Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Jeffrey, review of Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer, Edinburgh Review, I (October 1802): 63–83.

2. Gillray’s July 1798 cartoon in the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine. On Jacobin meter see Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, “‘When Klopstock England Defied’: Coleridge, Southey, and the German/English Hexameter,” Comparative Literature, 55.2 (Spring 2003): 137–40.

3. Jeffrey, review, 72. Thalaba the Destroyer, ed. Tim Fulford, vol. III of Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, 5 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004), 3.

4. Thalaba the Destroyer, 3.

5. Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instruction on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language (London, 1812), 145.

6. Thomas Sheridan, A Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language Calculated for the Purposes of Teaching Propriety of Pronunciation, and Justness of Delivery, in that Tongue, by the Organs of Speech (1781; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), xvi.

7. Review of Thalaba the Destroyer, British Critic, 18 (September 1802): 309–10.

8. For Wordsworth’s letter see EY 430.

9. Thelwall annotation to the title page of his copy of The Excursion (London, 1814), by kind permission of Paul F. Betz.

10. In his Augustan Measures: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Writings on Prosody and Metre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 12–14, 98, 14, Richard Bradford observes that Johnson’s criticism was offered initially by John Dryden who called blank verse prose mesurée. For further discussion of the animus against blank verse see Peter McDonald, Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Late in the century Richard Payne Knight repeated the charge of “measured prose” in The Progress of Civil Society (London, 1796), III: 522–24.

11. For discussion of the perceived relationship between prosodic and moral regulation, see Paul Fussell, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (New London: Connecticut College, 1954).

12. John Rice, An Introduction to the Art of Reading with Energy and Propriety (London, 1765), 177.

13. Richard Roe, The Elements of English Metre, Both in Prose and Verse, Illustrated, Under a Variety of Examples, by the Analogous Proportions of Annexed Lines, and by Other Occasional Marks (London, 1801), 1, 2, 7, 3. On equivalence and equal-time theories of prosody, see Fussell, Theory of Prosody, 101–63.

14. See Bradford, Augustan Measures, 130–31.

15. First published in Edinburgh, 1841, and reissued in 22 editions by the end of the nineteenth century. Here I cite the Edinburgh, 1842 edition, page 4.

16. The phrase is reported by Henry Crabb Robinson in a letter of 12 September 1857; cited in Brennan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995), 206.

17. Black’s Picturesque Guide to the English Lakes, Including an Essay on the Geology of the District by John Phillips, FRS, GL, Late Professor of Geology and Mineralogy in the University of Dublin (Edinburgh, 1850), 82. Subsequent references are cited in parenthesis in the text from this edition, unless otherwise stated.

18. Cited in O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter, 272.

19. Thelwall, Selections, x; HC 161.

20. For example, Sally Bushell, Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2009).

21. See, for example, “Revision as Form: Wordsworth’s Drowned Man,” in Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), and Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Also, Jonathan Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) and Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and “The Recluse” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Romantic poets’ revisions and their significance are also discussed in Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

22. Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 14, 225–40. See also Michael Baron, Language and Relationship in Wordsworth’s Writing (London: Longman, 1995), 235–51, and J. H. Prynne, Field Notes: The Solitary Reaper and Others (London: Barque Press, 2007). On “mediality”—“the general condition within which, under certain circumstances, something like ‘poetry’ or ‘literature’ can take place”—see David E. Wellerby, foreword to Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), xiii. See also Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. David Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 239–62.

23. McLane, Balladeering, 234.

24. Joshua Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols (1775; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), 8.

25. John B. Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

26. John Addington Symonds, Blank Verse (London: John C. Nimmo, 1895), 16.

27. For George Saintsbury (A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 3 vols. [London: Macmillan, 1906–10]), Shakespearean and Miltonic blank verse exhibits “the astonishing and almost miraculous powers of the English blend” of prosody, which incorporates the “discipline of classical and early modern regularity, and the life of ancient English freedom” (III: 512; I: 376). Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), 53. Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

28. Symonds, Blank Verse, 71–72; Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, I: 316. “A type and symbol of our national literary spirit,” Symonds continues, blank verse is “uncontrolled by precedent or rule, inclined to extravagance, yet reaching perfection at intervals by an inner force and vivida vis of native inspiration” (72).

29. Review of Wordsworth, The Excursion; Edinburgh Review, 24 (November 1814): 1–4 (1).

30. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London, 1787), I: 221.

31. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, I: 220.

32. Christopher Ricks, “Wordsworth: ‘A Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines,’” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism, 21 (1971): 1–32 (6–7).

33. The historical approach to national meter inaugurated by Edwin Guest, A History of English Rhythms, 2 vols. (London: W. Pickering, 1838), T. S. Omond, A Study of Metre (London: Grant Richards, 1903), and Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody. Genealogy continues to inform approaches to blank verse by, for example, O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter, Henry Weinfield, The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Robert Burns Shaw, Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).

34. E.g. Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London: Longman, 1982). Attridge’s scheme is applied to Wordsworth by O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter.

35. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

36. Notable exceptions include Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

37. Joseph Priestley, A Description of a Chart of Biography; with a Catalogue of All the Names Inserted in It, and the Dates Annexed to Them (London, 1790), quoted in Roe, The Elements of English Metre, title page. My book thus closely examines a moment in the “history of communication theory” described by John Guillory (in “Enlightening Mediation,” This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010], 37–63). On Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, he writes: “Communication by signs (words) compensates for the absolute (because unmeasurable) distance between one mind and another. That distance, which is not exactly physical, is nonetheless conflated in the history of communication theory with the physical distance between bodies in space. Every communication can be seen as a telecommunication, and conversely long-distance communication as a figure for the inherent difficulty of communication” (46).

38. William Gilpin, Observations … on Several Parts of England: Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland (London, 1786), I: xix.

39. Wordsworth’s prose description of the Lake country was retitled several times, as A Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England (1820), A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England (1822 and 1823), and A Guide through the District of the Lakes, in the North of England, with a Description of the Scenery, etc. For the Use of Tourists and Residents (1835). The shorthand title Guide to the Lakes derives from Hudson and Nicholson’s 1842 republishing of the 1835 text in an expanded volume (A Complete Guide to the Lakes, Comprising Minute Directions for the Tourist, with Mr. Wordsworth’s Description of the Scenery of the Country …).

40. For a different approach to Wordsworth’s lexicon see Hugh Sykes Davies, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

41. On the Survey’s history see W. A. Seymour (ed.), A History of the Ordnance Survey (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), and Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London: Granta, 2010).

42. Michael Wiley, Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); James Garrett, Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

43. Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990), 12. Tufte borrows the idea of “flatland” from A. Square [Edwin A. Abbott], Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (London, 1884).

44. E.g. Paul De Man, “Hypogram and Inscription,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 32. See also Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” Diacritics, 7.4 (Winter, 1977): 59–69.

45. Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

46. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 525. The text of the 1805 poem is based on MS A (DC MS 52).

47. Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery. I take the phrase from Wolfson, Formal Charges, 14.

48. Bennett, Wordsworth Writing, 5; Bushell, Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dickinson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).

49. Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutics of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Nicholas Mason, Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Heather Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

50. Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

51. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 21.

52. Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

53. Yopie Prins, “Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and the Science of English Verse,” in “New Lyric Studies,” PMLA, 123.1 (January 2008): 229–34; Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), “Prosody as Cognition,” Critical Quarterly, 40.4 (1998): 3–15, and “What Is Historical Poetics?” in Theory Aside, ed. Jason Potts and Daniel Stout (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 97–116. Other historical approaches include Jason Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009) and Jason Hall, Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011).

54. O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter, 181.

55. O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter, 11; Ricks, “Wordsworth: ‘A Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines’”; Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

56. Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Yopie Prins, “Victorian Meters,” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89–113.

57. John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd ed., (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 95–101.

58. Yopie Prins, “Metrical Translation: Nineteenth-Century Homers and the Hexameter Mania,” in Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 229–56; Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

59. For discussion of this issue in Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody, see Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter, 79–108.

60. Celeste Langan, “Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Studies in Romanticism 40.1 (Spring 2001): 52, 53.

61. Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 108–43, and especially 137–38.

62. Simonsen, Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts: Typographic Inscription, Ekphrasis and Posterity in the Later Work (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

CHAPTER 1

1. On the role of cartography in the consolidation of “India,” see Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

2. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 208. Further references to this text will be denoted parenthetically.

3. See Cynthia Chase, “Monument and Inscription: Wordsworth’s ‘Rude Embryo’ and the Remaining of History,” in Kenneth R. Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson, and Herbert Marks (eds.), Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 50–77 (55).

4. Crosthwaite published “An Accurate Map of the Matchless Lake of Derwent” first in 1783; he followed it with six more, issuing them together as Seven Maps of the Lakes in 1794, 1800, 1809 and 1819 (London: published and sold by Peter Crosthwaite, the Author, at his Museum in Keswick).

5. For bibliographic details, see above in note 39 to the Introduction; W Prose, II: 123–49.

6. (London, 1755).

7. George Pearch (London, 1768) reprinted 1770, 1775, 1783. Both Brown’s text and part of Dalton’s poem appeared as addenda to editions of Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes, in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire. By the author of The Antiquities of Furness (London, 1780) from 1780 onward. Wordsworth also quoted Brown’s poem in his Guide to the Lakes. Just as verse was incorporated within and added to the ends of prose tours, prose tours were appended to verse; the 1775 Poems of Mr. Gray, for instance, included as an appendix Thomas Gray’s journal. See Peter Bicknell, The Picturesque Scenery of the Lake District, 1752–1855: A Bibliographic Study (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990), 2–3. In 1820, Wordsworth published his Description of the Scenery of the Lakes with Vaudracour and Julia, excerpted from The Prelude manuscript, and his Duddon Sonnets.

8. Gilpin’s Observations, Relative to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland, 2 vols. (London, 1786) derives from his eight-volume manuscript Tour through England; more particularly the mountainous parts of Cumberland, and Westmorland…. Here I quote Observations, I: xix.

9. Gilpin’s Observations contains thirty illustrations: one line drawing of antique vases, one line-diagram of hill forms, and twenty-five views. The remaining three illustrations are sketchplans of the Lakes—simple outlines of Ullswater, Windermere, and Derwentwater, not to scale.

10. William Hutchinson, An Excursion to the Lakes, in Westmoreland and Cumberland, August 1773 (London, 1774), 61, citing Mason, The English Garden (1772–82), Book I, lines 212–15. I retain original punctuation to demonstrate the visual effects of verse citations.

11. Citing Thomson, Summer, from The Seasons (1726–1730), lines 590–606.

12. Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, Landscape, Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 76.

13. On the problem of closure in blank verse, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 78–84.

14. On the serial logic of the eighteenth-century tour, see Alan Liu, Wordsworth: A Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 5–7.

15. Samuel Johnson, “Milton,” Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 192–93.

16. Considering the “ascendancy of accentualism” in British poetry after 1770, Paul Fussell posits a prior “deafness” to “the element of stress in English”—a “disinclination or pure inability to recognize the force of accent” (Fussell, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England [New London: Connecticut College, 1954], 153).

17. See Richard Bradford, Augustan Measures: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Writings on Prosody and Metre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 130–31. Coward and Mason quoted in Bradford, 131.

18. Citing William Mason’s English Garden, Book I, lines 169–71.

19. Citing Night Thoughts (1742–45), Night IV, lines 80–88. The excerpt runs eight more lines.

20. Night Thoughts, Night II, line 572.

21. Hutchinson, An Excursion to the Lakes, 67, quoting English Garden, Book I, lines 358–59.

22. John Housman, A Topographical Description of Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire, and a Part of the West Riding of Yorkshire; Comprehending, First, A General Introductory View. Secondly, A more detailed account of each County; … Thirdly, A Tour through the most interesting Parts of the District (Carlisle: Francis Jollie, 1800), 152, citing Hutchinson’s Excursion, which is citing Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 606–9.

23. John Mason, cited in Bradford, Augustan Measures, 131.

24. For Wordsworth’s “perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturists,” the “almost visionary mountain republic,’” see his Guide through the District of the Lakes in W Prose, II: 206–7.

25. The lines continued to appear in the introduction’s later reformulations as A Guide to the Lakes.

26. Quoted in Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 40.

27. Gilpin, Observations, I: 122, quoting William Mason, Caractacus (1759), Act I, scene i, lines 13–15.

28. Gilpin, Observations, I: 122–23, quoting John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book XI, lines 417–20.

29. The bibliographic history of the text that began as the introduction to Wilkinson’s Select Views is given above in note 39 to the Introduction.

30. In his guidebook, Wordsworth introduces high-magnification views with such phrases as “Among minuter recommendations will be noticed” (W Prose, II: 182).

31. In The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827), II, 51–52 the lines were titled “Water-Fowl.” In an interesting inversion, Wordsworth quotes a prose line from the 1823 Guide to the Lakes as a headnote to the poem, marking now the prose as an extract: “‘Let me be allowed the aid of verse to describe the evolutions which these visitants sometimes perform, on a fine day towards the close of winter.’—Extract from the Author’s Book on the Lakes.”

32. On other examples of this culture, including the annuals and the reviews, see Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 28.

33. Books primarily of interest to antiquarians are an exception; for example, Thomas West’s The Antiquities of Furness (London, 1774) contained a Map of the Liberty of Furness in the County of Lancaster, scaled at one inch to two miles.

34. See Bicknell, The Picturesque Scenery of the Lake District, 26 for Young’s Six Months Tour (London, 1770); 27 for Hutchinson’s Excursion (London, 1774); 31 for Thomas Gray, whose widely circulated journal of his 1769 tour of the Lakes was first published, also mapless, in 1775 as part of The Poems of Mr. Gray. To which are prefixed memoirs of his life and writings by W. Mason, M.A. (York, 1775).

35. West, A Guide to the Lakes … in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire (London, 1784), viii.

36. Bicknell, The Picturesque Scenery of the Lake District, 13–15.

37. Bicknell, The Picturesque Scenery of the Lake District, 7, 13.

38. Bicknell, The Picturesque Scenery of the Lake District, 71. At one inch to two miles, the map was more detailed than West’s one-quarter inch to the mile.

39. Bicknell, The Picturesque Scenery of the Lake District, 13–14.

40. In incorporating prose annotations on the map, Crosthwaite was developing a practice that had begun to feature on the county maps of the mid-eighteenth century. For example, a marginal note in Emmanuel Bowen’s 1765 map of Cumberland and Westmorland reads, “Winander Mere is reckon’d the largest Lake in England, / and affords great plenty of Fish, which belong to Ap- / plethwaite in Winander Mere Parish. All the Isles of / this Lake (or Holmes as they are call’d) are parts / of the county of Westmorland.” In The Royal English Atlas: Eighteenth Century County Maps of England and Wales; by Emanuel Bowen and Thomas Kitchin, ed. J. B. Harley and Donald Hodgson (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971).

41. Alan Hankinson, The Regatta Men (Milnthorpe: Cicerone Press, 1988), 8.

42. For more detail, see the museum handbill reproduced in William Rollinson’s Introduction to A Series of Accurate Maps of the Principal Lakes of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire … First Surveyed and Planned Between 1783 and 1794 by Peter Crosthwaite (Newcastle-on-Tyne: Frank Graham, 1968).

43. Quoted in Hankinson, The Regatta Men, 10.

44. Crosthwaite’s handbill, Rollinson, Introduction to A Series of Accurate Maps.

45. Rollinson deduces that they were “very popular,” Introduction to A Series of Accurate Maps. Crosthwaite’s maps sold for one shilling and six pence each; the set for nine shillings.

46. David Wilson, “Peter Crosthwaite (1735–1808): Museum Owner, Mapmaker, and Inventor,” in Keswick Characters, vol. II, ed. Elizabeth Foot and Patricia Howell (Carlisle: Bookcase, 2007), 28.

47. The first phrase appears in the 1792 handbill for the museum, reproduced in Rollinson’s Introduction to A Series of Accurate Maps.

48. Within the lake boundaries, numerals indicate lake depths; arrows show the flow of water currents, and a compass rose indicates cardinal directions. Outside the lake boundary, pictographs (signs that resemble what they denote) mark villages and towns, rectangular blocks represent properties, and crosses signal churches. Different forms of line mark roads and parks; names indicate fields and woods.

49. Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes … in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire (London, 1778), 24.

50. Peter Crosthwaite, “Keswick and the Cumberland Lakes” (London, after 1819). The maps that I reproduce and analyze belong to a made-up volume held by the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The volume, stamped “Edensor Inn, Near Chatsworth,” contains six maps (Pocklington Island is missing). Henceforth, references to individual maps in this volume will be denoted parenthetically.

51. On the maps, the three stanzas of iambic hexameter are concluded by a single line of iambic heptameter.

52. England, Wales, and Scotland.

53. A Renaissance emblem typically comprises verbal and pictorial elements: the inscriptio (title, headline) and pictura (image), and sometimes also a subscriptio (a discursive caption, usually in verse). For a discussion, see James Elkins, “Emblemata,” The Domain of Images (Ithaca: Cornell, 1999), 195–211.

54. Although the punctuation of the quoted passage—the articulation of language—is considerable (e.g., “the Scale Force, (a Water Fall,) in one day, by the help of the Chaise, and a Boat”), the map fails to indicate where those “2 miles” are to be divided into “3 intervals of time.” This disjunction points both to the map’s drive to mark and measure and to its insufficiency as a navigational device.

55. On Crosthwaite’s inventions, see Rollinson, Introduction to a Series of Accurate Maps. Rollinson is quoting from an anonymous preface to the 1863 edition of Crosthwaite’s Series of Accurate Maps.

56. “Here lie the Splendid Spoils of Mountain Floods” points “Here,” to the “Fertile Plains,” and “yon,” to the “Stupendous Chasms,” claiming that the former is the spoil of the latter by the forces of floods over time.

57. The Derwent map is the only one of the series that advances beyond pictorial representation of peaks (the inset profile) to show them cartographically, employing the new European method of depicting peaks in plan view (as if from directly above).

58. Crosthwaite added these lines in 1809. See Rollinson, Introduction to A Series of Accurate Maps, and s.v. “Derwentwater.”

59. On the rising popularity of walking, see, for example, Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 9–19.

60. Wordsworth’s map was scaled at 1¾ inch to 10 miles. Otley’s Map of the District of the Lakes was issued in a handy portable format and was also included in Otley’s guidebook and William Green’s Tourist’s New Guide of 1819. Otley’s appellation “District of the Lakes” precedes the first recorded use of the term “Lake District.” According to A Dictionary of Lake District Place-Names (ed. Diana Whaley [English Place Name Society: University of Nottingham: Nottingham, 2006]), the Lake District was first so called in the 1829 Parson & White Gazetteer.

61. Black’s Picturesque Guide to the English Lakes with a copious itinerary; a map, and four charts of the Lake District; and engraved views of the scenery (Edinburgh, 1842), 4.

62. The terms appear in the two-page preface to the 1842 edition (v–vi). For a discussion of the development of the Lake District as Wordsworthian country in Black’s and other Victorian guidebooks, see Saeko Yoshikawa, William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, 1820–1900 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

63. On the sophistication of the visual representations of geology, see Martin S. Rudwick, “The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science, 1760–1840,” History of Science, 14 (1976), 149–95. The fifth edition is entitled Black’s Picturesque Guide to the Lakes, Including an Essay on the Geology of the District by John Phillips, FRS, GL, Late Professor of Geology and Mineralogy in the University of Dublin.

64. The 1853 edition concludes with “Memoranda for Botanists,” listing scientific names, locations, and periods of flowering.

65. Black’s Picturesque Guide to the English Lakes, Including an Essay on the Geology of the District by John Phillips, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1844), v.

66. Misquoting Excursion, III: 55–56. By condensing and reformatting information conveyed in the lengthy prose sections of the guide, the itinerary better suits the experience of the carriage and foot-traveler. Black’s itinerary recalls John Ogilby’s innovative strip-road maps from his Britannia (1675): a 300-page volume showing narrow strips (depicted as scrolls) of continuous post road between towns in England and Wales. John Cary modernized Ogilby’s strip maps in his 1790 road-book, Survey of the High Roads from London …, indicating properties and arrays of lines from positions on the road “to shew the points of sight from where the Houses are seen.” Quoted in Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 170.

67. Hartman, “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” 229.

CHAPTER 2

1. For estimates of distance, see Donald E. Hayden, Wordsworth’s Walking Tour of 1790 (Tulsa, OK: University of Tulsa Press, 1983), 116–19.

2. Although Geoffrey H. Hartman, following Wordsworth, dates the Ravine of Gondo passage to 1799 (Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964], 45), early 1804 is now recognized as the composition date for this passage and all of Book VI (1805, pp. 11–39).

3. For a bibliographical list of the six principal sources, see Max Wildi, “Wordsworth and the Simplon Pass I,” English Studies, 40 (1959): 226. See also Hayden, Wordsworth’s Walking Tour, 3–6.

4. For a reading of the focal position of the Simplon episode in the critical discourse on The Prelude, see David Ferris, “History, Wordsworth and the Simplon Pass,” Studies in Romanticism, 30 (1991): 391–438. For treatments of the episode since Hartman’s Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787, see, for example, M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973), 448–53; Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 195–204; Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 3–32; and Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 3–31.

5. Raymond Havens, “The Prelude”: A Commentary, vol. II of The Mind of a Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941), 420–23.

6. Hayden, Wordsworth’s Walking Tour, 4–6 passim. Wildi, “Wordsworth and the Simplon Pass I,” 227.

7. Michael Wiley, Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Space (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 16.

8. William to Dorothy Wordsworth, 6 and 16 September 1790, EY 32. Subsequent references to this letter are cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

9. Liu, in Wordsworth: The Sense of History, 9, remarks but dismisses one reference to limited “room” as an instance of the inexpressibility topos, linking it with other “clichés of circumvention.”

10. Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard, 6 October 1790, EY 39.

11. Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, 11–12, 4–5.

12. Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, 6–7.

13. As Hayden notes (Wordsworth’s Walking Tour, 108), Wordsworth acknowledges in Descriptive Sketches his indebtedness to the observations appended to Ramond de Carbonnière’s French translation of Travels in Switzerland, which included Coxe’s map.

14. William Coxe, Travels in Switzerland. In a Series of Letters to William Melmoth, Esq., 3 vols. (London: 1789).

15. Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, 11.

16. A crucial distinction between Wiley’s work and my own is Wiley’s interest in the way in which blank spaces on maps could make it possible for Wordsworth to spatialize imagination. I am interested in the highly mapped area of Simplon Pass and the way in which graphic complexity and confusion inform Wordsworth’s discourse of mind and nature. Wiley interprets the apostrophe to the imagination as a “geographical blanking” (Romantic Geography, 15)—even though, as I will show, this site was thoroughly mapped and in strikingly different ways in this period.

17. Homann Heirs, Vallesia Superior (Nuremberg: 1768).

18. In Cartographic Relief Presentation (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1982), 3, Eduard Imhof writes, “Earlier maps gave the misleading impression of ubiquitous level ground and valley floors, devoid of any landforms, lying between isolate mountain symbols, the shapes of valleys and gently undulating ground not being shown.”

19. Guillaume Henri Dufour, Topographische Karte der Schweiz … Ingenieure unter der Aufsicht des Generals G. H. Dufour (Berne, 1833–63).

20. Samuel Dunn, Switzerland Divided into Thirteen Cantons with their Subjects and their Allies …, 1786, in Dunn’s A New Atlas of the Mundane System … with a general introduction to Geography and Cosmography (London: 1788).

21. In his Cartographic Relief Presentation, 8, Imhof notes that the “wholesale transition from side and oblique views of mountains to the planimetric form for complete coverage of Switzerland took place in the maps of the Napoleonic military topographer Bacler d’Albe just before 1800, and in the so-called ‘Meyer Atlas.’”

22. On the technique of layering and separation, see Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990), 53–66.

23. Imhof, Cartographic Relief Presentation, 10–11.

24. P. D. A. Harvey discusses the problem of showing rivers and roads on hills in both picture maps and scale maps. The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures, and Surveys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 181–83.

25. Captain C. A. Chauchard, Carte de la Partie Septentrionale de l’Italie (Paris: 1791).

26. Louis Albert Guislain, Baron de Bacler d’Albe, Carte Générale du Théâtre de la Guerre en Italie et dans les Alpes (Paris: 1802).

27. I thank Denise Riley for suggesting the term cartospection to me.

28. Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, or Education of an Orator, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson, M.A., 2 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1903), II: 163–64.

29. As Reed notes (1805, 182), Wordsworth quotes James Thomson, “The Castle of Indolence,” I: 128.

30. “Imagination slept, / And yet not utterly” (III: 260–61).

31. “Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” in Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 274, lines 91, 93–94.

32. Jacobus writes, in Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference, regarding the diagrams, that the “historically unmoored subject can take comfort from the Newtonian scheme of overarching order and proportion” (79).

33. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 240–41.

34. Weiskel suggests that the episode of the unwitting crossing is a screen memory Wordsworth uses to forestall and repress a more traumatic encounter with the order of Eternity at Gondo Gorge (Romantic Sublime, 202).

35. “Regarded as a digressive form, a sort of interruption, excess or redundance, apostrophe in The Prelude becomes the signal instance of the rupture of the temporal scheme of memory by the time of writing—a radical discontinuity which ruptures the illusion of sequentiality and insists, embarrassingly, on self-presence and voice; insists too that invocation itself may be more important than what is invoked,” Mary Jacobus, “Apostrophe and Lyric Voice in The Prelude,” in William Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” ed. and intro. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 149. Wordsworth’s self-address in the Simplon episode, which I read as a special form of apostrophe, suggests that he presents himself in an integrated circuit of speaking and hearing. A distinction emerges between the trope of hypotyposis (“behold a map”), which positions Wordsworth in time and place, and the placeless immediacy, or point, of self-address.

36. The “mind” (1805, VI: 542) appears as “soul” in MS D (1850, p. 711; I: 610).

37. For dating of later manuscripts (MSS D and E), see 1850, pp. 6–9.

38. 1850, VI: 581. See also 1850, pp. 11 and 711. This change is retained in further revisions of the poem, including those of 1838–39, and appears in the first print edition of the poem in 1850.

39. 1850, VI: 643–44. This change does not appear in MS D, but is recorded by the editor as appearing as a correction in Wordsworth’s hand to MS E, which would date the revision to 1838–39, or after (p. 131, note 643–44; and pp. 6–9, 25–26).

40. 1850, VI: 588. See 1850, p. 129, notes 587–96.

41. 1850, I: 16–18 read, “should the chosen guide / Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, / I cannot miss my way.”

42. Wordsworth would contemplate how the pure relations of geometry “could become / Herein a leader to the human mind” (1805, VI: 146–47).

43. 1850, VI: 752–54. A facsimile of the MS D page appears on 1850, p. 728.

44. What the editor, Mark Reed calls C-stage revision. See notes 505–6 on p. 669 of 1805, II. A facsimile of MS A (DC MS 52) 134r appears in 1805, I: p. 820.

45. Suggestively, but not significantly, the deletion lines tangle into a dark mass reminiscent of Romantic-era cartographic renderings of the Pass.

46. Track is defined in OED as “the mark, or series of marks, left by the passage of anything” (I.1.a). So, too, trace is understood as “the track made by the passage of any person or thing, whether beaten by feet or indicated in any other way” (5.a). However, the cartographic references in Prelude Book VI and the practices of map-line tracing associated with its epistolary antecedents foreground the representational implications of “[?line] / Traced out mockingly” and the class of textual meanings attached to the word “trace.”

47. OED, s.v. “trace,” v.1, 3.9, 10.

48. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 39.

49. The poem in revision also shares with the map the use of typography to signal geographical significance. Sometime between 1824 and 1832, after the Wordsworths’ return trip to the Alps, the copyist of MS D (either William or Mary) called for the rare resetting of an entire clause in italics (by underlining it in the manuscript): “that we had crossed the Alps” (1850, VI: 592). Italics dictate a slowing of reading, as per the understanding of the day, emphasizing here the geographical knowledge gleaned from the Peasant and the ensuing full stop. Brought to the aid of “human speech,” typography intensifies the affective-epistemological turn at this point in the text (1850, VI: 593–95).

50. The 1850 text has “The only track now visible was one / That from the Streamlet’s farther bank, held forth / Conspicuous invitation to ascend / A lofty mountain” (VI: 580–83).

51. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 284–85.

52. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 285, citing 1850, I: 639–41.

53. 1850, VI: 754.

54. 1850, VIII: 451–53.

CHAPTER 3

1. On cartography’s excitement of the cultural imagination in the early nineteenth century, see Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordinance Survey (London: Granta, 2010), 202–12.

2. William Wordsworth, “View from the Top of Black Comb,” line 5, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 99.

3. Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 325. See also 24–25 and 53–54.

4. See Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 81.

5. W. A. Seymour explains that the Royal Society “implicitly” supported “surveying done with scientific objectives” (2). A History of the Ordnance Survey, ed. W. A. Seymour (Folkestone, UK: Dawson, 1980).

6. Seymour, History of the Ordnance Survey, 14.

7. Seymour, History of the Ordnance Survey, 4.

8. Seymour, History of the Ordnance Survey, 46.

9. Quoted in Tim Owen and Elaine Pilbeam, Ordnance Survey: Map Makers to Britain Since 1791 (Southampton: Ordnance Survey, 1992), 11.

10. Edney, Mapping an Empire, 19.

11. Owen and Pilbeam, Ordnance Survey: Map Makers, 7.

12. For description of early methods of the topographical survey, see Seymour, History of the Ordnance Survey, 59–60.

13. Edney, Mapping an Empire, 21.

14. Quoted in Seymour, History of the Ordnance Survey, 7.

15. Hewitt, Map of a Nation, 106, 206.

16. Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps: A History, 82.

17. Seymour, History of the Ordnance Survey, 49.

18. Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps: A History, 90. See also J. B. Harley and R. R. Oliver, introductory essay to Northern England and the Isle of Man, Old Series Ordnance Survey Maps of England and Wales, vol. VIII, ed. Harry Margary (Lympne Castle, Kent : H. Margary, 1991), xxii.

19. Stations were marked by wooden pipes set into the ground and, after 1791, with stones. Seymour, History of the Ordnance Survey, 29; 38. Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps: A History, 99.

20. Helen M. Wallis and Arthur H. Robinson, Cartographical Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900. (Tring: Map Collector Publications [1982] in association with the International Cartographic Association, 1987), “Hachures,” 218.

21. Wallis and Robinson, Cartographical Innovations, “Point Symbol,” 235.

22. P. D. A. Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures, and Surveys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 183. Alan G. Hodgkiss, Discovering Antique Maps (Princes Risborough, UK: Shire, 1996), 13.

23. Hodgkiss, Discovering Antique Maps, 43.

24. Comparable to French revolutionary rationalization of space. See Hewitt, Map of a Nation, 106–8.

25. See Joel Gascoyne’s nine-sheet Map of the County of Cornwall newly Surveyed (1699) which represents towns “ichnographically” (in plan). In Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps: A History, 86–87.

26. Line 9. See Poems, in Two Volumes and Other Poems, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 207–8.

27. The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), The Pedlar MS E, lines 143–46, p. 394.

28. Christopher Ricks, “Wordsworth: ‘A Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines,’” Essays in Criticism, 21 (1971), 1–32; Susan Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 144.

29. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 211.

30. Lee M. Johnson, Wordsworth’s Metaphysical Verse: Geometry, Nature and Form (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). On the poet’s use of “geometrical thought” as “the rational keystone of a belief in a principle of immortality,” see 3.

31. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 33.

32. Hartman reads “images of liquid light” as part of the “imagery of continuous revelation in Wordsworth” (The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954], 31, 30).

33. Unmediated Vision, 17–21.

34. On the “relationships between an individual’s participation in time and his completed poetic self’s reliance on timeless geometrical patterns,” see Johnson, Wordsworth’s Metaphysical Verse, 67–122 (68).

35. For a similar linkage between fishing line and the poet’s verse lines, see Wolfson, Romantic Interactions, 144.

36. The sense of grammatical repair derives from the reinstatement of hypotaxis following five lines linked and divided by the coordinating conjunction.

37. The parallel lines of mountains, Wordsworth wrote in his fragment on “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” produce sublime effects by suggesting the infinite and eternal. W Prose, II: 357.

38. Parrish relies for his reading text on MSS U and V; here he imports the first line from MS V.

39. The “varied line is that alone in which complete beauty is found.” Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 105.

40. OED, s.v., lineament, (1): “A line; also, a delineation, diagram, outline, sketch; pl. outlines, designs. lit. and fig.”; and (Obs. 3): “In narrower sense, a portion of the face viewed with respect to its outline; a feature.”

41. Ricks, “Wordsworth: ‘A Pure Organic Pleasure,’” 6–7.

42. Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard, 6 October 1790, EY 39.

43. See Jonathan Arac’s compelling reading of this revision in “Bounding Lines: The Prelude and Critical Revision,” Boundary, 7 (1979), 31–48.

44. For example, see Hewitt, Map of a Nation, 201–6.

45. On nature inscriptions and the convention of the genius loci (spirit of the place), see Geoffrey Hartman, “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 211–13. See also Chapter 1.

46. The principal text I will use is reading text 2 of the poem, the first published text, as appears in Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, 97–98 (lines 10, 1–6).

47. Hartman, Beyond Formalism, 222.

48. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), 29.

49. DC MS 80, 28v, in Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, p. 337.

50. Poems by William Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), II: p. 286, lines 23–24.

51. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 6 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1836–37), III: 281, 22–24.

52. On county maps, see 311 n. 40.

53. Poems by William Wordsworth, II: p. 286.

54. In his Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Space (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 160, Michael Wiley asserts that Wordsworth assumes the perspective of Colonel Mudge and reconciles himself to the project of mathematically delineating the nation. The poem’s philosophical stance, I suggest, is more complex and less resolved.

55. I take the text from its first publication in Poems by William Wordsworth (1815), I: 305–6. It is reproduced in Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820.

56. Wiley, Romantic Geography, 166.

57. Wordsworth reconciles his “natural, home-centered, pastoral-idyllic geography” with the Trigonometrical Survey’s “nationalistic-militaristic model of the land,” which was a “necessary to safeguard whatever remained” of the former (Wiley, Romantic Geography, 162).

58. Wiley, Romantic Geography, 163.

59. Wordsworth also associates mountain lines with motion in the mind in his fragment “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” in W Prose, II: 352.

60. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Evans, & Longman, 1832), II: p. 11, lines 23–25.

61. See MS photographs and transcriptions, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, 341–51.

62. DC MS 80, 28r, in Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, 341.

63. The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1820), II: p. 128, lines 23–28.

64. On the political implication of the shepherd’s view of Ireland, see James M. Garrett, Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 74.

65. “Preface” to the 1815 Poems of William Wordsworth. W Prose, III: 33.

66. “Preface” to the 1815 Poems of William Wordsworth. W Prose, III: 36.

67. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, 29.

68. See Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps: A History, on the enlargement of scale in English maps and also late eighteenth-century attempts to depict slope more naturalistically (81–91). See also Yolande Jones, “Aspects of Relief Portrayal on 19th Century British Military Maps,” Cartographic Journal, 11 (1974): 19–33, and Harvey, History of Topographical Maps, 181–83. Although lacking in detail, Emmanuel Bowen and Thomas Kitchin’s A New Map of the Counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland Divided into their Respective Wards (approximately four miles to one inch) indicates upland in plan view (London, 1760).

69. On Roy’s late eighteenth-century experimentation with the barometer for measuring height (called leveling), see Seymour, History of the Ordnance Survey, 13. A device introduced in the period called the clinometer could estimate slope angles (the dip) and heights, but in itself did not offer a way to measure and render entire forms. Jones implies that it is unclear how much these were used by Ordnance surveyors (“Aspects of Relief,” 21).

70. Some methods involved the precise quantifying of hachures. Jones, “Aspects of Relief,” 20; Dawson quoted in Jones, “Aspects of Relief,” 21.

71. On the Ordnance Survey as a training ground and on Robert Dawson’s “natural history principle” of drawing, see Jones, “Aspects of Relief,” 21–27, and also see Seymour, History of the Ordnance Survey, 50–53.

72. Harley and Oliver report the impression of slope can be “confused”; one Ordnance official found contours “clear in the upland but confused in the lowland area of the sheet” (Northern England and the Isle of Man, xiii).

73. Major General Sir James Carmichael-Smyth, Memoir upon the Topographical System of Colonel Van Gorkum (London, 1828), 1, cf. 8 and 2.

74. Carmichael-Smyth, Memoir upon the Topographical System, 53. Carmichael-Smyth promoted a mode of ascertaining slope by treating it as a hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. His revision of a recent Dutch method regulated hachures by assigning particular thicknesses and lengths of line—called “normals”—to particular angles of slope, whose precise degree could be assessed by reference to a published scale (1; 20).

75. For the most detailed history of the introduction of contours to the topographical maps of Great Britain, Ireland, and Scotland, see Harley and Oliver, Northern England and the Isle of Man, vii–xxvi.

76. Eduard Imhof makes clear the distinction: “In contrast to contours, shading and shadow tones can never express the forms of features with metric accuracy, since they possess only visual character. In the depiction of forms this method of surface tone gradation is far superior to the network of contour lines, as it can reveal individual shapes and the complete form at one and the same time. Shading and shadow tones, therefore, are effective additions to contours in many maps, transforming the metric framework into a continuous surface. On the other hand, they can be used alone, without contours.” Imhof, Cartographic Relief Presentation, ed. H. J. Steward (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1982), 159.

77. Harley and Oliver explain that the committee’s reason for convening was to determine the scale at which Scotland would be mapped; with the display of contoured map 91 SE at the Great Exhibition, however, the committee’s debate focused on modes of relief depiction (Northern England and the Isle of Man, xii).

78. Lieutenant Colonel Dawson to Sir C. Trevelyan, Correspondence on Contouring and Hill Delineation, No. 3, Parliamentary Papers. Accounts and Papers (7) 1854, 349.

79. Dawson to Trevelyan, 349.

80. Map 91 SE, in its second incarnation, appeared with hachure lines drawn in the office from a base grid of contour lines. This practice, which began in the 1840s, was discontinued in 1854.

81. Dawson to Trevelyan, 349.

82. Dawson to Trevelyan, 349.

83. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing, with Particular Reference to the Representation of the Physical Forms of Ground in Topographical Maps,” Correspondence on Contouring and Hill Delineation. Parliamentary Papers. Accounts and Papers (7) 1854, 362.

84. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), vol. III Modern Painters, 307. In the earliest volumes of Modern Painters, used by Dawson, Ruskin’s engagement with landscape was thoroughly Wordsworthian. Each volume began with an epigraph from The Excursion; Ruskin also quoted “Tintern Abbey” to demonstrate how the artist is “to hold to the unpenetrated forest and the unfurrowed hill” (III, Modern Painters, 628). Several other quotations from Wordsworth’s poetry exemplified “the intense penetrative depth of Wordsworth” (V, Modern Painters, 330). For his part, Wordsworth praised Ruskin for having “given abundant proof how closely he has observed and how deeply he has reflected” in Modern Painters. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Later Years, Part IV, 1840–53, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 780–81.

85. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 360, 363.

86. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 359, 361.

87. Lt. Col. Dawson to Trevelyan, 352, 354.

88. Lt. Col. Dawson to Trevelyan, 354.

89. Lt. Col. Dawson to Trevelyan, 350.

90. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 360, 361.

91. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 361.

92. Qtd. in Jones, “Aspects of Relief,” 20.

93. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 359.

94. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 359, 361.

95. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 359, 363, citing Modern Painters, The Works of John Ruskin, III: 161.

96. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 359.

97. Lt. Col. Dawson to Trevelyan, 350, 354.

98. Lt. Col. Dawson to Trevelyan, 359.

99. Thomas Arnold cited in Lt. Col. Dawson to Trevelyan, 359.

100. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 363.

101. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 363, citing Modern Painters, The Works of John Ruskin, III: 468.

102. Quoted in Harley and Oliver, Northern England and the Isle of Man, xvi.

103. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 363, citing Ruskin, Modern Painters, The Works of John Ruskin, III: 262.

104. Matthew Arnold, “Ordnance Maps,” Democratic Education, vol. II, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1962), 253.

105. Arnold, Democratic Education, 253.

106. Arnold, Democratic Education, 253. Though appearing to reduce the symbolic content of maps to shading and names, Arnold merely opposes these cartographic elements to criticize the Ordnance Survey’s inattention to shading. Arnold’s opposition points to the Ordnance Survey’s increasing prioritization of names over and against hachuring and their valorization of legibility over and against expressivity.

107. Arnold, Democratic Education, 255–56.

108. As Seymour explains, Roy did take the representation of relief seriously, and he criticized the late eighteenth-century mapmakers for their seeming disregard to a matter he deemed crucial for military not aesthetic reasons (History of the Ordnance Survey, 7).

109. Carmichael-Smyth, Memoir upon the Topographical System, 53.

110. Arnold, Democratic Education, 253.

111. Arnold’s letter literalizes Benedict Anderson’s understanding of the nation as an imaginary community: community that exists by virtue of its opportunity to imagine the national form into being. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

112. Robert Dawson, “Thoughts on Plan-Drawing,” 363.

113. Arnold, “Memorial Verses,” Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (New York: A. L. Burt, 1900), 273–74. Arnold’s poems are all cited from this edition.

INTERCHAPTER

1. Martin J. S. Rudwick, “The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science, 1760–1840,” History of Science, 14 (1976): 149–95 (151).

2. J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 54.

3. William Kenrick’s 1773 Dictionary, incorporated a rhetorical grammar in which the Elements of Speech in general and those of the English Tongue in particular are analyzed; and the Rudiments of Articulation, Pronunciation, and Prosody intelligibly displayed.

4. Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, First Part, Containing the Art of Reading Prose (London, 1775), 146. See also Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (London, 1798), 32.

5. See John Thelwall, Illustrations of English Rhythmus: Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instructions on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language (London, 1812).

6. Paul Fussell, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966), 80, 134.

7. Say, Poems on Several Occasions and Two Critical Essays (London, 1745), 104.

8. Poems on Several Occasions, 174, 172, 173.

9. Fussell, Theory of Prosody, 153.

10. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 154.

11. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 155–57.

12. Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, Second Part, Containing the Art of Reading Verse (London, 1775), 387.

13. Walker, Elements of Elocution: Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures on the Art of Reading, 2 vols. (London, 1781) I: 139.

14. R. C. Alston, editorial headnote to Joshua Steele, Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to Be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols (1775; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969).

15. Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, 17.

16. Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, 4–5.

17. Michael Maittaire, The English Grammar: Or, an Essay on the Art of Grammar, Applied to and Exemplified in the English Tongue (1712; facs. rpt. Menston Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1967), 193.

18. Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, 5.

19. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 184.

20. William Cockin, The Art of Delivering Language (1775; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), 82.

21. Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 89.

22. Steele dedicated his Essay to the Royal Society (“Instituted for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge”) as well as to the “Society for the Encouragement of the Arts,” usually referred to as the Society of Arts.

23. Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, 17. Steele refers to the chromatico-diatonic scale.

24. Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, 5.

25. Only in the 1830s did spot heights begin to appear on Ordnance Survey topographical maps.

26. John Denham, “Cooper’s Hill,” Poems and Translations; with the Sophy, a Tragedy, 5th ed. (London, 1709), lines 40, 160, 42, 43–44. (The remediated couplet represents lines 191–92.) As Steele’s emphasis is the “rhythmus of quantity” in this example, not “melody,” he illustrates the cadences and the temporal quantities of thesis, arsis, and rests.

27. On the construction of the speech of Ireland and Scotland as provincial dialects of a “standard” English spoken in London, see Lynda Mugglestone, Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 44–47.

28. Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, 11; Walker, Elements of Elocution, 121.

29. The lines on the abolition movement remain but are slightly changed: after the C-stage revision, no political “contention” but the “first memorable onset” of abolition stirs the air (1850, X: 247).

30. “Day after day, up early and down late, / From vale to vale, from hill to hill we went” (1805, VI: 431–32).

31. “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” commemorating the moment when “That glorious Form, that Light insufferable” “chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay,” lines 9, 14.

CHAPTER 4

1. Thomas Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, First Part, Containing the Art of Reading Prose (London, 1775), 146–47.

2. W. J. B. Owen, Wordsworth as Critic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969). Owen’s goal is not to historicize forcible communication but to draw out the naturalism of the Preface: the “attempt to define a permanent rhetoric is for Wordsworth a means of aligning poetry with nature, of giving it, as far as possible, a form as ‘steady’ and as ‘perennial’ as that of the mountain” (8, 5).

3. Hans Aarslef, “Wordsworth, Language, and Romanticism,” in his From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 372–81. On Wordsworth’s adaptation to autobiography of the primitive encounter at the core of Enlightenment speculative histories of language, see Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 71–213. See also James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 216–34.

4. Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 75.

5. British Romanticism and the Science of Mind, 77, 81.

6. Notable exceptions include Andrew Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) and Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

7. MS A of The Ruined Cottage, composed between March and 4–7 June 1797, and containing the tale of Margaret and her husband. See The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 79–87.

8. MS B (DC MS 17), the first complete manuscript of The Ruined Cottage. See The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, 46. Editors surmise that the Alfoxden Notebook contained work on the introduction to The Ruined Cottage, which itself included the brief history of the Pedlar, and that these lines contributed to lines 1–147 of MS B (13). For the dating of the passage, see 13 and 18–21.

9. Only two pages (50v and 6r) of the Discharged Soldier are extant in MS 14 (the Alfoxden Notebook). Letters on stubs 3, 4, and 5, however, indicate that the pages “once contained a version” of lines 1–102 of the passage.

10. On the earliest versions of the then untitled poem, in the Alfoxden and Christabel Notebooks and MS Verse 18A, see Beth Darlington, “Two Early Texts: A Night-Piece and The Discharged Soldier,” in Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, Ephim Fogel, and Beth Darlington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 425–48. My citations of the poem, however, are from the version presented in LB 278–82.

11. Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 189–200.

12. Milestones were a feature of the eighteenth-century roads built by the army in Scotland and India to facilitate the movement of troops and so quell uprisings. On milestones as “measure” of “the vastness of empire” and of the “infinite expansion of capital,” see Langan, Romantic Vagrancy, 223–24.

13. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755). Compare the OED definition of emphatic: (1989) s.v. “emphatic.” “Of language, modes of statement or representation; also of tones, gesture, etc. Forcibly expressive.”

14. OED (1989), s.v. “emphasis,” see sense 6.

15. Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), 79.

16. Joseph Priestley, The Rudiments of English Grammar Adapted to the Use of Schools; with Examples of English Composition (London, 1761; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), 50.

17. John Herries, Elements of Speech (London, 1773), 217.

18. Herries, Elements of Speech, 217.

19. Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, or Education of an Orator, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson (London: George Bell and Sons, 1903), II: 106, 107.

20. Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 262–63.

21. Lausberg differentiates figures of speech and thought: “figurae elocutionis have to do with linguistic concretization itself (changed precisely by the figurae), figurae sententiae on the other hand go beyond the realm of elocutio and have to do with the conception of ideas” (273).

22. Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, II: 155, 170.

23. Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, 396.

24. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1869), 155, 194.

25. OED (1989) s.v. “emphasis,” see sense 2.

26. Wilbur S. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 243.

27. OED (1989) s.v. “emphasize”: “To impart emphasis to (anything); to lay stress upon (a word or phrase in speaking); to add force to (speech, arguments, actions, etc.); to lay stress upon, bring into special prominence (a fact, idea, feature in a representation, etc.).”

28. Thomas Sheridan, A Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language: Calculated Solely for the Purposes of Teaching Propriety of Pronunciation, and Justness of Delivery, in That Tongue, by the Organs of Speech (London, 1781; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), 159.

29. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in The Works of John Locke, 3 vols. (London: John Churchill, 1714), I: 238.

30. Vivian Salmon, “English Punctuation Theory 1500–1800,” Anglia: Zeitschrift fur Englische Philologie, 106.3–4 (1988), 285–314 (306); Michael Maittaire, The English Grammar: Or, an Essay on the Art of Grammar, Applied to and Exemplified in the English Tongue (1712; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1967), 200–201.

31. Maittaire, The English Grammar, 201–2.

32. Accent diverged from its standard placement in a word only under the condition of “plain Opposition” in a sentence. Watts, The Art of Reading and Writing English, or The Chief-Principles and Rules of Pronouncing our Mother-Tongue, both in Prose and Verse; with a Variety of Instructions for True Spelling (1721; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1972), 56–57.

33. Watts, The Art of Reading, 57. This work was repeatedly printed from 1721 to at least 1783 on both sides of the Atlantic.

34. Watts, Art of Reading, 59. Salmon observes Watts’ primacy in this recognition (“English Punctuation Theory 1500–1800,” 307).

35. Lindley Murray, English Grammar (1795; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1968), 155.

36. Murray, English Grammar, 154. Although Robert Lowth does not treat emphasis in his 1762 English Grammar, Murray does (1795), demonstrating the influence of the elocutionary movement on the teaching of grammar.

37. Cohen, Sensible Words, 119.

38. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in The Works of John Locke, I; 182.

39. See, Aeschylus, Persians, 518, and Euripides, Bacchae, 22. My gratitude to Timothy Bahti for clarification of the early Greek senses and for the examples.

40. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (London, 1798), 110.

41. Watts, Art of Reading, 59; Matthew Arnold, “Ordnance Maps,” Democratic Education, vol. II, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 253.

42. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 129.

43. Sheridan, A Rhetorical Grammar, xvi.

44. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 164, 165.

45. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 186.

46. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 132, 125.

47. Samuel Say, Poems on Several Occasions, and Two Critical Essays (London, 1745), 98.

48. John Rice, An Introduction to the Art of Reading with Energy and Propriety (London, 1765), 353, 195.

49. Sheridan, The Art of Speaking, 7th ed. (London, 1792), 11.

50. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 130.

51. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 120. Sheridan suggests that “gross errours” in the pronunciation of the church service both amount to and incite the commission of sins.

52. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 129.

53. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, 240. Sheridan, A Rhetorical Grammar, xviii.

54. Sheridan, British Education (Dublin, 1756), 202.

55. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 69, 128–29.

56. John Walker, A Rhetorical Grammar, or Course of Lessons in Elocution (1785; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1971), 99.

57. John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1968), vii.

58. Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, II: 355.

59. Herries, Elements of Speech, 218.

60. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 129.

61. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 128. As Paula McDowell has argued, “literate groups’ ideas about oral forms and practices developed in an especially close dialectical relationship with ideas about print (especially print commerce)” (“Mediating Media Past and Present: Toward a Genealogy of ‘Print Culture’ and ‘Oral Tradition,’” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010], 246).

62. Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, First Part, 181–82.

63. Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, First Part, 286, 297–98.

64. Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, Second Part, Containing the Art of Reading Verse (London, 1775), 387, 389.

65. Walker, Rhetorical Grammar, 111.

66. Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English, 114.

67. Walker, Rhetorical Grammar, 100, 112.

68. Walker, Rhetorical Grammar, 114–19. For Walker’s theory of inflexion, see the Interchapter.

69. Rather than value his advice to “avoid artificiality and to keep to [a] natural manner of delivery,” some of the instructors Sheridan inspired “valued instead his idea that rules could be devised to enable ordained teachers in the art of arousing passions by a system of fixed tones and gestures.” Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, 243. Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, First Part, 153.

70. Enfield, The Speaker: or, Miscellaneous Pieces, Selected from the Best English Writers (London, 1782), xviii.

71. Cockin, The Art of Delivering Written Language, or, An Essay on Reading: in Which the Subject is Treated Philosophically as well as with a View to Practice (London, 1775), 41, 44–52.

72. Cockin, The Art of Delivering Written Language, 149–50.

73. These are the only extant manuscript lines of Dorothy’s Alfoxden journal, parts of which were first published by William Knight in 1889. Pamela Woof disputes their common attribution to Dorothy, observing that vocabulary and syntax “point rather to W[illiam]” as the base author. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2008), 274.

74. When the “moon burst through the invisible veil which enveloped her,” Dorothy records, “the shadows of the oaks blackened, and their lines became more strongly marked.” When a “white thin cloud” again covers the moon, the “sky is flat, unmarked by distances;” the dog “makes a strange, uncouth howl.” Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, 142.

75. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, 142.

76. The Wordsworths were writing forward from the first leaf and backward from the last leaf in the notebook. The Payne Knight quotation appears on 49v. See LB 715–16. Butler and Green omit Dorothy’s “Dr.”

77. See my discussion of Johnson and the heroic measure in Chapter 1.

78. Richard Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil Society (London, 1796). He also credited the “roughness” of English diction for giving “Impressive sense and energy” to poetry (it “stamps, in sound less flowing and refined, / Each thought and image strongly on the mind” (III: 522–24).

79. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London, 1787), II: 438.

80. On Wordsworth and Quintilian see Brad Sullivan, Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge: Refiguring Relationships Among Minds, Worlds, and Words (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). See also Roger N. Murray, Wordsworth’s Style: Figures and Themes in the “Lyrical Ballads” of 1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 37 note 3.

81. Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, II: 155.

82. James Burgh, The Art of Speaking, in Two Parts, 2nd ed. (Dublin, 1763), title page. On The Speaker, see Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, 85–86.

83. Langan, Romantic Vagrancy, suggests that Wordsworth’s aesthetic drive to present the self as autonomous (aesthetically, politically) depends upon a staged encounter with the vagabond-double. Wordsworth’s is a strategy of reduction and displacement, refusing to engage fully with the vagrant, resulting from aesthetic drive.

84. Langan, Romantic Vagrancy, 177.

85. Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 30; Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 12. And according to Bewell, “we can see the Discharged Soldier as a figure of superseded fictions, a belated version of the Dantesque and Miltonic sublime.” Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, 91.

86. Watts, Art of Reading, 59.

87. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 215. Peter De Bolla notes the importance of coordinating gestures, looks, and vocal tones. (The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject [London: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 179).

88. Enfield, The Speaker, xv.

89. Burgh, The Art of Speaking, 16.

90. The Art of Speaking, 16.

91. Peter De Bolla explains, “The text must become internalized, thereby turning the dead letter into living speech…. The exterior textual matter is assimilated within the interior sentiments of the mind of the orator, who then expresses the combined text/internal sentiment” in the appropriate manner.” Discourse of the Sublime, 167.

92. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 115.

93. Burgh, The Art of Speaking, 12.

94. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, II: 448–49.

95. Burgh, The Art of Speaking, 12. Compare Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 128–29.

96. De Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime, 231.

97. On the soldier’s alienation and its social causes, see discussions by, among others, Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Gary Harrison, Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty and Power (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994); Langan, Romantic Vagrancy; and David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987).

98. De Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime, 159.

99. On the allusion to Dante’s selva oscura and the way in which the “journey takes on the symbolical resonances of a classical catabasis,” see Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, 88.

100. Herries, Elements of Speech, 218.

101. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 186, 32.

102. Herries, Elements of Speech, 218.

103. Paul D. Sheats has argued that the soldier redeems Wordsworth from the solipsism he enjoyed at the start of the passage. Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1785–1798 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). For an alternative reading, see Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion, 29.

104. According to Alan Bewell, “the episode thus incorporates an idea of literary history that justifies the notion of a poetry of everyday life. For the ‘man’ that speaks in Wordsworth’s poetry to appear, ‘a man speaking to men,’ he had first to pass through the sublime underworld of a fear-enchanted past, whose vestigial traces and echoes can still be found in dreams and the fictions of romance.” Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, 91.

105. Burgh, The Art of Speaking, 16.

106. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 129.

107. See, for example, Langan, Romantic Vagrancy, 19–20.

108. Langan, Romantic Vagrancy, 164, 200. See also 171–75.

109. Say, Poems on Several Occasions, 142.

110. Payne Knight, Progress of Civil Society, III: 530.

111. Payne Knight, Progress of Civil Society, quoted in the Alfoxden Notebook (LB 715–16).

112. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 156.

113. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 132.

114. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 109.

115. I offer this not as a definitive but possible voicing of the line. A four-beat alternative, “The gravitation and the filial bond,” is also possible. Both readings expose the limitations of the foot-based system of scansion promoted by George Saintsbury in his History of English Prosody: From the 12th Century to the Present Day (London: Macmillan, 1906–10), and point up the dependency of metrical description on performance. For an application of Derek Attridge’s more nuanced system (The Rhythms of English Poetry [London: Longman, 1982]), see Brennan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995).

116. Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, First Part, 148.

117. See the discussions of activity and energy in the vitalist philosophy of Joseph Priestley and his followers in H. W. Piper, The Active Universe: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets (London: Athlone Press, 1962). The elocutionary conception of emphasis here resonates with what Paul de Man calls the “face-making,” “totalizing power of language.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 91.

118. Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, First Part, 301.

119. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 129.

120. In a letter to John Thelwall concerning, among other matters, his “system of metre” in blank verse, Wordsworth stated that “any dislocation of the verse” (disruption of the “Iambic”) may be “justified by some passion or the other.” Mid-January 1804, EY 434. See Chapter 7.

121. Herries, Elements of Speech, 218.

122. For a reading of the way in which Wordsworth rewrites his origin in the mother so as to identify himself as the origin of motion and e-motion, see Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 48–57.

123. Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, Second Part, 248. As he explains, the strong stress on the first syllable in the line produces an “uncommon cesura” and has a “striking” effect.

124. Sheridan, A Rhetorical Grammar, xvii.

125. Langan, Romantic Vagrancy, 195.

126. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, I: 451, 297.

127. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, I: 285, 298, 452.

128. Longinus, “On Sublimity,” in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D. A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 164. Quintilian’s Institute of Oratory, II: 171.

129. The babe illustrates, then, the early, more propositional lines from Goslar: “There is an active principle alive in all things,” a “Spirit that knows no insulated spot, / No chasm, no solitude, —from link to link / It circulates, the soul of all the worlds” (LB 309).

130. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, I: 451.

131. Maittaire lists epanalepsis (the repetition of a word at the beginning and end of a sentence) among the “Figures or Schemes,” which “alter not the signification, but enlighten and enliven the Composure of the Words, either by an Emphatical Simple or Compounded repetition, or by a Passionate Argumentative Persuasion and Confirmation.” The English Grammar, 221.

132. Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, 396.

CHAPTER 5

1. Thomas Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, First Part, Containing the Art of Reading Prose (London, 1775), 146.

2. Line 65: The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979).

3. Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 92, 98. For another treatment of Wordsworth’s publication anxiety, see Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

4. For example, John Rice, An Introduction to the Art of Reading with Energy and Propriety (London, 1765), 195.

5. M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992), 49.

6. Vivian Salmon, “English Punctuation Theory 1500–1800,” Anglia: Zeitschrift fur Englische Philologie, 106: 3–4 (1988): 306.

7. Henry Dixon, The English Instructor (1728; facs. rept. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1967), 105.

8. Michael Maittaire, The English Grammar: Or, an Essay on the Art of Grammar, Applied to and Exemplified in the English Tongue (1712; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1967), 193.

9. John Mason, An Essay on Elocution and Pronunciation (1748; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1968), 20.

10. Mason, An Essay on Elocution and Pronunciation, 21.

11. Mason, An Essay on Elocution and Pronunciation, 23.

12. See 307, n. 37.

13. Thomas Sheridan, A Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language: Calculated Solely for the Purpose of Teaching Propriety of Pronunciation, and Justness of Delivery, in That Tongue, by the Organs of Speech (1781; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), 103.

14. Sheridan, Rhetorical Grammar, 89, 130, 168, 108, 104, 105, 109.

15. Sheridan rejected grammarians’ basing of punctuation on the quantitative system of rests in music. Thomas Sheridan, A Complete Dictionary of the English Language, Both With Regard to Sound and Meaning: One Main Object of Which is, To Establish a Plain and Permanent Standard of Pronunciation; To Which is Prefixed a Prosodial Grammar, 2nd ed. (London, 1789), xliv.

16. Sheridan, Prosodial Grammar, in A Complete Dictionary, xliv, lxxv.

17. Sheridan, Prosodial Grammar, xlvi.

18. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (London, 1798), 137.

19. Sheridan, Rhetorical Grammar, 104, 113.

20. William Cockin, The Art of Delivering Written Language (1775; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), 99.

21. Walker, Elements of Elocution, (1781; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), I: 111.

22. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Kenneth P. Winkler (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 33.

23. Abbé Batteaux, quoted in John Rice, An Introduction to the Art of Reading with Energy and Propriety (London, 1765), 238.

24. On the history of ellipsis marks, including the dash (but not the “blank line”), see Anne C. Henry, “The Re-mark-able Rise of ‘…’: Reading Ellipsis Marks in Literary Texts,” Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, ed. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 120–43. On their use in the novel, see Janine Borchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Andrew Piper’s argument that, along with asterisks, floral ornament, and “blank, black, and marbled pages” in Tristram Shandy, dashes highlighted the inexpressible, indecent, unthinkable, or forgotten, and the silent or suspenseful passage of time. Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 183.

25. Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, with Critical Notes (London, 1762), 154–72.

26. Robertson, An Essay on Punctuation (1785; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), 29. In his examples of the use of the dash to mark “an unexpected turn in the sentiment; or a sort of epigrammatic point,” Robertson uses both the short and long forms of the dash (132).

27. Walker, Elements of Elocution, I: 63.

28. Walker, Elements of Elocution, I: 106.

29. I cite the manuscript letter now held by the Beinecke Library, Yale University (*MS Vault Shelves Wordsworth—Lyrical Ballads).

30. See, for example, Lucy Newlyn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in Each Other (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Susan Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 166–78, 179–207.

31. Assessing Davy’s involvement in the corrections, James Butler and Karen Green observe that there is “no way of knowing whether this initial sheet of poems went to [Davy] or directly to Biggs and Cottle,” given that a note directs the letter to the printers “‘In case of Mr D—’s absence’” (LB 124). Moreover, the ink of the corrections “is indistinguishable from Grasmere work” and the number of corrections on the sheet is no greater than that on subsequent sheets sent directly to the printers. We know for certain that Wordsworth was actively involved in correcting the copy at Grasmere. In her journal spanning this period, Dorothy frequently mentions her brother’s “altering” of his poems, and part of her entry for October 1, 1800, “we corrected the last sheet,” suggests a regular and ongoing practice. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29, 23. Cornelius H. Patton, “Important Coleridge and Wordsworth Manuscripts Acquired by Yale,” Yale University Library Gazette, 9.2 (1934): 42–45. Given Wordsworth’s supervision of verbal and nonverbal elements throughout the copy, the Cornell editors can only hedge on the matter of Davy’s involvement (LB 124).

32. First drafted in the Prelude lines of DC MS 19 (MS JJ), excerpted in a letter to Coleridge, reworked in DC MS 15, copied separately by William and Dorothy in DC MS 16, and copied again by Dorothy, “There was a Boy” is increasingly punctuated. Still, DC MS 29, Dorothy’s fair copy of the poem, is significantly less punctuated than MS 1800 (the printer’s copy), which adds twenty-two commas, among other signs, nineteen more than are in William’s fair copy, DC MS 16.

33. Commas new to MS 1800 are in boldface here; commas apparently added to the copy in correction follow “sometimes” and “Listening.”

34. Cornell Lyrical Ballads editors Butler and Green read the dash in Dorothy’s fair copy (DC MS 29) also as double (LB 408). This is possible; it is more definitively double in MS 1800.

35. As I discuss below, two appear in “The Female Vagrant,” bracketing one phrase.

36. Of authors admired by Wordsworth, two stand out for their use of the long, 2-em dash: Laurence Sterne, who uses them throughout the much admired Tristram Shandy, and Charlotte Smith. Wordsworth subscribed to, and gave to his daughter Dora, his copy of Elegiac Sonnets with additional sonnets and other poems (5th ed., London, 1789), which is pervaded by 2-em dashes. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 127–28.

37. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 137.

38. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 137–38.

39. Geoffrey H. Hartman emphasized that the significance of “the voice of mountain torrents” and “the visible scene” are not available to the boy: he has a “presentiment” of death that is only known, reflected upon, by the Wordsworthian “I” in the second verse paragraph. Commenting on Paul De Man’s several readings of this passage, Timothy Bahti links the boy’s unconsciousness of death to the imagery of phenomenal reflection and to the insubstantiality of linguistic trope. Like the figure of chiasmus (which reflects and reverses), the reflection of the “uncertain heaven” on the surface of the “steady lake” can be spotted on the page but not “read,” that is, interpreted. See Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 19–22; Timothy Bahti, “The Unimaginable Touch of Tropes,” Diacritics, 25.4 (1995), 39–58.

40. Sheridan, Prosodial Grammar, xlvii.

41. Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 166–70.

42. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 137, 138.

43. In “The Female Vagrant,” lines 265, 266–67, 270; LB 58.

44. Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 167.

45. Robertson, An Essay on Punctuation, 131.

46. For discussion of the history, and amendments to the notes in later editions, see also David Duff, “Paratextual Dilemmas: Wordsworth’s ‘The Brothers’ and the Problems of Generic Labelling,” Romanticism, 6.2 (2000): 234–61.

47. On the paratexts used by Romantic poets to bridge the perceived distance between author and audience, see Andrew Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 110.

48. John Walker gave the colon double the time of the semicolon (A Rhetorical Grammar [London, 1785], 32). My analysis is based on the manuscript letters that Wordsworth sent to Davy and printers Biggs and Cottle (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: *MS. Vault Shelves Wordsworth—Lyrical Ballads, Folders 1–13). These manuscripts, designated MS 1800 in LB, are used for the Reading Text of “The Brothers” in LB.

49. For “sink” more deeply, see Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 128.

50. Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 83–84.

51. The first dash is introduced in the printer’s copy; the semicolon and final dash are introduced as corrections to the printer’s copy (MS 1800). In a deflection and deferral of the truth, Leonard here points to a grave that he recognizes as his grandfather’s.

52. Compare LB 392–402.

53. DC MS 174. See LB, p. 415.

54. The LB Reading Text reverts to DC MS 174’s more visually dramatic final punctuation of “headlong—” (397), which is obscured by the margin of MS 1800. The printed text of 1800 shows “head-long” (see Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, 2 vols. [London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800], II, 43; also LB note for line 397 on p. 158).

55. See Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7–9.

56. The remainder of the verse (“The Priest here ended—”) begins the next verse paragraph and is thus printed on the next line, aligned vertically with the end of the line above. Because the line is hypermetrical and also ends with an em dash, the 2-em dash after “hung” in the manuscript pushes Wordsworth’s line to the limits of his printers’ paper. (See Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems [1800], II, 44). MS 1800 shows 2-em dashes also at lines 220, 263, 282, and 312; these appear in print in 1800 as em dashes.

57. The lines correspond to LB Reading Text, lines 343–51.

58. On Wordsworth’s not reading proofs, see the editors’ introduction to LB 127. The 1800 printed text of “The Brothers” is indeed more heavily punctuated; changes include the addition of five exclamation marks, two dashes, and quotation marks to indicate the direct speech of the Priest in the opening narrative.

59. The mark also heralds changes to the poem in the edition of 1802, in which “the publisher imposed consistent house styling.” Textual presentation became more of a negotiation, insofar as Wordsworth “saw (and sometimes altered) these changes before their publication in 1802” (LB 127). The 1802 edition also raised new tensions for Wordsworth. Because in 1800 the printers had departed from the manuscript copy numerous times and egregiously omitted fifteen lines from “Michael,” Wordsworth’s concerns about the “business” of punctuation were now complicated by the business of negotiating with printers at a distance. On the major omission of fifteen lines from “Michael” and other printing errors, see J. E. Wells, “Lyrical Ballads, 1800: Cancel Leaves,” PMLA, 53 (1938): 220–22.

60. Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 78–100.

61. Dorothy’s fair copy of the poem, found in DC MS 16, is untitled. According to Butler and Green, no surviving documents indicate that the Contents title “originated with Wordsworth” (LB 211). That the poem is an inscription is the clear implication of the title given only in the Contents of editions from 1800 to 1820, “Lines written on a Tablet in a School,” but is not otherwise a necessary inference. Wordsworth listed the poem by other names in editions after 1820.

62. In 1815, Wordsworth classified “Lines written on a Tablet in a School” as a Poem Proceeding from Sentiment and Reflection, not as an Inscription.

63. On the convention of the plea for reverence, see Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Wordsworth, Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 389–414.

64. This charged image of abjection (and reduction of the human to a stagnant and immobile nature) gains force by an allusion to King Lear, which puts the dead Matthew on a level with Poor Tom who drinks “the green mantle of the standing pool” (III. iv).

65. Without developing the typographic implications, Bennett states, “the manual force of inscription takes on a special significance in such poems, poems in which the graphics or graphology of poetry, in which a certain graphopoesis, is contemplated and emphasized.” Wordsworth’s Writing, 81.

66. The Preface to Lyrical Ballads was probably composed between 29 June and 27 Sept 1800 (LB 740).

67. On the relation to discourses of discovery and coastal naming (Captain Cook), see Michael Wiley, Romantic Geography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 81–106, and Carol Bolton, Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 95–109.

68. For reproduction of MS page, see LB 733.

69. Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 59.

70. The bibliographic implication of the “sheep-fold” also appears in “Inscription For the House (an Outhouse) on the Island at Grasmere,” lines 9-13, where Wordsworth contrasts the homely masonry of the sheep-fold with the architectural plans of classical buildings displayed in “red Morocco folio.” See LB 182–83.

71. For the dating see Stephen Parrish, The Art of Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 151, 149–54.

72. Although the Cornell reading text, which is based on MS 1800, does not record this, the manuscript clearly shows a 2-em dash at the start of the line (LB 389). Evidently, while correcting the comma at the end of the previous line to a period (which Cornell does record in the list of nonverbal variants), Davy or the printer also changed the 2-em dash to an em dash.

73. Brennan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), 182.

74. Qtd. in Parrish, The Art of Lyrical Ballads, 183.

75. See Parrish, The Art of Lyrical Ballads, 183–84. In his letter to Fox, Wordsworth quoted from Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria, X. vii. 15; Loeb) claims that he would use as the epigraph for the 1802 and 1805 editions: “It is feeling and force of imagination that make us eloquent. It is for this reason that even the uneducated have no difficulty in finding words to express their meaning, if only they are stirred by some strong emotion” (qtd. in LB 377–78).

76. O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter, 179–80. Lines encompassed “dramatic, narrative, philosophical, autobiographical, descriptive, and lyric genres” (180).

77. There are 2,843 lines in volume II. I thank Michael Gamer for confirming my calculations.

78. See O’Donnell’s sensitive demonstration of Wordsworth’s variety of blank-verse voices in The Passion of Meter, 179–237; and on the double negative structure throughout “Tintern Abbey,” see Elfenbein, The Rise of English, 53–54.

79. On the presentation of the surface for visual imagination see Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium),” Representations, 57 (Winter 1997): 90–115.

80. The semicolon in line 53 is added for the 1802 edition but included in the LB Reading Text.

CHAPTER 6

1. A rare exception is the opening invocation of the breeze (1805, line 5). The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). Henceforth cited as Norton. This edition remains in print and is advertised by the publisher as one of “the essential texts for studying this author” in the new edition of Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). In the Prelude text that Halmi prints, the exclamation marks, silently omitted in 1979, are returned to the 1805 poem. On “the poem to Coleridge,” see Norton, ix.

2. Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on The Prelude (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 176–77.

3. Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 68. For a Bakhtinian reading of Wordsworthian apostrophe, particularly in Lyrical Ballads, see Michael Mackovski, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

4. See, for example, Romanticism, An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th ed. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), p. 363, lines 88, 110.

5. Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference, 166.

6. Jonathan Culler’s reference to apostrophe as embarrassing put the figure, along with prosopopoeia, emphasized by Paul de Man, at the center of discussion of lyric. Culler, “Apostrophe,” Diacritics, 7.4 (1977): 59–69.

7. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. I, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 90.

8. Wordsworth’s “red” should be punningly read—read “with overtoil.” In an influential reading, Neil Hertz drew attention to the figuration of the cityscape as a visual surface that threatens to erode the difference between reading and seeing and thereby to disable Wordsworth’s writing of autobiography. “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 56–60, quotation on 57.

9. Thomas Sheridan, A Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language: Calculated Solely for the Purposes of Teaching Propriety of Pronunciation, and Justness of Delivery, in That Tongue, by the Organs of Speech (London: 1781; reprint Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), 128.

10. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (London, 1798), xv.

11. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 186.

12. Thomas Sheridan, A Complete Dictionary of the English Language, Both With Regard to Sound and Meaning: One Main Object of Which is, To Establish a Plain and Permanent Standard of Pronunciation; To Which is Prefixed a Prosodial Grammar, 2nd ed. (London, 1789), xlvi.

13. John Walker, Elements of Elocution, vol. 1 (1781; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), 319.

14. [Notebook Draft of an Essay on Punctuation], The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997), 422.

15. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London, 1787), I: 451.

16. Adorno, Notes to Literature, I: 93.

17. Joseph Robertson, An Essay on Punctuation (1785; facs. rpt. Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), 103.

18. Robertson, An Essay on Punctuation, 103, quoting “Introduction to the Study of Polite Literature.”

19. MS JJ, DC MS 19; DC MS 15; DC MS 16. See Stephen Parrish’s Introduction to The Prelude 1798–1799 (1799), pp. 3–36.

20. Lines reconstructed from textual stubs in a second notebook, MS 15, with help from MS U. Parrish notes that they are “evidently fresh composition, and they introduce a new element into main body of the poem. Here for the first time is a loving person addressed” (1799, p. 13).

21. Dorothy and William to Coleridge, letter of December 1798, sent at the time Wordsworth was finishing the completion of MS JJ (EY 239, 243). Although Dorothy’s earlier letter to Coleridge, which contained the lines “There was a boy” (from MS JJ) and which he acknowledged in a letter of 10 December, does not survive, we do have Coleridge’s reply (CL, I: 452).

22. Although De Selincourt and Shaver do not record a final exclamation mark (EY 243), the manuscript letter clearly shows a dark exclamation mark (“our very dear friend!”) sloped just like three in the valediction that they do record. Still, the final punctuation may be William’s. Parrish writes, “After transcription, Dorothy or William went over the text and added or altered some of the punctuation” (1799, p. 131).

23. “For thou art with me, here, upon the banks / Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, / My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart …” (lines 115–18, LB 119).

24. A letter of 10 May 1798, CL, I: 406.

25. Coleridge did not date the letter. Ernest H. Coleridge dates the letter to “winter 1798–99” and Griggs conjectures “Early Dec 1798” (CL, I: 450–53). Others have suggested early February.

26. Leading him to understand that “as in English & German we form our harmony from tone not quantity—or perhaps our quantity depends upon the Intonation” (qtd. in Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, “‘When Klopstock England Defied’: Coleridge, Southey, and the German/ English Hexameter,” Comparative Literature, 55.2 (Spring 2003): 130–63 (143). On Coleridge’s experimentation see 130–51.

27. On hexameters, Coleridge, and debates about the most appropriate national meter, see Yopie Prins, “Metrical Translation: Nineteenth-Century Homers and the Hexameter Mania,” in Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 229–56.

28. Inserted, evidence suggests, sometime after the opening of Part II. The lines first appear in the fair copies of the 1798–1799 text, MSS U and V.

29. Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 206.

30. On the deceptive use of “friendly quotation,” see Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 145–46, 167–71.

31. The Five Book Prelude, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 10. Henceforth cited as Five Book Prelude.

32. Reed notes that by 18 March “the family had sent off to Coleridge, in parts, the manuscript now known as MS M (DC MS 44), with its copies of almost ‘all William’s smaller poems’” (1805, I: p. 11).

33. See, for instance, “Thus far, My Friend! have we, though leaving much / Unvisited …” (MS M, f. 143r).

34. Newlyn, Coleridge and Wordsworth, 172.

35. Newlyn, Coleridge and Wordsworth, 175–76.

36. Parker, “Wordsworth’s Whelming Tide: Coleridge and the Art of Analogy,” in Forms of Lyric: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Reuben A. Brower (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 75–102 (89).

37. I take the 1807 text from the Norton Prelude as the only widely available printing of the manuscript text of 1807 which was given to Wordsworth. Cf. PW, II. ii, pp. 1028–36.

38. Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 833.

39. On Coleridge’s iconic exploitation of parentheses, see John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 127–36.

40. Parker, “Wordsworth’s Whelming Tide,” 80.

41. Parker, “Wordsworth’s Whelming Tide,” 77, 102. Parker quotes Coleridge’s letter to Wordsworth of 30 May 1815, CL, IV: 570–76.

42. Wordsworth, “The Texts: History and Presentation,” Norton, 511.

43. “The Texts: History and Presentation,” Norton, 525.

44. See, for example, Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

45. Although Jonathan Wordsworth retains the spelling of the base manuscript throughout the 1799 poem, he alters the spelling of the preterit throughout the 1805 text, choosing “‘to mark the occasional “éd” that requires a stress’ rather than ‘to preserve apostrophe “d” for the many that don’t.’” On the destruction of this “evidence of William Wordsworth’s preferred practice,” see Donald H. Reiman, “Cornell Wordsworth, Norton Prelude,” in Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 152. Reiman also critiques the Norton’s alteration of the 1799 and 1805 poems’ punctuation and capitalization.

46. The Norton edition differentiates the poet as a user of language from the inscriptional surfaces of London. In Book VII, “Advertisements, of giant size!” and the “Delusion bold!” of Jack the Giant-killer’s “Coat of Darkness” are shorn of their exclamation points; “the word / Invisible flames forth upon his Chest!” not only loses its exclamation point but also acquires capitals, indicating a preference for visual emphasis over emphasis of vocal phrasing: “the word / INVISIBLE flames forth upon his chest” (1805, VII: 210, 308, 304, 309–10, cf. Norton, VII: 210, 308, 304, 309–10).

CHAPTER 7

Epigraph: Ruined Cottage MS B, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 52r, lines 1–12, p. 275.

1. As J. P. Ward shows in “‘Came from Yon Fountain’: Wordsworth’s Influence on Victorian Educators,” Victorian Studies, 29 (1986), 405–36 (420) citing the educational journal Papers for the Schoolmaster which printed the Regional Training Board examination papers. See also Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 50, citing Ian Michael, The Teaching of English: From the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and showing passages from Excursion Book I were set for learning and recitation in women’s training colleges.

2. Jeffrey, review of The Excursion; Edinburgh Review, 24 (November 1814): 1–4.

3. From the title of Thelwall’s Illustrations of English Rhythmus: Selections for the illustration of a Course of Instructions on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language (London, 1812).

4. On Matthew Arnold’s efforts to have Wordsworth’s poems adopted in the education system, so as to use their “beauty” to counteract “anarchy,” see Ward, “‘Came from Yon Fountain’,” 434.

5. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (LB 746–7); Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London, 1869).

6. From the title of Book IV, “Despondency Corrected.”

7. John Thelwall to Susan Thelwall (“Stella”), 18 July 1797. In Damian Walford Davies, Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), 296.

8. See Nicholas Roe, “John Thelwall and the West Country: The Road to Nether Stowey Revisited,” in John Thelwall: Critical Reassessments, ed. Yasmin Solomonescu, Romantic Circles Praxis. Accessed 28 June 2012. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/thelwall/HTML/praxis.2011.roe.html. See also Judith Thompson, “An Autumnal Blast, a Killing Frost: Coleridge’s Poetic Conversation with John Thelwall,” Studies in Romanticism, 36.3 (1997): 427–56.

9. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth. A Revised Electronic Edition, ed. Jared Curtis (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1993; rev. ed. Tirril, Penrith, 2007), 45.

10. See E. P. Thompson, “Hunting the Jacobin Fox,” The Romantics in a Revolutionary Age, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York: New Press, 1997), 156–217; Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 13–24; Michael Scrivener, Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 3; John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 165ff. For a different reading of the passage of the Two Acts, see Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 26.

11. See David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 239–44, from which quotations of these letters are drawn. Richard Gravil, “The Somerset Sound; or, the Darling Child of Speech,” The Coleridge Bulletin: The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge, NS 26 (2005), 18–21.

12. I quote from “Sonnet III To Luxury,” 6, “Ode. II,” 53–4, and “Sonnet V. The Source of Slavery,” 2, 5, 6. On Thelwall’s “directness of speech,” refusal of the subjective, and commitment to “principles of honesty and truth” through personification, see Fairer, Organising Poetry, 237–38.

13. See Johnston, Unusual Suspects, 25–32.

14. From a lecture of 6 November 1795, printed in The Tribune, 47. In The Politics of English Jacobinism: the Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 316.

15. John Rice, An Introduction to the Art of Reading with Energy and Propriety (London, 1765), 138.

16. An Essay towards a Definition of Animal Vitality: Read at the Theatre, Guy’s Hospital, January 26, 1793; in which several of the opinions of the celebrated John Hunter are examined and controverted (London, 1793), 39, 41. On the literary and ideological ramifications of Thelwall’s materialist theory of vitality over the four decades of his career, see Yasmin Solomonescu, John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

17. Roe suggests “that it was Thelwall’s scientific speculations, as much as his politics, which brought the charge of treason in 1794”: Politics of Nature, 92. See also Fairer, Organising Poetry, 236. So, too, Noel Jackson reads the poetry of 1798–1801 as suggesting a force in language akin to the “electrical fluid” that stimulates passion in listeners. Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 54.

18. Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 109.

19. Quoted in Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry, 47, 45.

20. From a lecture of 6 November 1795, printed in The Tribune, 47. In The Politics of English Jacobinism: the Writings of John Thelwall, 316.

21. Qtd. in Mrs. Cecil (Boyle) Thelwall, The Life of John Thelwall (London, 1837), 347. See Molly Desjardins, “Thelwall and Association,” para. 12, in John Thelwall: Critical Reassessments. Accessed 28 June 2014. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/thelwall/HTML/praxis.2011.desjardins.html. See also Hazlitt’s description, probably of Thelwall: “‘The most dashing orator I ever heard is the flattest writer I ever read. In speaking, he was like a volcano vomiting out lava; in writing, he is like a volcano burnt out…. The lightning of national indignation flashed from his eye; the working of the popular mind were seen labouring in his bosom … but … read one of these very popular and electrical effusions … and you would not believe it to be the same!’” (qtd. in Thompson, The Romantics in a Revolutionary Age, 158).

22. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (London, 1798), 129. See also Hugh Blair: “On the right management of the Emphasis depend the whole life and spirit of every Discourse.” Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, II: 438.

23. See Fairer, Organising Poetry, 236–59.

24. A label given him by Secretary of State for War, William Windham: see John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Steve Poole (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 1–11.

25. Fairer, Organising Poetry, 255. On this poetry of retirement and the Llyswen period, see Yasmin Solomonescu, “Mute Records and Blank Legends: John Thelwall’s ‘Paternal Tears,’” Romanticism, 16.2 (2010), 152–63, and Judith Thompson, John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 125–60.

26. “On leaving the Bottoms of Glocestershire; where the Author had been entertained by several families with great hospitality. Aug. 12, 1797.” Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (Hereford, 1801), 138–39.

27. It makes no appearance in Poems Written in Close Confinement.

28. Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, 129.

29. “To the Infant Hampden,” Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, 141.

30. Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, 130.

31. On the reciprocal influence, see Roe, The Politics of Nature, 96–119; Walford Davies, Presences that Disturb, 193–240. In the Silenced Partner, 53–56, Judith Thompson argues that Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” responds to Thelwall’s “To the Infant Hampden.” See also Gravil, “Somerset Sound.” Thelwall’s use of the 2-em dash perhaps also influenced Wordsworth’s use of the mark in Lyrical Ballads (1800).

32. See Roe, Politics of Nature, 93–95, quotation on 95.

33. Thelwall’s inscription of his copy of The Excursion (London, 1814), by kind permission of Paul F. Betz.

34. Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instruction on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language (London, 1812), 73. Henceforth cited as Selections.

35. Selections, xliv.

36. Syllables vary from none to five (five usually reserved for prose, the most “base” of feet). Pacing changes according to the number of syllables.

37. Thelwall defines “emphasis” as the “superadding to the customary energy of the poise or heavy syllable” a species of time, inflexion, or extra “emphatic force.” s.v. Emphasis, Abraham Rees, The Cyclopædia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature (London, 1819). The volume in which this entry appeared was first published in 1809.

38. Steele quoted in Selections, i–ii. In an 1806 letter on “Pulsation and Remission” published in the Monthly Magazine and reprinted in the Letter to Henry Cline, Thelwall claimed to have independently arrived at his ideas. HC 177–79.

39. Selections, v–vi.

40. “Effusion I” of the verse sequence “Paternal Tears” in Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement, 149.

41. Cf. Celeste Langan, “Pathologies of Communication from Coleridge to Schreber,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 102 (2003): 117–52.

42. Rees, The Cyclopædia. The volume in which this essay appeared was first published in 1809.

43. Cf. Selections, lviii.

44. Qtd. in The Life of John Thelwall, 347.

45. John Thelwall, A Letter to Francis Jeffray on Certain Calumnies and Misrepresentations in the Edinburgh Review; the Conduct of Certain Individuals, on the night of Mr. Thelwall’s Probationary Lecture, at Bernard’s Rooms, Edinburgh … With an appendix, containing Outlines of a course of lectures on the science and practice of elocution (Edinburgh, 1804), 95.

46. John Thelwall, Concluding Address to a Course of Lectures at Huddersfield, 12, in A Letter to Francis Jeffray. Elocution worked “to give energy to every other pursuit of genius and intellect.” The Vestibule of Eloquence (London, 1810), 54.

47. The letter text is given in Walford Davies, Presences that Disturb, 18.

48. Thelwall, Letter to Jeffray, see especially 69–72.

49. On Thelwall in Kendal, see Judith Thompson, Silenced Partner, 17.

50. Thelwall refers to “Accent of Punctuation” in his outline of “Part I” of “Lecture the Twelfth.” Letter to Jeffray, “Outline,” 8.

51. On poetry as a “metrical medium, transmitting … surges of pressure to the psychesoma,” see Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 241.

52. Thelwall, Letter to Jeffray, 109.

53. Thelwall, Letter to Jeffray, “Errata,” n.p.

54. Selections, lxix.

55. Selections, and Original Articles (1802), 3.

56. Thelwall, Letter to Jeffray, 68–69.

57. Thelwall, The Rights of Nature Against the Usurpations of Establishments (Norwich, 1796), 75.

58. Letter to Henry Cline, 165, 164.

59. Selections and Original Articles, for Mr. Thelwall’s Lectures on the Science and Practice of Elocution; Together with the Introductory Discourse and Outlines (Birmingham, 1806).

60. Thomas Gray, “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” line 59.

61. Selections, iii.

62. “Introductory Essay,” Selections (1806), iv.

63. Selections, xi, 30.

64. Selections, iv.

65. Selections, iv.

66. Selections, v.

67. Selections, xl.

68. According to Hugh Blair, “When one mounts a Pulpit, or rises in Public Assembly, one assumes a new, studied tone, and a cadence altogether foreign to [one’s] natural manner.” Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London, 1787), II: 448.

69. Rice, An Introduction to the Art of Reading with Energy and Propriety (London, 1765), 16.

70. Selections, v.

71. Selections, 40.

72. Vestibule of Eloquence, 1.

73. Selections, 40, 44.

74. Selections, 1.

75. Selections, 34.

76. Selections and Original Articles (Birmingham, 1806), page 15, lines 13, 26–40.

77. “Historical and Oratorical Society at Mr. Thelwall’s Institution,” Monthly Magazine, 28 (1809): 152–57 (154). Cited in Judy Duchan, A History of Speech-Language Pathology: John Thelwall, A Nineteenth-Century British Elocutionist 1764–1834. Online resource. Accessed 28 June 2012. http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/new_history/thelwall/politics_practice.html

78. Selections, xxi.

79. Selections, x, see also xxi.

80. Selections, xvi–xvii.

81. Selections, xix; see also xv, xviii.

82. In her contextualization of Thelwall’s program with respect to the early nineteenthcentury British Lyceum movement (a “nationwide system of adult education which was unified in its mandate to advance a democratic tradition of interdisciplinary education” [148]), Tara-Lynn Fleming reads the Selections “not only as cultural sites of learning” and sociability that cut across the classes, but as “material expressions of the lyceum institution” (159): Tara-Lynn Fleming, “Tracing the Textual Reverberation: The Role of Thelwall’s Elocutionary Selections in the British Lyceum.” In Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, 147–60.

83. Building upon E. P. Thompson’s comparison of the figure of the Solitary and the disappointed revolutionary who retreated from public life to the Wye valley (E. P. Thompson, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age, 196–201), Judith Thompson argues that by scanning The Excursion Thelwall wrote himself back into a conversation with Wordsworth and Coleridge from which he had been excluded and inscribed himself into a literary history that would go on to erase him. The Silenced Partner, 255–73.

84. Thelwall’s inscription of his copy of The Excursion (London, 1814), by kind permission of Paul F. Betz. By rhythmical clauses, Thelwall seems to mean balanced groupings of cadences, divided from each other by “grammatical pauses, emphases, and caesurae.” Rhythmus “consists in an arrangement of cadences, or metrical feet, in clauses more or less distinguishable by the ear.” Verse “is constituted of a regular succession of like cadences, or of a limited variety of cadence, divided … into obviously proportioned clauses; so as to present sensible responses, at proportioned intervals, to the ear” (Selections, lv-lvi). Prose is “perpetually varying, not only in the length of clauses, and the recurrence of emphases, but thro’ all the practicable varieties of cadence” (xv).

85. My interpretation of Thelwall’s act of scansion should be compared with Richard Gravil, “Mr Thelwall’s Ear; or, hearing The Excursion,” in Grasmere 2011: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference, ed. Richard Gravil (Humanities e-books, 2012), 189–203.

86. Selections, xxii, xix, xxiii.

87. Selections, xvii.

88. From an announcement in The Times, 17 April 1820. Qtd. in Roe, “Lives of John Thelwall: Another View of the ‘Jacobin Fox,’” in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, 13–24 (20). The Excursion is listed as item number 203 in A Catalogue of the Genuine Library of Valuable Books, Maps in Cases, Busts, Pair of Globes, Medals and Coins, and Miscellaneous Effects of John Thelwall, Esq…. Which will be Sold by Auction by Mr. Armstrong. I am grateful to Patty O’Boyle for sharing this reference with me.

89. Judith Thompson, Silenced Partner, 264.

90. William St. Clair considers the poem “for its length, perhaps the most expensive work of literature ever published in England.” He adds, “For the price of The Excursion in quarto, a reader in Salisbury could have bought over a hundred fat pigs,” The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 201–2.

91. Entry of 15 February 1815, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, 3 vols. (London, 1869), I: 473.

92. Selections, 23.

93. In Thelwall’s Selections and Vestibule of Eloquence, Judith Thompson states, poetry becomes “a site of sociable conversation and education” (Silenced Partner, 264). Sally Bushell argues that The Excursion models a form of active reception that brings the solitary reader into a position of a discursive community with other minds and achieves by proxy the restoration of the Solitary. Bushell, Re-reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

94. The boy applies this mode of natural, pleasurable assimilation to geometry books. By clothing “the nakedness of austere truth” in nature’s “hues,” “forms,” and the “spirit of her forms,” he delights in learning: “her simplest laws, / His triangles—they were the stars of heaven, / The silent stars!” (I: 290, 288, 289, 292–4).

95. Similarly, the image of a river running into a sea on a map, in the contemporary “Essay upon Epitaphs,” is used to counterpoint the sense of a “receptacle without bounds or dimensions,” the sense of a powerful feeder of “the perpetual current”—the sense, that is, of “immortality” (W Prose, II: 51).

96. Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 274.

97. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse, 273.

98. To Kevis Goodman, the therapeutic value of the stories lies in their seriality: their spacing out of accidents and of death, slowly across time, acts as a retroactive counter to the Solitary’s past trauma. Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 106–43.

99. On Thelwall’s sidebars and other notations, see Judith Thompson, Silenced Partner, 271–72.

100. The Excursion (London, 1814). By kind permission of Paul F. Betz.

101. The Excursion (London, 1814). By kind permission of Paul F. Betz.

102. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse, 273.

103. “Oration,” Vestibule of Eloquence, 45–46.

104. Vestibule of Eloquence, 44.

105. From a lecture of 6 November 1795, printed in The Tribune, 47. In The Politics of English Jacobinism: the Writings of John Thelwall, 316. As Catherine Packham writes, in the 1790s Thelwall identified this “energy” with “reason”—an “animating force” that he differentiated from enthusiasm. Packham, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 133.

106. Vestibule of Eloquence, 44.

107. Vestibule of Eloquence, 46.

108. The Trident of Albion … To Which Is Prefixed, an Introductory Discourse on the Nature and Objects of Elocutionary Science (Liverpool, 1805), 24, 23.

109. On Wordsworth’s visit to Ireland during the Ordnance Survey of that country (1829), his growing interest in triangulation, and possible repercussions for revisions to The Prelude, see Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London: Granta, 2010), 262-63.

110. William Roy quoted in Seymour, History of the Ordnance Survey, 7.

111. Vestibule of Eloquence, 122.

112. Thompson, Silenced Partner, 262, 263.

113. Parts of Thelwall’s incomplete poem, published in The Vestibule of Eloquence, were read and recited at Thelwall’s Institute and heard at his lectures.

114. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse, 313.

115. Johnston, “Wordsworth’s Excursion: Route and Destination,” Wordsworth Circle, 45.2 (2014): 106–13 (110).

116. Vestibule of Eloquence, 23.