use of brush and ink to depict a landscape in oblique or vertical light.
Contour lines represent hills by using lines to connect all points of equal elevation.
The earliest maps represented relief with a combination of hachuring and shading,
while those produced up to mid-century represented relief with hill-sketching, and
those after mid-century used a combination of hill-sketching and selected contour lines
to represent hills.
The use of contour lines to represent relief had been considered for use by the
Ordnance Survey as early as the 1830s but was rejected due to the limitations of
available printing technology and the resistance of the surveyors and draftsmen.
Despite the survey’s origins in scientific operations, the surveyors and draftsmen
viewed their work more as art than as science. In 1810, when Mudge entrusted the
field instruction of cadets in surveying and drawing to Robert Dawson, he offered this
praise of Dawson:
Besides his other qualifications, Mr. Dawson had the merit of
bringing topographical drawing to a degree of perfection that had
given to his plans a beauty and accuracy of expression which some
of our eminent artists had previously supposed unattainable.
(quoted in Close 80)
Mudge praises Dawson’s work for its “beauty” and accuracy, though not accuracy of
representation, but of “expression.” While the land may be subject to a certain degree
of scientific measurement, in the early days of the Ordnance Survey there remained a
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sense that the landscape was still something that was seen, and so its cartographic
representation had to adhere to how someone might see it. Dawson was quite
unambiguous about what he felt to be the duties of the mapmaker: “The draughtman’s
art is to do justice to nature and the engraver’s art is to do justice to the draughtman; on
neither side should rules and methods be imposed, except by superior artistic
judgment” (quoted in Close, 126). For Dawson, it is not a question of plotting,
drawing, or even representing, but rather one of “justice.” Measuring the land is not so
much an arithmetic activity as it is an artistic one, and the justness of the measure is
determined by fidelity to Nature. Mudge was in complete agreement with Dawson’s
sentiments, summed up by his simple, yet of course entirely ambiguous, instruction for
surveyors: “I would have them all draw from nature” (quoted in Seymour 52).
Of course not everyone liked Dawson’s system. In a report critical of the
Ordnance Survey made to Parliament in 1828, Major-General Sir James
Carmichael-Smith advocated a more scientific approach, declaring that Dawson’s
approach “left too much to the taste, imagination and fancy of the individual
draughtsman” (quoted in Seymour 52). As J. B. Harley has shown, upon close
examination the surveyor’s field sketches “exhibit wide variations in accuracy, in
attention to detail, and in style of drawing” (“Error and Revision” 118), but such
differences are inevitable in any approach that sees landscape as subject to expression
as much as to measurement, as affecting an observer as much as capable of chaining
and perambulation.3
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But this local variation was due as much to what was represented on the map as
to how it was represented. The early days of the survey were marked by confusion
over what should be included on the maps, and the details included were often
contingent upon the personal interests o f the surveyor as well as the closeness o f the
ties established by the surveyor with the local population. The general policy was that
surveyors were supposed to locate and record everything attached to the ground, “to
show any features visible from the ground” and avoid “except in the case of
administrative divisions, to mark ideal, or invisible, lines” (Close 112). Thus despite
the anxiety felt by the local populations, the survey was never intended as a cadastral
one, and the Ordnance Survey office would not be given such a task until late in the
nineteenth century. However, it is one thing to record the presence of an object and
quite another to identify and name it. Despite William Roy’s personal interest in
antiquities—his posthumously published monograph, The Military Antiquities o f the
Romans in Britain, was the standard source on the subject until well into the twentieth
century—the pre-1791 material collected for the detailed survey shows no interest in
mapping antiquities (Seymour 63-64). Over the next two decades antiquities were
increasingly noted as the survey extended into the artifact-rich south-west, but still
there was no policy on the inclusion of such material, it depending more upon “the
personal interests of the surveyor and on his contact with well-informed local
antiquaries anxious to secure inclusion of their own work on the maps” (Seymour 64).
The most prominent example of the effect a local antiquarian could have on the
“official” representation of the local landscape is the survey of Dorset conducted by
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Philip and Edmund Crocker between 1805 and 1809. The Crockers worked closely
with Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who was at the time preparing his foundational study of
ancient British monuments, Ancient Wiltshire, first published in 1812. Mudge reported
that Hoare was delighted with the work of the Crockers, and corrections on proofs of
the OS maps in Hoare’s hand reveal his close involvement with the mapping. By 1807,
Philip Crocker had begun drawing maps and illustrations for Hoare’s Ancient
Wiltshire, a task which eventually led him to leave the survey and work first as Hoare’s
illustrator and later as his land agent. The resulting OS map represented the Wiltshire
area as containing the highest concentration of prehistoric antiquities in Britain, a view
which supported and was supported by Hoare’s own work (Seymour 63-5). These
contingent practices of personal interest and local enthusiasm were not finally codified
into rules until 1816, when in a detailed statement of policy, field surveyors were
instructed that “all remains of ancient Fortifications, Druidical Monuments, vitrified
Forts, and all Tumuli & Barrows shall be noticed in the Plans [detailed field sketches]
wherever they occur” (Seymour 54). Increasingly, the cartographic representation of
the nation was being transformed into a museum of national heritage.
In addition, surveyors went to great lengths to establish the correct orthography
and in many cases etymology of place-names, a practice which, while well-intentioned,
embroiled the survey in nationalistic controversies when a plethora of possible
spellings for Welsh and Irish place-names led to a frequent recourse to anglicizing the
names. The names of principal towns and parishes were checked against official
sources such as the published census returns, but for minor names, local spoken and
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written forms were adopted with only cursory attempts to resolve disagreements. For
example, the names in South Wales were mostly anglicized, but as the survey moved
further west, away from the English border, increasingly there was controversy. The
maps of Pembrokeshire published in 1818 and 1820 were disputed by local authorities.
Thomas Colby, then head of the survey and himself a Welshman, replied that proof
maps had been sent to two prominent Pembrokeshire residents for correction, and that
one was returned unchanged and the other was returned with substantial revision.
Which one was adopted is unclear, but such significant disagreement probably led to
frequent unhappy compromises (Seymour 61-4). In Ireland, the survey made great
efforts to collect place-names, even employing the noted Irish philologist John
O’Donovan to gather variants and select the one that seemed to come closest to the
presumed Irish original. O’Donovan’s procedure is clear from a letter he wrote in 1834
to Thomas Larcom, the head of the Irish survey:
In the parish of Tyrella there is a townland called Ballykinler,
which Vallency, Beauford, and in all probability O’Reilly, would
have explained, the Town at the Head o f the Sea . . . but as soon as
I heard it pronounced by an old Irishman, I said it must mean the
Town o f the Candlestick (horrid name ! !), and silly conjecture for
any sensible person! Be it so, say I—but turn to the fact. Look at
Harris’s History o f the County o f Down, 1744, and you will find,
Ballykinler lower, middle, upper . . . formed the parish of
Ballykinler, the tithes of which were appropriated to Christ Church,
Dublin, for WAX LIGHT . . . (quoted in Close 137)
However, controversy ensued when the survey was faced with cases in which the
current spelling could not be reduced to original meanings. In these cases, the survey
often invented new spellings. For example, the survey adopted the names Ballynacorra
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for Ballinacurra, Cahir for Caher, Monasterevin for Monasterevan, and Skull for
Schull, adoptions that were ignored by the Irish government and the Post Office as well
as by later mapmakers (Seymour 89).
From the representation of relief according to artistic principles to an
investigation into the origin of place-names, the local survey proceeded under the
assumption that land, while reducible to triangles, was essentially a human landscape,
seen by people and marked by their historical presence. While the directors of the
Ordnance Survey never lost sight of the goal of producing a uniform map of Great
Britain, the surveyors, draftsmen, and engravers progressed slowly from secondary
triangle to map sheet to county set, accumulating in the process vast stores of
ethnographic and folkloric information drawn from local informants. In this way, the
survey perpetuated the practice of commercial map-makers of the eighteenth century
whose maps catered to the taste of their landlord customers. Aesthetically attractive
maps replete with local historical and archaeological information appealed to
customers who would number among their polite accomplishments some training in
drawing and painting, as well as in history and antiquities. Thus the increased
availability of detailed maps not only allowed a larger proportion of the population to
“own” the British landscape; it allowed more people to demonstrate their own
possession of polite accomplishments formerly reserved for a higher class.
One curious byproduct of this combination of aesthetic design and the interest in
the local can still be seen in today’s Ordnance Survey maps, and that is a nearly
uniform density of information, which while rendering the map aesthetically attractive
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actually reifies the rural landscape at the expense of the urban. If one studies an
Ordnance Survey map, whether it be the 1801 map of Kent or any modem OS map,
what is apparent upon close inspection is the frequency of names assigned to rural
farms and houses and the lack of names for similar structures in urban areas. For
example, on a recent OS map of the city o f Canterbury and its environs, farms, inns,
houses, and public houses along the A291 north of Sturry are represented and labeled,
while in Canterbury itself no such structures are noted. So while the “Fox & Hound,”
located on the A291 in the Blean Woods, is represented and named, no similar
establishments are noted in Canterbury. O f course, this doesn’t mean there are no pubs
in Canterbury, but rather that the increased density of the urban environment restricts
what can be represented, in this case allowing only a school, a cathedral and a couple
of hospitals to be identified (though not named) in the city.6 In the larger-scale maps of
the early nineteenth century similar problems were encountered. W. A. Seymour
points out that “in the hilly but densely populated areas of the Pennine fringes and in
South Wales, the engraved map began to fail, especially where names coincided with
woods and steep slopes” (105). Urban areas took on the look of a monolithic,
undifferentiated and unnamed mass of buildings, while rural areas were picturesquely
dotted with inns and farms and antiquities. Curiously, urban areas take on a blank
appearance while the blank rural spaces are filled in with specific local detail, creating
a uniform density of information that does not correspond to the wide variations in
density found in the landscape. The effect of such a representation is to create a rural
landscape that appears more human in its picturesque mixture of habitation and open
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space and an urban landscape that appears bereft of human activity, close, cramped and
undifferentiated.
Of course, urban areas were not bereft of human activity, but overwhelmed with
it, the absence or presence of activity leading to the same figuration of undifferentiated
signs. This lack of differentiation, or rather the inability to register or read the plethora
of activities, makes the juxtaposition of urban and rural landscape the cartographic
equivalent of Wordsworth’s juxtaposition of London and a county fair in Books VII
and Vm of the 1805 Prelude. As noted in Chapter 1, this juxtaposition enables
Wordsworth to register the unreadability of the uncounted and unaccountable multitude
and contrast it with the eminently readable rural landscape. The “blank confusion” of
the “mighty City” (VTI.696-7) gives way to an ordered landscape where proportion
between man and nature implies reciprocity between man fitted to the land and the land
fitted to man:
Immense
Is the Recess, the circumambient World
Magnificent, by which they are embraced.
They move about up on the soft green field:
How little They, they and their doings seem,
Their herds and flocks about them, they themselves,
And all that they can further or obstruct!
Through utter weakness pitiably dear
As tender Infants are: and yet how great!
For all things serve them; them the Morning light
Loves as it glistens on the silent rocks,
And them the silent Rocks, which now from high
Look down upon them; the reposing Clouds,
The lurking Brooks from their invisible haunts,
And Old Helvellyn, conscious of the stir,
And the blue Sky that roofs their calm abode. (Vin.46-61)
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Unlike the “Parliament of Monsters” (VTL692), the “undistinguishable world”
(VTL700) of London, the rural landscape does not overwhelm the rural people, but
places them in a relationship with the land that both infantilizes and sanctifies them.
This “Recess,” like the “urn-like” vale of the Solitary or the vale guarded “By rocks
impassable and mountains huge” glimpsed at the end of The Excursion, is an idealized
portrait of the British landscape that relies on elements of the picturesque to provide
the aesthetic equivalent of national identity.
Wordsworth provides such a picturesque depiction of the rural landscape in
revisions made to “Ode, Composed in January 1816,” which was originally published
in the Thanksgiving Ode volume. In the 1816 version, Wordsworth provides a picture
of the rural landscape of Britain as background to a vision of St. George descending to
earth to deliver a patriotic commemoration at the end of the war.
I saw, in wondrous perspective displayed,
A landscape richer than happiest skill
Of pencil ever clothed with light and shade;
An intermingled pomp of vale and hill,
Tower, town, and city—and suburban grove,
And stately forest where the wild deer rove. (9-14)
In the version published in the 1827 edition of his poems, this background is
embellished with the picturesque local details that, like the Ordnance Survey maps, had
come to represent a certain vision of Britain.
I saw, in wondrous perspective displayed,
A landscape more august than happiest skill
Of pencil ever cloth’d with light and shade;
An intermingled pomp of vale and hill,
Tower, town, and city, and naval stream,
Nor wanting lurking hamlets, dusky towns,
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And scattered rural farms of aspect bright,
And, here and there, between the pastoral downs,
The azure sea upswelled upon the sight.
Fair prospect, such as Britain only shows! (SP 202, app. crit.)
The aristocratic features such as the suburban grove and stately forest are replaced by
the more egalitarian and utilitarian naval stream and picturesque scattering of hamlets,
towns and rural farms, with the towns appropriately dusky and unclear and the farms
brightly delineated. The landscape is a much more distinctly human landscape, and it
is the delineation of these local details, the siting of human habitations intermingled
with vale and hill and azure sea, which defines this “Fair prospect, such as Britain only
shows.” The unending prospect o f imperial Britain is only one possible vision of
Britain, one which has proven too susceptible to the fickle skies. Clearly what was
needed was an explication of the British national character from the local details
increasingly depicted on the maps of Britain, details that fed an idealization of the
British landscape and the equally idealized British character purportedly formed by and
responsive to the local.
What defined this national character then was not so much the shared geography
as a shared response to an imagined geography, and in this way Wordsworth is able to
define the problem of oppositional politics as one of deviant response to landscape. In
a letter to John Scott of April 18, 1816, Wordsworth attempts to explain how the
political opposition deviates from the true British character.
The partialities of these individuals, from different causes and in
different ways are both foreign . . . Suppose the opposition as a
body, or take them in classes, the Grenvilles, the Wellesleys, the
Foxites, the Burdettites, and let your imagination carry them in
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procession through Westminster Hall, and thence let them pass into
the adjoining Abbey, and give them credit for feeling the utmost
and best that they are capable of feeling in connection with these
venerable and sacred places, and say frankly whether you would be
satisfied with the result (M Y2: 304).
By calling the opposition “foreign” Wordsworth is able to dissociate them from the
true British character, but here foreignness is not some overt mark of physiognomic
feature, color, or language, but a subtle distinction in how one responds to the artifacts
of the nation. To be truly British one must respond with appropriate reverence to
British things, be suitably moved at the trappings of British power and heritage.
However, for Wordsworth one must be stirred not only by the overt symbols of Church
and State, but by the subtle configuration of the British landscape, a landscape that for
him embodies the culture and heritage of the British nation.
Imagine them to be looking from a green hill over a rich landscape
diversified by Spires and Church Towers and hamlets, and all the
happy images of English landscape, would their sensations come
much nearer to what one would desire; in a word have [they]
becoming reverence of the English character, and do they value as
they ought, and even as their opponents do, the Constitution of the
country, in Church and State (MY 2: 304).
In this idealized picture of the British landscape, there is a striking resemblance to that
landscape described at the end of The Excursion, where the “old Church-tower” stood
“In majesty presiding over fields” (IX.575-6). It is astonishing how rapidly
Wordsworth passes from landscape to character to Constitution, as if “Constitution
could be mapped straight out of topographical features and both were equally legible.
This is both an ingenious and dangerous solution to the problem of competing ideas
about the nation and the character of the nation. By shifting the burden of patriotism
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from overt act to intricate response, Wordsworth establishes a new test for inclusion,
one focused on the individual’s response to an idealization of the local and specific.
Since both Whig and Tory could wave the flag, a finer discrimination was necessary to
distinguish true from false, and so reverence for the established forms of Church and
State, embodied in an imagined feudal landscape of Church and hamlet, Westminster
Abbey and Westminster Hall, provides the means to discriminate between the false
patriot and the true.7
Of course, if a test of patriotism is dependent upon a proper appreciation of rural
landscape, the very idea of a uniform national character becomes difficult to maintain
in the face of competing local characters formed by idiosyncratic local landscapes—the
urban sprawl of London, the Suffolk downs, the industrial midlands, the Cumberland
mountains. All different, but not all equal. For years Wordsworth had been troubled
by the growth of “the lower orders” which had been “for upwards of thirty years
accumulating in pestilential masses of ignorant population,” and the change this
urbanization had wrought in the national character, a change he perceived to be a
threatening “disease” which now was breaking out in “all its danger and deformity”
{MY 2: 21). The disease was even touching his native Westmorland, where
Wordsworth worried about the loss of “the principal ties which kept the different
classes of society in a vital and harmonious dependence upon each other” and the
replacement of “this moral cement” with nothing but “a quickened self-interest” {MY
2: 375-6). For Wordsworth the cure for this disease lay not in a recourse to an abstract,
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national rhetoric but in a return to the local delineation of character and the landscape
which he felt produced it. That landscape was his native Westmorland.
In the polemical and highly partisan tract he wrote in support of Lord Lonsdale’s
candidate for the 1818 Westmorland election, Wordsworth turned away from talk of
the national character to a delineation of the local character.
And first looking at this matter locally, what is that portion of
England known by the name of the County of Westmorland? A
Country which indeed the natives of it love, and are justly proud
of; a region famous for the production of shrewd, intelligent, brave,
active, honest, enterprising men:—but it covers no very large space
on the map; the soil is in general barren, the country poor
accordingly, and of necessity thinly inhabited (Two Addresses to
the Freeholders o f Westmorland in PrW 3: 156).
Putting aside the accuracy of this depiction of the local inhabitants, what is important is
how Wordsworth uses the local character as both an idealization of what he feels to be
best about the national character and as a counter-example to what he feels to be the
current state of the national character. Despite the fact that it occupies little space on
the physical map, Wordsworth wants to argue that it occupies, or should occupy, a
large space on the imaginative map of the nation’s character. If the inhabitants of
Westmorland are characterized as “independent” (PrW 3: 170), it is to contrast them
with “the ignorant and distressed multitudes, in other parts of the Island” (PrW 3: 168)
subject to “demagogues and mob-exciting patriots” (PrW 3: 169). If the Lowthers are
praised for their long association with Westmorland, it is to contrast them with London
agitators who “have no natural connection with the county” (PrW 3: 177) and have
come to Westmorland “from the dirty alleys and obscure courts of the Metropolis”
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(PrW3: 171) to disseminate their “falsehoods and misrepresentations” (PrW 3: 184).
Wordsworth’s purpose here, as well as in his uncharacteristic electioneering activities,
was not motivated simply by a toadyish adherence to his patron, but by a siege
mentality that saw in this relatively minor election the spread of the diseased national
character into his native vale. In this local campaign, Wordsworth confronted the loss
of the local, the usurpation of Westmorland “independence” by the “dark dependence”
(PrW 3: 182) symbolized by Henry Brougham, the opposition candidate. What was at
stake was not simply a seat in Parliament, but a vision of Britain which sought to
counter the spread of disease with a localized vision of what the national character
should be, a vision that rested upon the exemplary character o f the people of
Westmorland and the detailed delineation of the landscape that formed that character.
Like the sequestered vale in Book IX of The Excursion, this landscape must be guarded
from the intrusions of the Metropolis and the “restless world” that it represented.
This connection between landscape and character and its relationship to the
exchange of the abstract mountain-top vision for the delineation of local detail can be
seen in the complicated revision history of the second ode to Lycoris, titled “To the
Same.” In an early fair-copied manuscript dated 1817, the poem depicts a quiet scene
of meditation which is held to be more desirable than any mountain-top vision:
Come— let us venture to exchange the pomp
Of widespread landscape for the internal wealth
Of quiet thought—protracted till thine eye
Be calm as water when the winds are gone
And no one can tell whither. (“Reading Text 1,” SP 8-12)
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The last three lines of this passage date back to 1799 and an early version of “Nutting”
and a poem called “Travelling” which emerged out of it. Interestingly, in 1817 what is
set in opposition to “quiet thought” is the “pomp of widespread landscape” as if these
were mutually exclusive. In this version, the implication is similar to that found in the
suspiciously apt passage Petrarch encounters in his Augustine on the top of Mont
Ventoux, that man marvels at the wonders of the world but of himself considers not.
However, sometime between 1817 and the initial publication of the poem in
1820 Wordsworth dramatically reworked this eighteen-line version and produced a
thirty-line version which expands on the meaning of the widespread landscape, the
source of that “quiet thought,” and the foolishness of valuing the one over the other. In
this new version the poem begins abruptly with a rejection of the struggle for the
mountain top.
Enough of climbing toil!—Ambition treads
Here, as in busier scenes, ground steep and rough,
Oft perilous, always tiresome; and each step
As we for most uncertain gain ascend
Towards the clouds, dwarfing the world below,
Induces, for its old familiar sights,
Unacceptable feelings of contempt,
With wonder mixed—That Man could e’er be tied
In anxious bondage, to such nice array
And formal fellowship of petty things! (“Reading Text 2,” SP
1- 10)
What is here being rejected is the movement up the mountain described in “View from
the Top of Black Comb,” which reduced the “lofty Mount” of Anglesey to a “dwindled
object,” a movement which produced an aesthetic colonization. In addition, the
struggle up the mountain to gain the grand vision is, as in the inscription to Black
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Comb, simply ambition uncomfortably aligned with a desire for domination, and one
which like mastery produces contempt for the familiar sights dwarfed by the
perspective. The “familiar” is here allied to the material in what functions essentially as
a critique of transcendence. It is for “most uncertain gain” that we aspire heavenward,
when the product of such aspirations is to despise the earth, to see it as a “nice array”
of “petty things.” What must be exchanged is the pomp of this widespread landscape,
despite its allures, for the source of those “quiet thoughts,” a source which is present in
the landscape but too often unseen by the abstract vision.
Oh, ’tis the heart that magnifies this life,
Making a truth and beauty of her own!
And moss-grown alleys, circumscribing shades,
And gurgling rills, assist her in the work
More efficaciously than realms outspread,
As in a map, before the Adventurer’s gaze,
Ocean and earth contending for regard. (“Reading Text 2,” 11-17)
The poet says “Enough of climbing toil,” for such desires for mastery and the “grand
terraqueous spectacle” induce contempt for the world and, more important, for the
small recesses and hidden spots that truly nourish the soul. These spots, while
unimportant to the Adventurer’s gaze, are what in fact define the landscape, filling in
the tri go nometer’s triangles with the surveyor’s art. The tension noted in the previous
chapter between the desire for the imperial vision and its problematic association with
that most notorious Adventurer Napoleon, between “realms outspread / As in a map”
and the “formal fellowship of petty things,” is here momentarily resolved. The
uncertain gain of the abstract imperializing vision is rejected in favor of the local and
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obscure details that are only visible to the initiate and the topographical surveyor who
seeks to represent not the ideal or invisible lines but things attached to the ground.
Lo! there a dim Egerian grotto fringed
With ivy-twine, profusely from its brows
Dependant,—enter without further aim;
And let me see thee sink into a mood
Of quiet thought—protracted till thine eye
Be calm as water when the winds are gone
And no one can tell whither. (“Reading Text 2,” 18-24)
It is this “dim Egerian grotto,” virtually hidden from sight, that the poet locates the
so ^se of “quiet thought.” Yet this place is not simply the origin of “quiet thought,”
but constituted by those thoughts as well, by how well one responds to this secret
place. It is through one’s response, through “the heart that magnifies this life,” that
any place is defined, and ultimately it is through the accumulation of such spots or the
modeling of such responses that the nation itself is defined. For Wordsworth, this is
not so much the discovery of a new place as it is the return to his native country after
exile. In the Preface to the Poems of 1815, Wordsworth used a brief passage from
Q
Virgil’s first Eclogue to illustrate his definition of Imagination. The passage is spoken
by Meliboeus, who, soon to begin his exile from his “patrios” (father’s lands), looks
upon his little flock of goats and laments: “Non ego vos posthac viridi projectus in
antro / Dumosa pendere procul de rupe videbo” (Not I hereafter, stretched full length in
some green cave, / Shall watch you far off hanging on a thorny crag) (75-6). The
“green cave” returns in “To the Same” as the “dim Egerian grotto,” and the sight of the
goats “hanging” is replaced by the “ivy-twine” which, as the enjambment literalizes, is
“Dependant.” In short, the exile has ended; the poet has returned home.
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When Wordsworth further revised this poem for the 1827 edition of his poems,
he left the first seventeen lines of the 1820 version largely unchanged and focused on
further defining the mysterious source of power he found in the dim Egerian grotto.
Long as the heat shall rage, let that dim cave
Protect us, there deciphering as we may
Diluvian records; or the sighs of Earth
Interpreting; or counting for old Time
His minutes, by reiterated drops,
Audible tears, from some invisible source
That deepens upon fancy—more and more
Drawn tow’rd the centre whence those sighs creep forth
To awe the lightness of humanity:
Or, shutting up thyself within thyself,
There let me see thee sink into a mood
Of gentler thought, protracted till thine eye
Be calm as water when the winds are gone,
And no one can tell whither. (“Reading Text 3,” SP 32-46)
This is unmistakably autumnal poetry, the poetry of advancing middle-age and
increasing isolation. But to attribute these almost antiquarian desires for reading and
deciphering “Diluvian records”—whether they be the local markings of the earth or
poetic fragments composed years earlier—a retreat from the world into the fortified
vale, to increasing age is to miss the context of that retreat. Even to call it a retreat is
an injustice since Wordsworth is returning to those local habitations from which he has
always drawn strength.9 It is also important to remember that Wordsworth is not
advocating or justifying a hermit’s sequestration from the world, there to dabble in
local history or shut up oneself within oneself, but is instead positing that it is only
through the detailed examination of the local that any possibility exists for knowing the
abstract or the general. Wordsworth is stating that the moss grown alleys,
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circumscribed shades and gurgling rills do the work “more efficaciously” than the
Adventurer’s map, and given the failure of his own overtly imperial poetry it is hard to
argue against him. It is to this task set forth here that Wordsworth turned: to reading
and writing the local landscape, to deciphering diluvian records, to interpreting the
sighs of the earth, to becoming a poet of passing time, the “Bard of ebbing time” amid
“the wreck of IS and w a s.”
This turn is clearly marked by Wordsworth’s decision in 1819 to publish two
long poems, one which had lain in manuscript for over two decades and the other for
over one decade. Little is known about why Wordsworth chose to publish Peter Bell in
April 1819 and The Waggoner in May 1819. Perhaps, as John E. Jordan suggests,
Peter Bell was intended as an elaborate offering to Southey, to whom the poem is
dedicated and who had privately paid to Wordsworth the very high compliment of
associating him with Milton. That Wordsworth later defended the publication of Peter
Bell by consciously invoking Milton’s own defense of the publication of Tetrachordon
lends some support to this theory. Or perhaps Wordsworth was responding to a
passage in Coleridge’s recently published collected edition of The Friend, which
reported how Sir Alexander Ball was struck by “the Truth and psychological insight
with which [the manuscript version of Peter Bell read to him by Coleridge] represented
the practicability of reforming the most hardened minds, and the various accidents
which may awaken the most brutalized Person to a recognition of his nobler Being” (2:
290). Certainly it would not be the first or the last time that Wordsworth reacted to
Coleridge’s praise or criticism through revision or publication. Or perhaps it was only
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in 1819 that Wordsworth recognized how Peter Bell might be fit, as he states in the
dedication to Southey, “for filling permanently a station, however humble, in the
Literature of the Country” (PB 41), and how too it might fit into his own attempts to
write a local but generalizable poetry of the nation.
In an early journal entry, Dorothy Wordsworth referred to Peter Bell as “the
Yorkshire Wolds poem,”1 0 and it is very much a poem about a specific place. But it
takes some time for the poem to get to this place, as the poet first describes a journey in
and the subsequent dismissal of a fairy boat shaped like the crescent moon, and then
details the wandering itinerary of the roving Peter Bell. Initially the fairy boat seems to
mark an escape from the restless world, an abandonment of the real for the fanciful.
Interestingly, the fanciful is figured as an elevated view of the world like that of the
prospect view which diminishes the earth to a “tiny grain.” But this diminishment, like
the mountain top view described in the second ode to Lycoris, “To the Same,” which
induces contempt for old familiar sights, does not sit well with the narrator and so, over
the objections of the fairy boat, the narrator dismisses it in favor of the known and
observable world.
Go but the world’s a sleepy world:
And ’tis, I fear, an age too late;
Take with you some ambitious Youth!
For I myself, in very truth
Am all unfit to be your mate.
Long have I loved what I beheld,
The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother-earth
Suffices me—her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears. (131-140)
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Again the expansive vision is coupled with ambition, and in a later revision the boat is
even called a “restless Wanderer” as if to call further attention to the abstracting
imagination figured by the boat. The pomp of widespread landscape is exchanged for
the “common growth” of earth, the dim cave where one can hear the sighs of earth and
the drops of time that are like so many “audible tears.” But despite this embracing of
the common and rejection of the abstract and fanciful, the narrator hints at a deeper
fear, that it might already be “an age too late.”
In place of the abstract vision we have a homely tale that centers on a rover who,
seeking a shortcut through the woods, gets lost and stumbles upon an ass standing
stationary by the river lamenting the loss of its master. But before we get to the
Yorkshire Wolds we are told of Peter’s wide-ranging travels, covering virtually the
entire geography of Britain, from “Cornwall’s rocky shore” (219) to the cliffs o f Dover,
“Caernarvon’s Towers” (221), Salisbury Plain, Lincolnshire, Northumberland,
Lancastershire, the lowlands and highlands of Scotland, and the “Cheviot Hills” (235).
The movement of the narrative is from the elevated overview of the trigonometer to the
perambulation of the local surveyor. Yet despite these wide-ranging travels, Peter
knew nothing and learned nothing.
He travelled here, he travelled there;—
But not the value of a hair
Was heart or head the better.
He rov’d among the vales and streams,
In the green wood and hollow dell;
They were his dwellings night and day,—
But nature ne’er could find the way
Into the heart of Peter Bell.
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In vain, through every changeful year,
Did Nature lead him as before;
A primrose by a river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more. (248-260)
Like many Wordsworthian characters, Peter Bell is perceived to be formed by the
landscapes he has known. However, unlike most of the others, something has gone
wrong with Peter’s natural education. The “mountains and dreary moors” (305) have
only marked him with a “savage character” (304), and “solitary Nature” (307) has only
fed “the unshap’d half human thoughts” (306) which when wedded with “whatever
vice / The cruel city breeds” (309-310) produce a thoroughly profligate and vicious
person. But even this man is capable of reform, though it requires the almost
supernatural conjunction of his own superstitious mind with a dead man, a
preternatural ass, a strange and exotic landscape, and a Methodist preacher to bring it
about.
After encountering the ass by the river, Peter attempts to steal it, is foiled, and
then discovers the body of the ass’ dead master which he frees from the river, and
drags ashore; he then sets out with the ass to return the dead man to his home. The
journey takes them through a “wild fantastic scene” made wild by Peter’s own
imagination.
The rocks that tower on either side
Build up a wild fantastic scene;
Temples like those among the Hindoos,
And mosques, and spires, and abbey windows,
And castles all with ivy green! (725-730)
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This is an imaginative rendition of the landscape which moves from the oriental
exoticism of Hindu temples and Moslem mosques to the more familiar objects of
British exoticism, ruined abbeys and castles. It is important to remember that this is
the narrator’s description of Peter’s thoughts, thoughts that render the natural landscape
supernatural. The narrator later disdainfully rejects such magical visions and playfully
chastises the “Dread Spirits” responsible for them.
Dread Spirits! to torment the good
Why wander from your course so far,
Disordering colour, form, and stature!
—Let good men feel the soul of Nature,
And see things as they are. (811-815)
However, to assume that Wordsworth agrees with this chastisement by his
commonsensicai narrator or that he allies himself with the superstitious Peter is to miss
the point, for here the real and the fanciful are both in the service of Peter’s reform.
Surely it is efficacious that Peter is frightened by a rumbling in the earth which he feels
is a portent of his coming retribution for his past iniquities, an efficacy which the
narrator’s matter-of-fact explanation of miners at work with gunpowder only
diminishes. And when in this state of expectancy the site of a ruined chapel recalls to
Peter his own proclivity for uncivil marriage, it doesn’t much matter how Peter is
reformed, only that the work of reform has begun.
Peter’s reform is a product of the conjunction between a superstitious mind, a
series of preternatural events, and a local topography susceptible of imaginative
interpretations. While he has previously roved the length and breadth of Britain
without learning a thing, here a certain state of mind allows him finally to read the
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landscape, to figure in its strange configurations the symbols of his own doom, and
discover in its ruins the analogues of his own ruinous life. In the sonnet “Gordale”
which was published with Peter Bell in 1819, Wordsworth returns to these local
superstitions as a way of delineating the power of the local landscape. In
Gordale-chasm at a particular time of day and in suitable weather, one might catch
sight of
The local Deity, with oozy hair
And mineral crown, beside his jagged urn
Recumbent:—Him thou mays’t behold, who hides
His lineaments by day, and there presides,
Teaching the docile waters how to turn (8-12)
Like the local field surveyors who walked the country sketching hills, mapping
everything attached to the ground, and gathering folkloric and ethnographic material,
Wordsworth instructs his readers on the local superstitions and supernatural sightings
attributed to places. Like the fanciful names given to the Lake District mountains by
the locals—names like “The Astrologer” or “The Ancient Woman”—these local
traditions humanize nature by characterizing it as an active, lived-in landscape. Peter
Bell is just such a folk tale, and one can easily imagine how the stations of his journey
could be named for his presence, spots on the map marked with names that carry
tradition and history.
For Wordsworth this return to local traditions recovers the meaning of the
landscape by investing it with human transit and human purposes. Unlike the
unpeopled and impossibly abstract national landscape of the trigonometer, the local
landscape is marked everywhere by a history which reconnects the present with the
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past. Imperial dominion is replaced by historical contingency, as the abstract map is
filled in with local detail. In “Malham Cove,” another sonnet included in the Peter
Bell volume, Wordsworth exemplifies the ways in which the folkloric traditions
attached to a place are not merely superstitious ephemera but constitutive of both the
place and how one responds to it.
Was the aim frustrated by force or guile,
When giants scooped from out the rocky ground,
Tier under tier, this semicirque profound?
(Giants—the same who built in Erin's isle
That Causeway with incomparable toil!)—
Oh, had this vast theatric structure wound
With finished sweep into a perfect round,
No mightier work had gained the plausive smile
Of all-beholding Phoebus! But, alas,
Vain earth! false world! Foundations must be laid
In Heaven; for, 'mid the wreck of IS and w as,
Things incomplete and purposes betrayed
Make sadder transits o'er thought's optic glass
Than noblest objects utterly decayed.
In telling the story of how giants might have “scooped from out the rocky ground” the
shape of the landscape, there is a telling echo of the “Prospectus” to The Recluse,
where Wordsworth had openly rejected such stories:
Not Chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—
My haunt, and the main region of my song. (“Prospectus,” 35-41)
Whereas earlier in the decade Wordsworth had seen such tales as unsuitable for his
poetry, by the end of the decade he was increasingly turning to the history and folklore
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and local mythology that differentiated the local landscape. William Galperin argues
that the opening question of “Malham Cove” about “the mystification of place—the
cove’s mythological origins—becomes a means, indeed, not only to contest this myth,
but, more important, to reveal the self-aggrandizement of all mythmaking” (11-12), and
yet nowhere does Wordsworth characterize this folk tradition as mythological and thus
subject to skepticism. While clearly this is a tale of mythological origins, the poem
does not reject the mythology, but rather folds it into other human concerns. When the
sonnet turns at the end of the ninth line, the rejection of the “Vain earth, false world” is
curious in its utter practicality, given that we have been in the company of giants, and
serves to humanize the mythological. Furthermore, the folk tradition that Malham
Cove was formed by the action of giants both humanizes and historicizes the sublime
abstract work of geologic time. A purpose is attached to the work, as if the very form
of rocks and hills was willed into being. But purposes can be betrayed, and even giants
capable of building that causeway in Ireland can be frustrated by force or guile. The
local landscape, then, is not simply background or picturesque attraction, but revealing
in the associations built up over immemorial time of the ways in which people have
observed and interpreted that landscape. As James K. Chandler remarks in his
discussion of a later Wordsworth sonnet, “Powers we love seem to cling to places;
tradition is universal love localized by fancy” (173). Tradition, and traditionary
knowledge, is not merely a mythology to be dismissed, but as Peter J. Manning calls it,
a kind of “imaginative history” (“Cleansing” 293), which is as necessary to
understanding place as any documentary record. However, despite this effort at
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reclamation and preservation, the “wreck of IS and WAS” remains as both a reminder of
present and past failures as well as a recognition o f the disjunction between present and
past. The wreck is both artifact and gap, ruin and abyss, traceable connection and
unresolveable distance. It is both the wreck of is and was and the wreck between is
and was.
When Leigh Hunt reviewed the Peter Bell volume in the Examiner, he lambasted
it as “another didactic little horror” exemplifying “a philosophy of violence and
hopelessness” (Reiman 2: 538). He closes the review with a look at “Malham Cove”:
. . . the conclusion of one of the others is very melancholy, and
would let us into the secret of Mr. Wordsworth’s philosophy, if
nothing else did. He forsakes the real cause of the world, and then
abuses what he has injured. And yet this is he who would make us
in love with the visible creation! (Reiman 2: 539)
What Hunt seems to lament is Wordsworth’s failure to remain the same, and what he
fails to understand is the increasing complexity o f Wordsworth’s vision which
continually encompasses both lightness and darkness, commemorative hymn and
elegiac dirge. As the intrusion of the timberman in The Excursion exemplifies, the
nation refuses to be self-similar, and the past and present inherent in the visible marks
of human transit over the landscape, while everywhere marking the land as lived-in, are
also testament to hopes ruined, things incomplete and purposes betrayed. It is a “vain
earth” and a “false world” because it is simultaneously a readable landscape marked
everywhere by history, and an unreadable landscape marked by the irreversible nature
of time and the irreconcilability of the present and the past.
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If Peter Bell recounts how the superstitious mind reads personal meaning into the
specific local landscape, The Waggoner depicts a specific local landscape already
written over by human transit and domestication. While the narrator of Peter Bell may
have been unduly disdainful of such supernatural imaginings, the narrator o f The
Waggoner uses such local traditions and superstitions to create a decidedly human
landscape. As with Peter Bell, it is unclear why Wordsworth chose to publish The
Waggoner in 1819, just over a month after the appearance of Peter Bell. According to
Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth “consented” to publish the poem just to give critics who
had blasted Peter Bell “another bone to pick” (154). Whether this goes far enough
towards explaining Wordsworth’s decision, or whether it at all answers why The
Waggoner was considered a suitable bone, is subject to debate. What is clear is how
well The Waggoner answered to the sort of local poetry Wordsworth was trying to
write at this time, some of which appeared in the 1819 volumes but much of which
would be included in the poems on the Duddon river.
Wordsworth was well aware of the local nature of The Waggoner, but his attitude
towards the utility and acceptability of poetry with local interest had apparently
undergone some change. In the dedication to Lamb, Wordsworth recalls the effect the
poem had on the dedicated city dweller:
In the Year 1806, if I am not mistaken, T h e W a g g o n e r was read
to you in manuscript; and, as you have remembered it for so long a
time, I am the more encouraged to hope, that, since the localities
on which it partly depends did not prevent its being interesting to
you, it may prove acceptable to others. (39)
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As early as 1809, Dorothy Wordsworth had written, that The Waggoner was soon to be
published.1 1 In 1814, she mentioned the imminent publication of The White Doe o f
Rylstone, Peter Bell, and The Waggoner. “This is resolved upon,” she wrote to
Catherine Clarkson, “and I think you may depend upon not being disappointed” (MY 2:
140). Yet, while The White Doe o f Rylstone was published in 1815, Peter Bell and The
Waggoner were not, and while this failure is generally attributed to Wordsworth’s
personal “disappointment over the reception of The Excursion and The White Doe”
(M Y2: 140n), there exists no support for this conjecture. Perhaps Wordsworth was
uncomfortable with the specifically local character of these poems— something he
alludes to in his dedication to Lamb—at a time in his career when he was uncertain
about the utility and significance of the local and at a time in history that seemed to
require the high impassioned strains of a bardic voice. By 1819 these reservations
seemed to be allayed by Wordsworth’s discovery (or rediscovery) of the ways in which
the local can inform and perhaps even be constitutive of the larger abstract and national
visions.
The Waggoner focuses on a single night’s journey along the Keswick road
leading from Ambleside past Rydal Lake, over Dunmail-raise, through Wythbum, past
Thirlmere and Castlerigg, and on to Keswick. It is a poetical guide-book or itinerary
map, complete with descriptions of the local inns and taverns and the traditions that
surround various points of interest. It is of course also a comic tale about a
good-natured but weak-willed waggoner who offers shelter to vagrants, is much too
fond of the temptations of the roadside inn, and is dismissed by his master for just
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these faults. But the hero also is a skilled waggoner able gently to coerce his
eight-horse wagon up the steepest grade without recourse to the whip, and
knowledgeable about the local traditions of the landscape over which he travels.
Despite its wry comic tone, the poem is elegiac about the loss of this waggoner, who
had himself become something of a “living Almanack” (798), a “speaking Diary”
(799), and who in his sure movements “Gave to days a mark and name / By which we
knew them when they came” (801-802). In his stead, the narrator sees only confusion
and lack of compassion, “Eight sorry carts” (827) and the vagrants and stragglers who
follow in their wake.
The lame, the sickly, and the old;
Men, Women, heartless with the cold;
And Babes in wet and starv’ling plight;
Which once, be weather as it might,
Had still a nest within a nest,
Thy shelter—and their Mother’s breast!
Then most of all, then far the most,
Do I regret what we have lost; (836-843)
Besides the practical difficulties occasioned by the loss of both “ WAGGONER and
W a in ” (773), the loss of Benjamin the waggoner points to greater losses, suffered
when the need for commercial efficiency overtakes the human purposes which local
traditions serve. Benjamin’s dismissal is seen as part of a more general dismissal of
that idiosyncrasy which, while perfectly suited to the demands of the local conditions
and landscape, is deemed inefficient waste and unbusinesslike practice by outside
commercial interests. Almost to counter this dismissal of the local, the poem serves as
a repository for local traditions, an antiquarian cabinet, a local surveyor’s sketchbook
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recording the local names given to rocks and mountains, and the traditional
associations that have built up around the various features in the landscape. Thus
Helm-crag is further defined by the names “The Astrologer” and “The Ancient
Woman” given to the two figures of its broken summit by the locals, and
Dunmail-raise is further delineated by a local tradition which explains the source of its
name:
[They] now have reach’d that pile o f stones,
Heap’d over brave Bung Dunmail’s bones;
He who had once supreme command,
Last king of rocky Cumberland;
His bones, and those of all his Power,
Slain here in a disastrous hour! (205-210)
This local tradition, which holds that B C ing Dunmail—the last king of Cumberland—is
buried on the top of Dunmail-raise, recalls a time of local independence, visible daily
to the inhabitants of Cumbria in the origins of the mountain’s name. The mountain
itself is a constant reminder of the loss of the local, the absorption of Cumbria in the
twelfth century by the already expanding English nation. The iandscape is marked
with these historic reminders that provide local identity and differentiate this spot, or
these spots, from other spots in Britain, the nation, paradoxically, consisting of
infinitely multiplied, differentiated, and non-homogeneous “spots.” At the beginning of
Canto Fourth of The Waggoner, the narrator embarks on a fanciful journey through
such a marked landscape, recalling the local traditions of fairy bands seen in certain
lights upon Skiddaw and relating the mythic stories surrounding Threlkeld Hall. All of
this is a celebration of the local in its idiosyncrasy, eccentricity and incongruity, and
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serves to differentiate this landscape from other landscapes. As Manning argues in
reference to the Yarrow Revisited poems, Wordsworth asks his readers “to interpret
local superstition as true signs of national character” (“Cleansing” 290). The features
of the local landscape become figures for the local character, a character held up as
exemplary in the face of continual encroachments from the Metropolis and the restless
world. The responsiveness to local idiosyncrasy becomes a measure of how deftly one
reads the national character.
Contrasted sharply with this depiction of the local landscape is the oddly
mocking depiction of one of the nation’s greatest triumphs. The discharged sailor
turned traveling showman unveils before the patrons of “The Cherry Tree”—a pub in
Wythbum—a model of Nelson’s ship “The Vanguard,” and proceeds to recreate the
Battle of the Nile. Part of the mocking fun in this episode lies in the stunned credulity
of the rural crowd and Benjamin’s drink-induced toast “To Nelson, England’s pride
and treasure, / Her bulwark and her tower of strength” (423-424), where “treasure” is
made to rhyme with the “bowl of double measure” and “strength” with “a draught of
length.” But while rural patriotism is surely being gently mocked, there is a hint that
all such shows of national spirit are suspicious and amusing for other reasons. When
the show is over, the discharged sailor carefully puts his model ship away:
Then, like a hero crown’d with laurel,
Back to her place the ship he led;
Wheel’d her back in full apparel;
And so, flag-flying at mast-head,
Re-yoked her to the Ass:—anon,
Cries Benjamin, “We must be gone.” (435-440)
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The devious interior rhyme of “mast” with “Ass,” and the very idea of yoking Nelson’s
ship to an ass, is a curiously subversive treatment o f one of the great icons of British
perseverance and independence. Though The Waggoner was written in 1806, it must
be remembered that Wordsworth withheld publication until 1819. While such a
passage might have been offensive even to Wordsworth only a few years before, by
1819 he had already tried and failed to write poetry that could depict the nation. For
despite the ostensible shows of unanimity and undifferentiated purpose that seemed to
inform such national celebrations as that which followed the news of Nelson’s victory,
what Wordsworth perpetually seemed to see, and perhaps eventually came to accept,
was just how different and perhaps even inassimilable the various local populations
and local landscapes were.
Wordsworth’s desire to salvage local tradition from the encroachments of the
inventive age receives a serious, and at times elegiac, treatment in the twelve sonnets
which conclude the 1819 edition o f The Waggoner. While the marked landscape of the
Keswick road called forth the playful interweaving of the broadly comic and
mock-heroic, the sonnets record a struggle between the desire to preserve a vanishing
past and with it local identity, and the nagging fear that it was already too late. The
sonnet “Aerial Rock” describes such an attempt to preserve the local associations of
places, as the poet considers imaginatively siting “an imperial Castle” upon the rock
which “the plough / Of ruin shall not touch” (8-9). But this act of imagined
preservation is rejected almost immediately as an “Innocent scheme” incapable of
improving the identity of a place which had been neglected by “hoar Antiquity” (12).
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Ail that remains is the hope that this place might “catch a gleam / Of golden sun-set—
ere it fade and die!” (13-14), an elegiac wish signaling the possibility that not
everything can be salvaged and preserved.
Despite this sense of the futility of this innocent and naive desire to salvage the
local by recording its traditions, many of the sonnets continue with the attempt.
“Written upon a Blank Leaf in ‘The Compleat Angler’ ” praises Walton for his
exhortations “To reverent watching of each still report / That Nature utters from her
rural shrine” (5-6), and holds him up as a model of the local enthusiast who has created
a national reverence for the local. “The Wild Duck’s Nest” turns to just such a local
sight and contrasts it with the “sylvan bower” (2) of an “imperial Consort” (1), much to
the detriment o f the sylvan bower. In the sonnet that begins “Fallen, and diffus’d into a
shapeless heap,” later incorporated into the River Duddon sonnets, local traditions and
superstitions are recorded to explain the origins of the shapeless heap of the supposedly
original Rydal Hall, infusing the site with history and rendering a seemingly illegible
heap of stones legible. As Mary Queen of Scots is made to pray “Just Heaven, contract
the compass of my mind” (“Captivity” 9), so Wordsworth turns in the poem following
to a consideration of the snow-drop, the “vent’rous harbinger of Spring” (“To a
Snow-drop, Appearing Very Early in the Season” 13), and after that to the Derwent
whose “crown” of white water spray is preferred to those which grace the “Nemean
victor’s brow” (“To the River Derwent,” 10) or “some Roman chief—in triumph borne
/ With captives chained” (11-12).
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But this celebration of the local and particular calls forth in equal measure the
sense of an age already past, of traditions already lost. Meditations on Easter Sunday
recollect the common tradition of wearing new clothes on Easter, and such
recollections move Wordsworth to recall how “Domestic hands the home-bred wool
had shorn, / And she who span it culled the daintiest fleece” all in remembrance of the
passion. However, these recollections only serve to point out what has been lost, the
domestic cottage spinning industry, and the imaginative ties and associations that
accompany it:
A blest estate when piety sublime
These humble props disdained not! O green dales!
Sad may / be who heard your sabbath chime
When Art's abused inventions were unknown;
Kind Nature's various wealth was all your own;
And benefits were weighed in Reason's scales! (“Composed in
One of the Valleys of Westmoreland on Easter Sunday” 9-14)
In an earlier draft of this sonnet, Wordsworth was much more direct about the nation’s
involvement in this change and also much more optimistic about the possible recovery
of these lost traditions:
A blest Estate, where Piety sublime
These humble props disdained not—art thou flown,
Vanished for aye from Britain’s hills and Vales,
Extinct, or lingering in a happier clime
Where our abused inventions are unknown
And benefits are weigh’d in Reason’s scales? (“Composed on
Easter Sunday,” “Reading Text 1,” 9-14)
In this earlier draft, these traditions are gone forever from Britain, but there exists the
possibility that somewhere “our abused inventions are unknown” and labor remains
unalienated from the manifold purposes and meanings that actuate it. In the published
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version of 1819, this possibility is eradicated, the change is marked as universal and
irrevocable, and the local traditions are not transplanted to some “happier clime” but
placed in the distant realm of the irretrievable past. As the sonnet following this one
makes clear, what has been lost is a way of life, a structure and an order which the
“revolving motions” (“Grief, thou hast lost an ever ready friend,” 11) of the cottage
spinning wheel gave to the domestic laborers of the valley. In short, the loss of these
local traditions from Britain’s hills and vales signaled for Wordsworth the irreversible
decay of the national character.
This sense of the eradication of a way of life and the futility of any attempt to
recover it is the subtext of the three autumnal sonnets that close the 1819 edition of The
Waggoner. The sonnet “I watch, and long have watch’d with calm regret” is a moving
elegy to passing time, irrevocable change, and even pitiable decline. The poet details
the slow descent of a star as it sinks below the horizon, and how, unlike the star which
is guaranteed a cyclic rebirth, human time offers no such recompense.
Angels and Gods! we struggle with our fate,
While health, power, glory, pitiably decline,
Depress’d and then extinguish’d: and our state,
In this, how different, lost Star, from thine,
That no to-morrow shall our beams restore! (10-14)
The pitiable decline lamented by the poem points to the decline which the two
preceding sonnets had described, the loss of local associations and traditions which
was, for Wordsworth, the chief cause of what he perceived to be the decay of the
nation’s character. If the nation had declined, it had been brought about by the erosion
of local ties and feelings, the loss of tradition and the sense of local history and
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identity, the wreck o f is and was which no tomorrow can restore. Paradoxically, this
destruction of the local is both the product of and necessary to the rise of nationalism.
But amidst this elegy for things past, Wordsworth is unwilling to give himself over
entirely to despair. Though the second to last sonnet records the poet’s despair and
frustration at being unable to follow the song of the swan heard in a dream, of awaking
from the dream and “struggling in vain to follow” (“I heard (alas ’twas only in a
dream),” 14), the final sonnet sounds a note of seemingly impossible optimism in the
face of adverse circumstances. The 1819 edition of The Waggoner closes with the
sonnet which originally began “Eve’s lingering clouds extend in solid bars,” later
revised and titled “Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake.” Written in 1807 in the
depths of the Napoleonic War, the sonnet records a struggle to reach an affirmation in
the face of so many contradictory events. It is, like the two preceding sonnets, a sunset
scene. Here the poet glimpses upon the smoothed surface of the lake an inverted image
of the stars “beauteously revealed / At happy distance from earth’s groaning field, /
Where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars” (6-8). This leads the poet to ask darkly,
“Is it a mirror?—or the nether sphere / Opening its vast abyss,” uncertain whether the
vision is one of heaven or hell. But these dark thoughts are interrupted by a still, quiet
voice:
But list! a voice is near;
Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds,
“Be thankful thou; for, if unholy deeds
Ravage the world, tranquillity is here!” (11-14)
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Paul de Man has called attention to the “complex set of spatial ambiguities” that lead
one to wonder “where this ‘here’ is located” (Rhetoric 126). For de Man this sonnet is
representative of the “double vision”—simultaneously literal and symbolic— so
essential to Wordsworth’s poetry, which allows the poet “to see landscapes as objects,
as well as entrance gates to a world lying beyond visible nature” (132). But “here”
raises not only spatial ambiguities but temporal ones as well, for “here” is both a place
and a time—“here” is always also a “now.” These temporal ambiguities are
complicated further by the long delay between composition and publication. While de
Man demonstrates how the “here”—ostensibly referring to the side of Grasmere Lake
that is the site of the utterance— is geographically unstable, it is the “now” that is
always bound to the “here” that destabilizes “here,” by forcing us to consider both the
here and now of writing and the here and now of reading. Here includes not only the
specific and unique spot celebrated by the poem, but the reader’s unlocalizable “here”
which marks the shared act of contemplation that unites the poet and the reader, the
one speaking, the other listening. Wordsworth, through intense response to the local,
transforms the localized here of writing into the universal here of reading, thus creating
a nation of qualified readers and like-minded believers, and overleaping the middle
step—the actual historical nation with which he violently disagreed. The “here” then is
not the mark of the smug littie-Englander, but the appeal for a community of
enlightened meditative m inds. Wordsworth is after all the national poet, only the
nation is an imagined and purified nation not coextensive with the nation-state. The
local is not a fragment of the nation; the nation is a subset of the local.
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During the twelve years between the composition and publication of this poem,
Wordsworth sought to resolve the tension between the restless world outside the vale
and the protected space of his native Cumbria. Only in the years following the war was
he able to locate the here where tranquillity resides in the memory of people, the
tradition of places, and the minds of readers. On the shores of Grasmere, in the dim
Egerian grotto, in the recesses of the Yorkshire Wolds, on the Keswick road, and along
the course of the River Duddon, Wordsworth sought to overcome the wreck of is and
was, and on the Cumberland coast near Bootle, he cast his eyes over the estuary of the
Duddon there to “see what was, and is, and will abide.”
Notes
1 This summary of the composition history of The Excursion is based on that of de
Selincourt and Darbishire in PW, V, 363-375, especially 369-372.
2 James K. Chandler examines the importance of abstraction to Hazlitt’s ideas of
culture and justice in Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study o f the Poetry and Politics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 144-9.
3 The “base” is the base o f an imaginary triangle and the measurement of its length is
the most important and most time-consuming activity in trigonometric surveying.
Once the base has been accurately measured, its length (along with the base angles) is
used to calculate the distances to the apex along the two sides of the imaginary triangle.
4 Seymour, 112-4. Generally the Ordnance Survey maps, which were one inch to one
mile in scale, were rejected because they were considered to be too small scale. The
need for larger scale surveys (such as the now common 6 inches to one mile scale) and
town plans (at a scale of 5 or 10 feet to one mile) for transportation and public planning
eventually forced the Ordnance Survey to diversify its map scales.
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246
5 Chaining and perambulation were the two methods of determ ining distance.
Chaining used a chain of fixed length to determine distance and was used when exact
measurements were necessary. Perambulation was the traversal of land by a surveyor
and was used to estimate distances.
6 The map of Canterbury described here was published by the Ordnance Survey in
1959 and is reproduced in David TumbulFs Maps are Territories, Science is an Atlas
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
7 This near conflation of landscape with Constitution is characteristic of what J. G. A.
Pocock describes as the self-image of preindustrial England:
A society thinks of itself in purely traditional terms in proportion as it is aware
of itself simply as a cluster of institutionalised modes of transmitting behaviour
. . . In pre-industrial England, for example all social and national institutions
could be conceived as bound up with the common law, that law was conceived
as custom, and the activity of law-making was conceived as the conversion into
written precedents of unwritten usages whose sole authority was that of
immemorial antiquity. (Politics 240)
o
Susan Wolfson examines Wordsworth’s use of this same passage from Virgil in his
Preface to the Poems of 1815 to argue for an ironic reading of the Wanderer’s self-
imposed exile (112).
9 “Retreat” is Woodring’s characterization of the later Wordsworth, which he identifies
as beginning in 1814 (85-147).
1 0 Journals, 99. Both de Selincourt (P W 5: 366) and Reed (152) suggest that Peter Bell
is the Yorkshire Wolds poem referred to by Dorothy Wordsworth in her journal entry
for March 10, 1802. For conjectures which cast doubt on this attribution, see John E.
Jordan’s “Introduction” in Peter Bell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 7.
1 1 See her letter to De Quincey of May 1, 1809 in M Y 1: 335.
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Chapter 6
A Detailed Local Survey
The River Duddon Sonnets and the Writing of the Nation
Enough if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.
—Wordsworth, Sonnet XXXIII, The River Duddon (1820)
Over three decades after the trip to Bootle, Wordsworth recalled its importance
in the Fenwick note to The River Duddon, A Series o f Sonnets. Following a
wide-ranging list o f his various encounters with this river, his remembrances close on a
note of circumspection:
I have many affecting remembrances with this stream. These I forbear
to mention, especially things that occurred on its banks during the
latter part of that visit to the seaside of which the former part is
detailed in my epistle to Sir George Beaumont. (Fenwick 32)
Wordsworth provides the itinerary of “the latter part o f that visit” in a letter to Sara
Hutchinson written in 1811 upon the return of the Wordsworths to Grasmere.
Mary and I returned from Duddon Bridge, up the Duddon through
Seathwaite, the children with Fanny taking the direct road through
Coniston. We dined in the Porch of Ulpha Kirk, and passed two Hours
there and in the beautiful churchyard. Our pace was so slow and our halts
so many and long that it was half past 4 in the afternoon before we reached
New Field (the public house in Seathwaite) though we had left Duddon
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Bridge at nine. The next day we took as long a time to reach Eugh-dale
[Yewdale], over that long and steep ascent which you will remember to
have passed with Coleridge and me a few years ago (MY 1: 509-510).
Given the fears about the successful restoration o f their children’s health discussed in
Chapter 4, it is easy to see what some of those “affecting remembrances” were.
Separated from their children on their way back to Grasmere and idling about the
churchyard at Seathwaite, those fears soon to be realized must have occupied the minds
of William and Mary and cast over the splendid views an autumnal coloring, a sense of
impending loss and the belatedness of action. In their dilatory progress back to
Grasmere we can sense a desire to escape from the reality of a sickly child, a reality
that continually found its reflection in every halted sight, such that the respite stolen
from further anxieties of care was constantly overshadowed by a landscape that seemed
to be marked everywhere by loss and the passage of time. From the very personal need
to remember what has been lost, the need to punish oneself with the question “But how
could I forget thee,” springs the impassioned desire for a memory of the land, the
traditions and the customs which provide for Wordsworth the only bulwark against the
chaos of forgetting. It is in opposition to the painful self-flagellation evinced in the
sonnet “Surprized by joy—impatient as the Wind” that Wordsworth embarks on a
project of preservation, of a not-forgetting that seeks to locate the character of the
nation in its ability to remember and to read the landscape marked with history, the
landscape of memory.
If the publication of Peter Bell and The Waggoner signaled a conscious turn to
the local landscape, the publication a year later of the seemingly miscellaneous
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collection of poetry and prose titled The River Duddon1 marked the ascendancy of the
local, and Wordsworth’s most elaborate and conscious effort to write the nation
through a detailed local survey of what he felt to be the truly representative landscape
of the British nation. This survey took the form of a reading and writing of the local.
But as is often the case with Wordsworth, to call it a triumph, as many contemporary
reviewers did, is to miss the point, for the poems and the prose while something of a
triumph of memory, exemplify by the very need to remember the parallel movement
and possible ascendancy of forgetting. The poems and prose themselves, in the
dramatic structure of their arrangement, enact this tension between memory and
forgetting, a tension that is never wholly resolved. While the 1820 volume containing
the River Duddon sonnets was almost immediately effaced by its incorporation and
dispersal in the 1820 four volume collected edition of Wordsworth’s poems, Stephen
Gill is right to point out that “its identity as a discrete volume is of the greatest
historical significance.” However, while Gill is correct in stating that “none of these
poems is exclusively local” (334), it was the “thoughtful delineation o f local scenery”
that was identified by one contemporary critic as justification for considering
Wordsworth one of the great poets of the age:
He has entitled himself to this place by an intensity of natural
expression, and a thoughtful delineation of local scenery . . . From these
obvious resources he has turned himself to those treasures of
contemplative wealth, which, by adding value to rural objects, and all
the possible combinations of scenery, general, local, and domestic, have
philosophized, and spiritualized, and raised into commerce with the
soul, those beauties and sublimities of nature.. . . To Mr. Wordsworth
we do really think the praise of this new style of local poetry eminendy
belongs. {British Review (Sept. 1820) in Reiman 1:248)
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These are not local poems in the sense that one required knowledge o f the road out of
Ambleside to read “Ode: The Pass of Kirkstone,” just as fam iliarity with Grasmere was
not necessary for reading Michael. However, Gill is also correct when he states that
“the poems and the detailed Topographical Description which is their complement
proclaimed once again Wordsworth as poet, celebrant, and interpreter of a particular,
blessed region” (334). What makes the 1820 volume both not exclusively local and the
celebration of a particular, blessed region is the way the local stands in for the national
both as exemplary and as cautionary tale. What appears to be a retreat into the hills
and vales of Westmorland is in fact Wordsworth’s most ambitious attempt to write the
nation, an attempt that is both celebration and elegy and one that begins appropriately
enough with a detailed journey along the course of a British river.
In the “Advertisement” to the River Duddon volume Wordsworth acknowledges
the literary tradition o f the river poem, though curiously enough the first debt cited is to
a poem never written. In what reads like both an ironic challenge and a necessary
distancing, Wordsworth notes that while writing this series of sonnets he did not at first
perceive that he “was trespassing upon ground preoccupied, at least as far as intention
went, by Mr. Coleridge; who, more than twenty years ago, used to speak of writing a
rural Poem, to be entitled ‘The Brook,’ o f which he has given a sketch in a recent
publication.” But, as Wordsworth is quick to point out, “a particular subject cannot, I
think, much interfere with a general one,” and in what must have been a painful
reminder to Coleridge of his many unfulfilled projects and failed schemes, Wordsworth
adds that “these Sonnets may remind Mr. Coleridge of his own more comprehensive
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design, and induce him to fulfill it” (PW 3: 503). Wordsworth both conjures up the
ghost of those Racedown years, with its unfulfilled ambitions, and. dismisses it,
invoking Coleridge only to put him aside as irrelevant.3 In eschewing the
“comprehensive design” envisioned by Coleridge, Wordsworth implies that the River
Duddon does not possess any pretensions beyond the local, but as usual there is danger
in taking him at his word. In the address “To the Rev. Dr. Wordsworth” which was
printed in the River Duddon volume and later (in 1827) positioned as the introductory
poem to the sonnet series, Wordsworth makes clear how these local poems are indeed
comprehensive and speak to matters of great national importance.
Ah! not for emerald fields alone,
With ambient streams more pure and bright
Than fabled Cytherea’s zone
Glittering before the Thunderer’s sight,
Is to my heart of hearts endeared
The ground where we were bom and reared!
Hail, ancient Manners! sure defense,
Where they survive, of wholesome laws;
Remnants of love whose modest sense
Thus into narrow room withdraws;
Hail, usages of pristine mould,
And ye that guard them, Mountains old! (49-60)
It is not simply for the delineation o f the local, the emerald fields alone, that these
sonnets (and the volume as a whole) were written, but for what they say about “ancient
Maimers” and their presumed preservation in essentially rural areas like the Duddon
valley. The very idea of the rural always engenders its opposite, the urban, and if
“wholesome laws” and “love” have withdrawn into the “narrow room” of the sparsely
populated rural landscape then the writing of the local serves as both exemplary and
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cautionary tale of what Wordsworth feels must be preserved, and of what he also feels
is fast ebbing away. For Wordsworth these local poems speak directly to the general
state of the nation and the character of the nation, but to discover this, one must be
willing to take the journey into the deep recesses where Wordsworth locates the true
character of the nation.
Bear with me, Brother! quench the thought
That slights this passion, or condemns;
If thee fond Fancy ever brought
From the proud margin of the Thames,
And Lambeth's venerable towers,
To humbler streams, and greener bowers.
Yes, they can make, who fail to find,
Short leisure even in busiest days;
Moments, to cast a look behind,
And profit by those kindly rays
That through the clouds do sometimes steal,
And all the far-off past reveal. (61-72)
These stanzas are both a restatement of a common Wordsworthian theme, of great
knowledge in humble sources, and a studied rejection of that most common subject of
the British river poem, the Thames. Equally important though is the particular
temporality that Wordsworth implies is only available in rural scenes, those “Moments,
to cast a look behind.” The collapsing of spatial and temporal frames, prefiguring the
movement of the series itself, recuperates the surveying glance as an act of reflection
which brings history and futurity, origin and tendency together in a single action.4 If
this action is, as Paul de Man argues in “Time and History in Wordsworth,” always a
prefiguring of the poet’s death, it is also a prefiguring of the death of a particular vision
of the nation as well. Wordsworth turns away from the Thames, that great river of the
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state which is representative of all that is destructive of the British character, to
“humbler streams” where he feels the true source of the British character can still be
found. However, even along the course of the humbler streams the source has already
receded, and even there one must “cast a look behind” in order to study what the
“far-off past” reveals.
As Wordsworth notes in the “Advertisement” to the River Duddon volume, “The
power of waters over the minds o f Poets has been acknowledged from the earliest
ages,” from Virgil down to Bums (JPW 3: 504). The course of the river from obscure
birth through tempestuous youth and slow-moving middle age down to eventual
dissolution and dispersal has served as the topographical symbol of both the course of
human life and the destiny of empires.3 A brief look at two popular depictions of the
Thames known to Wordsworth, Thomson’s The Seasons and Thomas Love Peacock’s
The Genius o f the Thames, reveals the common assumptions about the Thames and the
difficulties encountered when the landscape is used as a symbol. Thomson’s poem was
the single most popular poem of the eighteenth century and Peacock’s poem enjoyed a
tremendous vogue in the decade when Wordsworth wrote his River Duddon series.
When Thomson came to write his celebrated description of the view from Richmond
Hill, the Thames was already a deeply inscribed river, the frequent subject of literary
treatments such as Denham’s Cooper Hill that sought to harmonize the mercantile and
the pastoral, and Thomson’s depiction was one of many that positioned the Thames as
exemplar of the state of the nation.
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What harmony Thomson achieves in The Seasons is always uneasy, shifting from
celebration of commerce and industry to celebration of rural life, from praise for urban
learning and enlightenment to ridicule for rural superstition and back again to criticism
of the pride, ambition, and flattery of urban and courtly life.6 The view from
Richmond Hill in “Summer” follows the course of the “silver Thames” (1416) from its
rural birth through a landscape marked not so much by rural ease as by civilizing
forces:
Slow let us trace the matchless vale of Thames;
Fair-winding up to where the muses haunt
In Twit’nam’s bowers, and for their Pope implore
The healing god; to royal Hampton’s pile . . .
0 vale of bliss! O softly-swelling hills!
On which the Power of Cultivation lies,
And joys to see the wonders of his toil. (“Summer” 1425-1428, 1435-1437)
The power of cultivation is both the presumed fecundity of the land and the implied
strength of British civilization, improvement of the land through better husbandry and
through higher learning. The prospect reveals a landscape that is rich because it has
been cultivated and civilized.
Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around,
Of hills, and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires,
And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all
The stretching landscape into smoke decays!
Happy Britannia! where the Queen of Arts,
Inspiring vigour, Liberty, abroad
Walks unconfined even to thy farthest cots,
And scatters plenty with unsparing hand. (1438-1445)
Just as the prospect spreads to the sight, so prosperity spreads to the farthest cottages in
this idealized vision of the British landscape, taking in all objects from the seemingly
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natural hills and dales and woods to the signs of cultivation, the lawns, the spires, the
towns, that humanize the landscape. Like Wordsworth’s imagined view, which he
proposed as a test for patriotism, this is a view that demands a nationalistic, even
jingoistic, response. Indeed so powerful was the association between Thomson’s
description of the view from Richmond Hill and the actual view itself that when the
painter Turner climbed to the top of Richmond Hill in 1810 he found the pages
containing this description affixed to a post placed at the summit, placed there by
someone as if to make the landscape literally readable (Hill 46).
However, as Thomson’s description descends down the Thames into the port of
London, the picturesque view of the British landscape is replaced by the bustle of the
commercial city. In what can only be described as hopeful verse, Thomson attempts to
write this landscape as similarly felicitous:
Full are thy cities with the sons of art;
And trade and joy, in every busy street,
Mingling are heard: even Drudgery himself,
As at a car he sweats, or, dusty, hews
The palace stone, looks gay. Thy crowded ports,
Where rising masts an endless prospect yield,
With labour bum . . . (1457-1463)
The picture of dusty Drudgery laboring at the palace stone recalls the work involved in
this process of civilization and cultivation, work that reminds us of the disparity
between those who must labor in drudgery, even if it is oxymoronically “gay”
drudgery, and those who needn’t labor at all. The rising masts, those potent symbols of
commerce, also must be built, and gay or not, it is labor that bums, consuming the
laborer in the process. While “whate’er / Exalts, embellishes, and renders
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life / Delightful” is the “gift of Industry” (“Autumn” 141-143), these gifts are not
purchased without some cost, and in “Autumn” Thomson reminds his readers of those
who bear the burden, though his reminder takes the softened imperative “Be mindful”:
Ye masters, then
Be mindful of the rough laborious hand
That sinks you soft in elegance and ease;
Be mindful of those limbs in russet clad
Whose toil to yours is warmth and graceful pride;
And oh, be mindful of that sparing board
Which covers yours with luxury profuse,
Makes your glass sparkle, and your sense rejoice;
Nor cruelly demand what the deep rains
And all-involving winds have swept away! (350-359)
Yet despite the frequent paeans to rural life and the industry o f laborers, Thomson
frequently bemoans the hold of folk tradition and “those superstitious horrors that
enslave / The fond sequacious herd, to mystic faith / And blind amazement prone”
(“Summer” 1712-1714). The sight of meteors “swells the superstitious din”
(“Autumn” 1123) of the crowd, and the rural laborer celebrated as the source of the
nation’s wealth becomes at nightfall “a benighted wretch / Who then bewildered
wanders through the dark / Full of pale fancies and chimeras huge” (“Autumn”
1145-1147). And yet a few lines later this benighted wretch is said to be “of men / The
happiest he” (1235-1236) when compared with those who live in the city surrounded
by “the sneaking crowd / Of flatterers false” (1240-1241) who “fret in guilt / And
guilty cities” (1348-1349).
Of course, for Thomson the solution is not predicated on a simple choice
between country and city, but on a recognition of the power o f cultivation to refashion
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both the mind and the landscape. The difficulty is that he would like to civilize the
rural and divest it of simple-minded traditions and superstitions, and at the same time
ruralize the urban and endow it with innocence and simple truth. The Seasons is also
very much a poem in the present tense, in many ways a typically Enlightenment poem
in its virtually uniform rejection of the past and absolute confidence in the future.
Despite the poem’s emphasis on cycles, of the social commerce of waters that fuels the
rains which fill the rivers which empty into the sea, nowhere does Thomson overtly
question either the effect of commerce and industry on the landscape he celebrates, or
the possibility of an end to empire, of the river losing momentum and dissipating in the
estuarial confluence with the sea.
When Thomas Love Peacock returned to Richmond Hill to sing the praises of the
Thames, the end of empire was very much on the mind of the public. The Genius o f
the Thames was published in 1810 and went through four editions before the end of the
war. In many ways it is a more successful harmonizing of the mercantile and pastoral
if only because gay Drudgery makes no appearance and commerce is seen as not
simply enriching all, but as Britain’s bulwark and strength. But unlike Thomson,
Peacock also looks to the past as source of the nation’s character, and his journey down
the Thames is a journey through Britain’s illustrious past, a past which has marked the
landscape but whose monuments seem precariously subject to erasure.
In 1810 with the entire continent of Europe, except for Portugal, a French
imperium and the British economy nearing collapse, the future of the nation let alone
the empire seemed anything but secure. Initially Peacock suppresses these fears and
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presents instead an almost wildly optimistic picture of the nation. After considering
and rejecting the claims of other rivers, Peacock explains why the Thames is the river
most suitable to poetry.
Far other charms than these possess,
Oh Thames! thy verdant margin bless:
Where peace, with freedom hand-in-hand,
Walks forth along the sparkling strand,
And cheerful toil, and glowing health,
Proclaim a patriot nation’s wealth.
The blood-stained scourge no tyrants wield:
No groaning slaves invert the field:
But willing labor’s careful train
Crowns all thy banks with waving grain,
With beauty decks thy sylvan shades,
With livelier green invests thy glades,
And grace, and bloom, and plenty, pours
On thy sweet meads and willowy shores.7
Given the reality of food shortages, high prices, labor unrest and the wartime paranoia
of seditious activity, this picture of Britain must have struck some readers as
beautifully idyllic and others as ludicrously unrealistic. But of course the appeal of
such nationalistic verse lies in its ability to confirm native strengths in the face of
foreign dangers. For Peacock, those native strengths stem from the seemingly
incongruous and naive visions of the rural landscape complete with pasturing cattle,
solitary oak, lonely spire, and embowered cot, and the urban landscape of imperial
might and commercial strength:
Throned in Augusta’s ample port,
Imperial commerce holds her court,
And Britain’s power sublimes:
To her the breath of every breeze
Conveys the wealth of subject seas,
And tributary climes . . .
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O’er states and empires, near and far,
While rolls the fiery surge of war,
Thy country’s wealth and power increase,
Thy vales and cities smile in peace;
And still, before thy gentle gales,
The laden bark of commerce sails, (p. 118, 119)
As in Thomson, the pastoral and mercantile are fused into a single vision of Britain,
and these divergent visions form the foundation of the nation’s strength and
perseverance. But while such a vision may have sufficed in 1744, in 1810 the pressing
realities of foreign wars, of an idealized rural landscape and equally idealized imperial
commerce that could only be maintained by “mighty vessels . . . that hurl the
thunder-bolt of battle,” were constant reminders of the precariousness of those
supposed sources of the state of the nation. Abruptly then, Peacock turns to another
source and locates it in a mythical and historical past.
The remainder of the first part of this two part poem is given over to a fanciful
story of the subjugation of Britain by the Romans symbolized by the killing of the last
Druid sage by a Roman soldier. Yet while there is the ubiquitous squeamishness of
Druidic human sacrifice, it is the “superstitious zeal” of the Druid that fuels his
resistance to the Roman, a resistance that proves vain, but one that serves as the
foundation of all future British resistance to tyranny. Before he dies, the Druid offers a
prophecy of the end of Roman rule, a prophecy that clearly is intended to speak to
contemporary events. First, the Druid sings of Rome’s ascendant power:
Queen of earth, imperial Rome
Rules, in boundless sway confessed,
From the day-star’s orient dome
To the limits of the west.
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Proudest work of mortal hands,
The Eternal City stands:
Bound in her all-circling sphere,
Monarchs kneel, and nations fear. (pp. 127-128)
Against this picture of Rome (or France) in ascendancy the Druid invokes time and the
seemingly inevitable decay of power.
So shall Rome’s colossal sway
In the lapse of time decay,
Leaving of her ancient fame
But the memory of a name. (p. 128)
As Rome’s power gives way to “the stream of ages” the Druid prophesies the rise of
Britain, when peace and freedom find a birth on “the sea-god’s favorite isle”:
Hail! all hail! my native land!
Long thy course of glory keep:
Long thy sovereign sails expand
O’er the subjugated deep!
When of Rome’s unbounded reign
Dust and shade alone remain,
Thou thy head divine shalt raise,
Through interminable days. (p. 129)
While the prophecy of the Druid provides solace in time of threatened subjugation, the
example of the fall of Rome (or France for that matter) opens up the possibility of a
future fall for Britain. If the stream of ages carries away chiefs and kings and “all work
of human pride” (p. 128), how is Britain to be saved from a similar fate? If history
repeatedly tells the tale of rise and fall, growth and decay, how is Britain to escape
from the inevitable cycles of history?
The second part of the poem seeks to resolve this dilemma, primarily through a
touristic journey from the source of the Thames to London. This journey becomes both
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a survey of the land and a survey of the past found inscribed in the features of the land
or in the memories associated with particular sites. However, this inscribed landscape
is presented as not permanent, but itself subject to erasure from the very processes of
time that have sanctified that landscape.
As oceans now o’er quicksands roar,
Where fields and hamlets smiled of yore;
As now the purple heather blows,
Where once impervious forests rose;
So perish from the burthened ground
The monuments of human toil:
Where cities shone, where castles frowned,
The careless ploughman turns the soil. (pp. 138-139)
Everywhere the slow processes of time seem at work eradicating human presence and
memory from the landscape. Yet there remains one hope for the preservation of history
and that is the imagination of the historian or poet or local enthusiast attuned to the
stories and memories that mark the landscape.
The illumined shrine has passed away:
The sculptured stone in dust is laid:
But when the midnight breezes play
Amid the barren hazel’s shade,
The lone enthusiast, lingering near,
The youth, whom slighted passion grieves,
Through fancy’s magic spell may hear
A spirit in the whispering leaves;
And dimly see, while mortals sleep,
Sad forms of cloistered maidens move,
The transient dreams of life to weep,
The fading flowers of youth and love! (pp. 141-142)
The lone enthusiast, familiar with the folk stories and histories of particular sites might
be able to preserve the human associations of the landscape and thus render the
landscape a palimpsest of human transit, human joy, and human woe. The journey
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down the Thames through space and time conveys Peacock through a historically rich
landscape marked by the presence of Britain’s illustrious and at times ignominious
past, a literary landscape already inscribed by “Denham’s spirit” on “yon poetic hill”
(p. 146), Pope’s presence on “Twitnam’s classic shore” and Thomson’s presence on
“Richmond’s beauteous height” (p. 147). And all these traditions, folkloric, historical
and literary, are traced back to the Druid sage, the personification of native strength
and perseverance whose prophecy has been marvelously fulfilled.
Yet the question still remains, how is Britain to escape the processes of time?
The vision of the past, while providing the foundation for this encomium on native
British strength also provides the historical precedent for its eventual dissolution and
decay.
I seemed to hear, in wakening thought,
While those wild minstrel accents rung,
Whate’er historic truth had taught,
Or philosophic bards had sung.
Methought a voice, serene and strange,
Whispered of fate, and time, and change,
And bade my wandering mind recall,
How nations rise, and fade, and fall. (pp. 151-152)
The enemy then is not so much Rome and France as it is time, “the foe of man’s
dominion” (p. 153), before which “Man and all his works decay” (p. 154). Peacock’s
solution is to appeal to “patriotic zeal” and posit that Britain may be impervious to the
assault of time because the character of the British nation is somehow different from
that of past nations that have risen and fell. Despite this emphasis on the strength of
the British character, the only justification given by Peacock for the nation’s endurance
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is the accident of geography. The poem closes with that most common of nationalistic
justifications of British perseverance, the appeal to the unique geography of the island
nation.
Ah! sure, if skill and courage true
Can check destruction’s headlong way,
Still shall thy power its course pursue,
Nor sink, but with the world’s decay.
Long as the cliff that girds thine isle
The bursting surf of ocean stems,
Shall commerce, wealth, and plenty smile
Along the silver-eddying Thames:
Still shall thine empire’s fabric stand,
Admired and feared from land to land,
Through every circling age renewed,
Unchanged, unshaken, unsubdued;
As rocks resist the wildest breeze,
That sweeps thy tributary seas. (pp. 154-155)
While sanctioned as justification for British endurance by its very conventionality, the
island geography does not answer any of the difficult questions. With the renewal of
invasion fears, trade embargoes and international trade disputes (and subsequent war
with the United States), the idea of the insular and sceptered isle impervious to assault
was in 1810 more a fanciful recollection than a provable assertion. The popular
success of The Genius o f the Thames simply was not due to its closely argued logic but
was a product of its ability to enunciate long-standing fantasies of the superiority of
British values and British character. Indeed, the strength of Peacock’s argument for the
inevitability of the fall of Rome and the hoped for fall o f Napoleonic France makes a
strong argument for the eventual fall of Britain, which the appeal to the sceptered isle
defense cannot wholly obviate. If the course of the river denotes the passage of time
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and time washes away every work of human toil, then how can the river become a
symbol of the preservation of the past and not the agent of its destruction?
When Wordsworth sets out to use a river as a way of writing the state of the
nation he consciously eschews the great national river that flows through the
metropolis and chooses instead an obscure local river that flows through one of the
least populated regions of the British Isles. However the choice of the Duddon over
the Thames is not a retreat into the mountain hermitage, nor is it a rejection of interest
in national issues. As described in Chapter 5, Wordsworth had come to distrust the
state of the national character, a state that he felt was growing daily more diseased.
The Duddon River, its surrounding rural landscape and associated ancient manners,
then provided an antidote to the diseased state o f the nation. Wordsworth pointed out
the difference in a late addition to the River Duddon sonnets when he split the octet and
sestet of one sonnet into two separate sonnets and supplied a new sestet for the first and
a new octet for the second. Thus the sonnets numbered XXXI and XXXII in 1820
were in manuscript part of a single sonnet. The added material draws a direct
connection between the Duddon and the Thames:
Beneath an ampler sky a region wide
Is opened round him:—hamlets, towers, and towns,
And blue-topped hills, behold him from afar;
In stately mien to sovereign Thames allied
Spreading his bosom under Kentish downs.
With commerce freighted, or triumphant war. (XXXI, 9-14)8
The prospect view presents a scene reminiscent of Thomson’s view from Richmond
Hill and Wordsworth’s own description of “The View from the Top of Black Comb,”
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though curiously the objects of the landscape—the hamlets, towers, towns and hills—
occupy the subject position, as if the archetypal British landscape were approving of
itself. Here the humbler Duddon is allied to the “sovereign Thames,” by their “stately”
miens, both representative of the state, with the Thames clearly marked as emblematic
of the modem commercial nation “With commerce freighted, or triumphant war,” and
the Duddon stately through its association with an idealized British landscape.
However, though they may be allied, there remains an important difference, one that
Wordsworth offers as justification for turning away from the proud margin of the
Thames to humbler streams:
But here no cannon thunders to the gale;
Upon the wave no haughty pendants cast
A crimson splendour: lowly is the mast
That rises here, and humbly spread, the sail;
While, less disturbed than in the narrow Vale
Through which with strange vicissitudes he passed,
The Wanderer seeks that receptacle vast
Where all his unambitious functions fail. (XXXII, “Conclusion,” 1-8)
Unlike the Thames, the Duddon is not the overt symbol of the nation’s strength, the
visible emblem of commercial power and imperial might, for on the Duddon “lowly is
the mast” and “humbly spread” is the sail. Instead of valuing these overt symbols of
the nation’s strength, Wordsworth characterizes them as “haughty” and by referring to
the Duddon as “unambitious” he implies that the Thames inspires opposing thoughts of
ambition and pride. For Wordsworth, the Thames may be a symbol of the nation, but it
is of a nation troubled and diseased, falling to ruin because in its ambitious pursuit of
geographical and commercial empire it is abandoning those ancient manners and
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traditions that are the true bulwark of British strength. The course of the Duddon is not
pursued simply for “emerald fields alone” but for what it might reveal about a
vanishing British culture, a culture desperately in need of preservation, threatened by
activities on the proud margin of the Thames.
As published in 1820, the River Duddon series consisted of thirty-three sonnets
that fall into three equal groups of eleven sonnets each. While this tripartite division is
not overtly marked in the text, each separate part can be seen to have its own unity and
structure, and the three parts together describe a movement through both the
geographical and imaginative landscape. Sonnet XII which begins “On, loitering
Muse” and sonnet XXHI which begins “Sad thoughts, avaunt!” each calls attention to
the shift from one part to another through an injunction directed to the poet and the
reader and through the seemingly overt rejection of all that has come before. In sonnet
XU, the poet feels chided by the stream to abandon his fanciful indulgences, and in
sonnet XXIII, the poet attempts to reject the sad thoughts occasioned by the folkloric
and historical remembrances attached to places. Thus the first eleven sonnets are
preoccupied with the imaginative representation of the landscape, while the middle
eleven sonnets move through an historical landscape. Each of these representative
modes is supplemented in turn and the final eleven sonnets move through a human
landscape dominated by memory, both personal and local. Yet while the fanciful and
the historical are each pushed aside, the series is not so much a progress in stages as a
series of variations, the truth of representation lying not in the overcoming of fancy and
history but in their incorporation within the larger structure of personal memory which
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includes the fanciful, the historical, the folkloric and the personal. It is through all of
these that the landscape is made legible and the silent tomb transformed into a speaking
monument.
The series begins with a rejection of the classical and the exotic in favor of the
“birthplace of a native Stream” (I, 9). Wordsworth’s choice is the Duddon River,
“remote from every taint / Of sordid industry” (II, 1-2), a characterization that implies
that other native streams are not free from such taint. The Duddon is recommended as
a fit subject by its isolation from industry, its perceived unchanged nature, which
allows it to be the repository of ancient manners. This unchanged nature is balanced
against the recognition that much change has already taken place even here in the
landscape:
to chant thy birth, thou hast
No meaner Poet than the whistling Blast,
And Desolation is thy Patron-saint!
She guards thee, ruthless Power! who would not spare
Those mighty forests, once the bison's screen,
Where stalked the huge deer to his shaggy lair
Through paths and alleys roofed with sombre green (II, 6-12)
In a note, Wordworth identifies the “huge deer” as “the Leigh, a gigantic species long
since extinct,” which along with the mighty forests of Britain serves as a tacit reminder
of how the landscape has changed and how the process of preservation is already far
behind the processes of change. The need then is for a memorial, a “speaking
monument” (III, 3) that might preserve native character (or species, or landscape
features) before it is lost to the passage of time.
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The question for Wordsworth is not whether preservation is necessary, but how it
should be done.' “How shall I paint thee?” is the question that opens the third sonnet,
and the question as to how the landscape can be represented becomes a preoccupation
of the entire series. The poet speaks of the unpromising, seemingly unpoetic
beginnings of the river and notes as he did in the sonnet “Aerial Rock”:
To dignify the spot that gives thee birth,
No sign of hoar Antiquity's esteem
Appears, and none of modem Fortune's care; (III, 9-11)
While “Aerial Rock” sounded a note of despair at the prospect of a seemingly blank or
erased landscape, here the poet discovers Nature’s own markers, and more importantly,
the ability of the poet to recognize those markers.
Yet thou thyself hast round thee shed a gleam
Of brilliant moss, instinct with freshness rare;
Prompt offering to thy Foster-mother, Earth! (HI, 12-14)
The origins of the river are seen as self-monumentalizing, as being inscribed with its
own legible figures of origin drawn from the original source o f all things, the Earth
itself. If the river is capable of shedding around itself its own legibility, then perhaps
through an imaginative reading of the landscape the poet too can discover the means of
reading and writing (and painting) the landscape. Again, this requires not the grand
prospect view but the attention to small detail, a study of the land not as in the
Adventurer’s map but in the finely observed details of a local survey:
Starts from a dizzy steep the undaunted Rill
Robed instantly in garb of snow-white foam;
And laughing dares the Adventurer, who hath clomb
So high, a rival purpose to fulfil;
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Else let the dastard backward wend, and roam,
Seeking less bold achievement, where he will! (IV, 9-14)
The “Adventurer,” now unambiguously termed a “dastard” whose rival purpose is a
conquering ambition, is chastised to seek a “less bold” but seemingly more substantial
achievement that is only possible when one abandons the height and comes down the
mountain into the valley, down to the streamside there to study Nature not in its grand
effects but in its nearly imperceptible workings. There, one glimpses how the river and
all Nature works towards creating monuments to itself:
but now, to form a shade
For Thee, green alders have together wound
Their foliage; ashes flung their arms around;
And birch-trees risen in silver colonnade.
And thou hast also tempted here to rise,
'Mid sheltering pines, this Cottage rude and grey; (V, 5-10)
There is a seamless movement from the natural architectural structure of trees to the
man-made and seemingly naturalized structures of human habitation, a blending which
Wordsworth will return to in some detail in the Topographical Description that
concludes the River Duddon volume. The landscape is lived-in and yet somehow still
natural, the “silver colonnade” of trees blending imperceptibly into the rude cottage
and the “old remains of hawthorn bowers” (VI, 2) that provide habitation for birds.
This idyllic landscape is only possible in a place free from the taint of sordid industry,
in this seemingly unchanged spot amidst increasing change and dislocation. This
idealized landscape provides an impossible exemplar for the landscape of Britain, a
remembered and memorialized depiction of what may have been but which was
increasingly no more.
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From idealized landscape it is a short step to pastoral fantasy. The seventh
sonnet presents the lament of a “love-sick Stripling” who fancifully desires to be
changed into the rose that touches the breast of the woman he loves. In opposition to
this desire, the poet speaks of those of “calmer mind” (VII, 11) who would be content
“To be an unculled floweret of the glen” (VTI, 12), a desire remarkable in that it is a
desire for an undesiring state, a curious reversal of Gray’s lament for those bom to
blush unseen. Desire, so closely allied with ambition, is rejected as a troubling
presence, and instead it is the end of desire that is sought.9 The disturbing nature of
desire is figured strongly in the eighth sonnet by both the poet’s own desire for
knowledge of origins and the recognition of past streamside travelers whose own
desires seem greatly at odds with the restorative function of water.
What aspect bore the Man who roved or fled,
First of his tribe, to this dark dell— who first
In this pellucid Current slaked his thirst?
What hopes came with him? what designs were spread
Along his path? His unprotected bed
What dreams encompassed? Was the intruder nursed
In hideous usages, and rites accursed,
That thinned the living and disturbed the dead?
No voice replies;—the earth, the air is mute
And Thou, blue Streamlet, murmuring yield'st no more
Than a soft record, that, whatever fruit
Of ignorance thou might'st witness heretofore,
Thy function was to heal and to restore,
To soothe and cleanse, not madden and pollute! (VIII)
The wished for end of desire occasions thoughts not of calm and peace but of some
earlier visitor to the Duddon, the first visitor and the purposes and desires that occupied
that visitor. The repetition of “first” in the second line seems to reiterate both the
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poet’s own desire for comprehending some first sight of the river and the impossibility
of knowing of such a sight with any certainty. The questions asked of this original
traveler who first “slaked his thirst” cannot be answered, his hopes, his designs, and his
dreams remain unrecoverable. This initial sympathy for the first visitor, shown by the
poet’s concern for hopes and dreams and the fragility of the “unprotected bed,” gives
way to anxiety over the possibly unfit attitude of the visitor. The anxiety occasioned by
these unaccountable purposes leads to the equally unaccountable and disturbing
surmise that this original visitor, called “the intruder” by the sixth line, may have
brought with him “hideous usages, and rites accursed,” may in fact have brought with
him attitudes and desires completely incongruous with the beauty and sublimity of the
natural setting. But as disturbing as these thoughts are, equally disturbing and yet
strangely comforting is the fact that no record exists, the landscape offering no
markings; “the earth, the air is mute.” Here mid the wreck of is and was, past purposes
are lost forever to time and the landscape seems impervious to records of human
transit. Yet, as in this case, sometimes nature’s supposed resistance can be figured as
positive in that the function of the landscape remains somehow inviolable despite
human action. If this is true then the meaning of the landscape lies in one’s
responsiveness to it in both its local details and in its universal functions. True
responsiveness then is meaning-making; it is not simple seeing but imaginative
deciphering of the diluvian records that mark the land, and yet that deciphering is
uncomfortably allied to a violation of the spirit of the place—the first visitor who may
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have brought “hideous usages” and the poet who attempts to read the landscape each
aligned with a desire that is opposed to the repose offered by the river.
The ninth and tenth sonnets suggest such an imaginative deciphering of the
landscape as the poet reads the stepping stones that provide bridges across the Duddon.
In the ninth sonnet the stepping stones give rise to a conventional meditation on the
passing of time. The poet imagines how the stepping stones thrill the child who “when
the high-swoln Flood runs fierce and wild” puts “His budding courage to the proof’
(IX, 10-11). Yet while the child may read the stones as an emblem of growing
maturity, a very different reading is occasioned by the stones for those whom
advancing age has rendered less sure of foot:
and here
Declining Manhood learns to note the sly
And sure encroachments of infirmity,
Thinking how fast time runs, life's end how near! (IX, 11-14)
As in “Tintem Abbey,” the same landscape gives rise to very different responses, but it
is the responsiveness itself that is important. Unlike the imagined original visitor
whose state of mind was disturbingly incompatible with the setting, here the potential
for different readings does not raise the anxiety of unreadability but is fused by the
conventional image of the course of the river as an emblem of the course of human life.
The ambition of youthful desires is not necessarily in opposition to the desire for the
end of desire, both being stages in the process of maturation. The different responses
are “age-appropriate” and sure reminders that what the observers bring to the site
informs their sight. In this way the anxieties about what that original visitor brought to
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the Duddon’s side are seemingly overcome by being overwritten, and yet also
sanctioned by the very process of overwriting. If responsiveness to the site is
contingent upon what one brings to that site, then the questions about the hopes,
designs, dreams and even hideous usages remain prominent if still unanswerable.
The encroachments of time which the stepping stones occasion for “Declining
Manhood” are pushed aside momentarily by the sight of two lovers crossing the
stream. In their playful exuberance there is a denial of time’s swift flow, and yet here
too doubts remain about the desires that remain hidden from view. When the boy, after
playfully withholding aid from his companion finally helps her across, the poet pauses
to voice a seemingly prudish concern: “Ah! if their fluttering hearts should stir too
much, / Should beat too strongly, both may be betrayed” (X, 11-12). Anxiety intrudes
momentarily on this pastoral depiction of youthful love, an anxiety centering on the
uncertain origins as well as the possibility of excess. Is this a warning that one can be
too responsive to the landscape, or that innocence is under assault, or perhaps that even
here in this idyllic spot innocence has always been under assault? What is the danger
of the heart stirring too much, of beating too strongly? In short, if nature never
betrayed the heart that loved her, how can one be betrayed by feeling too much?
The eleventh sonnet, “The Faery Chasm,” closes the first part with a powerful
depiction of the desire to read the landscape imaginatively and the ways in which the
landscape can frustrate those desires. The sonnet begins with a seemingly
unambiguous assertion of the truth of a local superstition attached to a place. In this
faery chasm local tradition maintains that the stones themselves are marked with the
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footprints of child-stealing elves, marks that can be deciphered by the traveler versed in
such legends.
No fiction was it of the antique age:
A sky-blue stone, within this sunless cleft,
Is of the very footmarks unbereft
Which tiny Elves impressed;— on that smooth stage
Dancing with all their brilliant equipage
In secret revels—haply after theft
Of some sweet Babe—Flower stolen, and coarse Weed left
For the distracted Mother to assuage
Her grief with, as she might! (XI, 1-9)
The assuredness of the beginning, that the story is “No fiction” of the past, betrays an
anxiety that surrounds the fanciful associations that the imaginative reading of
landscape produces. The very surface of the stone is said to be evidence of these local
traditions, of elves who are responsible for the disappearance of children. Of course
such folk tales exist in many different contexts as cultural mechanisms for accounting
for the extreme vulnerability and often precarious existence of children, and yet for
Wordsworth and Mary Wordsworth, herself a “distracted mother” forced to assuage her
grief however she may, such fanciful explanations for the loss of the children who
accompanied them on the banks of the Duddon in 1811 seem wholly inadequate. In a
sudden turn away from the fanciful, the sonnet concludes with the poet’s demand for
verification, a demand useless in its desire and productive of nothing but despair.
But, where, oh! where
Is traceable a vestige of the notes
That ruled those dances wild in character?—
Deep underground? Or in the upper air,
On the shrill wind of midnight? or where floats
O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer? (XI, 9-14)
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As the attempt to uncover the desires of the original visitor to the Duddon ended in a
hopeless string of questions, here too the desire for verification dissolves in a series of
surmises each without hope of resolution. The repetition of “where” in the ninth line
and the sudden injection o f “oh” which seems to mark actual pain reinforce the fact
that these are not idle questions but a recurrence of the desire for knowing which the
landscape frustrates. The anxiety has been displaced from the vanished child to the
vanished text, from body to text. The anxiety that lies behind this troubled shift from
the fanciful story of child-stealing to the realization that hope was “deep underground,”
or, as Wordsworth writes in “Surprized by Joy,” “long buried in the silent Tomb,”
surfaces and the landscape becomes again a blank illegible tablet. It is of course
disturbing that not even a “vestige” is traceable, and whether it is to be found deep
underground, or on “the shrill wind of midnight” or amid the autumnal gossamer that
floats over the twilight fields doesn’t really matter since such traces would be
ephemeral and ultimately untraceable, tantalizing in their presence but impossible to
catch. If this is all that fancy can offer, if the imaginative reading of the landscape is so
subject to the vagaries of the weather, then it is not enough, and some more permanent
marks of the landscape must be sought to answer for Wordsworth the question “How
shall I paint thee?”
The twelfth sonnet explicitly marks a turn away from fancy in search of some
more substantive marks of the landscape. The first line, “On, loitering Muse—the
swift Stream chides us—on!,” with its repetition of “on,” implies a certain impatience
with the results of the fancy, that “loitering Muse” who has seemingly led the poet
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astray. Everywhere nature presents “wild shapes for many a strange comparison” (XU,
4), a landscape that seems to demand a fanciful reading, but these must be left behind,
though of course the richness of these fanciful images, these “bright liquid mansions”
(XII, 7) of the imagination, belies the poet’s resolve to quit them. However, leave
them he must:
The Bard who walks with Duddon for his guide,
Shall find such toys of fancy thickly set:
Turn from the sight, enamoured Muse— we must;
Leave them—and, if thou canst, without regret! (XII, 11-14)
Even in taking leave, the poet lingers over what must be left behind, for these “toys of
fancy,” while rich in themselves, have drawn the poet into unanswerable meditations
and endless surmises. The poet turns away from the faery chasm to the open prospect
of Donnerdale, and there encounters the picturesque landscape of Britain that seems
more clearly legible.
Hail to the fields—with Dwellings sprinkled o'er,
And one small hamlet, under a green hill
Clustering, with bam and byre, and spouting mill!
A glance suffices,—should we wish for more,
Gay June would scorn us. (XDI, “Open Prospect,” 1-6)
The landscape with its picturesque siting of hamlet, bam, mill, and green hill seems
self-evident, a glance sufficing to make it readable as an emblem of the nation itself.
Yet amidst this seemingly perfect vision, the slight notes of a dirge sound almost
imperceptibly in the winds that roar across the vale, “loud as the gusts that lash / The
matted forests of Ontario's shore / By wasteful steel unsmitten” (XIII, 7-9). The sound
of the wind that seems allied to those sounds that emanate from North America recalls
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that while forests remain there, in Wordsworth’s Britain they are mostly gone, smitten
apparently by the wasteful steel, the seemingly endless demands of civilization, war,
and industry. In Britain, the landscape has been dramatically altered by hum an
presence and as in Book VII of The Excursion, even the most idyllic retreat is
threatened by the presence of the timberman with axe in hand.
Despite the attractions of the picturesque “Mountain Stream” with its “Shepherd
and his Cot” (XTV, 1), the poet is drawn away from human intercourse, from the
“warm hearth” of the “generous household” (XK, 12-13), by the progress of the river
which seems impelled by “some awful Spirit” to leave, “utterly to desert, the haunts of
men” (XIV, 9-10) and “through this wilderness a passage cleave” (XTV, 12). As in the
second ode to Lycoris discussed in Chapter 5, the poet leaves the open prospect and
seeks some deep chasm, and there he encounters the possibility of an illegible
landscape.
From this deep chasm, where quivering sunbeams play
Upon its loftiest crags, mine eyes behold
A gloomy niche, capacious, blank, and cold;
A concave free from shrubs and mosses grey;
In semblance fresh, as if, with dire affray,
Some Statue, placed amid these regions old
For tutelary service, thence had rolled,
Startling the flight of timid Yesterday!
Was it by mortals sculptured?—weary slaves
Of slow endeavour! or abruptly cast
Into rude shape by fire, with roaring blast
Tempestuously let loose from central caves?
Or fashioned by the turbulence of waves,
Then, when o’ er highest hills the Deluge passed? (XV)
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This deep chasm, like the faery chasm the poet has left behind, occasions the
possibility of blankness by the multiplicity of readings that it produces, all without
hope of verification or certainty. It is “blank” and therefore both available for
inscription and impervious to inscription. Here we have a figure or statue but cannot
discover its origins or purpose, how it was formed or how it was used. The landscape
appears marked by human transit, and yet the monument itself was fashioned by
natural forces. Or was it? Is it the work of “weary slaves” used for “tutelary service,”
a monument of some pagan religion nursed in hideous usages and rites accursed? Or is
it the product of catastrophic geological processes cast out from the bowels of the
earth? Or is it the product of slow geological time, the constant action of waters let
loose in ancient Biblical times? As in “The Faery Chasm” the series of surmises
reflects an anxiety of unknowing though here the surmises move through a real
landscape examined by the local surveyors of ethnography, history, geology, and
tradition. Yet these seemingly more real explanations also produce an impasse of
undecidability. Just as was the case with the local surveyors who struggled to map and
name the landscape, close examination reveals not certain, but competing and often
mutually exclusive explanations.
However, unlike the fanciful surmises that Wordsworth chooses to abandon
without regret, it is in the conjunction between fancy, history, and folklore that
Wordsworth finds a temporary solution. In “American Tradition” the poet rejects
“such fruitless questions” (XVI, 1) that concluded the fifteenth sonnet as wrong-headed
in their desire for certainty, since certainty, such as it is, only exists in how the
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landscape is read by the inhabitants of that landscape. While the naive traveler may be
perplexed by these seemingly unreadable monuments, the local population, like the
Native Americans who “smile” at the “White Man’s ignorance” (XVI, 4, 5), do read
the landscape and attach meanings to it. Just as the Native Americans on the banks of
the Oroonoko can tell a story about the origins of “the sculptured shows” (XVI, 2) that
grace the high cliff side, so too can local history and tradition provide the foundation
for a human attachment to the landscape, a landscape that is read as marked and written
by human presence and transit. The Native Americans tell of how the “Great Waters”
rose and covered the plains and how over these waters:
his Fathers urged, to ridge and steep
Else unapproachable, their buoyant way;
And carved, on mural cliffs undreaded side,
Sun, moon, and stars, and beast of chase or prey;
Whate'er they sought, shunned, loved, or deified! (XVI, 10-14)
This is a story about how the landscape is written over and read, but it is also a story
about how the writing itself takes place. Natural forces directed by supernatural forces
create the opportunity for the artist’s work, a remarkably succinct explication of
Wordsworth’s own ideas about composition. The questions raised by the unreadable
gloomy niche are fruitless then because they fail to recognize the fact that the
landscape is read, that there are stories attached to monuments, that the silent tomb is
only silent if one does not know how to listen or what to listen for, or simply if one
does not listen at all. The history and local traditions attached to places always provide
a way of reading the landscape, but to read one must abandon all hope of certainty.
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At the very center of the River Duddon series are two sonnets that both embrace
the past and the landscape marked by human presence, and raise the disturbing
possibility that the past with its ancient manners and customs is fast moving beyond
recall. Sonnet XVII is titled “Return” and marks a return or doubling back to historical
sources, a reversal of time that both preserves the meanings attached to the landscape
and openly questions whether such meanings can be preserved. The sonnet begins with
a request, “A dark plume fetch me from yon blasted yew, / Perched on whose top the
Danish Raven croaks,” as if possession of a souvenir or memento, “a dark plume,” will
somehow assist and safeguard the memory of the past. The Danish raven, symbol of
the ancient Danes who occupied parts of Britain, gives way to the sight of an eagle,
“the imperial Bird of Rome” (XVII, 3), a sight which seems to invoke “Departed ages”
(XVn, 4). These sights return the observer to the past and mark the landscape as
bearing the inscriptions of past ages and cultures, but the return is tenuous, as
Wordsworth states in the lengthy note that accompanies Sonnets XVII and XVIII, for
though the eagle “frequently returns,” it “is always destroyed” (PW, HI, 508). Like the
inhabitants of the sparsely populated mountain districts, the eagle “requires a large
domain for its support,” and though its return is capable of invoking departed ages,
those ages are departed, vanished, and the symbol itself seems constantly threatened
and subject to destruction. Thus, though the past is present in the marked and
monumentalized landscape, it is also already departed, and the marks and symbols that
record that former presence are subject to erasure from the landscape. While the
eagle’s “wild wailing” fills the air and hushes into silence the sheep that sleep amid the
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monuments of departed ages, the eagle is threatened with destruction and the
monuments are subject to decay.
Aloft, the imperial Bird o f Rome invokes
Departed ages, shedding where he flew
Loose fragments of wild wailing, that bestrew
The clouds and thrill the chambers of the rocks;
And into silence hush the timorous flocks,
That, calmly couching while the nightly dew
Moistened each fleece, beneath the twinkling stars
Slept amid that lone Camp on Hardknot's height,
Whose Guardians bent the knee to Jove and Mars:
Or, near that mystic Round of Druid frame
Tardily sinking by its proper weight
Deep into patient Earth, from whose smooth breast it came! (XVTI,
3-14)
The eagle’s call which invokes departed ages is already something of a ruin, its “loose
fragments” falling to the ground like so many pieces of stone. On the ground are other
loose fragments, pieces of stone that mark the Roman and Druid presence in the history
of the landscape, a presence that survives in the memory of the “country people” who
have given the names “Hardknot Castle” and the “Sunken Church” to these decaying
monuments (PW 3: 508). While antiquities can be mapped and named, they must also
be preserved in memory and local tradition, for the processes of nature are steadily at
work eradicating human history. History is present in the land, but even monuments of
stone are subject to decay. This twofold recognition of a landscape marked by history
and the eradication of history from the landscape produces an overflow of the sonnet
form, the fourteenth line of this sonnet being the only hexameter line in the entire
series of sonnets. The slow cadence o f this last line reinforces the slow process of
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eradication, while the overflow of the line indicates an inability to contain these forces
and the meditations they give rise to within the structure of the poem itself.
The anxieties raised by this poem call into question the ability to preserve the
past in the face of change, whether that change be the taint of sordid industry, the loss
of ancient manners, or nature’s own processes of eradication. History, which entered
the River Duddon poems as a seeming source of salvation, is shown to be a temporal
entity built upon a fragile materiality, what de Man calls “the retrospective recording of
man’s failure to overcome the power o f time” {Romanticism 91). If, as de Man asserts,
“The restorative power, in Wordsworth, does not reside in nature, or in History, or in a
continuous progression from one to another, but in the persistent power of mind and
language after nature and history have failed” (89), then the task of the poems and the
accompanying prose is the impossible task of writing into cultural memory both the
artifacts that comprise history and the dissolution that is everywhere unwriting that
history. At this midway point in the sequence, Wordsworth appears trapped in a cycle
of preservation and decay, writing the history of the land at just the moment when that
history is being erased.
The greatest anxiety is that dissolution climbs from low to high and sinks from
high to low, touching all monuments, and while Wordsworth would maintain later that
“Truth fails not,” he also had to observe that truth’s “outward forms that bear / The
longest date do melt like frosty rime, / That in the morning whitened hill and
plain / And is no more” (“Mutability,” 7-10). These anxieties surface in the eighteenth
sonnet of the River Duddon series, “Seathwaite Chapel,” which opens with a
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recognition, that even sacred religion is not free from the touch of change and
dissolution.
Sacred Religion! “mother of form and fear,”
Dread arbitress of mutable respect,
New rites ordaining when the old are wrecked,
Or cease to please the fickle worshipper;
If one strong wish may be embosomed here
Mother of Love! for this deep vale, protect
Truth's holy lamp (XVTH, 1-7)
By quoting from Samuel Daniel’s Musophilus, Wordsworth invokes another departed
age as a context for the decay of outward forms and the potential decay of “Truth’s
holy lamp.” Daniel’s poem is a cautionary tale about the loss of Britain’s established
church, threatened then by the rise of dissenting churches. Yet it is strangely illogical
to characterize religion as “mother of form and fear,” the “Dread arbitress” who
somehow enforces respect and is capable of ordaining “new rites” to replace the loose
fragments of the old, and yet to assert “one strong wish” that somehow the current form
will escape such change. It is surely no accident that the respect enforced by the
church is characterized as a “mutable” respect—mutable because of the fickleness of
the believers, but also because, despite claims to the contrary, mutability is the
condition of all things that exist in time. In a landscape seemingly without
permanence, Wordsworth invokes a “wish” that some things may be free from change,
and yet when he considers Seathwaite Chapel and hopes for protection of truth’s holy
lamp, he can only turn to the past to describe what he hopes will be preserved.
Mother of Love! for this deep vale, protect
Truth's holy lamp, pure source of bright effect,
Gifted to purge the vapoury atmosphere
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That seeks to stifle it;— as in those days
When this low Pile a Gospel Teacher knew,
Whose good works formed an endless retinue:
Such Priest as Chaucer sang in fervent lays;
Such as the heaven-taught skill of Herbert drew;
And tender Goldsmith crowned with deathless praise! (XVTII,
6-14)
What Wordsworth hopes to preserve, the established church and the ancient manners it
fostered, is already located in the past, in “those days” of the Reverend Robert Walker,
the “Gospel Teacher,” who died in 1802, of Chaucer and Herbert long past, and of
Goldsmith whose “deathless praise” occurs amidst a lament for an irretrievable past.
The lengthy hagiographical Memoir o f the Rev. Robert Walker which Wordsworth
affixed as a note to this sonnet is an act of preservation, an attempt to write into
memory the ancient manners of “those days” which require preservation because they
are so quickly vanishing from the land. Yet despite the grandness o f the attempt,
despair at being thwarted surfaces in the recognition that irreversible change steadily
remakes the landscape and eradicates human monuments.
We have been dwelling upon images of peace in the moral world, that
have brought us again to the quiet enclosure of consecrated ground in
which this venerable pair lie interred. The sounding brook, that rolls
close by the churchyard, without disturbing feeling or meditation, is
now unfortunately laid bare; but not long ago it participated, with the
chapel, the shade of some stately ash-trees, which will not spring
again. (PW 3: 519-520)
Despite these belated attempts at preservation, much has already been lost. But how
have these changes come about? Who or what has “laid bare” the sounding brook and
what has become of the “stately ash-trees” and why will they “not spring again”? In
the uncertainty between whether the landscape has been changed by natural forces or
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human improvements lies the anxiety over mutability. Is it a natural force of
eradication that is silently folding human monuments into the breast of the patient
earth, or are these changes wrought by human intervention, by the taint of sordid
industry? While in this passage it is unclear what the source o f change is, later in the
Memoir Wordsworth shows no uncertainty as to how these changes have been effected.
Upon the Seathwaite Brook, at a small distance from the parsonage, has
been erected a mill for spinning yam; it is a mean and disagreeable
object, though not unimportant to the spectator, as calling to mind the
momentous changes wrought by such inventions in the frame of
society—changes which have proved especially unfavourable to these
mountain solitudes. (PW 3: 520)
The changes have already taken place, and so the act of preservation is really more an
act of recuperation, a rescuing of precious artifacts from the fire. Yet if it is a
recuperation, if those ancient manners really are ancient and belong to the past, this
belatedness raises the question of their applicability to Wordsworth’s own time. The
question is how memory can be anything other than nostalgia, a question that
Wordsworth attempts to address by appealing (as he will in the conclusion of the River
Duddon series) to the unchangeable nature of the form and function of Walker’s life.
So much had been effected by those new powers, before the subject of the
preceding biographical sketch closed his life, that their operation could not
escape his notice, and doubtless excited touching reflections upon the
comparatively insignificant results of his own manual industry. But Robert
Walker was not a man of times and circumstances; had he lived at a later
period, the principle of duty would have produced application as
unremitting; the same energy of character would have been displayed,
though in many instances with widely-different effects. (PW 3: 520)
The purpose of this memoir is to preserve the ancient manners of the past and their
association with the monuments of the landscape, and these must be salvaged not for
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their beauty but for their continued necessity as a counter-example to a nation forgetful
o f its past. As evidence of mutability—even in the symbols of truth’s holy lamp—
mounts, to write and preserve the past becomes an act of national importance, the only
hope for the nation’s salvation. For preservation to rise above nostalgia, for memory to
rise above remembrance, the need for and applicability of the past in reforming the
present must be demonstrated, and the wreck between is and was healed. That truth’s
holy lamp and its visible symbol require preservation in Chaucer, Herbert, Goldsmith,
and furthermore in Wordsworth’s poetry and the lengthy notes affixed to it, all speak to
the precariousness of the past; and the constant intrusions of dissolution, perhaps by
natural forces, perhaps by human intervention, all seem to denote the possible futility
of the attempt.
Wordsworth attempts to paint the Duddon Valley by revealing the historical
markers and symbols that tie the present landscape and its inhabitants to those ancient
manners that require preservation, but everywhere the marked landscape is under
assault from time and change, natural forces and human improvements. Even as
Wordsworth is describing some aspect of the land and its people as unchanged, change
is everywhere eradicating the past. The very length of the notes with which
Wordsworth supplements the poetry betrays an anxiety over what those poems are
capable of representing, and the notes themselves cannot hold back the intrusions of
change which they had sought to stem by serving as containers for artifacts from the
past. Following the extraordinary exertion of energy required to write into memory the
vanishing (or perhaps vanished) past, the series, like the Duddon itself, loses
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momentum and drifts into a series of tributary streams and digressions that record a
sense of despair over the project itself. In “The Plain of Donnerdale,” the poet
expresses doubts about his ability to memorialize the landscape, as he recalls how “The
old inventive Poets” (XX, 1) would have “beautified Elysium” (XX, 6) itself with their
description of the Duddon. But for the poet the “still repose” of the widening stream
seems only a chain that must be broken, and tranquility itself seems to have lost its
power to heal. This weariness must be overcome, for much remains of hard
journeying. The river seems to have lost direction and purpose, and in the meditations
inaugurated by the slow progress of the stream, memory returns, though it is of a past
that is irrevocable.
Whence that low voice?—A whisper from the heart,
That told of days long past, when here I roved
With friends and kindred tenderly beloved;
Some who had early mandates to depart,
Yet are allowed to steal my path athwart
By Duddon's side; once more do we unite,
Once more, beneath the kind Earth's tranquil light;
And smothered joys into new being start. (XXI, 1-8)
In the Fenwick notes, Wordsworth identifies as the source of this meditation, his 1799
stay in Broughton with his cousin Mary, who later died young, but again a too literal
reading of Wordsworth’s intentions would blind us to the fact that this landscape was
forever associated with “many affecting remembrances” of that fateful trip to Bootle in
1811. Yet the surprising intensity of the verb “steal” signals a heightened perception of
these personal memories which, like the sudden intrusion of Imagination in Book VI of
The Prelude, come “athwart” the poet’s path. Like Imagination, personal memories
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both block progress and enable deeper insight into the temporality that contains both
history and futurity, origins and tendency. But the return of memory always implies the
possibility of forgetting, and when memory resurfaces in “Surprised by Joy”
Wordsworth notes that its return “Was the worse pang that sorrow ever bore” (10)
except for one, that moment of realization when standing by the grave of his daughter
“That neither present time, nor years unborn / Could to my sight that heavenly face
restore” (13-14). If memory always invokes the possibility of forgetting, it also always
invokes absence, which no amount of preservation can recuperate, o f things gone
silently out of mind, lost in the immutable process of time. Though Sonnet XXI
struggles toward an affirmation, the affirmation remains a curiously muted one.
From her unworthy seat, the cloudy stall
O f Time, breaks forth triumphant Memory;
Her glistening tresses bound, yet light and free
As golden locks of birch, that rise and fall
On gales that breathe too gently to recall
Aught o f the fading year's inclemency! (XXI, 9-14)
Memory breaks forth “triumphant,” but she comes from an “unworthy seat,” and her
“glistening tresses” remain “bound” yet somehow also free, the imagery again
reminiscent of the appearance of Imagination in the writing of the Simplon Pass
episode. At this point in the series, personal memory appears capable only of speaking
what is lost and while the poet hopes that memory can start into new being smothered
joys, there remains the allied doubt that it can do little more than momentarily deflect
the “fading year’s inclemency.”
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From personal reminiscence the series passes into local tradition. “Tradition”
tells the story of a “love-lorn Maid” who “at some far-distant tim e” (XXH, 1) saw the
reflection o f a primrose in the still waters of Long Dub and “longed to ravish” it (XXII,
8). What became o f her, whether she plunged into the water or fell while attempting to
climb “the humid precipice,” no one knows. All that remains is the symbol of her
story.
Upon the steep rock's breast
The lonely Primrose yet renews its bloom,
Untouched memento of her hapless doom! (XXII, 12-14)
Like the dark plume that the poet desires as a souvenir of the historical past, the
primrose remains an untouched memento, a symbol both of how local tradition
memorializes in the landscape the sad transit of human desires and how that
memorialized landscape remains tantalizingly out of reach of human hands. In “The
Faery Chasm” which closed the first part of the series, the poet assured us that the story
of child-stealing elves was “No fiction of the antique age,” an assurance that was
subsequently revealed as hasty and false by the poet’s own desire to discover even a
“vestige” of the elves’ presence. In “Tradition” which closes the second part of the
series, there is seemingly no need for asserting the veracity of the legend which
originated at “some far-distant time,” and though the primrose might be just a primrose
and nothing more to the Peter Bells of the world, here through local traditions it speaks
of human tragedy and memorializes the landscape with human presence. In “The Faery
Chasm” the poet bemoaned the failure of the place to mark memory, while in
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“Tradition” memory does indeed rise “triumphant” in marking the place, occupying in
terms of the figuration the position accorded Imagination in Book VI of The Prelude.
Just as the second part of the series opened with a chastisement of the poet’s
digressive fancy, the third part opens with a rejection of the melancholy despair that
memory and the past has evoked. “Sheep-Washing” recounts another tradition of the
landscape, the annual washing of the sheep prior to shearing, and calls forth from the
poet the injunction “Sad thoughts, avaunt!” (XXm, 1). Yet sad thoughts prove
difficult to banish, and though the poet is able to lose himself in the riotous clamor of
the scene, the sonnet closes with an almost petulant condescension toward the
incongruity of this noisy human activity amidst this mountain solitude.
Meanwhile ifDuddon’s spotless breast receive
Unwelcome mixtures as the uncouth noise
Thickens, the pastoral River will forgive
Such wrong; nor need we blame the licensed joys,
Though false to Nature's quiet equipoise:
Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive. (XXHI,
“Sheep-washing,” 9-14)
The poet’s reaction is like that of the tourist promised soundless mountain solitude and
encountering instead a boisterous country fair. The emphasized “we” draws the reader
into this condescending attitude towards the local population whose actions are “false”
to nature, but fortunately “fugitive.” Here local tradition appears as something that
seems to interfere with the appreciation of the landscape rather than inform that
appreciation. Just as the thoughts of the first visitor to the Duddon conjured up visions
of druidic sacrifice, the sight of the dalesmen, and the hint of the pollution they bring to
the scene, creates an incongruous matching of landscape and inhabitants that
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momentarily raises the possibility of misreading. However, as the series moves
towards its conclusion, what the poet discovers is that he is the one who has misread
the landscape, and his own desire to escape from human presence produces not the
promise of some pure experience of nature but the danger of forgetting.
“The Resting-Place” marks another moment of stasis in the series as the poet
withdraws into a nook and momentarily escapes from the busy tumult of the world.
This Nook—with woodbine hung and straggling weed
Tempting recess as ever pilgrim chose,
Half grot, half arbour—proffers to enclose
Body and mind, from molestation freed,
In narrow compass—narrow as itself: (XXIV, 5-9)
The emphasis on personal memory in these tributary streams leads to a withdrawal
from society, like the retreat into the dim Egerian grot, an enclosing of body and mind
“from molestation freed,” a solipsism that implies solitude is necessary to achieve
some pure experience of nature. This respite proves short-lived, for while this resting
place seemed to promise solitary meditation, the poet’s thoughts turn instead to a
consideration of his own solitude, the absence of “The One for whom my heart shall
ever beat / With tenderest love” (XXV, 4-5), and the fanciful wish that she could
somehow be transported to this spot to share his present joys.
Rough ways my steps have trod;—too rough and long
For her companionship; here dwells soft ease:
With sweets that she partakes not some distaste
Mingles, and lurking consciousness of wrong;
Languish the flowers; the waters seem to waste
Their vocal charm; their sparklings cease to please.
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The sought for solitude proves empty of human companionship and presence and the
desire for some pure experience o f nature has proven to be misguided. The attempt to
escape from human presence has produced only the “lurking consciousness of wrong”
and when human presence is removed—the bodily presence of the dalesmen, the
historical presence of the monuments, the imaginative presence of local traditions—the
flowers themselves seem to languish, the waters cease to please. Without human
presence and memory, the landscape itself seems stripped of meaning and purpose.
From these melancholy thoughts the poet abruptly turns away and instructs
himself to “Return, Content!” (XXVI, 1), for even these solitary digressions have not
been without their purpose. In youth he has tracked the course of these tributary
streams not for “scanty gains” (XXVI, 9) since they have taught him “random cares
and truant joys” (XXVI, 10). To these excursions “Maturer fancy owes . . . Impetuous
thoughts that brook not servile reins” (XXVI, 13-14). It is now only after recognizing
that the landscape requires both absence and presence, that to desire both solitude and
human presence is not error, that the journey can be renewed.
I rose while yet the cattle, heat-opprest,
Crowded together under rustling trees
Brushed by the current of the water-breeze;
And for their sakes, and love of all that rest,
On Duddon's margin, in the sheltering nest;
For all the startled scaly tribes that slink
Into his coverts, and each fearless link
Of dancing insects forged upon his breast;
For these, and hopes and recollections worn
Close to the vital seat of human clay;
Glad meetings, tender partings, that upstay
The drooping mind of absence, by vows sworn
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In his pure presence near the trysting thorn—
I thanked the Leader of my onward way. (XXVII, “Journey
Renewed”)
The fascination with closely observed nature is not incompatible with the need for
human presence, nor is the desire for an unpeopled picturesque landscape incongruous
with the reading of landscape as marked by human presence. Both are necessary, if not
required, to paint the living landscape in all the richness of its detail. As the sestet of
“Journey Renewed” makes clear, the landscape is marked by more than rocks and
stones and trees. It is marked by the memory of people, events, meetings and social
intercourse. This is not the hermit’s life, for in memory lives the recognition of people
rooted in the land itself, a lived-in landscape that everywhere bears the marks of
history, local tradition and personal memory, of past and present human transit and
human presence. While “No record tells” of the battles that might have raged across
the land, whether that land be the North of Britain or the European continent,
Yet, to the loyal and the brave, who lie
In the blank earth, neglected and forlorn,
The passing Winds memorial tribute pay;
The Torrents chant their praise, inspiring scom
Of power usurped; with proclamation high,
And glad acknowledgment, of lawful sway. (XXVIII, 9-14)
The land itself, marked everywhere by symbols of British liberty and freedom, is
self-monumentalizing, itself the record that tells of lance opposed to lance. Landscape
is constitution. If the earth appears blank it is only so if memory fails, for the
landscape is only readable as a palimpsest of human activity. Those soldiers conducted
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home in single state have their memorials in the memory of local inhabitants and the
memory of human intercourse.
It is Wordsworth’s belief that if the physical geography appears blank it is only
because we have suffered ourselves to forget, and therefore the dangers of forgetting
are never far from the celebration of triumphant memory:
And oft-times he—who, yielding to the force
O f chance-temptation, ere his journey end,
From chosen comrade turns, or faithful friend—
In vain shall rue the broken intercourse. (XXIX, 5-8)
Wordsworth uses the potent figure of infidelity to characterize forgetting. The one
“who swerves from innocence” (XXIX, 1) abandons all ties to the past in the heedless
pursuit of “chance-temptation.” Thus forgetting is nothing less than a violation of
one’s consummate duty, and remembering is nothing less than the fulfillment of one’s
sacred vow. Yet the need to figure forgetting in such strong terms implies that it
remains a powerful and very real danger. Therefore the bulwark of the British national
character is the ability to remember. The landscape is memory, and it is nothing less
than one’s duty to remember.
How sweet were leisure! could it yield no more
Than 'mid that wave-washed Churchyard to recline,
From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine;
Or there to pace, and mark the summits hoar
Of distant moonlit mountains faintly shine,
Soothed by the unseen River's gentle roar. (XXX, 9-14)
The act of remembering draws together the memory of people and the measurement of
places. Both the churchyard gravestones and the distant moonlit mountains are marks
on the landscape, preserved on the geographer’s map and in the memory of a human
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observer. To read the landscape one must not merely measure the height of the distant
mountains but extract from the very earth itself the marks left by the people who have
inhabited the land. The poet’s task, then, is to remember, to crown the good with
deathless praise, to preserve for future generations the heritage of the people.
The representation of the river’s end, the geographical location where the river
empties into the sea, describes the move out of the Duddon Valley into the larger
nation represented by the Thames. As discussed earlier, the two sonnets numbered
XXXI and XXXII in 1820 grew out of a single sonnet. This manuscript sonnet
consisted of the octet of Sonnet XXXI and the sestet of Sonnet XXXH, and the
interpolated material provided Wordsworth’s justification for writing the nation (or the
wished-for nation) through a humble stream instead of the great national river. If the
Thames had been historically the symbol of national progress and wealth, it was also
for Wordsworth closely allied with that national progress which was fast eradicating
local differentiation and the ancient manners, customs, traditions and histories of local
populations. The power of cultivation, while necessary to the advancement of wealth,
was also producing widespread and for Wordsworth undesirable change. Yet all rivers,
local and national, humble and proud, eventually come to an end, and so too the
Duddon moves inexorably towards its final destination:
Not hurled precipitous from steep to steep;
Lingering no more 'mid flower-enamelled lands
And blooming thickets; nor by rocky bands
Held; but in radiant progress toward the Deep
Where mightiest rivers into powerless sleep
Sink, and forget their nature— now expands
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Majestic Duddon, over smooth flat sands
Gliding in silence with unfettered sweep! (XXXI, 1-8)
The first few lines of this sonnet recap the progress of the river, and the second half of
the octet, with its repetition of long vowel sounds, captures the stately flow of the river
as it expands across its estuarial sands and empties into the sea. Just as the end of the
river marks the end of the river’s progress, so the end of the river raises for the poet the
fear that his progress will be lost, that like the river the history he has sought to
preserve is destined to sink into powerless sleep. The danger here is that even the
mightiest rivers come to an end and in that dissolution they will “forget their nature.”
But what exactly does it mean for a river to forget its nature? One answer is that the
nature of a river is movement and in that powerless sleep o f the sea the individualized
movement of the river is lost. Another way in which the river might forget its nature
though is shown in the concluding sestet where the Duddon is represented as losing its
local character, of becoming more and more an abstract symbol and in its increasing
abstractness seen to be allied to that other national river and symbol of the state.
Beneath an ampler sky a region wide
Is opened round him:—hamlets, towers, and towns,
And blue-topped hills, behold him from afar;
In stately mien to sovereign Thames allied
Spreading his bosom under Kentish downs,
With commerce freighted, or triumphant war. (XXXI, 9-14)
Here the “ampler sky” provides a prospect view of the landscape which could be any
landscape of innumerable places in Britain, a generic view of hamlets, towers, and
towns like the “goodly prospect” seen from Thomson’s Richmond Hill, or the “Fair
prospect, such as Britain only shows” that served as background to Wordsworth’s
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vision o f St. George in “Ode, Composed in January 1816.” De Man argues that this
movement between octet and sestet is superficially a “progression from nature to
history, from a rural to an urban world” (.Romanticism 85), but as discussed earlier, to
be allied with the Thames, symbol of prosperity and wealth, but also symbol o f the
tremendous cost of the changes wrought by prosperity and wealth, is to be associated
with all that is wrong with the nation. Therefore, even the “Majestic Duddon” can be
said to forget its nature. In a sense, the Duddon must forget its nature, become so
abstract as to be undifferentiated from countless other British landscapes, in order for it
to be allied to the Thames, for the Duddon has provided Wordsworth with an
opportunity to address what is wrong with that abstract picture of the nation. De Man
asserts that this sonnet rejects the world of history represented by the “human
creations” and human “enterprises” raised in the sestet, but such an argument collapses
two very different histories—the local history and character represented by the
Duddon, and the national history and character represented by the Thames. While
undoubtedly, the movement towards the sea is a “movement away from nature toward
pure nothingness” (86), on the level of representational politics nature is the local
character of the many “spots” throughout Britain, and pure nothingness is the abstract
nation emptied of local differentiation.
That the following sonnet is not a separate poem but a continuation of the
preceding one is made clear by its first word, “But,” which marks both the syntactic
conjunction and thematic disjunction between the two. The poem begins “But here no
cannon thunders to the gale,” and proceeds to note not how the Duddon is allied to the
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sovereign Thames but the ways in which it remains local and differentiated.
Importantly, the differentiation relies on the distinction between humility and pride,
with the Duddon marked by signs of humble nature and “unambitious functions” in
direct contrast to the “proud margin of the Thames” (“To the Rev. Dr. Wordsworth,”
64) and its apparently ambitious functions. It is this sense of humility that the poet
initially hopes to emulate and so be, like the river, resigned to destiny.
And may thy Poet, cloud-bom Stream! be free—
The sweets of earth contentedly resigned,
And each tumultuous working left behind
At seemly distance—to advance like Thee;
Prepared, in peace of heart, in calm of mind
And soul, to mingle with Eternity! (XXXII, 9-14)
The stream offers something of a chastisement to the poet, to leave behind “each
tumultuous working,” the workings of fancy and imagination, to abandon pride and
also in a sense to abandon figuration, both imaginative and historical, so that at the end
one might enter Eternity humble. Eternity is the locus of forgetting, the end of
figuration and memory, for Eternity marks the end of differentiation, the subsumption
of identity by timelessness. In this next to last sonnet, which is curiously titled
“Conclusion,” the consideration of the course of the river brings us to the same
conclusion as that reached in Peacock’s The Genius o f the Thames. If the river denotes
time, and time is the agent o f decay, then how can the river become a symbol of the
preservation of the past and not the agent of its destruction?
The final sonnet unwrites the conclusions reached in the supposed “Conclusion”
of the river. While the physical geography can be said to come to an end in the sonnet
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“Conclusion,” in that the conclusion of the river is the point at which it empties into
the sea, the imaginative geography of the river persists because the very concept of
landscape requires some observer, some human presence. In “After-Thought / ’ the
reflective observer, the eye (I) that controls the landscape, offers another reading of the
river:
I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,
As being past away.—Vain sympathies!
For, backward, Duddon, as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide; (XXXIII, “After-Thought,”
1-4)
The downward movement of the series from imagined source to visible end is reversed
by the observer’s simple act of looking backwards, upstream across space and time.
While time moves inexorably forward, the human mind is not tied to such strict
temporal laws, and memory, which is the act of looking backwards, can restore that
which seemed to have been lost. The empirical facts of human existence, the perceived
course of human life, requires as Wordsworth states in “Ode to Lycoris” an “art / To
which our souls must bend; / A skill—to balance and supply” (39-41) to counteract the
movement of time and recover from the geographer’s map the landscape of human
memory. This backward look is a return to sources, a movement when in the brief
parting of clouds the far-off past is revealed. The wreck of is and was is healed by both
the abstract notion of functional endurance and the continued necessity of cultural
memory:
Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;
The Form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,
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We Men, who in our mom of youth defied
The elements, must vanish;—be it so! (XXXIII, 5-9)
In the Fenwick notes to “Ode— 1817,” Wordsworth characterized his purpose in that
poem as intending “to place in view the immortality of succession where immortality is
denied, as far as we know, to the individual creature” (SP 544) and this
characterization serves to elucidate “After-Thought” as well. To the observer not
chained to the succession of images produced by a journey downstream but capable of
a backward look, the river, while still a symbol of time’s forward movement can also
be a symbol of the solace provided by memory and the history which can be
constructed by the individual mind. While, like the waters themselves destined “to
mingle with Eternity,” individual human existence can be freed from the blank
forgetfulness of Eternity by the interposition of an observer capable of reading the
marks left on the landscape by prior human presence. As de Man notes, “This
backward motion does not exist in nature but is the privilege of the faculty of mind that
Wordsworth calls the imagination, asserting the possibility of reflection in the face of
the most radical dissolution, personal or historical” (Romanticism 88). For
Wordsworth then reflection and the memory it produces are nothing less than national
imperatives, constitutive not merely of the self but of the nation as well. Thus, for the
“Bard of ebbing time” these poems are nothing less than memorials, and memorials are
simply the highest work of human endeavor.
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
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Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know. (XXXIII, 10-14)
These vagrant reeds have been fashioned into a speaking monument which speaks of
human presence and absence, history, the present, and futurity. But the backward
glance that salvages history from the forward movement of time is ever subjected to
increasing pressure to move forward, and the speaking monuments themselves are
subject to decay. The landscape which Wordsworth has sought to celebrate was
already under pressure from spouting mills, and the ancient manners which
Wordsworth sought to preserve were in his opinion as early as 1812 already vanished
from the face of the land. As The Excursion makes very clear, Wordsworth was well
aware that the past had already receded and no amount of backward looking could
reinstate it in the present world. Poetry and memory, memorials and markers,
something left behind to mark the landscape as human, epitaphs and monuments, all
make the landscape legible as a human landscape and transform the silent tomb into a
speaking monument; all attest to the belief that something can be left behind and
ultimately preserved. But what exactly is preserved, the soaring eagle on the wing or
the stuffed bird in a glass case? Like the extinct Leigh preserved only in the poet’s
note or the South Kensington museum, what becomes of the landscape when it only
exists as memory, when the nation itself can be preserved only as a jumble of artifacts
in the museum that is the land itself?
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Notes
1 The complete title of the 1820 volume was The River Duddon, A Series o f Sonnets,
Vaudracour and Julia, and other Poems, To which is annexed A Topographical
Description o f the Country o f the Lakes, in the North o f England.
2 Gill, Wordsworth: A Life, 334. One significant way that the River Duddon volume
was important is that it marked a striking turn in Wordsworth’s reputation as measured
by contemporary reviews. Though he persisted in claiming that he never read reviews
of his poetry, Wordsworth himself late in his life told an acquaintance that “My sonnets
to the river Duddon have been wonderfully popular. Properly speaking, nothing that I
ever wrote has been popular, but they have been more warmly received” (PW3: 505).
The reception accorded The River Duddon volume ranged from the grudging praise of
the unrepentant reviewer for the Monthly Review who sought to take credit for
Wordsworth’s transformation to John Wilson’s characterization of Wordsworth as “a
genuine English classic, in the purest and highest sense of the term” (Reiman 1: 101).
In both the traditionally sympathetic and unsympathetic journals, critics praised this
volume for possessing “all o f the beauties and very few of the defects of this writer”
(Literary Chronicle, July 1, 1820, Reiman 2: 586). What Blackwood’ s describes as the
“native strength and originality” (Reiman 1: 101) of Wordsworth’s genius, the British
Critic locates in some “individualizing trait thrown in, which gives a reality to it, and
makes us feel that he is describing some real spot where the event in narration
occurred” (Reiman 1: 191).
3 For more on the psychodynamics of this riposte between Wordsworth and Coleridge,
see Linda J. Palumbo, “Wordsworth’s Coleridge in the River Duddon,” Round Table o f
South Central College English Association, 27:2 (Summer 1986), 1-4.
4 These are Wordsworth’s terms from the “Essay Upon Epitaphs” which served as a
note to Book V of The Excursion-. “Origin and tendency are notions inseparably co
relative. Never did a child stand by the side of a running stream, pondering within
himself what power was the feeder of the perpetual current, from what never-wearied
sources the body of water was supplied, but he must have been inevitably propelled to
follow this question by another: ‘Towards what abyss is it in progress? what receptacle
can contain the mighty influx?”’ (PW5: 446n).
5 Wyman Herendeen points out how the genre of the river progress was a favorite
subject of English Renaissance writers who used the river as a metaphor of the state, of
the life and death of empires and the fateful alternation between commerce and
calamity. Raleigh’s journey in search of El Dorado is the consummate blending of an
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individual spiritual journey with a mythos of imperial penetration and subjugation,
while the numerous excursions on the Thames found in such diverse works as
Camden’s Britannia or Drayton’s Poly-Olbion were the literary equivalent of Queen
Elizabeth I’s frequent river processions orchestrated to demonstrate British opulence,
commercial success, and imperial power.
6 As Raymond Williams notes in The Country and the City, The Seasons seems to
mark a moment of change, when the traditional uses of the pastoral as celebration of
country life and critique of city life prove inadequate to contain the multiple and
conflicting ideologies of the country and the city. The seemingly easy opposition
between country and city gives way to the complex demands of a rapidly changing
capitalist economy that while ostensibly the source of increased wealth, ease, and
power, is also productive of unremitting toil and drudgery and threatening to the rural
peace which it purportedly enables.
7 The Genius o f the Thames, pp. 117-118 in Thomas Love Peacock, The Works o f
Thomas Love Peacock, edited by Herbert Francis Brett Brett-Smith and Clifford Ernest
Jones (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1924-1934), vol. 6, 105-165. Subsequent
references will appear in the text and refer to page numbers.
o
All quotations from The River Duddon: A Series o f Sonnets are taken from PW 3:
244-261. The version printed by De Selincourt was that o f the 1850 edition of
Wordsworth’s poems which contained many changes from the 1820 edition. Unless
otherwise noted, the version I use is a reconstructed version of the 1820 edition based
on the textual history detailed in the apparatus criticus provided by De Selincourt in
PW 3: 244-261 and in the notes to the series (PW 3: 503-524).
9 See Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense o f History, 75-115, for a discussion of “repose” as a
figure which enabled the harnessing of desire and violence specifically tied to a larger
movement towards supervision and social control.
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PART III
MUSEUM
Chapter 7
A National Property
Wordsworth’s new local poetry, which dominated the 1820 edition of the River
Duddon, was local in its details but national in its mission. The local geography,
traditions, and people of the Lakes, marked by idiosyncrasy and a narrative of rugged
resistance, stood in a synecdochial relationship to an idealized vision of the nation.
This landscape was both commonplace and exotic, representative and rare,
representative of the nation paradoxically because it was becoming increasingly rare.
As an object of study, isolated yet threatened, as a site of pilgrimage and promised
transformation, as a ritual space set apart from everyday life by geography and the
imagination, the landscape of the Lakes can be likened to a vast national museum space
dedicated, like the contemporary British Museum and National Gallery, to the
education of the modem citizen, the construction of human identity, and the
demonstration of state power. Using Carol Duncan’s analysis of the ritual
characteristics of the public art museum, we can identify a similar construction and use
of the landscape in Wordsworth’s poetry and prose. This construction of the landscape
as a museum creates what Svetlana Alpers refers to as “the museum effect,” the
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transformation of all objects into objects of aesthetic interest. This aestheticizing gaze,
so frequently the subject of recent Wordsworth scholarship, finds its parallel in two
seemingly disparate debates contemporary to Wordsworth: that concerning Lord
Elgin’s expropriation of the Parthenon Marbles, and that concerning a planned railway
connecting a large manufacturing town with the Lake District. While both the marbles
and the railway promised widespread access to the improving influence of aesthetic
contemplation, both also threatened to destroy the objects of contemplation they
purported to make available. For Wordsworth, the availability of the Parthenon
Marbles and the opening of the National Gallery offered unprecedented opportunities
for the refinement of taste and thus the improvement of society, while the increased
interest in the Lakes, partially attributable to his own personality and writings, and the
proposed increased accessibility of this region, made easier by the railway and his own
published tourist guide book, offered no promise of improvement to the visitor and
threatened the destruction o f the proper constitution of society. The seeming paradox
of Wordsworth’s support for access to the metropolitan museum and his opposition to
similar access to the museum of the land cannot be attributed solely to narrow self-
interest, but must be seen as revealing commonly-held ideas concerning who the
“people” were and who constituted the nation. Like his campaigning in the 1818
Westmorland election and his vehement opposition to and subsequent despair over the
Reform Bill, Wordsworth’s opposition to the Kendal and Windermere Railway was a
political act that sought to safeguard Britain’s last best hope from the restless world
outside the vale.
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If we live in what Germain Bazin calls “the Museum Age,” it is an age that can
trace its origins to the flurry of activity which for all practical purposes began with
Napoleon’s nationalization of the royal art collection and declaration of the Louvre as a
public institution. The political importance of the public museum was not lost on
Napoleon or on his contemporaries, nor could Napoleon be said to have discovered the
political power inherent in the idea of the collection. The forerunners of the museum,
the princely art collections and the cabinets of curiosities, functioned as demonstrations
of the collector’s wealth and taste and served to legitimate power. As Eilean Hooper-
Greenhill notes of the Medici Palace with its huge private collection of art, artifacts,
books and curiosities, “Culture, connoisseurship and ostentatious display began to be
used to support the positions of the dominant merchants to underlie their economic
power” (24). In short, one of the basic functions of this first museum of Europe “was
the establishment of a position of superiority and exteriority through the display of
wealth and status” (72), a display which Tony Bennett points out was only accessible to
“those who possessed] the appropriate socially-coded ways of seeing” (Bennett 35).
Like the studiolo of the Renaissance prince studied by Guisseppe Olmi, these
collections formed “an attempt to reappropriate and reassemble all reality in miniature,
to constitute a place from the centre of which the prince could symbolically reclaim
dominion over the entire natural and artificial world” (Olmi 5). As Hooper-Greenhill
adds, “This representation of the w orld,. . . together with the fact that the room was
secret, combined to constitute a specific subject position, a position that reserved to the
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prince not only the knowledge of the world constituting his supremacy, but the
possibility of knowing itself’ (106).
While Napoleon’s overtly political gesture of opening the Louvre to the public
implies a sudden revolutionary shift from secret knowledge and limited access to
national demonstration and public display, private collections like the Imperial Gallery
of Vienna were frequently open to the public, though that public was limited to those
who could pay a large fee (Hudson 4). Even an ostensibly public institution like the
British Museum, founded in 1757, required visitors to submit to a tedious and
complicated process of approval which only the most diligent were willing to endure.
Once approved for admission, visitors were hurried through the collection by impatient
readers eager to return to their private studies (Hudson 8-9). What a late eighteenth
century visitor to the British Museum saw was an enormous and miscellaneous
collection characterized by a French visitor in 1795 as “an immense magazine in which
things have been thrown at random, rather than a scientific collection, destined to
instruct and honor a great nation” (quoted in Miller 90). As Kenneth Hudson describes
the collection:
Excavations were going on in steadily increasing numbers
throughout Europe and the Middle East. Travellers and explorers
were bringing back enormous quantities of what can only be called
loot from Africa, South America, China, Japan and the Pacific
Islands. Botanists, zoologists and geologists were foraging all over
the world and shipping their finds back to their motherlands. The
problem, which became more acute each year, was what to do with
it all. How was it to be sifted, housed and arranged and made
meaningful? (53-4)
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This loot of the world which formed the bulk of the British Museum’s collections dates
from the origins of the museum in the Sloane collection. The Sloane collection, the
first of the many private collections bequeathed to the nation, was the lifelong work of
Sir Hans Sloane, whose collecting activities began during his service in colonial
Jamaica in the 1680s. As personal physician to the Duke of Abermarle, then Governor
of Jamaica, Sloane used his position to amass a large collection of natural history
specimens, native art, and other curiosities, which were transported to England in ship
after ship. After the British Museum was officially founded as a public institution, the
ships full of colonial acquisitions continued to arrive, and the representational value of
these acquisitions was not lost on those in government. Referring to the many gifts to
the museum made by Sir James Cook, Matthew Maty, Principal Librarian of the
museum, wrote to the Lord Chancellor: “The Museum is going to be enriched with a
complete and most superb collection of all natural and artificial curiosities which have
been found in the expedition to the South Seas.” The Admiralty, Maty stressed, was
insistent that these collections be displayed at the museum “in a particular manner and
in a distinguished place as a monument of these national exertions of British
munificence and industry” (quoted in Miller 75).
From its beginnings in colonial expropriation through its growth as repository of
imperial spoils, the British Museum functioned, like the princely galleries of the
Renaissance, as representative of the wealth and status, not of a single individual, but
of the nation as an abstract entity of concerted interests. However, in order to function
in this way the museum needed to be available to the public it was supposed to
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educate, a public towards which the museum directors were decidedly ambivalent.
Calls to make the museum more accessible were frequently met with concerns over
public behavior, and it is telling that during the Gordon Riots in 1780 troops were
stationed in the museum gardens, as if the “rabble” would consider the Museum a
symbol as potent as the Bastille (Bennett 69). Yet in 1782, when Parliament tried to
force the museum to charge an admission fee to keep the number of visitors down, and
more specifically to keep the “lower orders” out, the fee was opposed by the Trustees
of the museum and was never implemented (Miller 71). However, the museum
retained its policy of reviewing the credentials of all prospective visitors and allowing
only those found “not exceptionable” to be admitted (Wittlin 113). It is clear that the
trustees of the “public” museum saw their public as a limited one, and their fear that
unrestricted access would bring visitors “in liquor” who “will never be kept in order”
(quoted in Miller 62) betokens a fear of the unruly mobs, the “lower orders” they
wished to educate but were unwilling to admit.
The museum public, then, was always thought of as an educable public which at
the beginning of the nineteenth century excluded the vast majority of the people, like
Wordsworth’s own distinction between the Public and the People made in the prose
supplements to the 1815 edition of his collected poems. The museum public consisted
of franchised citizens, or those who thought of themselves as franchised, and it is no
coincidence that museum attendance, essentially stagnant from 1783 to 1809, doubled
in the years surrounding Waterloo and increased tenfold in the year before the Reform
Bill.1 What these new visitors saw was an increasingly sophisticated articulation of the
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citizen and the nation to which he (and the gendered pronoun is appropriate) belonged.
This educative process was built around the notion of improvement—a notion which
was itself receiving widespread currency in the decades following Waterloo— a “march
of intellect” that tied individual improvement to national improvement and vice-versa
(Briggs 216-225). In the “specific ritual scenarios” (Duncan 2) of the national museum
and the museum that was the nation, the public learned how to be the people.
The specific ritual scenarios identified by Duncan participate in what
anthropologists characterize as the function of ritual, both secular and religious: “That
is, like other cultures, we, too, build sites that publicly represent beliefs about the order
of the world, its past and present, and the individual’s place within it” (Duncan 8). The
museum does this by providing a space outside of the everyday, a script o f responses,
and the promise of transformation for those who properly make use of the space and
the script. The museum functions as a ritual space by being cordoned off from
everyday experience, “marked off and culturally designated as reserved for a special
quality of attention—in this case, for contemplation and learning” (10). As
anthropologist Mary Douglas notes of ritual practice in general, “A ritual provides a
frame. The marked off time or place alerts a special kind of expectancy” ( 'Purity and
Danger 63). For Duncan the museum constitutes an instance of what anthropologist
Victor Turner calls “liminality,” that “mode of consciousness outside of or ‘betwixt-
and-between the normal, day-to-day cultural and social states and processes of getting
and spending’” (Turner, “Frame” 33). As Turner’s allusion to Wordsworth makes
clear, the liminal space and the experience it makes available exists not only outside of
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the everyday, but in opposition to it, as an imagined space of retreat from cares that
threaten to lay waste to our powers. This special argument for the benefits of aesthetic
contemplation, for the “special kind of expectancy” created by the liminal space of the
museum, leads to the frequent characterization o f museums as “sites which enable
individuals . . . to move beyond the psychic constraints of mundane existence, step out
of time, and attain new, larger perspectives” (Duncan 12).
Besides being clearly marked off, the museum space, like other ritual sites, is a
performance space, “a place programmed for the enactment of something”:
It may be something an individual enacts alone by following a
prescribed route, by repeating a prayer, by recalling a narrative, or
by engaging in some other structured experience that relates to the
history or meaning of the site (or to some object or objects on the
site). Some individuals may use a ritual site more knowledgeably
than others—they may be more educationally prepared to respond
to its symbolic cues. (12)
In the museum, the visitor enacts the performance usually by following a prescribed
route through the museum, responding appropriately to the objects, and internalizing
some master narrative used to order the artifacts, exhibits, rooms or buildings. The
museum provides “both the stage set and the script” (12) and ideally it even constructs
its own dramatis personae, those individuals predisposed “to enact the museum ritual”
(13). The reward for those receptive to the museum experience is nothing less than a
transformation of the self. As Duncan summarizes, the experience “confers or renews
identity or purifies or restores order in the self or to the world through sacrifice, ordeal,
or enlightenment. . . According to their advocates, museum visitors come away with a
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sense of enlightenment, or a feeling of having been spiritually nourished or restored”
(13).
The liminal space of the museum and the prescribed performance of its visitors
brought about a transformation in how those visitors saw themselves as citizens of the
state. In revolutionary France, the transformation of the King’s Palace into a public
space purportedly represented an emerging principle of equality, but also made visible
“a new relationship between the individual as citizen and the state as benefactor”
(Duncan 24). The Louvre, later rededicated as the Musee Napoleon,
addressed its visitor as a bourgeois citizen who enters the museum
in search of enlightenment and rationally understood pleasures. In
the museum, this citizen finds a culture that unites him with other
French citizens regardless of their individual social position. He
also encounters there the state itself, embodied in the very form of
the museum. (26)
In Britain, however, as the limited and difficult access to the British Museum at the
beginning of the nineteenth century made clear, the relationship between the citizen
and the public was more complex. As Iain Pears has noted, the gentlemanly art
collections of eighteenth century Britain were open only to members of “polite society’
and closed to the public, functioning as demonstrations of the disposable wealth,
proper breeding and good taste that separated its owners from vulgar society and thus
served as legitimations of power (176-178). When William Cobbett denounced the
British Museum “as a place intended only for the amusement of the curious and rich”
(quoted in Miller 138), he was merely echoing similar denunciations that had appeared
earlier in the Edinburgh Review and the generally pro-museum Quarterly Review. The
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public addressed by the public museum in Britain remained closely tied to questions of
citizenship, and thus had to wait for the political reforms of the 1830s.
The ritual space of the museum, however, was not limited to the monumental
edifices of culture situated in the metropolis, but extended over the whole of a
monumentalized British landscape. Geoffrey Hartman sees Wordsworth’s
achievement as freeing the inscription from the physical monument (Unremarkable
Wordsworth 40), but clearly Wordsworth’s procedure of forming a generalizing
utterance from the mundane details of the legible landscape transforms that landscape
into a ritual space that calls for the performance of something and promises nothing
less than the transformation of the visitor. While a poem like “Tintem Abbey” enacts
this ritual of imaginative transformation freed from the physical monumentality of the
landscape, throughout Wordsworth’s poetry his evocations of place, that rely on the
recollection of past narratives inscribed in the landscape, create a museum space of
physical monuments, a guide book of British heritage.
Any number of early Wordsworth lyrics could be used to demonstrate the
museum quality of the landscape. “Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew Tree” marks a site
singled out for a special kind of expectancy. The mundane detail in L he landscape
gives rise to a narrative associated with the site, a cautionary tale of pride and self-pity
which then leads to an exordium on the part of the speaker against such vices. Like an
artifact in the museum, this site even comes with its own label, the supposed “Lines”
which have been left on the seat for the education of some future visitor. For this
fancied future visitor, the reading of the landscape (“Stranger! these gloomy boughs /
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Had charms for him” (24-5)) is actually a re-reading o f an already inscribed prior
reading of the landscape. The transformation promised the visitor/reader is in the form
of a moral lesson (“Stranger! henceforth be warned” (50)) which curiously instructs the
visitor to look away from the monument back to the landscape itself. In “Michael” we
have a similar movement, first off from the public way into the liminal space o f a
“hidden valley” (8), where an illegible heap of stones will be made legible by the
poet’s narrative. Again though, the landscape available to the visitor/reader is one that
has already been written and can only be repeated by one who will act as “second self’
to the poet. Like artifacts in a museum, the landscape we are asked to contemplate is
one already marked by contemplation and the visitor’s experience is scripted by the
prior visit of the poet.
A visitor to a museum, like a view-hunting tourist, is of course a reader of
previously read and written signs, and Wordsworth himself suffers from no pretensions
as to being the original reader o f the landscape.2 What is important is how the
landscape is organized as a museum space for the performance of these rituals of self-
improvement, whether that improvement comes in the form of a moral lesson learned,
an exemplary narrative told, or a prayer recited. The landscape, or proper appreciation
of the aesthetic value and moral lessons offered by the landscape, was a means of
social improvement. Nature, in all its contested meanings, was not merely a source of
aesthetic pleasure, but properly read (and therein lies much future disagreement) it was
a source of moral education and spiritual fulfillment. O f course, such claims for the
proper appreciation of nature were already commonplace in some circles, though they
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would not receive widespread currency in Britain for some time yet, a currency which
owed much to Wordsworth’s later increased popularity. These wide ranging claims for
the educative value of landscape find perhaps their fullest expression in “Tintem
Abbey,” where ritual, performance, and transformation take place in a landscape
virtually stripped of materiality, the quintessential example of Hartman’s inscription
without a physical monument.
As recent commentators have pointed out, the poem generally called “Tintem
Abbey” doesn’t actually have an abbey, the one at Tintem or otherwise, anywhere in its
text. Its lengthy title, typical of inscriptive poetry, locates the poem “a Few Miles
above Tintem Abbey” in a setting from which the Abbey itself is not even visible. The
physical landscape is rendered both visible and invisible in other ways as well, as
Maijorie Levinson points out, in such metonymic slides as that which turns “hedge
rows,” marks of increased enclosure, into “hardly hedge-rows” and finally into the
aestheticized “little lines / Of sportive woods” (Levinson 42). It has become something
of a commonplace in recent criticism to see these acts of dematerialization, these slides
away from the real landscape into a privileged site of nourishment and redemption, as
part of Wordsworth’s strategy to erase the social and political landscape and replace it
with an internalized landscape. As Jerome McGann states, “Wordsworth lost the
world merely to gain his immortal soul” (88), and this elegant phrasing points up the
opposition that has marked the critical battleground of the poem: social responsibility
vs. personal desire. Without disagreeing with the details of these readings, I would like
to focus on how “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintem Abbey” attempts to
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write personal desire as social responsibility and even national necessity through its
narrative of the improving influence and educative value of the landscape.
As the title, the opening lines, and the structure reiterate, “Tintem Abbey” is a
poem about recurrence. The occasion of the poem is described in the title as “On
revisiting the Banks of the Wye,” and the opening lines, with their repetition of the
time which has passed between visits (“Five years,” “five summers,” “five long
winters”), invoke the sense of pilgrimage, of ritual repetition. The five unequal verse
paragraphs of the poem with their returning, reiterating motion also mark this sense of
repetition with difference. In the first verse paragraph, the landscape is made
ostensible through the use of determinate pronouns, as if the poet were a guide pointing
to the noticeable features of the landscape: “these waters,” “these steep and lofty
cliffs,” “this dark sycamore,” “these plots of cottage-ground,” “these orchard tufts,”
these hedge-rows,” “these pastoral farms.” Virtually no line passes without our guide
pointing to some aspect of the view, as if the poet demands that we too experience the
presence of the “landscape,” a word which recurs three times in the first twenty-five
lines and which, like the physical landscape itself, strangely disappears until the
penultimate line of the poem. “These forms of beauty” (or “These beauteous forms” as
the line stood after 1827) occupy, as Levinson points out, a precarious position
between cultivation and wildness, between plots of arable land, hedge-rows and
planted woods and the “wild green landscape” that they do not “disturb” (Levinson 14).
The seeming paradox is that these improvements, which to most visitors appear as an
ordering and structuring of the chaotic natural scene and creative of the very idea of
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landscape, are seen not as providing order but as not disturbing or disordering some
existing order.
The odd ambivalence raised by the idea that order might, but insistently here
does not, lead to disorder recurs in two opposed uses of the same verb, “disturb,” later
in the poem. The first use occurs in the midst of the poem’s climax, the recitation of
the “other gifts” that have brought “Abundant recompense” to the poet. In speaking of
the great moral and spiritual lessons which a proper reading of landscape can give to
those who “have learned” how “To look on nature” (89-90), the gift, for the poet, is a
recognition of “A presence that disturbs [him] with the joy / O f elevated thoughts” (95-
6). This presence, or “sense sublime” is disturbing because the joy of elevated
thoughts forces upon the poet a disordering of the conventional view and a recognition
“Of something far more deeply interfused.” This is a model o f how the landscape
teaches, how reading the landscape forces on the reader knowledge that disrupts the
everyday. The promise of the liminal space is that it will foster a certain heightened
kind of expectancy, that it will “disturb” us with the joy o f elevated thoughts and this
disordering will lead to a transformation of the self, a conferring and purifying of the
self. Thus the poet can declare at the end of the fourth verse paragraph a renewed
sense of self-identity (“Therefore am I still” (103)) founded on “purest thoughts.”
Enlightened and renewed, the poet can return to the everyday, “the dreary
intercourse of daily life,” which now cannot “disturb / Our chearfixl truth” (133-4) that
the world is full of blessings. In this last use of “disturb,” it is the renewed state that is
somehow safeguarded from disorder, as if the poet, like the wild green landscape, was
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somehow immune from the disordering effects of cultivation and civilization; or if not
immune then it is as if the disorder does not disturb some more basic order. If the
contemplation of the landscape promises to disturb us out of the everyday, to grant us
some enlightened knowledge, then the continued presence of the landscape in memory
somehow protects us from the disturbing influence of the everyday. Like the wild
green landscape, we can somehow remain wild and green amidst a world of hedge
rows and evil tongues. This is the evangelical message of “A worshipper of Nature,”
that in Nature’s presence we will be anointed, changed, and renewed for our work in
the world, that Nature will be found to be a source of pure delight and enlightenment
readying us to be “unwearied” in our service. And like the church, this process relies
on the continued separation of the sacred space from the secular world, and the
representation of sacred space as the place to which we long to return, to which we
occasionally return, but from which we are necessarily absent.
Despite the stationary quality of the poem—it gives the illusion of standing still
upon a single spot of earth—the narrative depends upon movement through space and
time. Following the scene-setting first verse paragraph which seems to establish
(almost manically as pointed out earlier) this place, the second verse paragraph
immediately invokes the absence of this place. While the presence of the landscape
might enable a certain aesthetic experience, such an experience only has meaning
because of its liminality, because it differs so from the everyday life led in the “lonely
rooms, and mid the din / Of towns and cities” (26-7). What provides “tranquil
restoration” (31) is not so much the actual presence of the landscape as its imagined
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presence somewhere out there on the margins of the everyday. In short, the
infrequency of its presence is necessary for its liminal status, and its liminal status is
necessary for its redemptive quality. For the landscape to teach and for the visitor to
learn, the landscape must remain a place to which the visitor can return. The
importance of this relationship is made clear in the short third verse paragraph where
the poet again imaginatively removes himself from the landscape so that he can return
to it yet again. As at the beginning of the second verse paragraph, the everyday world
is again invoked, the getting and spending, the “fretful stir / Unprofitable,” “the fever
of the world” (53-4) that is necessary both to mark the boundaries of the sacred space
of landscape and to create the need for such a place of restoration.
To further complicate the matter, the fourth verse paragraph, which turns back in
time to those earlier visits, posits the possibility that all are not equally capable of
learning from the landscape. That earlier self, figured as “boyish,” experienced
pleasure at the landscape, but this pleasure is clearly distinct from the sort of
restoration and enlightenment that would characterize a proper response. In short, this
earlier self proves on retrospect to be an exceptionable visitor to the museum of the
landscape. These movements back and forth between this sacred spot and the everyday
world, between this prepared visitor and some earlier unprepared visitor, create the
illusion of a progression that is like a procession. These turns and countertums, as
Hartman calls them {Wordsworth’ s Poetry 27), are always returns to the sacred place,
the place that promises education and enlightenment. As we move through this
particular museum of the landscape, the script takes us from a contemplation of the
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place itself to a contemplation of the not-place which proves the usefulness of the
place, to a contemplation o f the not-time which proves our qualification to read this
place, to our return to the everyday world enlightened and restored. If we have been
properly open to the museum experience, the place and time of composition has
become the place and time of reading. The “here” which the poem insists upon has
become the “here” of the invisible true nation of readers, who through their
responsiveness to the poet’s cues have proven their right to citizenship. During this
process we have rehearsed narratives associated with the place, and we have even
recited a prayer. The performance of “Tintem Abbey,” like that required of any
museum visitor, moves from artifact through contemplation to enlightenment. If there
is a difference between this early Wordsworth poem and those written after Waterloo
as part of his “new local poetry,” it is in the increased emphasis on the artifact, and a
decreased expectation of transformation. Like a weary traveler trudging through the
undifferentiated rooms of museum after museum, the visitor’s search for meaning
continued, but the potential for things to mean seemed to grow questionable.
The poetry Wordsworth published after 1819 is dominated by the tour, the
itinerary poems and sequences that describe almost in guide book fashion journeys
through the British and continental landscape. Some, like Peter Bell and The
Waggoner, are narrative poems that describe the fictional journeys of imagined
characters through actual landscapes, but most are sequences of poems that describe
the movement of the poet himself through the actual landscape. These poems
encompass many miles of travel, through the Duddon Valley, Scotland, Wales, France,
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Spain, and Italy. With at times numbing repetition, the poet moves from place to place,
from artifact to artifact, recording his thoughts. However, with few exceptions, the
traveler avoids entering the actual museums of these localities, taking instead a
museum “way of seeing” to the physical and imaginative monuments of the landscape.
While an imaginative whole can be fashioned out of some of these collections,
most of them offer no more structure than the ambulatory, the physical movement
through a landscape of monuments, like the guided tour through the museum space. In
Wordsworth’s sonnet, “After Visiting the Field of Waterloo,” we can see how what
Svetlana Alpers calls the “museum effect,” or the museum “way of seeing,” contributes
to the curious disappointment felt by the poet upon his encounter with one of the
pregnant sites of European history. The poem opens with a fanciful image of “A
winged Goddess,” holding in her hand the numerous “glittering crowns and garlands”
at stake in the Battle o f Waterloo, hovering in the air “above the far-famed spot” (5).
Her presence is evoked only to invoke her absence, and to call attention to the gap
which that absence creates in the experience of the visitor:
She vanished; leaving prospect blank and cold
Of wind-swept com that wide around us rolled
In dreary billows, wood, and meagre cot,
And monuments that must soon disappear;
Yet a dread recompense we found,
While glory seemed betrayed, while patriot-zeal
Sank in our hearts, we felt as men should feel
With such vast hoards of hidden carnage near,
And horror breathing from the silent ground! {PW3: 6-14)
Alpers characterizes the museum effect as the process by which the isolation of
“something from its world,” the offering up of it “for attentive looking,” transforms the
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object into an aesthetic object, into a work of art (26-7). The special kind of
expectancy associated with these acts of isolation and offering fosters an attentive
looking that aestheticizes the object, and the isolation of the object from its context
strips the object of historical meaning, rendering feeling the only response that is
available. In this poem that context is supplied somewhat tenuously in the fleeting
image of the winged Goddess, the political importance of the battle conveyed by the
conventional image of a deified arbiter holding aloft the spoils. To the visitor,
however, even this tenuous context is denied and what is left is a “prospect blank and
cold,” marked by temporary “monuments that soon must disappear.” The scene seems
to betray the “glory” and the “patriot-zeal” that the visitors expected to find, and yet
they do find a recompense, though a “local” and thus ephemeral one. The visitors “felt
as men should feel” at such a site, in spite of the site itself.
But what characterizes this proper response, its propriety so clearly marked by
the italicized should! The earlier version of this poem (1822) supplies the suppressed
counter-term to these proper feelings:
She vanished; all was joyless, blank, and cold;
But if from wind-swept fields of com that roll’d
In dreary billows, from the meagre cot,
And monuments that soon may disappear,
Meanings we craved which could not be found;
If the wide prospect seemed an envious seal
Of great exploits; we felt as men should feel... (app. crit. PW 3:
167)
In this earlier published version the relationship between landscape and feeling is made
possible only after the craving for meaning is exhausted. The landscape is not so much
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available for reading as it is available for the imaginative re-creation of feeling which is
the only possible meaning available. Viewed entirely in this context the field of
Waterloo makes available the contested historical and political meanings of “great
exploits.” It is only after the Goddess has vanished, leaving behind a landscape so like
many other landscapes, that the visitor is free to aestheticize the site. The monumental
landscape is available for inscription and reading regardless of the presence of actual
monuments. The museum way of seeing forces meaning to be written over the blank
prospect, whether that meaning be based on history, politics, folklore, or personal
feeling. The visitors felt as men (and women) should feel, that this was a sacred space
hallowed by the dead, set apart from other fields of dreary billows of com for
contemplation and transformation. What sets this landscape apart is “horror breathing
from the silent ground.” Horror is a response produced by the recollection of the site’s
historical importance, the resonance associated with this place which has been
transformed into feeling by the aesthetic gaze. What is felt is there, but typically the
there is silent and speaks only to those who feel, those who are contemplative enough
to understand the meaning without the monuments.
The trick of this implied but never articulated response is that merely to ask the
question,” How should men feel?” is to betray a lack of knowledge, sympathy, and
preparation, a lack that renders one a spurious visitor. The implication is that a
properly educated British citizen would know how to respond and would respond as
one should. In its utilization of response as a mark of distinction and its emphasis on
the capacity of the decontextualized object (or site) to induce feeling, Wordsworth’s
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sonnet on the field of Waterloo re-enacts the complex relationship between landscape,
taste, and citizenship laid out in the 1816 letter to John Scott discussed in Chapter 5.
In that letter, Wordsworth associated correct politics with correct taste, where correct
taste was represented by how one responded (or whether one responded at all) to an
idealized picture of the British landscape. In rapid order Wordsworth moved from an
idealized presentation of “the happy images of English landscape” to the “sensations”
of the imagined observer to the “becoming reverence of the English character” these
unarticulated sensations supposedly represented. Possession of these proper
sensations, knowing how one should feel and respond to these happy images,
discriminated the true patriots, those who “value as they ought” the “Constitution of
the country” (M Y 2: 304), from the false patriots. Just as the visitors to the museum
demonstrate their right to inclusion through their ability to respond appropriately and
with due reverence to the display o f cultural achievements and national power, the
visitor to the sacralized landscape is called upon to perform a like demonstration.
Failure to possess the proper feelings marks one as a member of a lesser class, perhaps
even as a member of the uneducable public, and thus, according to some, excludes one
from participation in the aesthetic life requisite for full citizenship. These are the
assumptions which underlie the seeming paradox of Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes
which seems to participate in and profit from the continued inundation of the Lake
District by view-hunting tourists, tourists Wordsworth would struggle to exclude in the
controversy over the Kendal and Windermere Railway. However, the Guide is only
paradoxical if it is seen as addressed to the tourist of the early Victorian age, an
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assumption which a close examination of the Guide does not bear out. The tourist
constructed and addressed by Wordsworth is a gentleman tourist of an earlier age, the
educated man of taste and feeling of Wordsworth’s own youth.
What later became the Guide to the Lakes was originally written to accompany a
series of sketches made by a local artist and published in 1810. This text was later
republished as part of the 1820 River Duddon volume, where it attracted considerable
critical attention, which led to its independent publication in 1822 as A Description o f
the Scenery o f the Lakes in the North o f England. A fourth edition appeared in 1823
and it achieved its final form in 1835 along with its new title A Guide through the
District o f the Lakes in the North o f England. As the 1835 title page explicitly states,
the Guide was intended “For the use of Tourists and Residents,” but as the very first
sentence of the text makes clear, by “Tourists” Wordsworth meant “Persons of taste,
and feeling for landscape” (1). While the purpose of the guide was “to reconcile a
Briton to the scenery of his own country” (106), the “Briton” constructed by the Guide
was very different from the Briton constructed by the recently passed Reform Bill. The
person of taste constructed by the Guide was characterized by the ability to make
proper discernments, by an interest in the aesthetics of landscape and landscape
painting, and by possession of a proper education and the right politics.
In what had served as the introduction to the Guide through its first four editions,
Wordsworth defines his purpose as providing a more “orderly arrangement” to the
thoughts of those who have already visited the Lakes, and “directing the attention” of
the future traveler “to distinctions in things” which would better enable the visitor to
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form “habits of more exact and considerate observation” (22). Like a museum docent,
the Guide encourages the visitor to utilize a special kind of expectancy, a more
concerted gaze, which is the foundation of aesthetic experience. Frequently,
Wordsworth refers to his reader as a “person of taste” and forms the boundaries of this
exclusive group through both admonition and appeal. The person of taste is
admonished for being initially “seduced” into the mistake of confusing magnitude with
grandeur when viewing large bodies of water, a mistake from which the future person
of taste is saved by Wordsworth’s direction. More often, the person of taste is
appealed to as holding opinions like the author’s on subjects as various as the
impertinence of excessive calculation, the beauty of rural bridges and the choice of
color for cottages (36, 65, 72-3). These appeals— to imagination over economic need,
to rudeness and antiquity over utility, and to painterly aesthetics over utilitarian ideas
of order and cleanliness— invoke a picturesque ideal, the proper appreciation of which
requires a painter’s eye or a gentleman’s education in the aesthetics of painting.
Aesthetic training, though, is only the initial step, for proper reading leads from
pleasure to veneration, from a recognition of aesthetic beauty to a political reading o f
the sacralized British landscape.
That the distinction which marks the person of taste extends to something so
seemingly insignificant as the color of the cottages merely points out how deeply
embedded in aesthetic practice a “feeling for landscape” is. When Wordsworth speaks
of proper colors for cottages, he can do so only by using “the technical language of
painters” (78). His chief objection is to the color white, an objection he bases on the
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belief that “an object of pure white” destroys “the gradation of distance” and therefore
“can scarcely ever be managed with good effect in landscape-painting” (80). The
primary consideration of color in the rural landscape is its manageability in the mind’s
painting of the scene, the traveler’s construction of the picturesque landscape. The
wrong color threatens to “divide” the landscape “into triangles, or other mathematical
figures, haunting the eye” of the observer. The continued emphasis on “forms, surface,
and colour” (31), on elements not “uninteresting to painters,” reifies the landscape as
an aesthetic object and associates proper appreciation o f the Lakes with possession of
the proper education and vocabulary. The hidden specter in the form, the mathematical
figure which haunts the eye, is the impertinent calculation of those who seek to subject
the landscape to measurement, the surveyors, government officials, merchants, railway
builders, and timbermen untrained in the proper construction of the picturesque.
For Wordsworth, fundamental to the picturesque quality of the rural landscape is
the distinctiveness and isolation of its inhabitants. Like the uniform density of
representation on Ordnance Survey maps discussed in Chapter 5, which created the
sense of a readable rural landscape and an unreadable urban landscape, the scarcity of
cottages is seen as necessary to the aesthetic design o f the Lakes. The emphasis on the
“single cottage, or cluster of cottages” (32) subordinates human habitation, even
population, to aesthetic demands. In the first edition, Wordsworth makes clear the
importance of aesthetics when he notes that cottages located in mountain recesses, by
their “retirement and seclusion . . . are endeared to the eye of the man of sensibility”
(179). This explicit justification of the appeal of these cottages was removed from
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subsequent editions, as was the explicit reference to “the man of sensibility.” Later
editions merely stated that isolated cottages “by seeming to withdraw from the eye, are
the more endeared to the feelings” (43). The substitution of “feeling” locates one’s
ability to read and appreciate the landscape in one’s ability to respond aesthetically to
the landscape. To the person of taste, any further explanation was unnecessary.
For Wordsworth, a cottage should be like “a production of Nature,” seeming
rather “to have grown than to have been erected” (62). The aged cottage should “call
to mind the processes o f Nature” and should “appear to be received into the bosom of
the living principle of things” (63). This description could be used to describe
Margaret’s cottage in The Excursion, but here in the Guide dilapidation is stripped of
the social and economic forces that at least partially account for the degradation of
Margaret’s cottage. In the economy of Nature and the construction of the picturesque
there is little room for poverty not subjected to aestheticization. When Wordsworth
speaks of the tarns of the Lake District, he describes an “economy of Nature” that sets
the large lakes against the small tarns. This economy is chiefly characterized by “a
gradual distribution” of water into smaller streams which then feed the tarns. The
“waters thus reserved, instead of uniting, to spread ravage and deformity, with those
which meet with no such detention, contribute to support, for a length of time, the
vigour of many streams” (39-40). The hierarchical economy which works to separate
large from small, which promises gradual distribution and relies upon the isolation of
the lesser from each other, locates in Nature the model of the quasi-feudal economy so
celebrated by Wordsworth. The threat o f combination spreading ravage and deformity,
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like the “marshalled thousands, darkening street and moor” imagined in the apocalyptic
political poem “The Warning,” is here defeated by geography and rendered safe by a
higher economy, that of Nature. Here the analogy is tempting though unproven, but
throughout the Guide the explicit politics of the person of taste are everywhere
rendered as natural, as grown from the native soil and not imported, as exemplary of a
“Republic of Shepherds” threatened by the “appetites and instincts, pursuits and
occupations, that deform and agitate the world” (48).
When Wordsworth turns to the history of settlement in the Lakes, he tells the
story of an exemplary social order which serves as counterpoint to the unstable
political climate of the 1820s and 1830s. The contrast between then and now is
frequently alluded to in the 1835 edition by a careful marking of the passing of this
social order which existed “till within the last sixty years” (59, 64, 67). Like the long
standing political narrative of native vigor maintained through the isolation of the
island nation protected by the encircling sea, the history of the Lakes is the history of a
rugged and peculiar geography which has enabled the perpetuation of ancient customs,
traditions, and allegiances. This resistant geography meant the region could not
“participate much of the benefit of Roman manners” (52), a curiously benign figuration
of colonization. The difficulty of access and communication “furnished a protection to
some unsubdued Britons,” making the region something of a cradle of native British
valor.
It is not so much its history of resistance, however, that gives the Lakes its
unique (and endangered) social order as its history of subordination founded in the
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hierarchical social order of a quasi-feudal society. For Wordsworth, the connection
between ancient social order and the aesthetic beauty of the landscape is direct, feudal
tenantry “being, in fact, one of the principal causes which give [this region] such a
striking superiority, in beauty and interest, over all other parts of the island” (55).
Enclosure is described as an independent action of the local inhabitants which has been
everywhere softened and naturalized by the passage of time, a natural and not
disfiguring process. Benign landowners and independent dalesmen coexisted
peacefully in a landscape everywhere marked by proper subordination, just as the
landscape itself reflected the “hand of man . . . incorporated with and subservient to the
powers and processes of Nature” (61). The result was a balanced economy of rights
and allegiances where “person and possession, exhibited a perfect equality, a
community of shepherds and agriculturists, proprietors, for the most part, of the lands
which they occupied and cultivated” (60). What made this all possible was the sense
of hierarchical order, man subordinated to Nature, tenant subordinated to Lord, where
power is naturalized as a benign force, always acting in the best interests of the greater
order. The preservation of the land is dependent upon the preservation of this order,
and it is no careless coincidence that it is in “the woods of Lowther” that “is found an
almost matchless store of ancient trees, and the majesty and wildness of the native
forest” (44). The preservation of the native forest relies upon the preservation of the
native social order. Ancient trees require ancient manners, and the majesty of one is
dependent upon the continued majesty of the other.
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Up until “the last sixty years” this social order, derived from a higher natural
order, made possible a “perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturists” (67). At the
conclusion of the second section, Wordsworth describes “this pure Commonwealth” as
being a product of the landscape itself, “a powerful empire like an ideal society or an
organized community, whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the
mountains which protected it” (68). The mountain republic, whose social order
developed from the peculiar geography of the local landscape, is naturalized and
idealized, held up to an unstable nation as exemplary. Yet as this second section has
been concerned with how the country has been “affected by its inhabitants” (51), the
relationship between landscape and social order is a reciprocal one, where first the
mountains define the hierarchical society, and then the hierarchical society inscribes
the landscape with its marks of power and subordination:
Venerable was the transition, when a curious traveller, descending
from the heart of the mountains, had come to some ancient
manorial residence in the more open parts of the Vales, which,
through the rights attached to its proprietor, connected the almost
visionary mountain republic he had been contemplating with the
substantial frame of society as existing in the laws and constitution
of a mighty empire. (68)
The veneration felt by the curious traveler is the response that every man should feel at
the sight of this physical representation of the natural order of society. The descent
down the mountain is a descent from imaginative idealization to physical inscription,
from the visionary to the substantial, from the “heart” to the “frame.” This act
connects the sky to the landscape, the mountain republic to the laws and constitution of
the nation. Here Wordsworth makes explicit the implied response required by the
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“happy images of English landscape,” the response which marks the reader and tourist
both as possessing the right politics and as being a person of taste qualified to read the
landscape. The person of taste is the true citizen of the nation, able to read the
constitution in the configuration of the prospect view or reflected in the small details of
the landscape. Even in the tiny chapel of Buttermere, “A patriot, calling to mind the
stately fabrics of Canterbury, York, or Westminster, will find a heartfelt satisfaction in
the presence of this lowly pile, as a monument of the wise institutions of our country,
and as evidence of the all-pervading and paternal care of that venerable Establishment”
(66). In short, the response required of the person of taste, the response that proves
citizenship, is veneration, a sense of awe in the presence of these substantial
manifestations of a symbolic order, an order which is itself derived from a symbolic
reading of the physical landscape. An aesthetic reading of the landscape, then,
decontextualizes the landscape in order to recontextualize it. Chapels become lowly
piles, manor houses become repositories of ancient manners, and all become
representative of the Constitution as well as the constitution of society.
That this proper response to the Chapel at Buttermere clearly marks the
qualifications of the visitor is made clear by De Quincey’s observation that,
unpossessed of this ability to read the landscape, “the first movement of a stranger’s
feelings would be towards loud laughter,” the chapel resembling “not so much a mimic
chapel in a drop scene from the Opera House, as a miniature copy from such a scene”
(Recollections 69). The distinction offered by De Quincey is between true and false
taste. True taste, like Wordsworth’s recontextualized symbolic reading, would read the
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chapel in terms of “its antiquity, its wild mountain exposure, and its consecrated
connexion” to the “almost helpless humility of that little pastoral community” (64).
False taste, elsewhere describe by De Quincey as that “pseudo-romantic rage” which
would eventually violate “the most awful solitudes amongst the ancient hills by opera-
house decorations” (157), would read the scene not simply as a copy, but a copy of a
copy, a representation not of some symbolic relationship between people and the land
or between the land and the Constitution, but o f another representation. While this
distinction offered by De Quincey mirrors Wordsworth’s distinction between cultivated
and common taste, for De Quincey, cultivated taste is always threatened by the peal of
improper laughter. Of greater importance, though, is how De Quincey’s figuration of
the chapel points out the displacement performed by the act of reading, the movement
from perception to symbol which is always threatened by the possibility o f the
unlimited deferral of a chain of substitutions, of copies which are copies of copies.
It is also important to remember that the description of the curious traveler’s
descent is in the past tense. This legible landscape reflecting the native social order
existed up until “within the last sixty years.” Since that time changes have occurred,
changes which Wordsworth attributes to the increased popularity of the region, which
has led to increased tourism, which in turn has resulted in the increased settlement of
non-natives. While increased population might account for a degradation of the
region’s aesthetic beauty, Wordsworth focuses not on the presence of these newcomers
but on their bad taste. He recounts change after change, improvement after
improvement, perpetuated by newcomers and asks of each “What could be more
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unfortunate than the taste that suggested” these changes {Guide 72). Ornamental
gardening, landscape follies, larch plantations, the immoderate “craving after
prospect,” the choice of color for cottages, the introduction of non-native plants, the
destruction of native forests, all these are held up as examples of the bad taste which
threatens the aesthetic pleasure provided by the picturesque landscape. The fear,
though, is not simply the loss of aesthetic pleasure, but the loss of one’s ability to read
the landscape as representative of a reconceptualized symbolic order. Only after
exhaustively treating these various imports does Wordsworth address what
undoubtedly was the chief cause of change in the region: the introduction of machinery
and the consequent decline of the native cottage industry. The narrative Wordsworth
rehearses is a familiar one, of small independent statesmen unable to maintain then-
small farms, of buildings decayed or destroyed, of mortgages defaulted, and of the
acquisitiveness of wealthy non-native purchasers. The future envisioned is one when
;ithe country on the margin of the Lakes will fall almost entirely into the possession of
gentry, either strangers or natives,” and in one last exhausted appeal to aesthetics
Wordsworth hopes “that a better taste should prevail among these new proprietors”
(91). Given Wordsworth’s reliance upon taste as the safeguard of both the social order
and aesthetic beauty of the region, and given his reliance on a passed social order as
guardian for that taste, this is an impossible hope. In one final appeal to persons of
taste, the true citizens of the nation, Wordsworth imagines a new dispensation which
will save the land from the people:
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In this wish the author will be joined by persons of pure taste
throughout the whole island, who, by their visits (often repeated) to
the Lakes in the North of England, testify that they deem the
district a sort of national property, in which every man has a right
and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy. (92)
Again the appeal is to like-minded readers, persons of discrimination throughout the
nation who form an imagined community of interests which elevate them above the
public. To these persons of taste, the educated, the gentlemanly, the affluent, belongs
the responsibility to safeguard the nation from its people, as in the distinction between
the People and the Public articulated by Wordsworth in his classification of readers.
This “national property” might belong to every man, but it is the “every man” who
already possesses the ability to see the landscape as an aesthetic object, and to read in
the physical landscape a symbolic order that legitimizes his social position and right to
rule. The national property belongs to the nation only when that nation is seen as
consisting of those enfranchised by the existing social order. Like the public art
museum or natural history museum that enable the visitor to read culture and history as
the narrative of the nation’s beneficence and the progress of man, the museum of the
landscape enables those—whose cultural acquirements predispose them to
discriminate, judge, and rule—to read back their own citizenship and possession of
rights and responsibilities. This appeal, present in all editions o f the Guide from 1810
on, was always an appeal to a social order which by the time of the fifth edition had
virtually passed away. In a passage which appeared only in 1810, Wordsworth could
state that “if the evil complained of should continue to spread, these vales . . . will lose
their chief recommendation for the eye of the painter and the man of imagination and
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feeling” (197). In subsequent editions, the aesthetic training which qualified the visitor
became more of an implied and shared response, a secret address to the proper visitor
who would know how one should feel, and who would recognize himself as a person
of taste. The irony of course is that the marketplace made no such distinction and the
Guide could function as a conduct manual for anyone who sought the civilizing ritual
of the museum of the land.
The danger of relying on “proper” responsiveness to mark distinction and thus
qualification is that responsiveness, as opposed to private property, could be feigned.
If a proper feeling for the picturesque marked one as a member of the appropriate class,
then the ability to feign such feeling could be used to deceive others into believing that
one possessed the acquirements (of property and education) necessary to form such
taste. De Quincey retells the story of such a fraud, perpetuated by a man named
Hatfield, who assumed the name of “The Hon. Augustus Hope,” supposed brother to
Lord Hopetoun. Though “some persons had discernment to doubt this,” what partially
allayed such doubts was Hope’s possession o f a proper feeling for landscape:
The stranger was a picturesque-hunter, but not of that order who
fly round the ordinary tour with the velocity of lovers posting to
Gretna, or of criminals running from the police; his purpose was to
domiciliate himself in this beautiful scenery, and to see it at his
leisure. (Recollections 61)
De Quincey’s irony is that Hope’s “leisure” masked the fact that Hatfield’s true
motives were like those of “lovers posting to Gretna,” that he actually was a criminal
“running from the police.” His supposed desire to “domiciliate himself’ in the
picturesque scenery, coupled with the incontrovertible evidence of the post office
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(Hatfield franked letters under an assumed name, a capital offense), opened all doors to
the impostor, whom De Quincey carefully designates as “the ‘Honourable’ gentleman”
(68). That Hatfield was a polygamist, forger, and impostor, the seducer of the “Maid
of Buttermere,” eventually brought him to scaffold, but for Coleridge and De Quincey
the great crime was that designations like “Honourable” and “gentleman” could be
entirely false, ironized by their assumption by an entirely unqualified person. As De
Quincey paraphrases Coleridge, the troubling lesson of the tragic tale is that distinction
itself is unreliable.
Coleridge said often, in looking back upon that frightful exposure
of human guilt and misery,—and I also echoed his feeling,— that
the man who, when pursued by these heart-rending apostrophes,
and with this litany of anguish sounding in his ears, from
despairing women, and famished children, could yet find it
possible to enjoy the calm pleasures of a Lake tourist, and
deliberately hunt for the picturesque, must have been a fiend of that
order which fortunately does not often emerge amongst men. (71)
The gap which Hatfield’s actions open up between persons of taste and base impostors
threatens to confound true and false taste, and destroy the distinction which is used to
discriminate between those properly educated to appreciate landscape and those whose
moral behavior must render them exceptionable visitors. If a man like Hatfield could
pass for a man possessing the eye to perceive and the heart to feel and enjoy the
distinctive scenery of the Lakes, then the opposition between the imaginary nation of
persons of taste and the general public who lack this taste collapses. If the landscape
must be saved for a few by forbidding access to all, the confounding o f the honorable
with the “Honourable,” the “not exceptionable” with the “fiend,” undermines the
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criteria for distinguishing between the few and the many. When taste and conduct are
at such variance, the high-minded claims for preservation at any cost are reduced to
bald assertions of ancient rights and privileges and personal and national self-interest
that aesthetic appeals sought to mask.
When, at the end of the Guide, Wordsworth appeals to the nation to save itself
from its own people, he duplicates the long-standing justification used by the British
Museum and the British government to retain possession of artifacts that were acquired
under circumstances that revealed a Hatfield-like confusion of proper taste and
immoral conduct. The argument put forward by Lord Elgin and later by the British
government and rejected by the supporters of Greek independence was that the removal
and transportation of the sculptures, friezes and architectural members, which the
Greeks call the Parthenon Marbles but which are known more generally as the Elgin
Marbles, was necessary to preserve these artifacts from the indifference of its owners
and to provide universal access to these objects of great aesthetic interest. In a recent
history of the British Museum, we find this unironic description of the “heroic” efforts
of Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and then ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire, to save these artifacts from the people:
Not only were many of the finest surviving statues being constantly
ground down for mortar . . . but even more aimless destruction of
buildings and other remains was continually going on. With great
difficulty, but aided considerably by Britain’s new-found prestige
from her recent victories over the French in Egypt, Elgin at last
obtained a firman or official license from Constantinople to take
away ‘any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon’.
Slowly, with frustrating delays and constant obstruction by local
authorities, the great sculptured friezes were removed from the
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Parthenon and then carefully packed and embarked on a British
man-of-war for transport to England. Elgin was now convinced
that the operation, drastic as it undoubtedly was, was the only
certain means of saving the precious sculptures. (Miller 103)
Elgin’s “preservation” of the Parthenon sculptures has always been a subject of
controversy.3 In his own time, he was censured by Parliament and called a thief and a
robber by Byron. Lord Aberdeen, an advisor to the British Museum, objected to
Elgin’s methods, and Richard Payne Knight, the dilettante, questioned the authenticity
of the marbles. In the debate on the purchase of the Elgin Marbles, Sir John Newport
characterized the sentiments of many when he said of Elgin:
The Honourable Lord has taken advantage of the most unjustifiable
means and has committed the most flagrant pillages. It was, it
seems, fatal that a representative of our country looted those
objects that the Turks and other barbarians had considered sacred.
{Hansard’ s ccci, 828)
Newport’s sarcastic reference to the “Honourable” Lord Elgin recalls the anxieties
raised by the Hatfield-Hope fraud in the Lakes. In this case, Elgin is, of course, an
Honorable Lord, but his actions place him below even the barbarians, and threaten not
merely the distinction of class, but also the distinction of the nation. John Hobhouse,
Byron’s friend and fellow-traveler, recorded that he saw on a wall in a chapel of the
Acropolis the following inscription: “Quod non fecerunt Gothi, hoc fecerunt Scoti”
(“What the Goths did not do, here the Scots did”) (quoted in St. Clair 193), an all too
clear reference to the honorable Scottish Lord.
The emphasis on desecration, what the contemporary Greek scholar Edward
Dodwell called the “indecency” of these acts, points to the permanently altered
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meaning of these decontextualized and aestheticized objects. While Haydon could
exclaim that these “sculptures would awake European art from its deep slumber,”
others were disturbed by this new relationship to historical objects. Just as Goethe had
come to suspect the “very capacity of the museum to frame objects as art and claim for
them a new kind of ritual attention” that “could entail the negation or obscuring of
other, older meanings” (Duncan 16), some questioned whether aesthetic demands
should take precedence over sacred, historic, and national demands. In a sense, sacred,
historic, and national demands were given precedence, but they were those of the
British nation and not those of Greece, itself not a nation at the time of the
transportation of the Parthenon sculptures. As a colony of Turkey, Greece could do
nothing to stop Elgin’s preservation activities. Independence for Greece was achieved
with British aid, and the modem Greek nation could be said to date from 1831, when
the Greek government officially asked the British government to return the Parthenon
sculptures. Interestingly, the question of ownership has frequently taken the form of a
genealogizing of the nation, with Britain claiming for itself Greece’s democratic
heritage. When the parliamentary committee set up to evaluate Elgin’s offer of the
sculptures to the nation recommended that the offer be accepted, the report concluded:
No other country can offer such an honourable shelter to the
monuments of Phedias and Pericles than ours where, safe from
ignorance and degradation, they shall receive the admiration and
reverence due them; they will serve as an example for rivalry and
imitation. (Report o f the Select Committee)
O f course, the question of honor and how one both designates and is designated as
“honorable” remains open. As recently as 1983, a letter-writer to The Times claimed
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that “moral order” dictated that Britain should keep the Elgin Marbles because Britain
is the “true heir of Pericles’ democracy.” Such views mask the history of access to the
cultural capital and symbolic power represented by the museum collections. In 1816
and for many decades afterward, access to these symbols of national pride was limited
to a relatively privileged class. As Tony Bennett points out, it was not until the
opening of the South Kensington Museum in 1857, with its “opening hours and
admissions policy designed to maximize its accessibility to the working classes,” that
the museum could be said to serve “an extended and undifferentiated public” (70).
Wordsworth, through education and friendships, was a member of that privileged
class. In 1806 he was able to attend a private viewing at the Royal Academy through
his association with Sir George Beaumont, whose bequest to the nation upon his death
formed the foundation o f the National Gallery’s collection. Later, in 1808,
Wordsworth and Coleridge used a letter of introduction from Beaumont to see Sir John
Angerstein’s collection. In 1817, Sara Hutchinson wrote to her cousin, Thomas
Monkhouse, to relay Wordsworth’s promise to apply to Samuel Rogers or to Beaumont
for tickets to the British Gallery. If Wordsworth had “come to town,” she writes, “he
has no doubt but he could have got one [ticket] from somebody, but it is an aristocratic
thing and the Tickets are so charily dispensed that the holders have membership
candidates for them when they do not use them themselves” (Letters 106). By 1828,
Wordsworth required no intermediary to gain access to the museums, making three
visits in as many weeks in the company of Henry Crabb Robinson. The ease of access
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marks both Wordsworth’s improved reputation and the museum’s changing admissions
policy.
While Wordsworth has left no sonnet on seeing the Elgin Marbles, he does write
to Haydon in 1815 as if he had already seen them, declaring that “A Man must be
senseless as a clod, or perverse as a Fiend, not to be enraptured with them” (MY 1: 257-
8). In 1815, the future of the marbles were the talk of London, but access to them was
severely limited, and it is doubtful that Wordsworth saw them during any of his
London visits prior to 1820. Haydon remarked on their forlorn state in 1815 when he
wished that “the French had them; we do not deserve such productions. There they lie,
covered with dust & dripping with damp, adored by Artists, admired by the People,
neglected by the government, doubted by Payne Knight” (Diary I, 439). While
Wordsworth probably had not seen the actual marbles, he probably had seen the
innumerable sketches and plaster casts which Haydon had made of them since his first
sight of the marbles in 1808 and which he used to decorate his studio. During the
London visit of 1815, Wordsworth visited Haydon’s studio more than once, as Haydon
made a plaster cast of Wordsworth’s face on one occasion, and made sketches of
Wordsworth for inclusion in his Christ’ s Entry into Jerusalem on another occasion. For
the Spring of 1815 Haydon’s diary records two obsessions—the ongoing Elgin Marbles
debate and his acquaintance with Wordsworth. On at least three separate occasions in
April and May, Haydon spent the day with Wordsworth, and while Haydon’s diary
records the subject of the poet’s conversation, the poet himself, Haydon’s conversation
undoubtedly turned on his own involvement in the Elgin Marbles controversy.
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Among Wordsworth’s London associates, the museum and the marbles were a
keen subject of interest. Lamb was a frequent visitor to the British Museum, and
Hazlitt, while no friend of Wordsworth, was a frequent guest at Lamb’s house. Hazlitt
wrote frequently on the subject of Britain’s museums and on the Elgin Marbles in
particular. His comments are particularly perceptive concerning the political purpose
of the museum and the question of access raised by the Elgin Marbles. He notes in one
of his Round Table essays that “Patriotism and Fine Arts have nothing to do with one
another—because patriotism relates to exclusive advantages, and the advantages of the
Fine Arts are not exclusive, but communicable.” In a direct hit at the Elgin Marbles, he
concludes, “The physical property of one country cannot be shared without loss by
another” (4: 143-144). While Hazlitt appears to be taking the high aesthetic road in
these comments, in other places he makes clear that it is the politics of aesthetics that
he is most interested in. In the Examiner of June 16, 1816, Hazlitt, writing in response
to the Select Committee report recommending purchase of the Elgin Marbles, states
“they are not worth so much as has been said,” but then further notes the true utility of
the marbles to the nation—that access to them will improve the public taste: “It was in
this point of view that the Gallery of the Louvre was of the greatest importance not
only to France, but to Europe. It was a means to civilise the world” (18: 102). Hazlitt
then bemoans the decision to disperse the works taken by Napoleon and collected in
the Louvre, sarcastically pointing to the justification made by the Duke of Wellington,
“that the works of art should be sacred to conquerors, and an heirloom of the soil that
gives them birth” (18: 102). Hazlitt asks, “If works of art are to be a sort of fixtures in
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every country, why are the Elgin Marbles brought here, for our artists to strut and fret
over this acquisition to our ‘glorious country’? If the French were not to retain their
collection of perfect works of art, why should we be allowed to make one of still higher
pretensions under pretence of carrying off only fragments and rubbish?” (18: 103).
Hazlitt’s chief objection is to what he calls “cant and hypocrisy,” but his own response
is ambivalent. Later he would write at length celebrating the Elgin Marbles, but like
many the dishonorable circumstances of their acquisition colored his own estimate of
their worth to the nation.
In focusing on their acquisition, Hazlitt was merely following the shift in the
public debate that took place with the publication in 1812 of Byron’s Childe Harold.
Byron’s attack on Elgin, which begins in the second canto of the poem and is carried
out at length in the notes, shifts the debate from the question of the marbles
authenticity and value as works of art to the question of their acquisition. William St.
Clair, writing on the history of the Elgin Marbles, states that with the publication of
Byron’s poem: “The Elgin Marbles had now become a symbol—of Greece’s
ignominious slavery, of Europe’s failure to help her, and of Britain’s overweening
pride. Whatever view one might take of Lord Elgin’s activities the whole basis of
public opinion was altered. Childe Harold has dominated all discussion of the Elgin
Marbles ever since” (189). St. Clair further notes how, after Byron, attacks on Elgin
became something of a literary genre. When the Reverend Edward Daniel Clarke
published Travels in Various Countries o f Europe, Asia, and Africa shortly after the
appearance of Childe Harold, and also questioned and attacked Elgin’s activities in
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Greece, to the public “it seemed simply that the opinions of the passionate poet were
being confirmed by the painstaking researches of the scholar” (192). After Byron,
travel writing took on the form of personal attack, and Elgin’s reputation suffered
untold damage from the constant barrage in print. While Wordsworth’s circle of
London friends normally found little to approve of in Byron’s writings, the
characterization of Elgin as thief, defiler and robber was something of a literary and
conversational commonplace by 1815. This characterization received new fuel in 1815
with the pirated publication of Byron’s vicious personal attack on Elgin, “The Curse of
Minerva,” privately printed by Byron for distribution amongst his friends, but
published in mutilated form in the New Monthly Magazine. Byron is the unspoken
context of Wordsworth’s comment to Haydon in 1815, that a person of taste would, by
definition, be “enraptured” by the Elgin Marbles. Those not enraptured were either
senseless or perverse, perversity reserved for Byron and other “Fiends” who chose to
read the sculptures as inherently political and not aesthetic objects.
The rapture which Wordsworth speaks of to Haydon is the museum effect at
work, the decontextuaiization and aestheticization of objects placed on display in the
museum. Hazlitt’s ambivalence, his desire to celebrate the beauties of the sculptures
but his unwillingness to forget the resonance of their acquisition, marks a middle
ground between Haydon’s pure aestheticization and Byron’s mischievous politicization
of the museum artifacts. As late as 1826 Hazlitt was still walking this middle ground,
stating of the Elgin Marbles, “If ever there were models of the Fine Arts fitted to give
an impulse to living genius, these are they,” and then referring wryly to their
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acquisition in a footnote: “[The French sculptors] may smile to see that we are willing
to remove works of art from their original places of abode, though we will not allow
others to do so” (Notes o f a Journey Through France and Italy, 18: 168). In this
debate, Wordsworth sided with Haydon, and Crabb Robinson provides telling insight
into Wordsworth’s own susceptibility to the museum effect. In June 1815, Crabb
Robinson accompanied Wordsworth on a tour of the British Museum. “Wordsworth
beheld the antiquities with great interest and feeling as objects of beauty,” writes
Robinson, “but with no great historical knowledge” {HCR on Books 1: 170). In his
own practice as a tourist Wordsworth chooses rapture and wonder over resonance,
aestheticization over contextualization. This choice parallels to some degree the
aesthetic education of the tourist which is the ostensive purpose of the Guide, but runs
counter to the more complex task of Wordsworth’s new local poetry and the subtext of
the Guide—to discriminate the true citizen able to read into the forms of the landscape
the symbolic and recontextualized ideal political order. The form of landscape reading
encouraged by the Guide relies on the production of resonance, of historical
knowledge, which is the source o f the veneration that necessarily underlies
preservation.
As political objects, the sculptures were unquestionably dirty, “sacred objects
plundered by profane English hands,” as Byron wrote in Childe Harold. As aesthetic
objects, they could participate in the symbolic representation of national power and
imagined origins, the construction of the British nation as the “honourable shelter” of
high culture, the “true heir” of ancient democracy. But the pressure of reform, in the
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form of increased access to cultural capital, continued unabated. Select Committees
formed by Parliament in the 1830s and 1840s to investigate the management o f the
museum found it to be “as bad as could be” (Miller 138), and despite resistance by the
keepers, the doors of the British Museum were slowly opened to the public. Reform,
in conjunction with that other great engine of access in the 1830s and 1840s—the
railways— increasingly brought pressure on the museum of the landscape, and in 1844
Wordsworth found himself fighting a solitary and rearguard action against the
encroachments of the public on the sacred space of the Lakes. For Wordsworth the
argument was clear: increased access would only bring destruction and so again the
nation had to be safeguarded against its people. His opposition to increased access took
the form of an argument against the availability of the aesthetic training necessary to
appreciate the beauty of the Lake District scenery. His real fear, however, was that
increased access would destroy the aesthetic object that access made available, and
once the aesthetic object was lost, so was the possibility of resonance, the historical
knowledge necessary for the citizen to understand the veneration that was the true
response to the symbolic British landscape. While Wordsworth him self participated in
the transformation of landscape into museum space, when increased access threatened
to make rapture the only response available, he sought to safeguard the museum by
closing its doors.
Wordsworth was not opposed to access, but he was opposed to increased access,
to the cheap and easy access made possible by modem conveyances. Coleridge’s
nephew, John Taylor Coleridge, recounted an incident that occurred in 1836.
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Traveling together to a social gathering at Lowther Castle, Wordsworth led them
through private, enclosed property. The Honorable Mr. Justice Coleridge asked
Wordsworth whether they were not trespassing, and paraphrased Wordsworth’s reply:
“No, the walks had, indeed, been inclosed, but [Wordsworth] remembered them open
to the public, and he always went through them when he chose.” At Lowther, they
encountered the owner of the enclosed property who, when he heard of their walk, also
noted that Coleridge and Wordsworth “had been trespassing.” To this:
Wordsworth maintained his point with somewhat more warmth
than I either liked, or could well account for. But afterwards, when
we were alone, he told me that he had purposefully answered Lord
W stoutly and warmly, because he had done a similar thing
with regard to some grounds in the neighbourhood of Penrith, and
excluded the people of Penrith from walking where they had
always enjoyed the rights before. He had evidently a pleasure in
vindicating these rights, and seemed to think it a duty.
(“Conversations and Personal Reminiscence of Wordsworth,”
Grosart 3: 425)
While historical access to public ways was a “right” of the local inhabitants and the
“duty” of the poet to protect, no such rights extended to the masses of tourists
crowding the margins of the Lakes. As early as 1805 we find Dorothy complaining of
“the season of bustle,” exacerbated by the fact that Dove Cottage lay “directly in the
highway of the Tourists” (EY 621). For Wordsworth this situation worsened as the
century progressed, ever faster and ever cheaper modes of transportation making even
the most isolated regions of the Lakes accessible to more and more tourists. The
impact of all these tourists, what Frances Ferguson refers to in another context as the
pressure of too many consciousnesses, was to render the aesthetic contemplation of the
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landscape difficult, if not impossible. Traveling himself by one of these accursed
modem conveyances, Wordsworth records his first impression of the Cave of Staffa
seen from a steamboat in 1833:
We saw, but surely, in the motley crowd,
Not one of us has felt, the far-famed sight;
How could we feel it? Each the other’s blight,
Hurried and hurrying, volatile and loud. (“Cave of Staffa,” 1-4)
Reduced to the status of tourist, penned in amongst the motley crowd, Wordsworth’s
encounter with “Fingal’s mystic cave” is reduced to a London street fair where
contemplation is impossible. Again the appeal o f the landscape is to a feeling, a
response that person of taste should feel, but here could not. Proper contemplation of
the aestheticized landscape is defined first as seeing, then as feeling, and finally as
reading. Everyone with eyes can see, so the true discrimination which marks the
properly trained visitor is dependent upon both an “eye to perceive” and “a heart to
enjoy.”
When modem conveyances threatened to bring the motley crowd to the Lakes,
Wordsworth responded immediately. The Kendal and Windermere Railway proposed
to connect Kendal with the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway and carry the line northwest
from Kendal to Windermere. Such a line would provide easy and relatively
inexpensive access to the Lakes to those who lived mid the din of towns and cities. In
two letters to The Morning Post, later revised and republished as a pamphlet,
Wordsworth based his opposition to the proposed railway on two propositions: that a
taste for Lake District scenery could not be taught, and thus increased access would not
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benefit those who lacked taste; and that increased access would destroy the very object
it intended to make available—the aestheticized landscape of contemplation. While
the former proposition proved woefully short-sighted, the latter proposition has proven
remarkably prophetic.
Wordsworth’s appeal to taste as a marker of class involves him in a curiously
circular argument. He posits that a taste for “what has acquired the name of
picturesque and romantic scenery is so far from being intuitive, that it can be produced
only by a slow and gradual process of culture” (PrW 3: 349). In this rejection of what
might be called natural (“intuitive”) taste in favor of cultivated taste, Wordsworth
discriminates between seeing the landscape and seeing and feeling the landscape.
Curiously, though acquired through a slow and gradual process of culture, this superior
taste cannot be taught, nor can it be learned from repeated visits. Natural or common
taste is characterized by the “green fields, clear blue skies, running streams of pure
water, rich groves and woods, orchards, and all the ordinary variety of rural nature”
that finds “an easy way to the affections of all men” (PrW 3: 343). These rural sights,
like “a rich meadow, with fat cattle grazing upon it,” evoke images of domesticated
landscape, enclosed and cultivated land made useful by man’s labor. Opposed to these
sights are such images as the scenery of the Lakes, or “the Alps and Pyrenees in their
utmost grandeur and beauty” (PrW 3: 343), images which evoke a landscape free from
human intervention, undomesticated, and accessible mostly to those only with the time
and money to travel extensively. The “processes of culture or opportunities of
observation” which habituate the observer to an appreciation of the picturesque and
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sublime landscape are processes and opportunities that are simply not available to the
vast majority of the public. Like so many other opportunities, training in the proper
taste for landscape is available only to a select few.
In a passage which appeared in The Morning Post but which was struck when the
letters were republished, Wordsworth makes clear that the question of taste is a
question of class. In chastising those who seek to educate the lower classes through
open access to recreation, Wordsworth states: “The constitution of society must be
examined with reflection. As long as inequalities of private property shall exist, there
must be privileges in recreations and amusements. All cannot be equally enjoyed by
all” {PrW 3: 347n). The slow and gradual process of culture is available only to those
who belong to the cultured class. Increased access can do nothing to change these
differences so long as “inequalities of private property” exist, inequalities which are the
foundation of the happy republic of shepherds and agriculturists described in the Guide
and here referred to as “a blessing to these vales” {PrW3: 352). Those reform-minded
people should instead encourage the “artisans and labourers, and the humbler classes of
shopkeepers” to make “little excursions with their wives and children among
neighbouring fields” {PrW 3: 344). While reformers might boast of the spread of
“comprehensive taste” that “easy entrance” to the British Museum and National Picture
Gallery have made possible, increased access cannot make available the cultural
attainments necessary for a just appreciation of landscape {PrW 3: 349). For
Wordsworth, the aesthetic response called for by the metropolitan museum was
rapture, but that called for by the symbolical British landscape moved beyond rapture
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to reading. The metropolitan museum could teach the public to feel the
decontextualized feelings evoked by objects of beauty, and the danger of the
aestheticized landscape was that by teaching the public how to feel, pleasure would
replace veneration. For Wordsworth, any benefit to the motley crowd would be
outweighed by the irreparable damage that crowd would inflict. The threatened damage
was both to the aesthetic object and by the aestheticization of the object, both to the
fragile landscape and the constitution of society which safeguarded the proper form of
reading.
The damage inflicted by ease of access would transform the Lakes into a
Londonized street fair, where all distinction would be lost. The dark fantasy
envisioned by Wordsworth is like a miniature Bartholomew Fair, where “wrestling
matches, horse and boat races without number, and pot-houses and beer-shops” (PrW
3: 346) would be brought to the Lakes by the “molestation of cheap trains” (PrW 3:
345). “Go to a pantomime, a farce, or a puppet-show,” he tells these interlopers, “if
you want noisy pleasure” (PrW3: 345), and do not disturb the solitary and peaceful
nature of the region which is its chief asset. For Wordsworth, the great irony is that
“the lakes are to pay this penalty for their own attractions!” (PrW 3: 351), that the
trains and the great influx of people they promise shall result in “a great disturbance of
the retirement, and in many places a destruction of the beauty of the country, which the
parties are come in search o f’ (PrW 3: 346).
While “desecrations” performed in the name of preservation and the promise of
universal access could be justified, as in Elgin’s case, as a service to the aesthetic
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education o f the nation, preservation of the landscape required that limitations be
placed on access. This “desecration” of the local landscape would be brought about by
a loss of distinction which would in turn eradicate the distinctiveness of the Lakes.
The Londonized Lakes, overwhelmed by an influx of visitors unable to properly
discriminate amongst what they see, threatened to destroy the sacred space o f the
museum of the landscape. As outrageous as a railway^proposed through the ruins of
Furness Abbey, the railway which would violate the Lakes was an even greater outrage.
“Sacred as that relic of devotion o f our ancestors,” Furness Abbey, deserves to be kept,
“there are temples of Nature, temples built by the Almighty, which have a still higher
claim to be left inviolated” (PrW 3: 353). Such might have been the thoughts of “a
man of imagination and feeling” (PrW 3: 353), a man with “an eye to perceive and a
heart to feel and worthily enjoy” (PrW 3: 355). Against this threat, Wordsworth
invokes, in his sonnet “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway,” Nature
itself:
Baffle the threat, bright Scene, from Orrest-head
Given to the pausing traveller’s rapturous glance:
Plead for thy peace, thou beautiful romance
Of nature; and, if human hearts be dead,
Speak, passing winds; ye torrents, with your strong
And constant voice, protest against the wrong. (9-14)
In this fantasy of local resistance, of a Nature resistant to reading by the unworthy and
speaking out its opposition to those capable of hearing and feeling, Wordsworth
attempts to invoke a scenery that discriminates amongst its observers. In response to
this sonnet, William Gladstone offered a very literal and practical reading o f this
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defiant landscape, stating “It had been my hope that Orrest Head, and other like
projections on the earth’s surface, would have pleaded for themselves in terms
intelligible to engineers and speculators” (quoted in L Y 616n). These wholly practical,
unaesthetic readers of the landscape would be concerned primarily with the ease of
negotiating a railway through the landscape, and this observation points out how
narrow was Wordsworth’s conception of the training that would qualify one to read.
While Orrest-head might baffle the aesthetic reading of the humbler classes of
shopkeepers, it could not withstand the topographical reading of the surveyor. As
Gladstone rightly notes, the true threat was not uneducated masses, but those educated
in this “iron age” to perform a different kind of reading, where, as Wordsworth himself
laments, “Fact with hearties search” would explore and be “Imagination’s Lord” (“To
the Utilitarians” 2-4).
The final irony is not that the railway was built, for that can invoke only a
nostalgic sadness for what once was but is no more. The great irony of Wordsworth’s
opposition to the railway, and his attempt to discriminate between a natural taste for
domestic landscape and a cultured taste for the picturesque and sublime, is that
Wordsworth himself, through his poetry and prose, had done more than anyone else to
naturalize the taste for the picturesque and acculturate the readers of Britain to the
better taste he thought to be a marker of class. It did not benefit his argument when the
author of Table Talk in The Morning Post wrote in fervent praise of Wordsworth’s
Kendal and Windermere letters that the Lakes should remain inviolate out of deference
to Wordsworth himself:
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And that so many of us at the present day have escaped from this
insensibility to the more secluded and awful forms of natural
beauty we in a great measure owe to Wordsworth and his writings.
Bearing this in mind, and giving him the honour which is his due,
the public ought, on his account alone, to spare the land he loves so
well from that violent intrusion against which he protests. (PrW3:
363n)
Veneration, which was the appropriate response to the landscape and exemplified a
proper reading of its symbolic cues, was already being transferred to the poet himself
and the landscape which everywhere was inscribed by its relation to his text. For the
countless visitors who journeyed to the Lakes, the sacred space of landscape was made
more sacred by the marked presence of the Lake poet, which made the landscape
readable as a museum dedicated to a single man. The ritual practice of the museum
and the museum of the landscape became a way of speaking about the poet himself as
well as about his poetry. The Wordsworth Tour through Wordsworth Country, a tour
made possible by the Guide to the Lakes and the many repackagings of Wordsworth
after his death, provided an opportunity for many to demonstrate their citizenship in the
nation through their responsiveness to what was becoming an increasingly literary
landscape. This increased interest has led to increased demand, necessitating, like the
debates over the Elgin Marbles and the Lake District railways, a balance between the
demand for access and the need for preservation. It was entirely fitting that one of the
first “literary museum” properties was the privately administered Dove Cottage, home
to the Great Decade Wordsworth, and ironically one of the leading historic attractions
in Britain today. Wordsworth has become one of those wise institutions, one of those
representatives of British heritage that enable the tourist to read in the landscape the
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Constitution of the nation. Yet, one might ask how many visitors gathered on the
banks of the Wye a few miles above Tintem Abbey on July 13, 1998 to recite a prayer
about the misty winds, and whether amidst that motley crowd anyone was able to feel
that far-famed sight.
Notes
1 Miller quotes attendance figures given by Matthew Maty, then Principal Librarian, to
the House of Commons. For July 1, 1783 through June 30, 1784, attendance was
estimated at 10,000 visitors. By 1808-1809, this figure had increased to 15,390, a
substantial percentage increase over 1783-1784, but still a slight figure given the
population of Great Britain, some twelve million people, recorded by the 1811 census.
By 1810-1811, attendance had nearly doubled over 1808-1809, and by 1830-1831, the
99,112 visitors marked a near tenfold increase over 1783-1784 (Miller 99). Attendance
continued to rise dramatically reaching 266,008 in 1837-1838, and after reforms in
admissions policies, 897,985 in 1847-1848 (Robert Cowtan, Memories o f the British
Museum (London, 1872), 305).
2 In fact, by casting the Poet as a listener to the Wanderer in The Excursion,
Wordsworth makes clear that the normative position for the poet is that o f a reader, not
an originator, of signs. For more on the poet as listener, see Wolfson’s The Questioning
Presence.
3 The controversy, o f course, continues to the present. The Greek government
repeatedly has requested the return of the Parthenon sculptures. Former Labour Party
leader Neil Kinnock supported the return of the sculptures to Greece, and during the
1997 Parliamentary campaign, Labour Party spokespersons promised that the new
Labour government would re-open negotiations with the Greek government. Following
Labour’s landslide win, one of the first statements by the new Labour government was
the announcement by the new Minister for Culture, Media and Sport Chris Smith that
the Parthenon Marbles would not be returned to Greece. While the politics of the
sculptures remains contentious, Elgin’s suspect activities have helped to preserve the
sculptures. The German art critic Frank Brommer sums up the ambivalent attitude of
many, who while disapproving of Elgin’s actions commend the act of preservation
itself: “Yet perhaps the combined efforts of the early Christians, Morosini and Elgin
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have done the building less harm than that inflicted on it every day by the weather, with
affects that have accumulated over the centuries. Elgin had casts made of the slabs
from west frieze, which he left in position. When the condition o f these casts in 1801
is compared with the condition of the originals today the difference in horrifying. The
more time passes without something begin done to protect the sculptures that remain
on the building, the more disapproval of Elgin’s theft turns into gratitude for the fact
that at least the sculptures in the British Museum have been spared, further damage”
(The Sculptures o f the Parthenon, translated by Mary Whittall (London: Thames and
London, 1979), 13-14). Since Brommer made these comments, the Greek government
has embarked on a multimillion dollar campaign to preserve the remaining Parthenon
sculptures. The Acropolis Museum has been constructed to house the remaining
sculptures as well as those still in Britain, but the British government continues to
ignore requests to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece.
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Chapter 8
A Service To The Nation
Wordsworth Country and the Wordsworth Museum
Small service is true service while it lasts
O f Friends, however humble, scom not one:
The Daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dew-drop from the Sun.
—Wordsworth, “Written in an Album ”
At the final meeting of the original Wordsworth Society, William Angus Knight
proposed that the society establish “somewhere in the Lake Country . . . an
institution—it could hardly be called a museum . . . it which all the memorials of
Wordsworth that can be collected may be brought together.” For this purpose he
suggested Dove Cottage be purchased, so that it might be “to Grasmere, what
Shakespeare’s house is to Stratford, or Bums’ Cottage is to Ayr” (quoted in Peek 193-
4). While the society disbanded before this project could be brought to fruition, a few
years later one of the society’s members, Stopford Brooke, did purchase the cottage
and in 1891 opened it to visitors. That first year, 420 visitors explored the tiny cottage
where the Wordsworths lived during much of William’s “Great Decade.” One hundred
years later over 80,000 would come in a single year to eye the newspaper wall-covering
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in Dorothy’s room and stand in the sitting room where Wordsworth and Coleridge
recited poetry and discussed the politics of the day. On a typical summer’s day nearly
500 tourists participate in this ritual, visiting this institution which could hardly be
called anything but a museum.1
The homes of William Wordsworth have been the site of literary pilgrimage
since Hazlitt and De Quincey presented themselves on the poet’s doorstep to pay
homage, and yet it is doubtful that any of Wordsworth’s contemporaries could have
foreseen the transformation of the English Lake District into what the British Tourist
Authority unabashedly calls “Wordsworth Country.” The name is fitting, for the
landscape that Wordsworth recorded has come to record him, his movements, his
compositions, his triumphs and his failures. The speaking monument he sought to
create has come virtually to speak only a single word: Wordsworth.
As David Lowenthal has suggested, the need for preservation arises out o f a
myriad of complex and at times contradictory impulses, but almost always involves a
nostalgia for some past time that was purportedly better—simpler, slower, more
humane, more wild, less polluted, more spiritual, less confused.2 The preservation of
Wordsworth and the parallel creation of Wordsworth country arises out of nostalgia,
though we must be careful not to characterize this nostalgia as simply backward-
looking but as bound up with questions of national identity. In the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, two primary versions of Wordsworth emerged out of the plenitude
of Wordsworths available. One was closely tied to the late nineteenth century
preservation movement and was local in effect, isolationist in focus, and popular in
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character. The other was closely tied to academic discourse and was wide-ranging in
effect, global in focus, and elitist in character. Such a characterization is overly broad
but in its outlines we can see why Wordsworth was and is so essential to the nation and
how he did and does provide a service to the nation.
While Wordsworth did call for the designation of the Lake District as a national
property and was (over)zealous in his defense of footpaths and public byways, his chief
association with the preservation movement is, as John Gaze terms it, as a kind of
“patron Saint” (9). When Wordsworth died in 1850, the Commons Preservation
Society (CPS), the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), the Kyrle
Society, and the Lake District Preservation Society (LDDS), were still some years
away. One direct tie between Wordsworth and the preservation movement, though, is
provided by the Reverend Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley. Rawnsley along with
Robert Hunter of the CPS and Octavia Hill, the housing reformer, formed the National
Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty in 1895. He was an
indefatigable campaigner and fundraiser for preservation causes, a frequent writer of
pamphlets, and a poet as well. One of his chief pastimes was literary place-hunting,
and along with William Angus Knight, Rawnsley produced detailed itineraries locating
the places referred to in Wordsworth’s poetry. His Literary Associations o f the English
Lakes was his most popular book and he assiduously collected recollections of and
anecdotes about Wordsworth from those Lake District residents still alive who had
known the poet.
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Rawnsley’s activities extended to the material marking of the landscape as well.
In conjunction with the Wordsworth Society of which he was a founding member, a
memorial marking the parting place of the brothers John and William Wordsworth and
inscribed with the last stanza of “Elegiac Verses” was erected in 1882 above Grisedale
Tam. Another memorial to Wordsworth was placed in Cockermouth and unveiled by
Matthew Arnold. At the Hawkshead Grammar School, the name carved by
Wordsworth with a penknife was covered in glass, and lines from Wordsworth’s poetry
were frescoed in scrolls on the walls of the school. The most prominence was given to
the line from “Written in an Aibum”: “Small service is hue service while it lasts.”
Not all of Rawnsley’s preservation efforts were successful. When the
Metropolitan Water District of Manchester proposed turning the seasonal lake of
Thirlmere into a reservoir, Rawnsley and the CPS vehemently opposed it. The plan
called for a dam at the southern end o f Thirlmere and the enclosure of a wide area of
common land in the catchment area, a plan which would lead to the destruction of the
valley. While the CPS was able to secure public right of access to the commons of the
catchment, the dam was approved. When Rawnsley realized he could not block the
plan, he sought to move the “Rock of Names”—the stone halfway between Dove
Cottage and Coleridge’s house on which the household members had carved their
initials—to save it from being immersed in the rising reservoir waters. Masons were
engaged to move the stone, but such a move proved impracticable. During
construction, the stone was dynamited to produce rubble for the dam. Rawnsley and
his wife picked through the rubble and used the fragments to build a cairn high above
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the site. The fragments can now be found mortared into a wall at the Wordsworth
Museum in Grasmere.
As lasting as stone is, Rawnsley’s more permanent marking of Wordsworth
country was his literary place-hunting. The immense popularity of Arnold’s selection
of Wordsworth’s poetry created demand for books on Wordsworth, and Rawnsley and
others obliged, producing dictionaries of place-names found in Wordsworth’s poetry,
picture books of scenes from Wordsworth’s poetry, and itineraries for tours o f the Lake
District that highlighted Wordsworth’s presence. Typical of these is Rawnsley’s Past
and Present at the English Lakes which, though written and published in 1916,
exemplifies Rawnsley’s procedure for reading the landscape. While the earlier
published Literary Associations o f the English Lakes was a self-conscious attempt to
aid literary place-hunters, Past and Present at the English Lakes had no such overt
purpose. However, by 1916 the act of literary place-hunting, and more specifically of
Wordsworth place-hunting (and haunting), had become so commonplace, that a walk
through the countryside could not be anything other than a walk through Wordsworth
country. A brief examination of Rawnsley’s procedure demonstrates how landscape
becomes a text that is only legible through a reading of literary associations, as an
iconic landscape mediated by texts.
In the brief itinerary “The Bluebells of the Duddon,” Rawnsley describes a walk
from Rydal Lake to the lower reaches of the Duddon, but it is not “nature” that is
described but the literary “nature” found in Wordsworth’s poetry. “Cuckoos called left
and right of us as we passed under the grey Nab Scar,” he writes, “and we remembered
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how Wordsworth, sauntering along the opposite side o f the lake, had listened to that
‘wandering voice’” (Past and Present 103). Descending into the Duddon Valley, the
travelers pause by the river’s side and there they “could not but remember those lines
of Wordsworth’s which describe felicitously the passing of Duddon to the sea” (106).
As they make their way back toward Duddon Bridge, Rawnsley wonders “why it was
that Wordsworth, with his love for flowers, wrote so little of the bluebell glories of the
North Country” (107), a thought banished by the belief that “such a lover of the
Duddon as he was . . . he must have often gazed, as we are gazing to-day, at the
ineffable beauty of the bluebell woods and thickets by its side” (107-8). Rawnsley then
closes by commenting “who is it who is really helping England in this bluebell time of
1915 but the soul of the man who poured forth that soul in his inspired sonnets for
freedom and independence a hundred years ago” (108).
While it is tempting to dismiss Rawnsley as an overly zealous Wordsworthian, it
is striking how the preserved landscape is not that of rural England, but that of the poet
who celebrated rural England. Everywhere Wordsworth comes athwart Rawnsley’s
path rising up out of the most casual sights and sounds. The recurring trope of literary
association is usurpation like that described by Wordsworth in the River Duddon
sonnets, with its conscious echoes of the Simplon Pass. Usurpation here functions as
constant and unavoidable mediation, the prior presence of texts, like the pages from
Thomson’s The Seasons fixed to a post on Richmond Hill. An earlier reading and
writing of nature has itself become the only nature that is available to the literary
tourist. Even when some Wordsworth text is not ready at hand to describe the scene,
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Rawnsley still calls up Wordsworth’s presence if only to ask why Wordsworth isn’t
more present, a concern quickly banished by the conjecture that, though unrecorded,
this view of the bluebells must also have been seen first by Wordsworth.
Rawnsley’s final invocation of Wordsworth is the most striking. When he
speculates that it is Wordsworth “who is really helping England” in the dark days of
1915, he is designating Wordsworth as source of the proper spirit of the national
character. In this the zealous rector was not alone. In 1915, Wordsworth’ s Patriotic
Poetry, selected and published by the Right Honorable Arthur Acland, presented
Wordsworth as representative of all that was good about the English character and the
reviews of this volume pointed out how Wordsworth served the nation in its time of
need. A. V. Dicey’s The Statesmanship o f Wordsworth, published in 1917, offered up
the poet as the champion of self-determination, a proto-nationalist whose message was
as current in 1917 as it was in 1809. Yet while this Wordsworthian spirit seems allied
to the nationalist spirit of the war effort, inevitably there is tension in the association of
the poet of the Lakes, 4 ithis blessed region,” with international politics. In a telling
slide from Wordsworth to war to local scenery, Rawnsley reveals how ultimately
Wordsworth’s service to the nation lies in the ways in which the poetry can be said to
draw one into a kind of personal and political isolationism. Rawnsley notes that
Wordsworth today would not be able to write ‘“But here no cannon thunders to the
gale,’ for in imagination, through the scented air and above the sound of Duddon and
song of birds, there comes to us thunder of the guns above the Yser’s side; and those
far-off chimneys, with their dark banners of smoke, tell us how night and day away at
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Barrow men are working to produce the instruments of death, the much-needed
munitions of war” (106-7). This intrusion of the present troubles into the idyllic
landscape threatens to lay bare the fragile underpinnings of a retreat into nature.
Rawnsley’s solution, which follows immediately, is disavowal of the death’s head in
Arcady through the invocation of the isolationist Wordsworth: “Yet so potent is the
spell of the bluebell slope on this gorgeous Maytide afternoon, that at times, though it
be for a few moments, we can forget the horrors of battle, and can feel in time with the
‘cloud-born stream’ with ‘each tumultuous working left behind’” (107). The complex
function of Wordsworth invoked by Rawnsley is one which posits the poet as both
mediator of the natural world and representative of English values, values that provide
for a justification of war and a withdrawal from the realities of war. Rawnsley
duplicates what he believes to be the ritual of the scene as established in countless
Wordsworth’s poems—the shift from the world outside the vale to the vale itself and
finally to the mind meditating on nature’s work. The curious feature of this shift is that
the mind invoked is not that of the present visitor, but that of a prior visitor,
Wordsworth, whose consciousness inhabits every scene including those he left
unrecorded. Here the mediation of texts is complete. A walk through Wordsworth
Country transforms everything into an artifact in the vast museum space of the nation.
While the Lake District preservation movement, of which Rawnsley was a key
figure, seems to offer a ready example of local opposition to meliorist claims of
national interest made by the railway, mining, and timber industries, the politics of
preservation were much more complex. Though Rawnsley opposed the scheme to dam
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Thirlmere and created a minor sensation with his futile attempt to save the “Rock of
Names,” Robert Somervell, a local merchant and a prominent member of the Thirlmere
Defense Association, was pained to discover that the leading members of the Thirlm ere
community were more interested in compensation than in conservation. Rawnsley
himself invoked the national interest in defending this about-face to Somervell, that if
there was not to be a continuing danger of cholera, cities required a safe and plentiful
supply of fresh water.3 The Lake District Defense Society (LDDS), formed by
members of the Wordsworth Society and led by Rawnsley, was equally ambivalent in
its aims. Rawnsley was adamant that the LDDS work with the CPS and the Kyrle
Society to protect rights of way and access over commons. Though more than ready to
use arguments about rights of access “to support the protection of ‘picturesque
beauty’,” the LDDS was “nervous of being invaded by hordes of fell-walkers” (Murphy
89).
Though purportedly formed to ensure the protection of “rest places for weary
workers,”4 the membership of the LDDS was drawn primarily from the intellectual,
professional and managerial classes. According to Graham Murphy’s analysis, less
than ten percent were Lake District residents and more than half lived either in London
and the Home Counties or in Manchester and surrounding industrial Lancashire.
Rawnsley’s defense of the predominance of outsiders, “that the inhabitants of the dales,
who have their world of beauty ‘too much with them late and soon,’ are not the safest
guardians of their lovely homes,” brought from a local newspaper the charge that the
LDDS were “cheap aesthetes” and “noisy sentimentalists.” “Cumberland people,”
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continued the unsigned editorial, “could look after their own interests without
interference from outsiders who put the protection of scenery before the livelihoods of
the locals.” 5 In Rawnsley’s justification and in the newspaper’s attack, we see the
confused result of Wordsworth’s own calls for isolation and preservation of the Lake
District. When Wordsworth warned about the encroachments of the metropolis that
would replace the independent spirit of the dalesmen with the dark dependence of the
urban center, he was arguing that the Lake District was the last (or one of the last)
bastions of an independent moral spirit which should be an exemplum for a diseased
nation forgetful of its past. When he called for its preservation it was to save the
landscape both for the people and from the people. By Rawnsley’s time these positions
had undergone a curious reversal—it was the metropole that offered to protect the
landscape from the encroachments (and short-sightedness) of the locals, to preserve the
unique individual character of the region from itself. Local resistance, still using the
language of independence and self-determination, was now motivated by a desire to
share in the economic benefits which the rest of the nation was allowed to enjoy.
Wordsworth’s wish had been granted: preservation was a national imperative, but the
cost of preservation was the local independence which Wordsworth most wanted to
preserve.
For whom was the nation being preserved? Whom would this great national
museum serve? For Wordsworth, as laid out in his Guide as well as in his battle
against the railway, preservation was necessary to safeguard a particular vision of the
British nation, one which probably never existed, and yet could serve to reform the
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present nation. But the lessons were available only to those who already possessed the
proper attainments necessary to enact the rituals, to register the requisite wonder, and
to respond to the resonance. While preservation has always been characterized as
stewardship—the safeguarding of heritage for unborn generations, the national and
individual responsibility of the Burkean citizen—charges of selfishness and elitism,
such as those leveled at Wordsworth’s opposition to the railway, have dogged the
movement since its inception. Robert Hunter could characterize the mission of the
National Trust as a “purely patriotic interest in those things which in the crush of our
commercial enterprise and in the poverty of landholders or in the lack of local care, ran
risk of passing away,”6 but “patriotic interest” had been the staple justification of the
prior usurpation of local interests conducted by the railways, mining companies, and
industrial and commercial interests. The Times could declare that the Trust “aims to
establish a National Gallery of natural pictures” (17 July 1894), but what were the costs
of such an aestheticization of the landscape and who would be made into artifacts and
who would be allowed access to this museum? The charge of selfishness and elitism
has been difficult to overcome, primarily because it is in some ways deeply embedded
in the very idea of preservation itself. The historian John Julius Norwich, in his
foreword to The National Trust Guide, unironically claims that the Trust is attempting
to overcome its image as “a toffee-nosed oligarchy of aesthetes, scholars or snobs” by
holding “fetes champetres in our parks . . . A theatrical garden party at Cliveden . . . a
Victorian extravaganza at Dunham Massey” and a performance of Cosi fan tutte at
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Blewcoat School” (Norwich xviii). If the Trust does indeed exist “for everyone,”
Norwich’s understanding of “everyone” is a very narrow one.
The problem though is not simply selfishness or elitism, but a practical problem
as well. Just as Wordsworth worried over the entertainments of the city invading the
quiet of the Lakes, and the crowds that blight one’s encounter with scenery, the Trust
continues to worry about the motor car with “a caravan swaying behind” (Norwich xii),
and the 120,000 annual visitors to Stourhead. The museum of the landscape raises the
paradox of preservation versus access. If preservation is intended to safeguard the
“beautiful, peaceful and unspoilt land for the benefit o f the public . . . if too much of
the public takes advantage of that land . . . the land loses those very qualities for which
it was acquired” (Norwich xv). The solution offered by the Trust is the same as that
offered by Wordsworth one hundred and fifty years before: make access difficult. To
preserve the museum itself, “Enjoyment . . . can be given only to a few; it should
therefore by right belong to those who will take the time and trouble to find them for
themselves. Too much signposting, in other words, can be as disastrous as too little.
For those moderately sound of wind and limb, possessed of an Ordnance Survey map
and a stout pair of shoes, the rewards will be immense. But they must be earned”
(Norwich xvi). It is for the athletic tourist, the bold Adventurer with map in hand, that
the museum is accessible. Wordsworth’s ambitious bounder has become the Trust’s
consummate visitor, and the attainment of the culture represented by heritage can be
gained only after subjecting oneself to a disciplinary initiation.
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It is difficult to separate the version of Wordsworth useful to the preservation
movement from the version of Wordsworth useful to the tourism industry. As an
advocate for preservation Wordsworth has been immensely useful to the heritage
industry and the heritage industry has been immensely successful as a source of
tourism. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s apocalyptic vision of the end o f empire, her poem
1811 published in that year, has proven prophetic in its depiction of England reduced to
a vast museum space open to the gawking of American tourists. Where Wordsworth
differs greatly from the late-nineteenth preservationists is in the motivation behind
preservation. Wordsworth thought he was safeguarding some precious and threatened
version of the national character, while the preservationists were safeguarding
Wordsworth. In commenting on the formation of the Wordsworth Society, Ruskin
evinces this confusion over what is being preserved. He notes that “the grand function
of the Society is to preserve, as far as possible, in England, the conditions of moral life
which made Wordsworth himself possible.” The purpose behind preservation,
however, is not as an antidote to the present national character but to safeguard
Wordsworth himself, for without these “conditions of moral life” Wordsworth’s poetry
would be “vainer than the hymns of Orpheus” (quoted in Peek 190). The solution
offered by preservation groups and the Wordsworth Society, two versions of the
preservation movement, was to save everything—texts, portraits, unpublished
manuscripts, sites, views, in short everything “of perishable character . .. which, if not
soon rescued from oblivion, might be lost to posterity.”7 In this sense, Wordsworth
and Wordsworth Country was a national archive, a vast magazine perhaps in which all
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sorts of artifacts are thrown at random. A different but complementary imagining of
the “Wordsworth” museum which emerged contemporaneously with the wholesale
preservation of Wordsworth was that of the museum as cultural training ground.
Articulated by Pater and Arnold, Wordsworth was an initiatory rite of cultural training,
and the preservation of Wordsworth relied, not without its paradoxes, on the selective
act of the critic.
Pater is quite explicit concerning the pedagogic utility of a certain configuration
of Wordsworth. In an essay first published in 1874 and later collected in
Appreciations, Pater begins by bemoaning “the presence of an alien element in
Wordsworth’s work” which is not representative of Wordsworth’s greatness and states
that “of all poets equally great, he would gain most by a skillfully made anthology”
{Three Major Texts 415). For Pater, however, there is something to be gained by the
unevenness, this “absolute duality between higher and lower moods” (415), for the type
of reading it forces upon the reader is “an excellent sort of training towards the things
of art and poetry”:
It begets in those, who, coming across him in youth, can bear him
at all, a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of
concentration and collectedness of mind in the right appreciation of
poetry, an expectation of things, in this order, coming to one by
means of a right discipline of the temper as well as of the intellect.
(415-6)
The juxtaposition of high and low, of sublime and mundane, provides a sort of
aesthetic education for those strenuous enough to bear it. The “right” taste arises out of
a “right discipline” which is produced by the process of selection, a curiously circular
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process that defines good taste as the ability to exercise good taste. Of more
importance than the result itself though is the process which transfers distinction from
the object of aesthetic contemplation to the perceiver:
[Wordsworth] meets us with the promise that he has much, and
something very peculiar, to give us, if we follow a certain difficult
way, and seems to have the secret of a special and privileged state
of mind. And those who have undergone his influence, and
followed this difficult way, are like people who have passed
through some initiation, a disciplina acrani, by submitting to
which they become able constantly to distinguish in art, speech,
feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive, from
that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive. (416)
Pater figures the act of reading Wordsworth as a kind o f initiation, a ritual process
which like that of the museum experience promises some kind of transformation. Like
the museum visitor, the reader is curiously passive as he or she is led through a
prescribed route with the promise that something will be given if he or she submits to
the ennobling effects of the process itself. Completely mystified in this description is
how that transformation takes place, how one graduates from waiting for a gift and
submitting to influence to being “able constantly to distinguish” between the true
objects of aesthetic experience and the mundane world that surrounds it. The reading
of Wordsworth, itself a mundane experience, holds the promise of a “secret” and
“privileged state of mind,” a break out of the everyday possible only after one has
endured the “difficult way.” But how, or when, or even whether that break takes place
remains obscure, hidden in an assumption about the salutary effects of culture. What is
clear is that pursuit of aesthetic knowledge originates in a desire for privileged
knowledge, for the distinction conferred upon those who can make distinctions.
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For Pater though the end is not simply the refinement of taste or the aesthetic
experience itself. For Pater this process is moral. While “the first aim of
Wordsworth’s poetry is to give the reader a peculiar kind of pleasure,” through this
pleasure one gains the “perfect end”—“the supreme importance of contemplation in the
conduct of life” (427): “That the end of life is not action but contemplation— being as
distinct from doing—a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some shape or other, the
principle of all the higher morality” (428). This “art of impassioned contemplation” is
the secret knowledge, the privileged state of mind, one is given by a study of
Wordsworth. But as this passage suggests with its virtually unparseable syntax, such a
state can be achieved only after much strenuous activity. For Pater, “the aim of all
culture” is “to witness . . . with appropriate emotions” those “great facts in man’s
existence which no machinery affects” (429). Wordsworth, the isolated seer, becomes
in Pater’s formulation the poet of isolation, the poet who calls us to contemplation, not
action. In this construction, Pater’s Wordsworth mirrors Rawnsley’s shift from
contemplation of war to contemplation of scenery to eventual usurpation by
Wordsworth’s voice. If it is difficult to equate Pater’s Wordsworth with the
Wordsworth who wrote on the Convention of Cintra and the Westmorland elections,
the political sonnets and “The Warning,” The Excursion and The River Duddon, it is
only because we have not purged away “those weaker elements in Wordsworth’s
poetry” to find “the more powerful and original poet, hidden away” (429).
The paradox implicit in Pater’s use of Wordsworth’s complete works as a
training ground for aesthetic taste emerges when such a use is placed alongside Pater’s
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call for a “skillfully made anthology.” Such an anthology would present in toto the
“more powerful and original poet,” but such an anthology, or rather one’s appreciation
of the skill which made the anthology, would be possible only after one had followed
the “difficult way” of reading through the complete works. In order to appreciate the
part, one would need to know the whole, and yet the part would render the whole
superfluous. Of course, this formulation is only paradoxical if everyone could follow
the difficult way and acquire proper aesthetic taste. That an anthology is at all
necessary implies that some readers will not, can not, or should not attempt to follow
the difficult way. In other words, preservation is necessary for access, but access must
be limited to a select few, those sound of wind and limb. While on first glance Pater’s
use of Wordsworth seems focused on the problem of every reader’s aesthetic
education, this education is available only to a select few. Ultimately Wordsworth’s
poetry through its aesthetic qualities is seen as a moral and didactic corrective, though
one necessarily limited to those who can endure the difficult way. For everyone else,
the redacted Wordsworth will do. Like the landscape of “Tintem Abbey” and the Lake
District, like the museum and the museum of the land, “Wordsworth” the poet, the
museum process, and the repository, functions as an educational opportunity, an
initiation, for a select few, and a space outside the everyday for the many.
As Pater notes in the republished version of “Wordsworth” that appeared in
1888, two such skillfully made anthologies had appeared since 1874. The first, Poems
o f Wordsworth, was edited by Matthew Arnold and published by MacMillan in 1879 as
part of its Golden Treasury series. The second, Selections from Wordsworth, was
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edited by William Angus Knight and published for the Wordsworth Society by Kegan
Paul in 1888. In literary historical terms, Arnold’s edition established an aesthetic
configuration of the “Great Decade” poet which persists to this day, while in strictly
historical terms, Knight’s edition—along with his many other publications—
established a geographic configuration of the Lake District Poet. Both used
Wordsworth to create a sense of an endangered national heritage. The “Great Decade”
poet reflected the nation’s need for a universalized figure of contemplative calm amidst
a world of movement and agitation, while the Lake District poet reflected the needs of
the nation for a localized landscape of contemplative calm amidst a world of getting
and spending. In both cases, the poet and the landscape fulfilled the desire for an
idealized past which stood in opposition to the present, but Arnold’s Wordsworth has
proven to have the most lasting effect.
It is impossible to overestimate the popularity of Arnold’s edition of
Wordsworth’s poems. First published in September 1879, it was republished with
minor changes in November 1879. It went through seven editions by 1890, fourteen
editions by 1900, twenty-four editions by 1910, and twenty-nine editions by 1920.
When Edward Dowden published his own edition of Wordsworth’s poems in 1897, he
was quick to reassure readers that “[w]ith a very few exceptions all the pieces chosen
by Matthew Arnold are included” (vii), as if to do otherwise was to risk instant
rejection. While eschewing Wordsworth’s classificatory scheme, which he calls
“ingenious but far-fetched” and ultimately “unsatisfactory” (Arnold, Poems o f
Wordsworth xii), Arnold adopts an equally suspect classificatory scheme purportedly
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based on genre and sanctioned by the example of the ancients. Arnold’s selection and
arrangement o f the poems preserve a poet whose project appears to focus on the
problem of preservation. From youthful experiments in ballads and narratives through
mature exercises in antique forms to sagacious reflections full of nostalgia and
belatedness, the Wordsworth constructed by Arnold is a bard of ebbed time, a voice
from the past singing of ways which have long vanished from the earth.
Arnold’s edition consists of 170 poems, a modest total when one considers that it
represents only about one-fifth of the total number of poems in Wordsworth’s collected
works published in 1850. In rejecting Wordsworth’s arrangement, Arnold contends
that “Wordsworth’s poems will never produce their due effect until they are freed from
their present artificial arrangement, and grouped more naturally” (Poems o f
Wordsworth xiii). Now, of course, there is nothing that makes genre more natural than
Wordsworth’s cumbersome method of “mental physiology” (as Arnold terms it), and
Arnold’s genres prove slippery as well. Of the six classes employed by Arnold,
three—“Poems of Ballad Form,” “Narrative Poems,” and “Sonnets”—use conventional
forms as the criteria for inclusion. Two of the classes—“Lyrical Poems” and
“Reflective and Elegiac Poems”—seem to rest uncomfortably between form and effect,
the form being either lyric or elegy, and the effect being lyrical, elegiac or reflective. In
these two classes, the classification seems to be based more on mood, either the mood
of the writer at the time of writing (like Wordsworth’s own 1807 class “Moods of My
Own Mind”), or the mood produced on the reader by the poem. The sixth class (placed
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fourth in sequence), “Poems Akin to the Antique and Odes,” seems partially based on
form, partially on affinity to some prior poetic models, and partially on content.
Besides proving that any classificatory scheme will be subject to some
objections, the sequence of Arnold’s classifications seems to reflect his own
conception of the growth of the poet. The volume opens with ballad poems, and of the
nine poems in this the shortest section of the book, five are taken from Wordsworth’s
“Poems of Childhood” class. All nine of the poems were published by 1807, with six
of the poems originally published in either the 1798 or 1800 Lyrical Ballads. The
ballad class, with its association with older folk poetry, is followed by the narrative
poems, a class which is clearly allied to the ballad but one which is assumed to mark an
advance in the handling of narrative materials and poetic form. With the exception of
the 84-line “The Force of Prayer,” all of the other narrative poems were written and
published by 1807, except for Arnold’s unsanctioned editorial reconstruction of the
narrative of Margaret and the ruined cottage from Book I of The Excursion, which
while mostly written in 1797-8 was not published until 1814. The “Lyrical Poems”
class which follows seems to mark a movement from story-telling to impassioned
utterance. With their emphasis on commonplace things and their effect on an
individualized speaker, these poems shift from the more public narratized landscape to
a more private subjective landscape. This shift recurs in the next two classes, “Poems
Akin to the Antique and Odes,” and “Sonnets,” both of which begin with poems
occasioned by public events and close with poems concerned with private matters. In
the “Sonnets” class this shift occurs abruptly after the eighteenth sonnet. The first
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eighteen sonnets of the section deal with public events and all but two of them were
classed by Wordsworth in “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty.” Following these eighteen
political sonnets, the sequence shifts abruptly to the less public and more technical
concerns of the poet with his form (“Scorn not the sonnet,” and “Nuns fret not”) and
the more private concerns of the poet himself (“Surprised by joy,” and “Go, faithful
portrait”). This shift to a more private register leads to the final class, “Reflective and
Elegiac Poems,” which appears to focus attention on the mature and necessarily
withdrawn (reflective) poet singing of the past (elegiac).
As discussed in Chapter 3, one of the primary effects of Arnold’s selection was
the creation of the “Great Decade” poet, who between 1798 and 1808, produced
“almost all of his really first-rate work” (Arnold, Poems o f Wordsworth xii). While for
Wordsworth the idea of selections from his poems was thought of as an act of
mutilation, for Arnold surgical selection was necessary to administer relief. Arnold’s
selections are dominated by the Great Decade Wordsworth. Nearly two-thirds of the
poems occupying nearly three-fourths of the space in the volume come from the Great
Decade, and it is interesting to note that it is not until the fifty-first selection in the
volume that one encounters a poem written after 1814. Thirty-two of the poems were
originally published in either the 1798 or 1800 Lyrical Ballads, and sixty-five of the
poems were originally published in the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes. Only the
curious category “Poems Akin to the Antique and Odes” and “Sonnets” devote more
space to non-Great Decade works, and in both cases the difference is only of a few
pages.
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However, if Wordsworth is defined primarily by what he wrote between 1798
and 1808, then it is inevitable that later work (or even dissim ilar Great Decade work)
will be seen as oddly un-Wordsworthian. Perhaps also, this lyricization of Wordsworth
is part of the general movement from epic to lyric described by M. H. Abrams some
fifty years ago.8 Such a movement would account for the increased value given to
Wordsworth’s shorter pieces and the decreased value given to The Excursion, though
Wordsworth’s own lengthy career does not provide a model of such a movement.
What remains unaccounted for is why the lyric should come to possess so much value.
In the case of Arnold’s Wordsworth, the lyric, with its emphasis on personal feeling,
becomes representative of the true power of poetry, the power to make us feel:
Wordsworth’s poetry is great because of the extraordinary power
with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered us in nature, the joy
offered to us in the simple primary affections and desires; and
because of the extraordinary power which, in case after case, he
shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it. (xxi)
Lyric poetry, as the vehicle for feeling, provides the primary access to Wordsworth’s
power, but our access to this power is limited. There is a diminution from
Wordsworth’s “feeling” to his “showing” to our “sharing,” a slipping away that is
reminiscent of Arnold’s own sense of the belatedness of both Wordsworth’s desire and
his own.
Shortly before Wordsworth’s death, Arnold had written that “Wordsworth’s eyes
avert their ken / From half of human fate” (“Stanzas in Memory of the Author of
‘Obermann’ ” 53-4), a criticism that seems to question the utility of a parochial vision
that doggedly excluded much of the world. This image of the self-marginalized poet,
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withdrawn into his mountain retreat, out of touch with the great movements of the age,
was something of a commonplace by the middle of the century. The anonymous
obituary writer for The Times had simply stated as fact that Wordsworth was “removed
by taste and temperament from the busy scenes of the world” (5). In the months
following Wordsworth’s death, however, Arnold returned to the subject of the isolated
seer, and the idea o f the contemplative life that would later prove to be the foundation
of his own conception of the relationship between the artist or critic and the society that
he or she served.
Arnold’s “Memorial Verses, April 1850,” published in the 1852 edition of his
Poems, begins appropriately enough at Wordsworth’s tomb amidst the landscape
memorialized by Wordsworth’s poetry. For Arnold, Wordsworth’s gift to the nation is
the gift of feeling, but what is distinctive about this conception is the studied absence
of a relationship between feeling and action, between private experience and public
duty.
He spoke, and loosed our hearts in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth,
Smiles broke from us and we had ease;
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o’er the sun-lit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. (47-53)
Wordsworth’s power is figured as a kind of sensual recall, the ability of his poetry to
recall us to some earlier time and some earlier relationship with the natural world.
That relationship is one of physical responsiveness to natural stimuli, but it is one
which can only be described in the past tense. Arnold hymns this prior relationship in
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“Empedocles on Etna” as descriptive of when “We had not lost our balance then, nor
grown / Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy” (11.240-1). Having now lost
our balance, grown to be thought’s slaves, and now dead to every natural joy, what
salutary purpose could Wordsworth’s poetry serve? In the “Memorial Verses,” it is
unclear what purpose it can serve now, for Arnold can only invoke instances of past
regenerations of the spirit, and he can only convey a nostalgic longing for a time when
Wordsworth’s poetry could have revived a world now long since dead.
Our youth return’d; for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furl’d,
The freshness of the early world. (54-7)
There is a certain fatality and despair in this depiction of some past episode of
regeneration, as if the very moment of possibility has passed as well. “The freshness of
the early world” may have once been shed and “our youth” may have returned, but this
easy link between cause and effect is separated by a description of the “spirits” which
are being acted upon, a description which denies the possibility of regeneration. The
objects of this regeneration are said to have “long been dead,” “dried up and closely
furl’d,” human spirits as desiccated plant life, flowers or leaves undergoing natural
decay and not subject to regeneration. At the risk of being too literal, the freshness of
the early world like the early morning dew may rime the surface of the spent bloom,
but it cannot return it to full flower nor can it restore its fragrance. The remoteness and
thus the inaccessibility of these salutary effects emerges out of this series of
regressions: Arnold the poet remembering some past effect brought about by an
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evocation of an even earlier world. What has intervened between the early world,
Wordsworth’s representation of it, and the “spirits” in need o f the cure is the death of
the spirits that would be saved. Poetry has passed from salvific to nostalgic for the
possibility o f salvation.
Of course, Arnold is writing a eulogy, but what is being eulogized is the
possibility o f poetry itself to have a place in what Arnold himself called this “deeply
unpoeticaF age (quoted in Honan 196). In what appears to be a curiously backhanded
tribute to Wordsworth’s genius, Arnold locates the future of poetry in the notion of
disinterestedness that would become so important in his later critical work. Arnold
imagines that the future may produce another poet of “Goethe’s sage mind” or
“Byron’s force,” but questions whether anyone of “Wordsworth’s healing power” will
emerge:
Others will teach us how to dare,
And against fear our breast to steel;
Others will strengthen us to bear—
But who, ah! who, will make us feel?
The cloud of mortal destiny,
Others will front it fearlessly—
But who, like him, will put it by? (64-70)
These seven lines are marked out from the rest of the poem by a shift in rhyme scheme
from couplets and an occasional triplet to these alternating rhymes closed by a triplet.
Within this passage there are three parallel syntactic units of two lines each, with the
first lines beginning with the trochaic “Others” and the second lines beginning with a
conjunction (“And,” “But,” “But”). The single line left out o f this parallelism is “The
cloud of mortal destiny,” a phrase descriptive of not what is representative of
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Wordsworth, but rather what Wordsworth manages to put by. This action of
Wordsworth, if it can even be called such, stands in marked contrast to the heroic
diction attributed to “Others” whose poetry involves teaching, daring, fearing,
strengthening, bearing and fronting. There is almost bathos in the paired rhyme of
“steel” and “feel,” and the concluding triplet moves from the heroic implications of
“destiny” and “fearlessly” to the strangely flat and passive “put it by.” In what appears
to be a moment of uncompromising strenuousness, Arnold places the seductiveness of
heroic action against the plainness of passive contemplation. To put by the cloud of
mortal destiny while seemingly an act of will can hardly be called active. To desire
“Wordsworth’s sweet calm” (“Stanzas in Memory o f the Author of ‘Obermann’ ” 79)
requires one to resist the temptations to act, to tempt the accusations of retreat, and to
risk the slide into the bathetic. For Arnold, Wordsworth has become the exemplum of
the disengaged, contemplative poet, a bard of ebbing and ebbed time.
Arnold’s “Memorial Verses” memorialize not merely the man or even the poetry,
but a relationship between poetry or literature or culture (as defined by Arnold) and the
nation itself. The regressing belatedness of this poem marks Arnold’s own anxieties
over the recuperability of this past relationship, a relationship or even a nostalgia for
such a relationship, which he has imaginatively located in Wordsworth. The passing of
Wordsworth marks not the passing of this relationship— for Arnold admits that
Wordsworth was himself nostalgic for it—but rather the further passing or slipping
away of the possibility of such a relationship. For Arnold, imaginative feeling as
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represented by Wordsworth is itself a relic of an earlier time, preserved in Wordsworth
and cherished by Arnold because it is alien to his own times.
While “feeling” covers a large range of human experience, Arnold focuses on
“joy” and more specifically on “the joy offered us in nature.” This focus ignores much
in Wordsworth and forces Arnold to contain other feelings to which the poems may
give rise. The chief containment strategy in Arnold’s edition of Wordsworth is
Arnold’s classification system itself, specifically the two miscellaneously titled classes
“Reflective and Elegiac Poems” and “Poems Akin to the Antique and Odes.” Both of
these classes, clearly marked as backward-looking, become repositories for the
nostalgic yearning and regressing belatedness that Arnold associated with Wordsworth
in “Memorial Verses.”
The “Reflective and Elegiac Poems” class also becomes a repository for what
might be called Wordsworth’s museum pieces. Very few of the poems can be called
elegies and in fact only three of the thirty-nine poems are drawn from Wordsworth’s
“Epitaphs and Elegiac Pieces” class. Virtually all of the poems are reflective in some
way, but then virtually every one of Wordsworth’s poems could be called reflective.
What appears to be the dominating characteristic of these poems is how reflection is
constructed by Arnold as a temporal experience which will always lead to the elegiac.
In other words, if reflection is a kind of intense contemplation, it is also a looking back
over time and this insistence upon a temporal distance between the poet and the poetic
occasion constantly invokes the additional temporal distance between the poet and the
reader. It is this additional temporal distance that seems to enforce the elegiac mood
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on poems that appear to have no relation to elegy, and actually creates the need for an
elegized subject. In a poem like “To the Lady Fleming,” the only possible elegized
subject, in what is essentially a perfunctory occasional piece, is the social order itself as
represented by the Fleming’s stock of a “noble line / O f chieftains” (Poems o f
Wordsworth p. 309). These ancient manners form the elegized subject of the poem
placed after “To the Lady Fleming”—“To the Rev. Dr. Wordsworth.” As discussed in
Chapter 6, this poem, which came to serve as an introduction to the River Duddon
sonnets, focuses attention on the “ancient Manners” of the local landscape to both call
attention to what Wordsworth feels must be preserved and to what he feels is fast
ebbing away. The elegized frame, by calling attention to the historical distance which
has intervened between Wordsworth’s call for preservation and the present time of the
reader, transforms the call for preservation into an elegy for what has been lost, and
converts Wordsworth’s fears into historical fact.
As mentioned before, the criteria for inclusion in the “Poems Akin to the Antique
and Odes” class seems to involve form, affinity to some prior poetic models, and
content. The criterion for including the three last poems in the class is clearly marked
by the titles of these poems, all of which contain the word “ode.” The first six poems
are neither identified as odes nor do they employ either the ode form or odic
characteristics. These six poems—“Laodamia,” “Dion,” “Character of the Happy
Warrior,” “Lines on the Expected Invasion, 1803,” “The Pillar of Trajan,” and
“September 1819”—would then be expected to be “Akin to the Antique,” though it is
not clear whether they are akin to the antique in form or content. “Laodamia” and
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“Dion” treat ancient subjects, the first drawn from Homer and the second from
Plutarch, and may be said to be akin to the antique in content. However, to classify
these two poems as antique in content denies these poems their topicality. As
discussed in Chapter 3, the story of “Laodamia” counseled a mourning nation of the
need to recognize the higher cause and the greater sacrifice that supersedes personal
suffering. “Dion,” which was probably composed shortly after Waterloo and which
was published in the River Duddon volume, uses a classical narrative to address the
contemporary problem of political leadership raised by Napoleon. Some commentators
see the topicality of the poem more specifically in the parallel between Dion’s orders to
kill Heraclides and Napoleon’s orders to kill the Duke d’Enghien, a subject which
Wordsworth had treated already in a sonnet.9 Regardless of the specificity of the
contemporary context, the focus of attention on the antique content denies these poems
their original status as contemporary critiques, a contemporality evident in 1820, but
not so evident by 1879. Indeed, even if we could recall the political climate
surrounding their original publication, the classification itself with its emphasis on the
antique, with what has passed or passed away, implies that the sentiments expressed in
the poems are themselves antique.
This potential slippage between antique form, antique content, and antique
sentiment affects how one explains the inclusion of the two most overtly nationalistic
poems in Arnold’s volume. The “Character of the Happy Warrior” uses the ancient
form of the character piece to delineate a distinctive kind of person, in this case that of
the happy warrior. Again however, Arnold’s classification exerts a pressure on the
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content of the poem itself, making it difficult to conclude whether the antiquity of the
poem is restricted to its form, or whether the sentiment itself—the idea of the selfless
man devoted to national service—is antique as well. This inability to identify the
characteristic “antiquity” of a poem, and thus the reason for its inclusion in this
classification, is most clearly seen in “Lines on the Expected Invasion, 1803” and
“September 1819.” The “Lines,” written in 1803 but not published until 1842, appears
to have no antique antecedent in form, nor does it rely on an antique narrative. The
repetition of the invocation “Come ye” may have reminded Arnold of the numerous
Latin veni hymns addressed to sacred spirits, but this would hardly be a recognizable
antique form. In the context of 1803, the poem is a call to arms, a plea to all England
to take up arms in the fight against Napoleon, a duty which falls to every man:
Come ye—whate’er your creed—O waken all,
Whate’er your temper, at your Country’s call;
Resolving (this a free-born Nation can)
To have one soul, and perish to a man,
Or save this honoured Land from every lord
But British reason and the British sword. {Poems o f Wordsworth
p. 191)
Although this poem was written in response to the pressure of contemporary events, it
remained unpublished for nearly four decades. The “1803” in the title identified the
context of the poem, first in 1842 and then in 1879, as belonging to a past time, deep in
the past of most of the 1842 readers and virtually lost in the past to Arnold’s 1879
readers. What appears to be most antique about this poem, however, is its fervor, its
baldly jingoistic tendencies, and while such tendencies abound in many of
Wordsworth’s war poems, placed here in this class of antique poems, these tendencies
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themselves appear antique, antiquated, belonging to some earlier time when such
fervor was possible. In Wordsworth’s collected works, this poem is placed amidst
other poems detailing the tumultuous events of 1803, and in the collected works the
poem which follows it is the sonnet “Anticipation, October 1803” which opens with
the lines “Shout, for a mighty Victory is won! / On British ground the Invaders are laid
low.” Stripped o f this historical context in Arnold’s edition, “Lines on the Expected
Invasion, 1803” appears quaint and almost ridiculous, representative of a historical
time long past when such fervor was not only possible but perhaps even necessary, but
which now appears as antique as the pillar of Trajan or Plutarch’s Lives.
Like “Lines on the Expected Invasion, 1803,” “September 1819” appears to have
no clear tie to antiquity. Its form is indistinguishable from other poems which Arnold
classed as “Lyrical Poems.” The stanza form, meter, and rhyme scheme is the same as
that used by Wordsworth in “To a Young Lady, Who Had Been Reproached for Taking
Long Walks in the Country” and “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower,” both
classed by Arnold as “Lyrical Poems.” The year in the title identifies the occasion of
the poem as contemporary (to Wordsworth), and the poem, like many of the lyrical
pieces treats of the poet’s thoughts on the passing of the seasons. The final four
stanzas do invoke classical figures, but these invocations are used to comment upon the
current state of poetry. By themselves, these invocations do not account for the
classification of this poem as akin to the antique. Again, what appears to mark this
poem as antique are the sentiments themselves, Wordsworth’s claims for the power of
poetry and his distress over how that power has been squandered.
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For deathless powers to verse belong,
And they like Demigods are strong
On whom the Muses smile;
But some their function have disclaimed.
Best pleased with what is aptliest framed
To enervate and defile. (Poems o f Wordsworth p. 195)
Originally published in 1820, Wordsworth’s high claims for poetry are balanced by his
belief that some poets, like Byron, have chosen to disregard the sanctity of their calling.
But what is interesting, and perhaps very perceptive of Arnold, is that while
Wordsworth maintains that “deathless powers” belong to poetry and that poets are
“like Demigods,” all of Wordsworth’s examples of deathless poetry and demigod-like
poets are taken from an irretrievable past. The poet invokes the poets of “Britain’s
earliest dawn” of which no records remain, and then calls up the historical figures of
Alcaeus of Lesbos and Sappho of the sixth century B.C. The most curious invocation
though is reserved for poetry that does not exist at all. The poet addresses the
antiquaries at work on the manuscripts discovered in Herculaneum, and exclaims:
What rapture! could ye seize
Some Theban fragment, or unroll
One precious, tender-hearted scroll
O f pure Simonides.
The poet wishes for the discovery of some Theban fragment of Sophocles or a poem by
Simonides, discoveries which were not made at Herculaneum. What makes this desire
so curious is that the discovery would be important not so much for what it would add
to our possession of deathless poetry, but rather for how such a discovery might enable
us to connect the ancient poetry we know to the ancient poetry that we have lost.
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That were, indeed, a genuine birth
Of poesy; a bursting forth
O f genius from the dust!
What Horace gloried to behold,
What Maro loved, shall we unfold?
Can haughty Time be just?
In this poem about the deathless power of verse, the climax is an imagined discovery of
dead poetry, a “genuine birth” that is more like a resurrection. Also, this birth of
poetry is not only fanciful, it is located in a deep and irretrievable past, a birth that
while allowing us to behold what Horace and Virgil read and loved, does not betoken
any similar birth of poetry now. While the first five stanzas of this poem treat of the
possibilities of poetry in the present tense, the final four stanzas locate those
possibilities in a distinctly past tense. The birth of poetry is tied not to acts of creative
genius but to acts of preservation that create links to the past. Perhaps it was this
almost antiquarian delight in the possibilities of the past that led Arnold to class this
poem as akin to the antique. But as the opening of the poem which follows this one in
Arnold’s edition confirms—with the phrase “An age hath been”—what is antique
about these poems is the yearning towards the past and more importantly the seeming
belief in the possibility of such recoveries. What is antique about these antique poems
is not a question of form or narrative but one of desire, and for Arnold it is this desire
itself that is past recovery. The question for Wordsworth and Arnold, “Can haughty
Time be just?”, remains unanswered.
That time could not be trusted to be just is the underlying assumption behind
Arnold’s edition of Wordsworth. To preserve and present Wordsworth’s “power” to
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the “English-speaking public and to the world” is Arnold’s avowed object (Poetry and
Criticism 345). As he states in his introduction to his selection of Byron’s poetry, his
editorial work is a “service” both to the reputation of the poet and “to the poetic glory
of our country” (361). But Arnold’s “skillfully made anthology,” his collection of
Wordsworthian touchstones substitutes for Pater’s literary aesthetic initiation “a halo
for a physiognomy . . . a statue where there was once a man.” Arnold quotes these
phrases from a contemporary French critic in his “Study of Poetry” as representative of
what he calls critical “charlatanism,” which confuses or obliterates “the distinctions
between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue
or only half-true” (307). Arnold would have us substitute for this “charlatanism,” the
touchstones of poetry which through their purported distinction enable the reader to lay
claim to distinction. Yet like Pater’s mystified transformation from novice to initiate,
Arnold claims that the distinctiveness must remain undefined, that “if we are asked to
define this mark or accent in the abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should
thereby be darkening the question, not clearing it” (313-4).
To provide a service to the “poetic glory” of his country, Arnold must create a
universal, globalized poet, a Wordsworth who writes not the nation but nature. This is
necessary because Arnold envisions culture as a global competition, and to Arnold the
great shame about Wordsworth is that he is virtually unknown on the continent. In a
letter to his sister, Arnold speaks to this global competition, hoping that “this collection
of mine may win for [Wordsworth] some appreciation on the Continent,” an
appreciation due because “Wordsworth’s body of work... is superior to the body of
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work of any Continental poet of the last hundred years except Goethe” (Letters 3: 48).
It is in this context of international competition of national poets that Arnold’s
configuration of the lyrical Wordsworth belongs. If Arnold obliterates the local and
historical Wordsworth, it is to create a national representative, “one of the very chief
glories of English poetry,” which Arnold believes will be better suited to upholding his
overtly nationalist claim that “by nothing is England so glorious as by her poetry”
(Poetry and Criticism, 346).
Both Pater and Arnold claim for Wordsworth this place on the world stage, and
both feel the need to strip Wordsworth of the localism and parochialism that had been
Wordsworth’s most celebrated and criticized characteristic. Such a configuration of
Wordsworth was essential to a global critical vision, to asserting the (prominent) place
of English literature within the competitive world of other national literatures, both
historical and contemporary. While this universalizing of Wordsworth was
undoubtedly instrumental in and, historically speaking, essential to establishing
Wordsworth’s reputation, equally instrumental was the contemporaneous attempt to
clarify and monumentalize Wordsworth’s association with the specific locations of his
life and work. While still the poet of nature, the local Wordsworth used by Rawnsley
and the preservation movement was the poet of particular places in nature, specific
sites preserved in his poetry and themselves worthy of preservation.
Chief amongst those cultural needs which gave rise to the preservation
movement is the nostalgia produced by the sense of dislocation brought on by the
bewildering speed of changes which began during Wordsworth’s lifetime and has
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continued unabated to the present. Wordsworth himself was nostalgic for those earlier
times and assiduous in his attempts to preserve something of that past. For
Wordsworth though, the question was not simply one of preservation for its own sake,
but preservation of those ancient manners, a kind of moral life that he felt was
disappearing from the landscape. His call for the creation of a “national property” in
the Lake District, made as early as 1810, was not simply an aesthetic or nationalist
plea, but, as described in the previous chapter, a political one which sought to attach
the reading of landscape to the proper sentiments of a citizen of the nation. But just as
Arnold’s “Memorial Verses” record an anxiety of belatedness, a nostalgia literally for
the possibility of nostalgia itself, the preservation of Wordsworth country preserves not
the ancient manners that Wordsworth sought to preserve but the poet nostalgic for such
ancient manners. While Wordsworth walked the landscape in search of a nation’s
history in small things, countless others have followed him, some with the Guide in
hand, in search of Wordsworth himself. While Wordsworth sought the speaking
monuments of the unmonumentalized landscape, the National Trust and other like-
minded organizations have sought to monumentalize that landscape and make the
monuments speak Wordsworth’s own history.
If the landscape itself, the scenes formed by our own practice of view-hunting, is
a museum, then it is not surprising that it too is subject to the contrary appeals of a
universal aesthetic and a localized narrative. Stephen Greenblatt, writing on the appeal
of the museum exhibition, identifies these two contrary though often simultaneous
responses as “wonder” and “resonance,” our desire to be stirred by the marvelous, the
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strange and the beautiful, as well as our desire to tell stories about the object or
experience, or rather our ability to read in it the thickness of historical context which is
itself a collection of stories. For Greenblatt, both responses are tied to fantasies of
appropriation, wonder feeding the desire to possess that which we cannot possess, to
take a portion of the cultural cache of the object to ourselves; and resonance initiating
our ability to contextualize and therefore contain the object.1 0 Because Wordsworth’s
poetry so frequently makes use of both the universal appeal and the personal response,
it was inevitable that his response would then become to countless literary tourists the
universal appeal of the landscape he recorded.
There is of course no irony in the fact that Wordsworth’s private responses have
become the resonances of the Lake District landscape. Had he been and remained an
obscure writer of no interest, such private utterances committed to the public record
would have remained for all practical purposes private. Nor is it particularly ironic that
the landscape he read has become so inscribed by his presence that it practically cannot
be read without that presence, for this appropriative reading of the local is, as critics
since Hazlitt have been quick to point out, one of the primary features of Wordsworth’s
poetry. In some of Wordsworth’s earliest inscriptive poetry, those poems collected in
1800 under the title “Poems on the Naming of Places,” we find this feature presented
as a kind of poetic procedure. In the “Advertisement” prefixed to the poems,
Wordsworth invokes an unmapped territory where “places will be found unnamed or of
unknown names.” These places are therefore available for a kind of initial inscription,
a naming which is available though only to the local residents, those “attached to rural
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3 9 5
objects” (LB 241). While this attachment implies a precondition for the act of naming
as well as a privilege required by and granted to the one who names, attachment also
implies the possession one takes of the landscape itself through naming. While the
name might grow from some “private and peculiar Interest,” the name itself privatizes
the landscape. Stout of wind and limb, and with an Ordnance Survey map in hand, we
can go off the public way and find the unfinished sheepfold, Point Rash Judgment and
the eminence named for the poet of commonplace things. These sites have been
privatized by Wordsworth, but our reading of the resonance enables us to privatize
Wordsworth. Wordsworth might possess the land, but we possess the Great Decade
Wordsworth and Wordsworth country.
In a recent study of the debates leading up to the 1842 Copyright Act, Chris R.
Vanden Bossche notes that “Wordsworth was the author most often cited as deserving
better remuneration for his works and their service to the nation” (61), but one could
argue that it was the Victorian preservation movement and Matthew Arnold who
created the configurations of Wordsworth that have proven most serviceable to the
nation. The idealized nation, the imagined community of shared interests, is brought
into existence by writing but made real by a revision that coerces all writing under a
single unified sign. The Great Decade Wordsworth and the Lake District Wordsworth
are constructions of a nation seeking its own unified representation. The poet attempts
to write the nation and the nation revises the poet into its own image, the poet both
creator and creature. The statistical man, the triangulated land, the preserved past, and
the poet who stands in purported opposition, all sanctify the process of classification
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3 9 6
and buttress the construction of a neutered self capable of feeling but not action.
Isolated not participating, preserved not changing, these constructions of Wordsworth
have proven to have the greatest utility: the domestic and domesticated poet, made to
oppose the everyday world he celebrated, singing of retreat from worldly cares. The
service to the nation provided by the census, map, museum, and the Victorian
construction of Wordsworth is the construction of a normative national identity safely
divested of any characteristics that might threaten the nation. Certainly no small
service, but true service while it lasts.
Notes
1 Visitor statistics courtesy of Sylvia Wordsworth of The Wordsworth Trust, from a
personal communication 16 October 1997.
2 Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 4-13,
363-412. Lowenthal also identifies nationalism as a related impulse towards
preservation: “vernacular languages, folklore, material arts, and antiquities became foci
of group consciousness and folk identity for Europe’s emergent—and often
beleaguered—nation-states” (393).
3 Rawnsley’s about-face is discussed in Somervell’s autobiography Robert Somervell
(London: Faber & Faber, 1935), 50-6.
4 Rawnsley quotes this phrasing from the Select Committee formed to investigate a
proposal to build a railway along Lake Ennerdale. See E. F. Rawnsley, Canon
Rawnsley: An Account o f his Life (Glasgow: MacLehose, Jackson: 1923), 53.
5 This charge was leveled by The Whitehaven News, and is quoted in J. D. Marshall and
J. K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to Mid-twentieth Century (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1981), 214.
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6 Hunter makes this claim in the promotional pamphlet The National Trust: Its Aims
and Its Works, published in 1897, and quoted in Jennifer Jenkins and Patrick James,
From Acorn to Oak Tree: The Growth o f the National Trust 1895-1994 (London:
Macmillan, 1994), 28.
7 These remarks are made by William Angus Knight in the preface to Wordsworthiana:
A Selection from Papers Read to the Wordsworth Society (London: MacMillan & Co.,
1889), xv.
n
Abrams argues the ascendancy of the lyric in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic
Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 70-99.
Since a general assumption of this study is that versions of Wordsworth like the “Great
Decade” poet have been constructed—by Wordsworth, his supporters, his critics, and
later editors and critics—to satisfy specific historical contingencies, Abrams argument
for a shift from epic to lyric as explanatory of the “Great Decade” Wordsworth is
something o f a tautology.
9 The sonnet on the Duke d’Enghien was titled “Sonnet on the Disintemment of the
Duke d’Enghien” when originally published in the Thanksgiving Ode volume of 1816.
It was later retitled “Feelings of a Royalist on the Disintemment of the Duke
d’Enghien.” For more on the contemporary background to “Dion,” see John Paul
Pritchard’s “On the Making of Wordsworth’s ‘Dion’” Studies in Philology, 49 (January
1952), 66-74, and Zera S. Fink, “‘Dion’ and Wordsworth’s Political Thought,” Studies
in Philology, 50 (July 1953), 510-4.
1 0 Greenblatt, writing on museum exhibition and display practices, defines resonance
as “the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a
larger world,” and wonder as “the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in
his or her tracks” (42). While Greenblatt frequently opposes resonance and wonder, he
suggests that “every exhibition worth viewing has both” (54). See Stephen Greenblatt,
“Resonance and Wonder,” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics o f Museum
Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1991), 42-56.
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