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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
IT IS ONE OF THE IRONIES OF THE LONG HISTORY OF POPULAR AND CRITICAL reception of William Wordsworth's poetry that a writer so remorselessly addicted to travel, to movement of and within the self, should have come to epitomize the importance of the sense of place in English literature. Identified in the popular mind with the English Lakes, Wordsworth's traditional but long-derided categorization as a nature poet has had a new lease of life in recent years with the rise of ecological literary criticism, and with growing interest in the geographic and spatial contexts of romanticism and the relative autonomy of regional cultures of the period. The considerable attention being given to the domestic politics of the Wordsworth circle has to some extent underscored this emphasis on the local, bounded quality of the poet's imagination. At their best, these trends have restored material depth and human complexity to criticism of Wordsworth and provided a welcome corrective to the theoretical excesses of the seventies and eighties; at their worst, they have risked caricaturing Wordsworth studies as a curious and risible offshoot of the heritage industry.
But however important local landscapes, the sensibility of place, and settled domesticity are to an appreciation of Wordsworth's creativity, the antithetical investments in freedom of movement, itinerancy, and travel of a poet described by one of his best critics as having a "gypsy in his soul" (1) should not be underestimated. Before his resettlement in Grasmere at the end of 1799, Wordsworth's adult life had been one of continual displacement, between Cambridge, France, London, Dorset, Somerset, Germany, and numerous more temporary residences. It is a mistake to assume that the return of the native celebrated in the writing of Home at Grasmere in 1800 quelled this restlessness: in addition to his constant wandering among his "dear native regions," Wordsworth was regularly taking off to various destinations in England in the second half of his life, and with members of his family undertook significant tours of Scotland, the Isle of Man, and countries in western Europe. I have argued elsewhere for the powerful influence of Wordsworth's compulsive pedestrianism on the generation of his early poetry up to The Prelude of 1805; on a different tack, Kenneth Johnston has interestingly noted the coincidence of Wordsworth's periods of creativity on his unfinished lifetime project, The Recluse, with transitional phases in his domestic existence--when his roots were being disturbed. (2) These are just two indications of the close link between writing and mobility in this poet's literary life. The area of Wordsworth's life and work that is least studied in this connection are the tours he undertook in the second half of his life. As Alan Liu has pointed out, Wordsworth considered the itinerary poems produced out of these tours sufficiently important for him to have breached the psychological principles underpinning the arrangement of the 1815 collected edition of his works with this broad and heterogeneous "middle zone of topicality": (3) in later collected editions the "memorials" of two tours in Scotland and of two tours on the Continent, plus other travel sequences such as the Duddon sonnets and Yarrow Revisited, distinctively subvert the leading principle of classifying the poems according to "the powers of mind predominant in the production of them." (4) It is remarkable that, until the publication earlier this year of John Wyatt's Wordsworth's Poems of Travel, (5) no sustained critical treatment had been made of these groups of poems; indeed, no full-length study of the importance of travel and travel literature to Wordsworth generally had been offered since Charles Norton Coe's in 1953. (6)
In this paper I want to focus on just one of the late tours--the Continental tour of 1820--and to begin to evaluate the significance of the genre which Wordsworth developed to leave a poetic trace of his itinerary, the memorial tour sequence. Braced for the challenge of reassessing the work which biographer Mary Moorman dubbed "the least interesting series of poems Wordsworth ever wrote," (7) I want to try to demonstrate the interest attached to an idiosyncratic textual enterprise which in a variety of interconnected ways shows Wordsworth not only revisiting the actual scenes of former travels but also returning to the imagination's personal sacred sites and reappraising the grounds of his creativity.
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The travelling party for the 1820 tour consisted of William, Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth, Mary's cousin Thomas Monkhouse, his wife Jane Horrocks, her sister and the Horrocks maid. They sailed from Dover to Calais on 10 July, and passed through Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland before reaching the southernmost part of their tour in the Italian Lakes and Milan. The diarist and family friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, joined them in Lucerne for the Swiss section of their expedition. They then returned through Switzerland and France, staying a month in Paris, and arrived back in England on 7 November. This route had much in common with the traditional Grand Tour, which it resembled also in its leisurely, variably-paced, companionate character, although its spiritual and imaginative center was in the Alps rather than in the great Italian cities. Perhaps more importantly, the Wordsworths' tour took place against a Continental landscape transformed by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which a generation earlier had all but stopped the Grand Tour dead in its tracks. The more personal significance of the tour was that it constituted a retracing in the reverse direction of the undergraduate walking tour which Wordsworth had undertaken with Robert Jones in the summer of 1790. Dorothy Wordsworth, whose imagination had fed off her brother's accounts of his experiences for thirty years, was thus enabled to substitute her own perceptions for the vicarious impressions which had been so precious to her, and later to write what Susan Levin has aptly called "her version of Book 6 of The Prelude." (8) I want to resist the tendency to treat Dorothy Wordsworth's prose, which encompasses some of the best travel writing of the romantic period, simply as background to the poetic output of her brother. Since my concern here is with William Wordsworth's literary record of the tour, I shall merely note that Dorothy's journal is the most substantial element in a more various intertext of the 1820 tour. William Wordsworth was in fact the only member of the party not to write a journal, and although several of these have not survived, Crabb Robinson's reminiscences and Mary Wordsworth's notebooks and journal are available for cross-comparison (although access to the latter is still surprisingly difficult). (9) In recording their impressions in this way the travellers were behaving like exemplary tourists of the day, and in many other respects too the tour was entirely conventional in form and character: Dorothy Wordsworth, apologizing for filling "so many pages ... about the outside of things hastily viewed," (10) summarizes the detached, alienated perspective of the recreational traveller which all witnesses to the tour share to some extent.
William Wordsworth's record of the tour, his Memorials of a Tour on the Continent 1820, published in March 1822, was written in a not uncharacteristic manner at some temporal (and spatial) remove from the experiences described. Far from undertaking a journal, Wordsworth composed almost nothing on the tour itself: after an unhappy interlude in Bruges when he was found "hurting himself with a sonnet" (11) (reflecting his well-known physical aversion to writing), he largely abandoned the creative task for the remainder of the tour. When he did begin serious composition towards the Memorials in November 1821, he worked from memory and from promptings in his wife's and sister's journals. He worked quickly, and the poems were ready for publication in March. His enthusiasm for the project seems to have taken him somewhat by surprise, since he began with the intention of composing a few poems to intersperse with his sister's prose, "as a tribute to the journal"; however, by the middle of January Dorothy reports that William's work "has grown to such importance ... that I have long ceased to consider it in connection with my own narrative" (LY 104). Dorothy seems less than surprised by this reversal of the hierarchical relationship between the two siblings' writing.
The first and only separate edition of Memorials of a Tour on the Continent 1820 contained thirty-nine poems, including a dedicatory sonnet and one poem included only in a footnote to the ode "To Enterprize." The poems are heterogeneous: although the sonnet is the dominant form, there are also examples of the ode, hymn, and elegy; poems that define themselves generically as an "effusion," "scene," or "memorial"; and other descriptive and meditative lyrics in a variety of stanza forms and meters. Memorials is a slim, well-produced octavo volume, with no decorative emblems or motifs, very sparing use of block capitals and italic type, and a maximum of eighteen lines of verse to the page; Longman priced it at 6s. 6d. The "bibliographical codes" (to use Jerome McGann's useful phrase) (12) of the work in its original format were therefore intriguingly close to those...
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