Through the Lake District

in 1810 the English curate and amateur painter Joseph Wilkinson published a collection of his depictions of the scenery of England’s Lake District, hiring the local poet William Wordsworth to write the edition’s introduction anonymously. While Wordsworth initially signed on to this project almost wholly for money, he would eventually revise and republish his essay several times under his own name. By 1835 it had become the book-length Guide through the District of the Lakes, a tourist handbook combined with pronouncements on everything from architectural aesthetics to ecologically responsible landscaping.

Despite the fact that Wordsworth is widely considered the most important nature poet in the British tradition, his Guide through the District of the Lakes remains relatively unknown, even among literary scholars. A major problem has been access, as editions of the Guide have been few, and most editions that do exist make no attempt to incorporate Wilkinson’s engravings or other key textual features. Accordingly, in the summer of 2010, BYU graduate student Shannon Stimpson and Professors Nick Mason and Paul Westover of the English Department began exploring the viability of producing an online edition of Wordsworth’s Guide that would allow readers to track the development of the text, from its earliest incarnation as a complement to Wilkinson’s engravings to its final form as a stand-alone tourist guide.

Thanks largely to a Mentoring Environment Grant (MEG) from the university, the research group grew to include two undergraduate English majors, Emily Young and Rachel Wise, and a third English Department faculty member, Professor Billy Hall. In addition to paying for student wages and supplies, the MEG funds allowed most of our group to travel to the Lake District to research Wordsworth’s manuscripts, homes, and landscapes.

In the Guide, Wordsworth writes that one should visit the Lake District during the last week of May to enjoy the “best combination of long days [and] fine weather,” so in May 2011 we went, packed into a rental minivan, navigating narrow and twisty Lake District roads, letting Wordsworth’s words guide us through his homeland.

We stayed in Ambleside, a quaint town surrounded by green fields spotted with lambs and stone cottages, with convenient access to the many excursions Wordsworth mentions in his Guide. We hiked to Loughrigg and Easedale Tarns, looked for Roman ruins in a cow pasture, searched for larch plantations, explored Kirkstall and Furness Abbeys, and watched the play of light and shadow on the mountains. On other days we visited Wordsworth’s homes and key sites near Keswick and Ulverston.

On our most adventurous day, we scaled Scafell Pike, the tallest mountain in England, in thick gray clouds and sixty-mile-per-hour wind gusts. Wordsworth’s Guide warns of the fickleness of the weather near the top, but even Wordsworth could not have prepared us for the effect of clambering over slick, lichen-covered rocks through sudden, but frequent, downpours of rain, accompanied by wind and palpable mist. Fortunately, at various times, the wind would suddenly blow the clouds away, allowing us to see breathtaking views of emerald green mountains and gray sea, stretching all the way to Scotland.

Visiting these sites was vital, as Wordsworth’s Guide is deeply rooted in a sense of place. The poet describes the lakes not only in touristic terms (e.g., take this road, here’s a good inn) but also in aesthetic terms (the picturesque, the sublime, and the heresy of whitewashed houses). Even after poring over the Guide and supplementary materials in Provo, we couldn’t truly begin to understand the text until we were on the ground in Northern England. There we saw how, as Wordsworth insists, gray slate buildings and natural evergreens fit better into the landscape than bright white houses and nonnative larch trees. And, on that rainy, windy hike up Scafell Pike, we discovered the sublime.

Being in the Lake District not only enabled us to visit the spots Wordsworth mentions in his Guide but also gave us access to the valuable archives held at the Wordsworth Trust. As a team we were able to study Wordsworth’s manuscripts, various published editions of the Guide, and the originals of Wilkinson’s sketches. Working closely with Jeff Cawton, the library’s curator, we made a range of discoveries about the Guide’s original print run, Wilkinson’s artistic method, and Wordsworth’s sequential changes. We also took in the Trust’s current exhibition on sketches and paintings of the Lake District, which enhanced our understanding of art as a means of tourism in the Lake District.

All in all, the trip to the Lake District was educational on many levels. Beyond engendering a greater understanding of Wordsworth’s Guide, it allowed us to research alongside experts and with materials found nowhere else and enabled us to discover the joys of original literary scholarship. Not only was our visit invaluable because of the information we gathered for our annotations and textual comparisons, but also because it provided an important mentoring experience as we students learned from our professors how to do text-based field research. With that mentoring, we became more than a group of students with their teachers; we became scholars with a common goal. In traveling, working, and eating together for a week, we also came to be colleagues and friends. ✦