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though unfortunately gaining some popular ground, is incorrect because mere means lake. To avoid confusion with the settlement of that name, then, 'Windermere Town' i s to be preferred.6 Tarns How should be Tarn HOWS, and although Squire accurately quotes Patmore to the effect that Tarn Hows is 'visited by some 500,000 people a year, with more than 600 present at peak periods,' a moment's reflection should have suggested that something is wrong with those numbers. Half a mil- lion a year is nearly 1400 a day, every day of the year.

That Wordsworth's writings were associated with changing attitudes to the Lake District landscape is indis- putable. What i s still in doubt is the extent to which the poet led that change. That these changing attitudes came at a time of increasing tourist visits to the area i s also beyond doubt. Again, it is uncertain which was cause and which effect, with the influence of Wordsworth being so nebulous as to be almost invisible. Squire has performed a useful service by opening up this topic for discussion. It isto be hoped that some rnoredetailed work will now be done to try to provide some answers to these questions.

Notes

1 I am grateful to my colleague Dr. Joyce Forbes for her comments on Wordsworth as a poet.

2 Sampson (1941, 572) suggests that '[rleaders will begin a study of Wordsworth most profitably if they dismiss from their minds the usual textbook ideas of Wordsworth as the leader of a "Romantic Revolt."' Rather, he succeeds in 'winning, in the end, the love and admiration of the best readers, not by any moral message or theory of art, but solely by the penetrating beauty of his poems.' If, accordingto Perkins (1967, 172), 'we sought stylistic affinities, we would go more to eighteenth-century predecessors than to Romantics of the next gen- eration.'

3 Perkins (1967, 172) observes that although 'Coleridge was sure Wordsworth would write the first truly philosophic poem, and philo- sophies -or religions - have been reared on his work, yet he himself described poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."'

4 Wordsworth's poetrydid notsell well atfirst. In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads. Although they were paid only thirty guineas for their work, the publisher lost his money (Morley in Wordsworth,l909, liv).

5 Certainly in his later days, tourists thronged to Wordsworth's home, on what Charles Lamb called 'gaping missions,' where the ever- careful poet might provide tea - ata price (Perkins 1967,171 ). Again, however, it may be questioned how many had gone to the Lake District for that purpose, as opposed to taking Wordsworth in as one of the sights because they happened to be there.

6 A popular question with locals is: 'How many lakes are there in the Lake District?' The correct answer is 'One: Bassenthwaite Lake.' All the others are meres or waters.

References AUSTEN, 1. 1965 Northanger Abbey (New York: New American Library) - 1972 Pride and Prejudice, ed T. Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin)

BATESON, F.W. 1956 Wordsworth: A Re-interpretation, 2nd ed (London: Longmans)

BOUCH, C.M.L, 1948 Prelates and People in the Lake Counties (Kendal: Titus Wilson)

BOUCH, C.M.L, and JONES, G . P . 1961 A Short Economic andsocial History of the Lake Counties, 1500- 1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press)

COLERIDGE, G.H.B. 1962 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge discovers the Lake Country' in Wordsworth and Coleridge, ed E.L. Griggs (New York: Russell and Russell) 135-65

HAVENS, R.D. 1962 'Solitude, silence, and loneliness in the poetry of Wordsworth' in Wordsworth and Coleridge, ed E.L. Griggs (New York: Russell and Russell) 12-25

KING, A. 1966 Wordsworth and the Artist's Vision (London: The Athlone Press)

the Lake District, Leaflet no. 12: 'Tourism in the Lake Districr' (Winder- mere: Lake District Special Planning Board)

LAKE DISTRICT NATIONAL PARK INFORMATION SERVICE, THE 1977 Discovering

MARSHALL, J.D. 1971 Old Lakeland(Newton Abbot: David and Charles) OSBORN, M. 1976 'Wordsworth's "Borderers" and the landscape of Pen-

rith' Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archmlogical Society (1 976) 144-58

PEARSALL, w.H., and PENNINGTON, w. 1973 The Lake District (London: Collins)

PERKINS, D., ed 1967 English Romantic Writers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)

ROBERTSON, E. 191 1 Wordsworthshire: An fntroduction to a Poet's Coun- try (London: Chatto and Windus)

SALVESEN, c. 1965 The Landscape of Memory (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press)

SAMPSON, G . 1941 The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

SQUIRE, 5.1. 1988 'Wordsworth and Lake District tourism: Romantic reshapingof landscape' The Canadian Geographer 32 (1988) 237-47

WILLIAMS, L.A. 1975 RoadTransportin Cumbria in theNineteenth Century (London: George Allen and Unwin)

WORDSWORTH, w. 1909 The Complete Poetical Works (London: Mac- millan)

GEOGRAPHY AS CRITICISM: A COMMENT ON 'WORDSWORTH A N D LAKE DISTRICT TO U RISM' O.F.G. Sitwell Department of Geography, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2H4

Shelagh Squire (1988) and Robert Dilley (in this issue of The Canadian Geographer) present us with a glimpse of what geography, or rather a branch of it, might be like if some of us were to adopt an approach to the study of places that sees them as being analogous to the works of prose and poetry that are the object of literary criticism. While the theoretical issues involved would be interest- ing if such an approach were to be taken seriously, I shall confine this comment to highlightingwhat I believe to be

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the strengths and weaknesses of both Squire‘s paper and Dilley’s commentary.

The heart of Squire’s paper (pp. 243-44) opens with the words: ‘Wordsworth’s presence at Grasmere attracted to the area other intellectuals who later wrote about their impressions and experiences in place.’ She then discusses De Quincy as an instance, and substanti- ates her point with aquotation from his writings. She then adds, ‘Wordsworth’s poetry fostered an intellectual kind of tourism, focused on the emotional recreation of literary inspired experiences with landscape and place,’ and continues with a pair of quotations from William Palmer, one such tourist. She then deals with a process that might be called social diffusion, as distinct from the spatial kind, whereby 6lite tourism was followed by mass tour- ism. Here Squire notes that Wordsworth’s writings helped to foster both, for in addition to his poems he also wrote a Guide to the Lake District. Had Squire anticipated one of the comments that Dilley was going to make, she could have taken the time to learn the number of editions through which theguide went. However, shedid read the Guide and noticed that it went through at least five edi- tions and that the publisher added information of a kind that tourists would find useful, as a supplement to that provided by the poet.

Here Squire begins to flag. She does have a well- constructed series of excerpts from Palmer to support observations about ‘the effects of mass tourism on land- scape,’ but she also includes a quotation from William Rollinson’s A History of Man in the Lake District. At first glance there might seem to be nothing wrong with that, but where the quotations from De Quincy and Palmer are statements by visitors who had come to the Lake District either certainly or probably because of Wordsworth (the quotations she chooses express their reactions to that place), Rollinson is an historian. What he says is doubt- less true, but we are now in the world of second-hand, no longer with either Wordsworth or tourists but with the scholar, the commentator, in short the predecessor of Squire. We have moved from original research to a re- view of literature.

Squire set that nugget of original research in a double envelope. The larger part extends from p. 239 to the beginning of Squire’s contribution on p. 243, noted above, and then continues after that for a further half- page. More than one topic is covered in these pages, the main ones being identified by the headings in the text: The Romantic Ideology and Literary Landscape as Tourist Landscape. Here we are in the realm of other people’s opinions. I am not an authority on these topics, and though the sources are documented, I prefer to leave

debate over most of the issues raised in this part of Squire’s paper to those who are familiar with the Lake District or with the poetry of William Wordsworth.

These topics are set, in their turn, in a survey of the origins of Romanticism. Here I do have a point to make. Squire‘s explicit overall objective is (1988, 237) ’[tlo assess the geographical implications of English romantic literature, paying particular attention to its integral role in shaping and creating “place”’ (emphasis added). In the section on the origins of Romanticism that follows, Squire then quotes or paraphrases a number of authorities:

Until the floweringof the romantic ideology in late 18th century, Western culture tended to see nature very negatively (p. 238). ... This [negative] perceptual orientation [represented by a quota- tion from Daniel Defoe, 17241 dominated most of the 18th century ... (p. 238). [However, at some time during the century] sentimental philosophy [with] its strand of pre-romantic thought, sensibility [begins to make itself felt] (p. 239). It does so, for example, in the writings of Joseph Warton, 1744, [who] suc- cinctly identified the main tenets of sensibility and, by extension, what later evolved into romanticism. ... In light of existing attitudes towards wild country, these pre-romantic poets, begin- ning to revel in the natural environment, were clearly expressing radical, if not revolutionary ideas. Yet, as this ‘nature poetry’ became an increasingly popular literary genre, the basic themes of romantic literature were slowly being integrated into contem- porary thought and, in the process, led to new kinds of environ- mental attitudes (p. 239).

Squire reiterates this general thesis in the two subse- quent sections of her paper. Within the context of the romantic ideology itself, she writes (p. 239):

Critics refer to [Wordsworth’s] Lyrical Ballads, published in ... 1798, as a ‘turning point in English literature.’ In retrospect, this collection of poetry signalled a turning-point also in perception of environment and in world-view.

When she reaches the section devoted to the literary landscape as tourist landscape, she begins as follows (p. 242):

Throughout the neo-classical period [which preceded the romantic movement], some aspects of nature had been sub- jected to stringent principles of order and control. The Baroque garden, with its geometrical paths, clipped hedges, and ornate fountains, is one of the best examples of the neo-classical ideolo- gy as expressed in landscape, but as the romantic movement gained momentum, attitudes toward scenery and natural beauty shifted.

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It thus seems fair to say that Squire accepts what Love- joy had in mind when he wrote (1 924,240): ’There seems to be an idea current that an antinomian temper was, at some time in the eighteenth century, introduced into asthetic theory and artistic practice by some romanticist, and that it thence speedily spread to moral feeling and social conduct.’ The problem is that in the course of pursuing his general theme, which had to do with the various forms that romanticism had taken, Lovejoy argued that it was the reverse of conventional thinking that had taken place. More specifically, he argued (p. 241) that the aesthetic principle used by Warton had already been put into effect in ‘the art of landscape de- sign. The first great revolt against the neo-classical aesthetics was not in literature at all, but in gardening ... ’ (emphasis added).

Nine years later Lovejoy returned to this topic. This time, after beginning by identifying the hallmarks of neo- classical aesthetics, he set out (1 933,2) what had by now, at least in his opinion, become the conventional view:

The transvaluation of asthetic values ... took place, ... when regularity, uniformity, clearly recognizable balance and paral- lelism came to be regarded as capital defects in a work of art, and irregularity, asymmetry, variety, surprise, an avoidance of that simplicity and unity which rended a whole design comprehensi- bleat a glance, took rank as asthetic virtues of a high order. It i s also .. . pretty generally known that the change first appeared on a Considerable scale in other arts and only gradually spread to the Esthetics of literature. In these other arts this incipient Romanticism manifested itself in, and was promoted by, four new phenomena in eighteenth-century taste and artistic prac- tice: (a) the enthusiasm for the landscape painting of Claude Lorrain, Poussin and Salvator Rosa; (b) the introduction and wide diffusion of the English or so-called ‘natural’ style in gardening, which was perhaps the eighteenth-century art par excellence; (c) the Gothic revival which began in England ... in the 1740s; (d) the admiration for the Chinese garden and, in a less degree, for the architecture and other artistic achievements of the Chinese.

Lovejoy then notes that the four were explicitly associ- ated together in the 18th century by the intelligentsia of the time. He cites authoritative studies for the first three’ and then states that establishing the fourth i s the objective of his paper. A lack of space forbids a complete replica- tion of the evidence he presents, but for him the initial criticaleventwasthe publication, in 1685, by Sir William Temple, of an essay entitled ‘Upon the gardens of Epi- curus.‘ Lovejoy (1933, 20) then traces the manner in

which the ideas of Temple spread and evolved in the hands of others and concludes:

The object of the present paper is limited to showing the large and temporarily primary part played by theChinese influence ... in the gradual conscious revolt against neo-classical standards which took place during the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. Though this revolt had its beginning, on a considerable scale, in the arts of gardening and architecture, it speedily ex- tended to literature and all the arts; and its later and purely literary manifestations were at least greatly facilitated and accelerated by the introduction, in Temple’s essay, of a new canon of asthetic excellence and by its repetition and elabora- tion by a succession of influential writers in the following dec- ades. A turning-point in the history of modern taste was reached when the ideals of regularity, Simplicity, uniformity, and easy logical intelligibility, were first openly impugned, when the assumption that true beauty is ‘geometrical’ ceased to be one to which ‘all consented, as to a Law of Nature’ [this is a reference back to a quotation from Sir Isaac Newton with which Lovejoy had begun his paper].

Because we are dealing with history and with topics as nebulous as the principles of Esthetics, it might be thought that perhaps Lovejoy’s views were not the accu- rate reflection of the received opinion of the 1930s as he claimed or, alternatively, that other, later workers have overturned him. Unfortunatelyfor Squire‘s point of view, Marjorie Nicolson‘s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1 959) suggests that the reverse has happened. The first two words of Nicolson’s title pertain to the view that prevailed ’during the first seventeen centuries of the Christian era’ (p. 3); during that time, mountains had been “‘Natures Shames and Il ls” and “Warts, Wens [i.e., boils], Blisters, lmposthumes [i.e. abscesses]” upon the otherwise fair face of Nature’ (p. 2). Then (p. 3): ’Within fifty years - all this was changed. The “Mountain Glory” dawned, then shone full splendour.’ Her whole book i s dedicated toexamining how and why this happened, but her thesis is summarized in the introduction (p. 4):

It was not merely a matter of literary language and conventions, though that played some part. It was a result of one of the most profound revolutions in thought that has ever occurred. ... The change in human attitudes about mountains involved a reversal of many basic attitudes. What men see in Nature is a result of what they have been taught to see - lessons they have learned in school, ... books they have read. They are conditioned most of all by what they mean by nature, a word that has gathered around itself paradox and ambiguity ever since the fifth century

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B.C. Human response to mountains has been influenced by inherited conventions of literature and theology, but even more it has been motivated by man’s conception of the world which he inhabits.

At the risk of distorting Nicolson’s l ine of argument, I shall say that she sees the basic critical process as being the way in which (p. 143):

[alwe, compounded of mingled terror and exultation, once reserved for God, passed over in the seventeenth century first to

an expanded cosmos, then from the macrocosm to the greatest objects in the geocosm - mountains, ocean, desert (emphasis added).

In the particular case of responding to mountains with awe, Nicolson attributes a key role toThomas Burnet and his Sacred Theory of the Earth, first published in Latin in 1681, and in English in 1684. That book was a conse- quence of a journey Burnet made across the Alps in 1671. He had been ’taught that ... all things in Nature exhibit design and plan, that proportion, relation, correspon- dence, symmetry are repeated [at every level of the uni- verse]’ (p. 21 9). But as a Protestant he was also open to the new philosophy emerging from the writings of Des- cartes, themselves greatly influenced by the new astron- omy of Copernicus and Cali leo ’that was breaking down restraint and limitation and exalting above Reason an insatiable Imagination that sought ”more beyond”‘ (p. 220). To his astonishment (p. 21 5):

Burnet was ’rapt’ and ’ravished’ by the vast, the grand, the majestic. Before vastness he experienced the awe and wonder he associated with God. ... Vast and irregular mountains were not beautiful, but, except for the vast and irregular night skies, nothing had ever moved Burnet to such awe or so led his mind to thoughts of God and infinity as did the mountains and the sea.

Nicolson notes (p. 253): ’If Burnet did nothing else, he made his generation ”mountain conscious” to an extent never before known in England.‘ That consciousness is visible in the writings of John Ray, one of a number of scholars who responded to the views presented in the Sacred Theory. Nicolson reports that (p. 261):

Ivlarious passages [in his The Wisdom of Cod ... , 16911 show his ‘innocent delight’ in his native landscape and suggest as well his interest in the kind of landscape painting that was becoming steadily more popular in England, whether imported from abroad or produced at home. ‘That the mountains are pleasant

objects to behold’ he wrote, ’appears in that the very images of them, their draughts and landskips [sic], are so much esteem’d.

After John Ray came Richard Bentley [The Folly of ... Atheism Demonstrated from ... the Frame of the World, 16931. Nicolson quotes h im as writ ing (p. 262): ‘All pulchritude i s relative,’ and, she continues (pp. 262-63):

He carried his attack on absolute [i.e., neo-classical] standards into issues concerning irregularity in the terrestrial world. ‘We ought not then to believe,’ he wrote, ‘that ... mountains are out of shape, because they were not exact pyramids or cones ... . This objected deformity ... is in our imaginations only, and not really in the things themselves.’

The emphasis is Nicolson‘s and she goes on to call Bent- ley the first English ‘subjectivist.’

Burnet was not the only author o f his generation to experience awe at the sights that surrounded h im as he crossed the high passes of the Alps. In 1688 John Dennis did so, and Nicolson records (pp. 276-77) the following extracts from a letter he wrote to ’an untraveled English friend’:

As soon as we had conquer’d one half of [the mountain], the unusual heighth in which we found our selves, the impending rock that hung over us, the dreadful depth of the precipice, and the torrent that roar’d at the bottom, gave us such a view as was altogether new and amazing. On the other side of the torrent, was a mountain that equall’d ours . . . . Its craggy clifts, which we half discern’d thro themisty gloom of the clouds that surrounded them, sometimes gave us a horrid prospect. And sometimes its face appear’d smooth and beautiful as the most even and fruitful ofvallies ... . Inthemeantimewewalk‘dupontheverybrink ... ofdestruction. ... Thesenseof all this produc‘d different motions in me, vis., a delightful horrour, a terrible joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, l trembled (emphasis added).

Nicolson then notes (p. 279) that, ‘Dennis was neither scientist nor theologian. He was a critic. He came back to England to develop an Esthetic that had been only embryonic when he went abroad ... .’ The key feature of his new critism was the attention he paid to the ‘sublime,’ whose true source was, in his opinion, ‘in religion ... in God and in the manifestationsof His greatness and power in Nature.‘ (pp. 281-82). Nicolson continues (p. 283):

Thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earth- quakes, volcanoes ... . Whatever their descendants in the orgies

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162 Commentary and Reply

of Gothic romance, these were noble ideas to Dennis. God and the angels, the glory and immensity of the heavenly bodies, the vastness of the seas and the mountains on earth - these were - the causes of the sublime.

Nicolson also discusses Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, who, drawing on his experiences during the ‘Grand Tour‘ he had made in 1686, published The Moralists: A Philosophic Rhapsody in 1709. It re- cords the fictional travels of a teacher and his pupil that take them on a tour of the universe. When they return they reflect on the things that they had seen. Here is the beginning of Nicolson‘s quotation (p. 293):

All ghastly and hideous as they appear, they want not their peculiar beauties. The wildernesspleases. We seem to live alone with nature. We view her in her inmost recesses, and contem- plate her with more delight in these original wilds than in the artificial labyrinths and feigned wilderness of the palace [that they had visited] (emphasis added).

Having read this, nobody will be surprised at Nicol- son’s conclusion (pp. 299-300):

To Dennis the categories of sublime and beautiful remained ... distinct ... . But in Shaftesbury’s experience ... [they] had not been antipathetic; nor were they in his aesthetic system. Irregu- larity was as natural to Nature as regularity ... . Insofar as Shaftesbury distinguished between the beautiful and the sub- lime, the sublime was a higher, a more majestic beauty.

On the basis of this foundation so firmly laid, Nicolson then goes on to show how the nature poets of the first half of the 18th century paved the way for Wordsworth and his peers at the century’s end. In her opinion there is no dramatic break between neo-classical and Romantic; no revolution in taste took place in 1798.

When Nicolson‘s conclusions are added to those of Lovejoy, the established view of the Romantic movement taken as a whole is the reverse of that presented by Squire. Far from it having been poets who taught the educated public to think that mountains were romantic by describ- ing them in those terms, it was rather the case that poets learned to think in those terms as the result of other men, who were not poets themselves, undergoing a diverse range of experiences. Some of these were men who, despite their education, could still be overcome by awe when they saw a real mountain. There were others who, despite the then current vogue for the baroque garden, began even in the early 18th century, to build into their gardens irregularity and asymmetry because gardens

seen by travellers in China not only possessed thesequal- ities, but were the more beautiful for it.

It would be easy simply to criticize Squire, but I think it is more reasonable to ask how she got the story so wrong. My conjecture springs from examining the four refer- enced sources for her knowledge of Romanticism: Abrams (1 975, 2nd ed; 1968), Bernbaum (1 949), Bowra (1961, 1 st ed 1950), and Frye (1968). To these we can add as sources of information about either the Lake Dis- trict or Wordsworth Heffernan (1984), Morris (1 947), Nicolson (1972, 1 st ed 1956), and Rollinson (1967) and, as authorities on past attitudes to the environment, Ber- nard (1978), Mulvey (1983), Nash (1973), and Tuan (1 974).2

I have been unable to consult Morris, Mulvey, or Nash. The rest I searched (in some cases editions other than those cited by Squire) with a view to seeing what they had to say about the origins of Romanticism and the frequen- cy with which they cited either Lovejoy or Nicolson. Among the four authorities on Romanticism, though Abrams and Frye sought to place the literature of the 18th century in its historical context, it would be easy to be led astray by their interest in the literature of the time to conclude that Romanticism was located in literature. This tendency would be even greater in a reader of Bowra or Bernbaum, as both of these writers focus exclusively on literature. As for their references to the two critical sources, Bernbaum lists Lovejoy in a bibliography, but makes no reference to either him or his ideas in the text. That is all.

In the remaining books to which I had access in the limited time available, Heffernan refers to Nicolson in a note, while Tuan (1974, 721, who devotes three para- graphs that seem to draw on her, begins them with a sentence that is sufficient to throw even carefu I readers off track: ‘Until well into the eighteenth century the prevail- ing view of mountains was unsympathetic.’ Given Nicol- son‘s detailed exposition cited above, it seems to me that Tuan is positively misleading on this point.

If her sources failed her, where else might Squire ex- pect help? A glance at the ’topics of current research’ listed by her mentor David Knight in the annual Directory of the Canadian Association of Geographers is enough to show that his expertise lies elsewhere. What about the anonymous referees appointed by the editor of the Cana- dian Geographer? Were they asleep at the switch? We will never know, but speaking personally I would not rush to condemn them. Had the editor’s choice fallen on me in 1987 when Squire’s paper was presumably being evaluated, I might have done no better than they. Though

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I had read Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being (1 936), I was not particularly interested at that time in his views on the 17th and 18th centuries, and I overlooked his impor- tant contribution in documenting the origins of the Romantic movement. Wholly by chance I not only reread The Great Chain of Being in the spring of 1989, but did SO

to learn his views on events in the 18th century. I thus paid attention to the references to his earlier work, and so looked them up when Squire‘s paper was drawn to my attention. Nor had I read Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory in 1987, though I knew the title, quite possibly having come across it in Tuan. Whether, without the lead provided by Lovejoy, I would have read it as one of the obligations of a referee is a hypothetical question that has no valid answer.

Having said that much in defence of Squire, I also think it fair to point out, however, that when she cited Bernard (1978, 15) in support of her thesis that even well into the 18th century many of those who crossed the Alps experi- enced only fear, without any redeeming thrill of sublim- ity, she did take the one short paragraph from pp. 14-1 7 that provides unqualified support for this point of view, and overlooked the rest which, if anything, favours Nicolson’s interpretation.

In a somewhat similar manner, the point that strikes me about Dilley’s commentary in the present issue of The Canadian Geographer is that its author knows the Lake District much better than Squire does. Nothing in her paper suggests that she has ever been there, whereas something about the tone of the commentary suggests not only knowledge but affection. It is written with that hint of testiness that comes easily when something we like has been dealt with roughly by an outsider.

This is not intended as a criticism of Dilley. By and large, given his reading of Squire’s text, his points are valid. The only one on which we differ has to do with the part of Squire’s paper that I value because in it she is making her own judgments based on evidence she has gathered for herself. Readers can decide for themselves which is the fairer assessment. I shall return to the point about direct knowledge in my conclusion.

Before proceeding, however, I must point out that the assessment of Wordsworth provided by Dilley, with the acknowledged assistance of Dr Joyce Forbes, i s hardly the current opinion among contemporary authorities on Wordsworth. As one of them stated in a relatively recent staternent(Bloom, 1971 ,viii): ‘Thesubjectofthisbook ... is the dialectic of nature and the imagination in Romantic poetry. That the Romantics were not poets of nature i s its central contention ... .’ No easier for the outsider to

understand is a thesis presented by Donald Marshall in an introduction he wrote to a collection of essays by Geof- frey Hartman, one of the most eminent of contemporary Wordsworth scholar^.^ To make his point clear, Marshall (1987, vii) first presents what he calls the ‘common view’ ofWordsworth as itexisted before roughly 1960, which is very much what we would expect from reading Dilley, and then cites a contrasting contemporary interpretation: ‘Hartman demonstrated instead an antagonism or dialec- tic between nature and imagination in Wordsworth.’

Conclusions

This story seems to have a simple moral: if geographers study places, asking as they do so why those places are the way they are, and if that question is the equivalent of the questions that critics ask about the texts that they read, then perhaps we can learn from the critics something about how we should go about our business. We would be advised to read what the critics are saying now, rather than what they were saying 30 and 40 years ago - though clearly some of the things they were saying 60 years ago are not necessarily irrelevant. As Squire’s article shows, a thorough knowledge of a field is desirable.

Must we then become expert as literary critics before we can become expert geographers? Perhaps. An alterna- tive would be to engage in interdisciplinary research.

What would we have to offer a prospective scholar from the fields of literary criticism? How about a knowl- edge of place? Surely something that will puzzle future historians of Geography as they peer back into our time and try to solve the problem of our behaviour is the question ofwhy a student (using the term in a broad rather than a narrow sense) of Geography working in Ottawa should choose to study the effect that a poet who has been dead for 140 years might or might not have had on a landscape located 5000 km away. I know that Allan Fotheringham tells us that there is nothing in Ottawa that could interest anyone of the slightest intelligence, but even here in the Prairies we have heard of the Gatineau hills, and if geographers want a region with a local litera- ture they could do worse than investigate Joan Finnigan’s Ottawa Valley.

Notes

1 Lovejoy (1933, 3-4) actually referred in his text to I . . . excellent studies - the first in Miss Manwaring’s ltalian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England [i.e., E.W. Manwaring, 1925 ... (New York: Oxford University Press)], the second in MrChristopher Hussey’s bookon the Picturesque [i.e., C. Hussey 1927 ... (New York: C.P. Putnam)] _ _ .

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The story of ... the Gothic revival has been told ... in Mr Kenneth Clark‘s workon this topic [i.e., K.M. Clark, 1928 The Gothic Revival (London: Constable)] .’

2 I presume that anyone who reads this comment will have access to Squire’s paper and thus have not, with the exception of two papers that I cite directly, included her sources in my own list of references.

3 As Dilley owes a debt to Joyce Forbesfor comments on Wordsworth as a poet, so I am endebted to Philip Knight for informed opinion on contemporary scholarly views of Wordsworth.

References BERNARD, P. 1978 Rush to the Alps: The Evolution of Vacationing in

Switzerland (New York: Columbia University Press) BLOOM, ti. 1971 The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic

Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) HARTMAN, G.H., ed 1987 The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press) LOVEJOY, A.O. 1924 ’On the discrimination of romanticisms’ Publications

ofthe Modern Language Association 39, 229-53 - 1933 ‘The Chinese origin of a romanticism‘ lournal of English and

Germanic Philology 32, 1-20 - 1936 The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of An ldea

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) MARSHALL, D.G. 1987 ’Foreword: Wordsworth and post-enlightenment

culture,’ in The Unremarkable Wordsworth, ed G.H. Hartrnan (Min- neapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press)

NICOLSON, M.H. 1959 Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The De- velopmentofthe Asthetics ofthe/nfinite(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) Excerpts reprinted from Marjorie Hope Nicolson: Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. Copyright 0 1959 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

SQUIRE, S.J. 1988 ’Wordsworth and Lake District tourism: Romantic reshaping of landscape‘ The Canadian Geographer 32,237-47

TUAN, Y-F. 1974 Jopophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Atti- tudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, N/: Prentice-Hall)

‘WORDSWORTH AND LAKE DISTRICT TOURISM’: A REPLY Shelagh 1. Squire Departrrent of Geography, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, England WC1 H OAP

As I stated (1 988, 238) in the original paper, ‘an assess- ment of the romantic genre i s . .. open to both speculation and a wide range of interpretations.’ I am pleased that the paper has generated interest. The preceding commentar- ies in this issue of The Canadian Geographer by Dilley and Sitwell illustrate the diversity of possible interpretive approaches and also raise a number of issues, some of which are integral to current debates in cultural geogra- phy. I will therefore respond to Dilley and Sitwell in turn, and where their observations are complementary, will addres them concurrently.

The aim of the original paper was to situate the study of literary landscapes within a cultural, as opposed to a

purely humanistic, framework. The question I sought to address was not so much how Wordsworth’s use of land- scape reflects autobiographical elements, but rather the way that his poetry has been appropriated from a purely literary context and taken into the wider discourse of mass culture. Tourist development in the Lake District offers one example of how the Wordsworth heritage has been re-interpreted and furnished with new cultural meaning. Unfortunately, neither Dilley nor Sitwell has demonstrated an adequate understanding of my original intent, and many of their remarks are derived from in- accurate readings of the paper.

One of the themes that i s common to both relates to the origins of Romanticism and the magnitude of its influence. Dilley suggests that I have made ‘many gener- alizations about Romanticism which ... may be of only marginal relevance.’ Sitwell is even more culpable of misrepresenting my original argument. If he were to read the paper again, it should become clear that I never implied that Romanticism was purely a literary move- ment. English social thought was undergoing a radical shift in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and such changes were partially expressed in Romantic literature. As I have clearly documented in the original paper, however (pp. 238-39), Romantic literature was part of a much wider cultural movement, certainly influenced by Gilpin, the picturesque, and sensibility, but also by a range of religious, social, and economic sentiments: ’Romanticism is understood perhaps best as part of an intellectual continuum: it was nurtured by the pictur- esque and the age of sensibility and, in a radically altered form, has affected literary expression and landscape atti- tudes into the 20th century.’ Raymond Williams (1973, 127), the key cultural critic in the U.K., has emphasized Wordsworth’s integral role at this particularly critical rno- ment in English social thought:

The agrarian confidence of the eighteenth century had been counterpointed, throughout, by feelings of loss and melancholy and regret: from the ambivalence of Thomson to the despair of Goldsmith. Now, with Wordsworth, an alternative principle was to be powerfully asserted: a confidence in nature, in its own workings, which at least at the beginning was also a broader, a more humane confidence in men.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the way that people thought about, talked about, and experienced landscape changed. Reflecting developments in English society over the preceding century and a half, this new cultural discourse, embodied in the Romantic move- ment, came together in the work of a particular group of

The Canadian Geographer/ Le Geographe canadien 34, no 2 (1990) 164-70 0 / 1990 Canadian Association of Geographers / L‘Association canadienne des geographes