SHELACH 1. SQUIRE Department of Geography, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1 S 586

WORDSWORTH AND LAKE DISTRICT TOURISM: ROMANTIC RESHAPING OF LANDSCAPE Creative literature colours popular perception of land- scape and place. An analysis of English romanticism, Wordsworth’s poetry in particular, illustrates how the transformation of an actual landscape into a literary landscape helped change attitudes toward wilderness and natural beauty. The romantic ideology fostered im- pressions of an idyllic, untamed Eden. In response to public fascination with this mythologized and emotional portrait of place, a tourist landscape emerged. Thus even those unfamiliar with romantic literature are encouraged to see particular landscapes from a literary perspective.

Dans la formation d’une perception envers un paysage ou un endroit, un element important est souvent la litter- ature imaginaire. Une analyse du romantisme anglais, en particulier la poesie de Wordsworth, demontre com- ment la transformation d’un paysage actuel sous une forme litteraire contribua fortement a un changement d’attitude envers la nature. Cette id6ologie romantique encouragea la notion d’un jardin d’Eden encore sau- vage. l a fascination entretenue par ce portrait mythique crea finalement un environnement touristique. Meme ceux qui n‘ont gube connaissance en litterature roman- tique ont une vision d‘un paysage particulier qui derive dune perception litteraire.

Few literary movements have had such sweeping intel- lectual and socio-cultural ramifications as ‘romanti- cism.’ Names like Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Coleridge evoke images in place as well as time, and this imagery has influenced the perception of certain geographic areas. This paper seeks to assess the geographical im- plications of English romantic literature, paying particu- lar attention to its integral role in shaping and creating ’place.’

To set this kind of analysis within a conceptual

framework, it i s important to identify some of the links between geography and creative literature and to trace the temporal and intellectual derivations of romantic thought. Subsequent consideration of the way in which romantic writers, specifically William Wordsworth, por- trayed landscape shows how the romantic world-view fundamentally changed prevailing attitudes toward scenery and natural beauty. The popularity of romantic literature has also fostered tourism; hordes of visitors, anxious to recreate the emotional experiences in place described by a literary idol, still descend on areas im- mortalized in poetry or prose.

A study of literary landscapes yields fertile ground for geographical scholarship. The work of a perceptive and environmentally sensitive writer may offer a highly accurate pictureof a place in time. in romantic literature this portrait i s coloured by intense emotion, and such elusive and subliminal dimensions of landscape provoke endless fascination.

Origins of Romanticism

Geographers have long recognized the special insights that creative literature may bring to a study of socio- cultural and environmental phenomena. indeed, this complementary relationship was first identified by John K. Wright in 1924. ’Some men of letters are endowed with a highly developed geographical instinct. As wri- ters, they have trained themselves to visualize even more clearly than the professional geographer those re- gional elements of the earth’s surface most significant to the general run of humanity.” Wright was a highly orig- inal and progressive thinker, and, as a geographer, he was several generations ahead of his contemporaries. Only recently, with the rise of more humanistic approaches to the discipline, have a number of scholars again begun to examine the geographical dimensions of

The Canadian Geographer/ Le Gkgraphe canadien 32, no 3 (1 988) 237-47 0 / 1988 Canadian Association of Geographers / L‘Association canadienne des geographes

literary landscapes. The focus of current thought, however, is shifting slowly from purely regional analysis to interpretation of landscapes as repositories for hidden meanings of place, experience, attitudes, and values.’ Although romantic authors drew inspiration from an actual landscape, they depicted an idealized and mythologized version of reality. An assessment of the romantic genre i s a quintessentially humanistic task, open to both speculation and a wide range of interpreta- tions.

The term romanticism is broadly based and thus re- sists precise definition. In a historical sense, ’it refers to the literature, and in lesser degree the painting, music, and some of the philosophy, produced in the period 1780-1 830, the period of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the nationalistic movements in Greece, Italy, and Germany that f ~ l l o w e d . ’ ~ Other fields have established slightly different temporal limits. In En- glish literature, the romantic period lies between rough- ly 1798 andl 832 - the publication of lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and the death of Sir Walter Scot4 Some critics cite Blake’s Songs oflnnocence and €xperience (1 789) as romantic literature, and the deaths of Keats in 1821 and Shelley in 1822 as the end of the romantic phase.’Some have emphasized William Gil- pin‘s influence, arguing that his Observations of the Riv- er Wye and Several far t r of South Wales (1 770) fostered a new way of looking at landscape, which was unques- tionably romantic.’

Gilpin perfected the art of seeing the natural environ- ment aesthetically and was clearly influenced by the picturesque movement. A precursor of sensibility and romanticism, picturesque thought used the eye for sensation, not just for information.’ In his tours through Britain, Gilpin ’never departed from the purity of his aesthetic principles. He was concerned solely with the visual aspect of the scene, and would not allow any other considerations to affect his judgement.’’ At Tintern Abbey, for example, later immortalized by Wordsworth, Cilpin’s comments provide clear evidence that he evalu- ated landscape through the medium of the picturesque:

When we stood at one end of this awful piece of ruin; and surveyed the whole in one view - the elements of air, and earth, its only covering, and pavement; and the grand, and venerable remains, which terminated both - perfect enough to form the perspective; yet broken enought to destroy the regular- ity; the eye was above measure delighted with the beauty, the greatness, and the novelty of the scene. More picturesque it certainly would have been, if the area, unadorned, had been left with a l l its rough fragments of ruin scattered round; and

bold was the hand that removed them: yet as the outside of the ruin, which is thechief object of picturesque curiosity, is still left in a l l its wild, and native rudeness; we excuse - perhaps we approve - the neatness, that is introduced ~ i t h i n . ~

A thematic interpretation of romanticism i s just as arbitrary as a historical definition. Although romantic literature is characterized by an insistence on the emo- tional instead of the rational, and the natural as opposed to the urban, the dates of such ideological shifts cannot be precisely documented. Romanticism is understood perhaps best as part of an intellectual continuum: it was nurtured by the picturesque and the age of sensibility and, in a radically altered form, has affected literary expression and landscape attitudes into the 20th cen- tury. This assumption does not preclude the significance of romanticism in art and music, but those aspects lie beyond the scope of the present paper.

Romantic literature helped to foster public apprecia- tion of wild country and primitivism, but the magnitude of its influence can be understood only in relation to pre-existing attitudes toward nature.” Since ancient times, wilderness and the natural world have generally been viewed with ambivalence. In the Bible, humans were cast out into an evil and desolate wilderness as a symbol of their rejection by God.” Concurrently, however, nature also played a spiritual role, serving as a place of refuge, contemplation, and purification.” Yet, until the flowering of the romantic ideology in the late 18th century, Western culture tended to see nature very negatively. In contrast to cities, which as products of Baroque rationality reflected the prevailing desire for order and control, wilderness was considered chaotic and therefore dangerous. Daniel Defoe, for example, described Wales in 1724 as a country ’full of horror’13 and saw no beauty in a mountain vista. Rather, it appeared to him ‘a ridge of horrid rocks and preci- p i ce~ . ’ ’ ~ This perceptual orientation dominated most of the 18th century and is perhaps best illustrated by the response of many Alpine travellers to mountain scenery. To protect themselves against the fearsome sight of ‘yawning precipices,‘ they made the journey blind- folded or under cover of darkne~s.‘~

mirrored prevailing environmental attitudes, and this philosophy was later identified as neo-classicism. That school‘s adherents had no interest in wilderness. They were concerned primarily with ’the urban rather than the rustic, in maturity rather than in youth [and] in the civilized present rather than the ruder past.‘16 Such themes were of course antithetical to the romantic im-

As Defoe’s comments suggest, literature of the period

Wordsworth and Lake District Tourism 239

agination, but reaction to neo-classicism, and the mechanization and regulation of the universe that it im- plied, first emerged through the picturesque movement and was then further expressed in the concept of sensi- bi I ity .

As a strand of pre-romantic thought, sensibility was most clearly articulated in sentimental philosophy. Based on premises of inherent human morality and the sanctity of the natural world, this doctrine held that ‘man would find the response to his own instinctive goodness, its sanction and support in the Genius of Nature, the beauty and harmony of which assured him that the uni- verse was the best of all possible worlds.’” As expressed in literary form, this particular view helped to change attitudes toward natural landscapes. In a blank-verse poem entitled The Enthusiast, or the lover of Nature (1 744), Warton succinctly identified the main tenets of sensibility and, by extension, what later evolved into romanticism. Thus, he condemned ’cities, formal gar- dens, conventional society, business [and] law courts,’18 while professing ‘love for the simple life, soli- tude, mountains, stormy oceans, [and] instinctively no- ble sa~ages.’’~ Most significant, however, poets like Warton felt that ‘poetic originality was wholly a product of nature.’20 Direct, as opposed to vicarious, contact with the natural world was deemed essential to the kind of emotional experience in landscape that had become the basis of literary expression.

pre-romantic poets, beginning to revel in the natural environment, were clearly expressing radical, if not re- volutionary ideas. Yet, as this ‘nature poetry’ became an increasingly popular literary genre, the basic themes of romantic literature were slowly being integrated into contemporary thought and, in the process, led to new kinds of environmental attitudes.

In light of existing attitudes toward wild country, these

The Romantic ideology

The work of William Wordsworth offers a particularly good illustration of the romantic ideology; his poetry synthesized a number of isolated ideas and, in conjunc- tion with his intense emotional affiliation with the Lake District, conveyed his impressions of place and experi- ence in ways that few could aspire to match. Critics refer to lyrical Ballads, published in co-operation with Coleridge in 1798, as a ‘turning point in English literature.’2’ In retrospect, this collection of poetry sig- nalled a turning-point also in perception of environment and in world-view.

Wordsworth based lyrical Ballads on ‘incidents and

situations from common life’,22 but from the romantic perspective, ’common life’ was that of the rural peasant, living in complete harmony with nature. When tran- scribed in poetic form, primitive existence was coloured highly by both imagination and emotion. In ’We Are Seven,’ for example, Wordsworth described his encoun- ter with a young cottage child thus.

I met a little cottage Girl: She was eight years old, she said: Her hair was thick with many a curl That clustered round her head.

She had a rustic woodland air, And she was wildly clad: Her eyes were fair, and very fair; Her beauty made me glad.23

This passage incorporates effectively many of the themes and images commonly associated with romantic litera- ture. The primitive, rural figure, ’wildly clad,’ and with ‘a rustic woodland air,’ is perhaps the most clearly identifiable; but, in choosing a child as his protagonist, Wordsworth was employing another well-known romantic device. Romantics were fascinated by the state of childhood; childhood innocence, closely allied with the natural world, was mythologized and idealized as a vanished golden age.

This theme recurs throughout much of Wordworth’s poetry. In ‘Michael, a Pastoral Poem’ (1 800), a child ‘Brings hope with it, and foward looking thoughts’ and i s eulogized as the best gift ‘that earth can offer to declin- ing man.’24 Loss of innocence, as incurred with the approach of adulthood, is lamented in ’Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807). As seen through the rose-tinted glass of memory, childhood gains spiritual and utopian dimensions.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Appareled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore - Turn whereso-er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.25

In the glow of ’celestial light,’ nature, like childhood, is sanctified, but in attempting to retrieve this state of childhood innocence through contact with nature, Wordsworth, and his contemporaries, were recreating

240 Shelagh 1. Squire ____ -~

the face of the natural world within a framework of their own perceptions and ideologies.

The Lake District - consisting of Cumberland and Westmorland - forms ‘a cartwheel pattern of lakes and valleys.’26 The dales are separated by ridges that fos- tered the development of isolated and self-reliant com- munities. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the eco- nomic fabric of the area was tied to farming, mining, and other industrial activities. Thus even while Words- worth was writing, the Lake District was by no means a pristine natural environment. Although the lack of a well-developed transportation network made the area less accessible than most other parts of the county, cen- turies of human settlement had left indelible marks on landscape.

The physical geography of the Lake District resulted from volcanic action and the effects of glaciation. These processes produced the rocks, lakes, and valleys that inspired the romantic imagination. Equally significant, though, was the cultural geography of place. It ‘was not, primarily, the Romans building their Wall, or the barons, their castles, or the monks, their monasteries who helped to make the landscape of Cumberland and Westmorland, but the men with the axe and the plough, the sheep-farmers, the quarrymen and the miner^.'^' In their fascination with the aesthetic dimensions of land- scape, the romantics either ignored or idealized such aspects of the living scene and enhanced the lineaments of physical geography with emotional and imaginative overtones.

Romantic poetry fits squarely into the humanistic vein, for, as defined by Wordsworth, his poetry resulted from a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’” Similarly, and although they approached literary art from different perspectives, Coleridge, Blake, and Shel- ley all conceived of poetry as reflecting the poet’s ‘im- aginative vision.’29 It is therefore this emotional re- sponse to place and experience, deemed essential to poetic expression, that distinguishes romantic poetry from other literary genres and, as such, merits further consideration.

Even though the romantic experience with place typi- cally occurred in a natural setting, romantic poetry is not simply the portrayal of landscape in verse. Rather, the romantics took an ‘actual’ landscape, in Wordsworth‘s case the Lake District, coloured i t with imagination and intense emotion, and created literary art. In the process, they also imbued landscape with elements of ‘human life, passion, and expre~siveness,’~~ and identified cor- responding links between the natural and spiritual worlds. Again, Wordsworth’s poetry articulates these

ideas most succinctly, and excerpts from ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ (1 798) illuminate this facet of the roman- tic ideology:

I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran, And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.3’

The themes of lost innocence and the golden age are inplicit, but just as significant are references to the hu- man soul irrevocably joined with nature at a specific point in time. Wordsworth further emphasized the sym- bolic and spiritual role of ‘Nature’ in the concluding lines of the poem when he referred to its ’holy plan‘ and lamented the course of human de~t iny.~’ Capitalization of the word ‘Nature’ throughout the poem highlights its allegorical significance.

The inherent morality of nature is even more clearly expressed in another set of verses. Claiming that there is more wisdom in nature than in books, Wordsworth pleads:

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things - We murder to dissect.33

These lines ardently state appreciation for the natural world as a place of purification and sanctification and stridently attack the ’meddling intellect’ of the neo- classicists.

Wordsworth’s emotional and literary response to what the romantic eye saw as natural beauty was not bounded by the confines of his native Lake District. Like many of his contemporaries, including Coleridge and Southey, he sought solitude, an essential ingredient of the roman- tic experience, on a walking tour in Wales.34 The Welsh landscape provided him with the inspiration for ‘Tintern Abbey’ - published in conjunction with Lyrical Ballads in 1798 - a classic romantic effusion of an intensely individual and, hence, emotional experience with

Wordsworth and Lake District Tourism 241

place. Indeed, the opening stanza i s virtually a model for the romantic style, with its melancholy tone, nostal- gic focus, and use of environmental imagery:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur. Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves ’Mid groves and copses. Once again I see These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild’ these pastoral farms, Green to the very door’ and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone.35

This landscape is almost too perfect, with the blissful, rustic peasant, set once again amid the lush beauty of solitary pastoralism. Wordsworth did not have to suffer in the ’romantic’ landscape to the degree that many small farmers did; hence, his favourable impressions of rural life. Yet this kind of portrait, so typical of the romantic vision, further substantiates the view that the romantic poets ‘added something to reality in the pro- cess of representing it.’36

Although in English literature romanticism is com- monly associated with the life and work of William Wordsworth, brief mention must also be made of some of his contemporaries, most notably Samuel Coleridge. As friend and collaborator, Coleridge lamented the pas- sage of time and loss of childhood innocence in much the same way as did Wordsworth. This idea is expressed succinctly in his ‘Sonnet to the River Otter’ (1 796):

Dear native Brook! Wild Streamlet of the West! How many various-fated years have past, What happy and what mournful hours, since last I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast, Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes I never shut amid the sunny ray,

But straight with all their tints thy waters rise, Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey And bedded sand that veined with various dyes Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way Visions of Childhood! oft have ye beguiled Lone manhood’s cares, yet waking fondest sighs: Ah! that once more I were a careless Child!37

The tone is both melancholy and nostalgic, and again nature is associated with the golden age of childhood innocence. A vanished past that probably never existed as described both fascinated and tantalized the romantic imagination. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge imbued na- ture with spiritual qualities and compared a landscape vista with ‘the wide wide Heaven,‘ with a ’many stee- pled tract magnificentlof hilly fields and meadows, and the sea.’38 In contrast to this heaven ’of such hues/As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits per- ceive his presence,’ is the city where humans are pent up, ‘winning [their] way ... through evil and pain/And strange ~alamity!’~’ The religious overtones that colour the whole poem offer yet another illustration of the romantic view of nature: a form of sacred space for both emotional and spiritual regeneration.

Critics of romanticism have tended to group romantic authors into separate schools.40 Wordsworth, Cole- ridge, and Robert Southey, who all drew inspiration from the Lake District, have been categorized as the ’Lake School.’ Keats belonged to the ‘Cockney School,’ and Byron and Shelley to the ’Satanic School.’ Such attempts at thematic classification, however, seem arbi- trary when one seeks to delineate a common romantic ideology. Most significant is that ‘the Romantics . . . cre- ated worlds of their own [and] succeeded in persuading others that these were not absurd or merely fan~i fu l . ’~ ’ In essence, they fostered an appreciation of ’place’ in the mind of the reader because the kind of scenery and landscape vistas embraced as literary settings had been terra incognita in the neo-classical world-view. In the case of the Lake Poets, or Sir Walter Scott, who took an actual landscape and portrayed it in literary form, en- vironmental reality soon became inseparable from that which was of imaginative origin. The romantic vision of place helped to obscure the actuality of place: although the resultant literary landscape was partially a landscape of the imagination, there i s also strong evidence to sug- gest that many romantic poets experienced literature in landscape. Chided by a friend for wasting his time dreaming on an ‘old gray stone’ instead of devoting him- self to books and other scholarly endeavours, Words- worth replied:

Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness.

Think you, ‘mid all this mighty sum Of things forever speaking, That nothing of itself will come, But we must sti l l be seeking?“’

Communion with nature i s clearly identified as the source of literary inspiration. The poet’s affinity with the natural world, a ’mighty sum of things forever speaking,‘ implies that he found poetry in landscape, as opposed to simply using landscape as the basis for poetry.

This particular interpretation is of course purely spec- ulative, but, more than any other school of poets, the romantics sought to uncover the hidden dimensions of place and experience through careful observation of their surroundings and ’a high degree of physical ~ensibi l i ty . ’~~ indeed, ’the world of the senses .. . was the instrument which set their visionary powers in action [and] it affected them at times in such a way that they seemed to be carried beyond it into a transcendental order of things.’44 Through the medium of literary art, they were able to ‘throw a new and magic light‘ on the common face of the natural ~ o r l d . “ ~ Their experiences in a natural setting led many romantics to ‘those exalting moments when they passed from sight to vision and pierced, as they thought, to the secrets of the universe.’46 By portraying in literary form, the ‘essence’ of such experiences, however, they reshaped the natural landscape in ways that proved appealing to public sentiment.

literary landscape as Tourist landscape

Throughout the neo-classical period, some aspects of nature had been subjected to stringent principles of order and control. The Baroque garden, with its geomet- ric paths, clipped hedges, and ornate fountains, i s one of the best examples of the neo-classical ideology as ex- pressed on landscape, but as the romantic movement gained momentum, attitudes toward scenery and natural beauty shifted. Gradually, mist-enshrouded lakes, mountain crags, and rustic huts became both aestheti- cally appealing and fashionable as romantic aficionados sought to recreate literary experiences in place.

Prior to the late 18th century, Lake District tourism was non-existent. Celia Fiennes visited Cumberland in

1698 as part of her ‘Great Journey to Newcastle and Cornwall,’ but she had none of the obsession with natu- ral scenery that later preoccupied the ‘romantic’ travellers. She simply described what she saw with little or no embellishment. Near Lake Windermere, for in- stance, she commented:

Thence I rode almost al l the waye in sight of this great water; some tymes I lost it by reason of the great hills interposeing and so a continu’d up hill and down hill and that pretty steep even when I was in that they called bottoms, which are very rich good grounds, and so I gained by degrees from lower to higher hills . . . at last I attained to the side of one of these hills or fells of rocks ... Looking down to the bottom it was at least a mile all full of those lesser hills and inclosures, so looking upward I was as farre from the top which was al l rocks and something more barren tho’ there was some trees and woods growing in the rocks and hanging over all down the brow of some of the hills; from these great fells there are severall springs out of the rock that trickle down their sides.47

The account is particularly significant because her literal descriptions indicate that ’she had little idea of what she was going to see and none at all of what she ought to feel about it.‘48 The journal where she recorded her impres- sions of landscape and place was not, at least initially, intended for publication, and thus it represents perhaps ‘the last truly unconditioned reflex to Cumberland land~cape . ’~~

Fiennes was followed by Daniel Defoe, who reiter- ated prevailing 18th-century attitudes toward wild coun- try. His Tour through England and Wales took him across parts of the Lake District, and he described West- morland as ‘a country eminent only for being the wild- est, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even in Wales it self.’50 It was not until 1767, when DrJohn Brown published a Descrip- tion of the lake and Vale of Keswick, that attitudes to- ward nature began to ~hange .~ ’ Brown was followed by the poet Thomas Gray, but in fostering romantic tour- ism, Gilpin’s influence was again highly significant. He visited the Lake District in 1772 and published his im- pressions as a guide book in 1786. He encouraged travellers not only to examine ’the face of a country but [to] examine it by the rules of picturesque beauty.‘52 Other guidebooks followed; lauding the virtues of scenic tourism, they helped to transform the Lake Dis- trict into a recognized tourist d e ~ t i n a t i o n . ~ ~

The importance of Wordsworth in popularizing the Lake District, and indeed in synthesizing this trans-

Wordsworth and Lake District Tourism 243

formation of literary place into tourist place, should not be underestimated. His poetry has ‘made each place he mentions a place of pilgrimage, and he has probably added more names than any other writer to a literary map of England.’54 Wordsworth is also central to the modern British tourist industry. Tarns How, for example, is ’visited by some 500,000 people a year, with more than 600 present at peak period^."^ Indeed, the images of place that Wordsworth created in his poetry now su- persede and transcend environmental actuality.

of an illustrated Guide to the Lake District, Wordsworth encouraged both elite and popular forms of tourist travel. In each case, though, tourism was place specific, as visitors were anxious to experience the particular geographic settings that had given rise to Wordsworth’s philosophy, or simply to see the areas associated with the poet’s life and work.

Initially, Wordsworth’s poetry appealed to an edu- cated elite. Scenic tourism resulting from this appeal was therefore limited to ‘persons of taste’ - the poet’s label for those able to appreciate the subtle nuances of landscape and place that he had attempted to articulate and convey.56 Wordsworth’s presence at Grasmere attracted to the area other intellectuals who later wrote about their impressions and experiences in place. Tho- mas De Quincey’s comments reveal the Wordswor- thian-romantic influence on the way in which this group of ‘tourists’ saw landscape. De Quincey’s description of the valley of Easedale near Grasmere i s rich in romantic imagery:

Through the use of place in his verse and as the author

Easedale is impressive as a solitude; for the depth of the seclu- sion is brought out and forced more pointedly upon the feelings by the thin scattering of houses over its sides, and over the surface of what may be called its floor.. . It is impressive from the excessive loveliness which adorns its little area ... But there is a third advantage possessed by this Easedale, above other rival valleys, in the sublimity of its mountain barriers. In one of i ts many rocky recesses is seen a ’force’ ... white with foam, descending at all seasons with considerable strength, and, after the melting of snows, with an Alpine violence. Follow the lead- ing of this ‘force’ for three quarters of a mile, and you come to a little mountain lake, locally termed a ’tarn’, the very finest and most gloomily sublime of its class. From this tarn it was, I doubt not, though applying it to another, that Wordsworth drew the circumstances of his general description. And far beyond this ’enormous barrier‘, that thus imprisons the very winds, tower upwards the aspiring heads (usually enveloped in cloud and mist) of Claramara, Bow Fell, and the other fells of Langdale

Head and Borrowdale. Easedale, in its relation to Crasmere, is a chamber within a chamber, or rather a closet within a cham- ber - a chapel within a cathedral - a little private oratory within a chapeL5’

Wordsworth’s poetry fostered an intellectual kind of tourism, focused on the emotional recreation of literary inspired experiences with landscape and place. Even in the late 19th century truly aesthetic, intellectually moti- vated travellers were still recording their impressions in Wordsworthian cadences. William Palmer, for exam- ple, described a vista between Rydal and Grasmere thus:

This sunny autumn morn the eye takes in the atmosphere of the scene even more than its component features ... the peaks soaring into the gleaming air become less important than the glorious woods at their feet. Autumn’s gorgeous art is vivid on fell and wood and meadow. The beauty of the scene lies in Nature’s harmonious blendings, and one feels that only the poet’s imagery can describe the scene . . . At our feet a feathery cloudlet sails in a second sky. So clear, so perfect, the counter- feit that even the charming mystery of height remains. The summit curving against the autumnal blue, the purple crags, the screes, here grey, there blue, there a finer tinge where rock, grass, and heather meet, the turgid flood of colour where the bracken is dying, the solid green of the larch woods, the softer plumes of birch, the fiery oaks, the fading green meadows, are all in this peaceful mirror.58

Rich in utopian imagery, this typically romantic portrait of place graphically reveals the literary influence in shaping tourist perceptions and attitudes.

equally revealing: Palmer’s reaction to views on Windermere Lake i s

As the steamer goes on, the scene grows in grandeur. Over a vast plain of water the distant mountains seem to hang. There are misty indications of level meadows and woodlands next the water, but the charm lies in the craggy, shaggy braes and the uprising summits. The woods continue - larch! larch! planted in harsh geometrical lines on the Furness side; the opposite, though really covered with villas, presents a happy, confused forest of oak and ash, sycamore, elm, beech, interspersed with hollies and great patches of underwood. The white foam of hawthorn flecks these hills in early summer; later, patches of gorse, in wild, unconsidered corners, brighten up the heavy green. Then come the heather and the heather bell, empurpling the higher ground; till September’s chilly nights turn the leafage to glories of gold and crimson, the brackens to red and russet.59

The kinds of images that Palmer’s prose evokes - gran- deur, mist, crags, and wild country - are distinctly romantic in origin. Currently, however, his recognition of the villas but conscious omission of them from his portrait exemplifies a common romantic tendency: reshaping the existingenvironment within an already established perceptual framework.

District tourism. At the end of the 18th century ‘the un- rest and bloodshed in Europe made the “Grand Tour” impracticable and attention was turned instead to the unexplored parts of the British Isles.’‘’ Yet, if Words- worth’s poetry encouraged an elite and intellectually oriented kind of travel, the mass circulation of his Guide to the Lake District helped to foster widespread tourist interest in the area. improved road travel had facilitated visitor access, but in 1847, when the first rail-line was extended into the Lake District, mass tourism was born, and it has continued to the present day. Wordsworth was vehemently opposed to rail expansion, but the 1835 edition of his Guide was clearly oriented toward the mass tourist.6’ He indicated the most favourable time of year to visit the area, suggested a possible itinerary, and described several excursions. His publisher inserted a list of local inns and distances between towns.62

altered the Lake District. Hotels were developed, and Windermere, for example, became a popular tourist centre.

The European political situation also encouraged Lake

Faciliated by rail expansion, mass tourism irrevocably

Gradually an element of commercialism crept into Lakeland, and soon many of the hotels around the shores of the major lakes had fleets of small boats which were hired out to visitors; and some inns were even equipped with small cannon, and on payment of a fee the guns were discharged to produce an echo -the more money paid, the louder the echo .._ And with the increase in the number of tourists came a corresponding expan- sion in the accommodation available; towns such as Penrith, Kendai and Cockermouth already possessed inns to cater for the needs of travellers, but by the eighteen thirties there were inns even in the most remote dales.h3

Palmer’s observations highlight the effects of mass tourism on landscape. Juxtaposed against his classic romantic effusions for place are a variety of indications that the original romantic landscape had gradually been transformed by tourism. References to ’yacht-racing,’ ’modern-built villas,’ and the ’soul-destroying haste‘ of motor traffic64 all suggest this process. Even more significant, wherever possible Palmer sought a land-

scape of the ’olden days’ amid the infrastructure of mod- ern tourist reality.65 He found Loweswater particularly appealing. ‘No glaring hotel, no road traversed by hoot- ing motorcars or rattling coaches. A man can sit far up the slope ... look down on placid water and quiet vale, and allow his mind to ramble back fifty or a hundred years. He can re-picture the old glen and its society.’66

In the Lake District, the transformation of a literary landscape into a tourist landscape was facilitated by romantic influences. Indeed, if current tourist brochures offer any indication, literary associations are still the basis of a thriving industry. Among the many attractions in the area are Wordsworth museums, several houses where the poet lived, now open to the public, and the ’old gray stone’ where he used to sit and reflect. There i s even the Wordsworth Hotel, offering four-star, luxury accommodation in the ’Very Heart of English Lakeland.‘67

This type of transformation occurred also in other parts of Britain.“ Wales, all but ignored for most of the 18th century, was ‘discovered‘ by the romantic imagina- tion. Popularized by Gilpin and Wordsworth, among others, the Welsh countryside attracted hundreds of travellers, anxious to view the ‘mountain torrents, water- falls, lakes, gloomy clouds, and muted c o l o ~ r s ’ ~ ~ that fashion had rendered sublime. In Scotland, the mass appeal of Sir Walter Scott’s novels encouraged tourist development in the Highlands. After publication of The Lady of the Lake in 181 0, there was a ‘rush of tourists to Loch Katrine and the Tros~achs.’~’ Indeed, public fas- cination with Scott’s romantic portrait of place was largely responsible for hotel construction in his home- land. As a Victorian newspaper editor, George Gilfillan, recorded in his memoir: ‘On all the roads leading to the Trossachs was suddenly heard the rushing of many char- iots and horsemen. Inns were crowded to suffocation.”’ Even today, the continued popularity of Scott’s work makes ‘Scott’s Countryside,’ as it is advertised in pro- motional brochures, a focus of tourist visitation.

When examined within the context of changing atti- tudes toward scenery and natural beauty, romanticism shows clearly how the face of reality alters under differ- ent perceptual guises. The romantic portrait of nature was highly selective and simply omitted landscape ele- ments that did not meet with romantic idealism and poetic expectations. Closer scrutiny of Wordsworth‘s ‘We Are Seven’ reveals a darker side of the romantic landscape. As cited, the poet waxed eloquent over the wholesome, rustic beauty of a cottage child. Yet, both a brother and a sister lay in the churchyard, and as the ‘little maid’ told the bard:

Wordsworth and Lake District Tourism 245

The first that died was sister Jane; In bed she moaning lay, Till God released her of her pain; And then she went away.

And when the ground was white with snow, And I could run and slide, My brother John was forced to go, And he lies by her side.’*

Childhood mortality and rural poverty tended to escape romantic notice, and this myopia became even more pronounced in romantic portraits of Wales. Indeed, although agricultural reporters ‘unanimously deplored the state of rural buildings and the squalid conditions under which most of the Welsh l i ~ e d , ” ~ a typical farm family, as seen through the romantic eye, was described as ’rosy-cheeked and sweet-tempered from their pure and natural life, eating in their spacious apartment of a kitchen, full of hanging sides of bacon, strings of vege- tables, and bright uten~ils.”~ The romantics demon- strated a similar blindness when confronted with the effects of industrial development and expansion. Seemingly oblivious to the factories, copper mines, and slate quarries that dotted the rural landscape, these seek- ers of majestic solitude saw, and later wrote about, a mythical Wales that had no existence beyond the bounds of their own fertile imaginations.

Conclusions

Since ‘the natural landscape is an indeterminate object it almost always contains enough diversity to allow the eye a great liberty in selecting, emphasizing and group- ing its element^."^ The romantics viewed the British landscape through a set of idealistic filters and reshaped their surroundings on the basis of this very specific per- ceptual orientation. As romantic literature captured pub- lic interest and attention, the romantic picture of place soon began to obscure the actuality of place. Coupled with an emerging desire among members of the social and intellectual elite to recreate the emotional experi- ences in place described by romantic authors, this pro- cess served as a catalyst for tourist development in many areas. Tourism, however, has wrought further changes in the romantic landscape. Tourist promoters, anxious to capitalize on the widespread appeal of romantic litera- ture, st i l l lose no opportunity to market literary associa- tions. Tourists are directed toward a series of ‘romantic’

sites and literary shrines and are thereby encouraged, both subtly and overtly, to see particular landscapes through the eyes of the writers who discovered them. Mountains, lakes, and scenic vistas are not admired solely on their own merits. Rather, they are deemed picturesque, and worthy of tourist attention, partially as a result of their portrayal in 19th-century romantic litera- ture.

Landscape is ‘rich in suggestion and vague emotional stimulu~,”~ and romantic poets seized upon such sub- liminal and highly individual elements of environmental experience as the basis for landscape description and ’nature’ poetry. Since much romantic literature is in- herently geographical, an examination of some com- mon romantic themes and images, as expressed in Wordsworth’s poetry, reveals a great deal about the ori- gins of particular environmental attitudes and changing responses to landscape and place.

When the effects of the industrial revolution could no longer be ignored, romantic idealism began to wane. Romantic imagery, however, has proved much more durable. Indeed, even those who have never read Wordsworth or Coleridge have access to romantic por- traits and impressions of place, as replicated and reinter- preted in tourist brochures. There are obviously many ways of seeing landscape, but, individual perspective and imaginative impulse notwithstanding, literature can significantly colour perceptions of place. Such is the case with romanticism. Although the romantic land- scape was essentially mythical, human preoccupation with this kind of mythologized reality takes an analysis of romantic literature beyond the bounds of literary criticism, into other intellectual spheres.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dr David Knight for his encouragement and constructive comments and to the editor and two anonymous referees for their helpful criticism.

Notes and References

1 John K. Wright ’Geography in literature’ Geographical Review 14 (1924) 659

2 Compare, for example, H.C. Darby ’The regional geography of Tho- mas Hardy’s Wessex’ Geographical Review 38 (1 948) 426-43 and Christopher L. Salter and William J. Lloyd Landscape in Literature Association of American Geographers, Resource Paper for College Geography No 76-3 (Washington, DC: 1977) with the following humanistic interpretations of literary landscapes: Yi-Fu Tuan ‘Litera- ture and geography: implications for geographical research‘ in David Ley and Marwyn S. Samuels eds Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems (Chicago: Maroufa 1978) 194-206; Douglas C.D.

246 Shelagh I. Squire

Pocock 'Imaginative literature and the geographer' in Douglas C.D. Pocock ed Humanistic Geography and Literature: Essays on the Ex- perience of Place (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble 1981) 1 17-22; J . Douglas Porteous 'Inscape: Landscapes of the mind in the Canadian and Mexican novels of Malcolm Lowry' Canadian Geographer 30 (Summer 1986) 123-31; and William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson- Housley eds Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1987)

3 Northrop Frye A Studv of English Romanticism (New York: Random House 19681 3

4 M. ti. Abrams ed The Norton Anthology of Englrsh Literature (New York: W.W. Norton 1975) 1283

5 C.M. Bowra The Romantic lmagination (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press 1961) 271

6 Christopher Mulvey Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press 19831 251

7 Norman Nicholson The Lakers: The First Tourists (London: Robert Hale 1972) 38

8 lbid40 9 William Cilpin Observations on the River Wye (1 770) (Richmond.

10 The word 'wilderness' carries a variety of biblical and North Amer- Surrey: Richmond Publishing 1973) 34-5

ican frontier connotations. In this context 'wild country' is thus more appropriate. Most of the Lake District, even in the 18th century, was not wilderness by biblical or North American standards. Although i t seemed wild in contrast to wuthern England, the landscape had been modified by over a thousand years oi settlement, farming, and mining pursuits. See William Rollinson A History of Man in the Lake District (London: J.M. Dent 1967)

1 1 See discussions by Roderick Nash Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press 1973) 13-20 and Yi-Fu Tuan Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1974) 109-10.

12 Nash Wilderness 14-18 and Tuan Topophilia 110 As Nash points out, thereare many illustrations of thisdual attitude toward wilder- ness. The Israelites, for example, wandered in a desolate wilderness for 40 years (Deut 32:lO). Yet this experience, although difficult and dangerous, enabled them to attain the spiritual purity necessary for their deliverance into Canaan, the promised land.

13 Daniel Oefoe A Tour through the Whole lsland of Great Britain Vol 2 , G.D.H. Cole and D.C. Browningeds, reved (London: J.M. Dent 1966) 54

14 ibid 15 Paul P. Bernard Rush to the Alps: The tvolution of Vacationing in

Switzerland (New York: Columbia University Press 1978) 15 16 Ernat Bernbaum Guide through the Romantic Movement (New

York: Ronald Press 19491 9 17 lbid 18 As interpreted by Bernbaum Guide 13 19 lbid 20 lbid25 21 Abrams Norton Anthology 1288 22 lbid 1380 23 Lines 5-1 2 in ibid 1367-8 24 Cines 146-8 in ibid 1413 25 Lines 1-9 in ibid 1429 26 Norman Nicholson Portrait ofthe Lakes (London: Robert Hale 1972)

16 27 lbid112 28 Abranis Norton Anthology 1391

29 lbid 1288 30 lbid 1290 3 1 Lines 1-8 (from Lyrical Ballads) in ibid 1369 32 Lines 2 1 -4 in ibid 1369-70 33 'TheTables Turned' lines 21 -8 (from Lyrical Ballads) in ibid 1371 34 lane Zaring 'The romantic face of Wales' Annals of the Association

35 'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the of American Geographers 67 (Sept 1977) 409

Banks of the Wye during a Tour July 13, 1798' lines 1-23 (from Lyrical Ballads) in Abrams Norton Anthology 1373

36 lames A.W. Heffernan The Recreation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable and Turner (Hanover, NH: Dart- mouth College - University Press of New England 1984) 144

37 Lines 1-14 in Abrams Norton Anthology 1624 38 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' I1 800) lines 21 -3 in ibid 1527 39 Lines 41-3 in ibid 40 See, for example, ibid 1286; and Bernbaum Guide 70, 102. 41 Bowra Romantic lmagination 12 42 'Expostulation and Reply' lines 21-8 (Lyrical Ballads) in Abrams

43 Bowra Romantic lmagination 12 44 lbid 45 lbid 13 46 lbid 47 Christopher Morris ed The lourneys of Celia Fiennes (London:

Cresset 1947) 195 48 Nicholson Lakers 27 49 lbid 50 Defw Tour 269-70 5 1 Nicholson Lakers 27; Rollinson History 132-3 52 Mulvey Anglo-American Landscapes 251 53 Rollinson History 134 54 Margaret Drabble A Writer's Britain: landscape in Literature

55 J. Allan Patmore Recreation and Resources: Leisure Patterns and

56 Peter T. Newby 'Literature and the fashioning of tourist taste' in

57 Thomas De Quincey Recollections ofthe lakes and the Lake Poets:

Norton Anthology 1370

(London: Thames and Hudson 1979) 147

Leisure Places (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1983) 184

Pocock ed Humanistic Geography and Literature 133-4

Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black nd) 2-4

York: MacMillan 1905) 44 58 William T. Palmer and A. Heaton Cooper The English lakes (New

59 lbid22-3 60 Rollinson History 132 61 On this, see ibid 140; and William Wordsworth Guide to the Lakes

5th ed 1835 (London: Oxford University Press 1970). 62 Wordsworth Guide. Some editions included a geological section by

another author, reflecting the growing interest in geology and natural history which, along with romanticism, contributed to public appre- ciation and use of wilder mountain areas like the Lake District.

63 Rollinson History 138-9. A related, but independent study might focus on how many of, where, and when these tourist hotels were built. Such trends lie beyond the scope of this paper. Yet, if data on travel, hotel accommodation, and contemporary advertisements be- came available, another facet of the romantic influence on Lake District tourism could be explored.

64 Palmer and Heaton Lakes 17, 1 1 ,40 65 lbid 108 66 lbid 67 In Britain: Literary Heritage (London: British Tourist Authoriw 1983)

Wordsworth and Lake District Tourism 247

68 Since the present study i s focused on Wordsworth’s poetry and Lake District tourism, the magnitude of romantic influences in populariz- ing other parts of the country cannot be given extensive considera- tion. Further research could be directed toward analysis of the spatial extent and pattern of such areas, with a view to determining why some became popular and others did not. See, for example, Paul Theroux The Kingdom by the Sea; A lourney around Great Britain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1983) 127-8.

69 Zaring ’Romantic Face of Wales’ 403 70 Drabble Writer’s Britain 172. For more on Scott’s influence on tourist

development in the Highlands, see R.W. Butler ’Evolution of tourism in the Scottish Highlands’ Annals of Tourism Research 12 (1 985)

376-7 and R. W. Butler ‘Literature as an influence in shaping the image of tourist destinations: a review and case study’ in John S. Marsh ed Canadian Studies of Parks, Recreation and Tourism in Foreign Lands Occasional Paper Number 1 1 (Peterborough: Depart- ment of Geography, Trent University 1986) 122-8.

71 Drabble Writer’s Britain 172 72 Lines 49-52,57-60 in Abrams Norton Anthology 1368 73 Zaring ’Romantic Face of Wales’ 41 5 74 lbid414 75 George Santayana The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aes-

76 lbid thetic Theory (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1936) 101