Guide to the Lakes
Encyclopedia
Guide to the Lakes, William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....

's travellers' guidebook to England's Lake District
Lake District
The Lake District, also commonly known as The Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous not only for its lakes and its mountains but also for its associations with the early 19th century poetry and writings of William Wordsworth...

, has been studied by scholars both for its relationship to his Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

 poetry and as an early influence on 19th-century geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...

. Originally written because Wordsworth needed money, the first version was published in 1810 as anonymous text in a collection of engravings. The work is now best known from its expanded and updated 1835 fifth edition.

According to Wordsworth biographer Stephen Gill:
The Guide is multi-faceted. It is a guide, but it is also a prose-poem about light, shapes, and textures, about movement and stillness ... It is a paean to a way of life, but also a lament for the inevitability of its passing ... What holds this diversity together is the voice of complete authority, compounded from experience, intense observation, thought, and love.

Relation to Wordsworth's life and thought

Wordsworth was born in the Lake District
Lake District
The Lake District, also commonly known as The Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous not only for its lakes and its mountains but also for its associations with the early 19th century poetry and writings of William Wordsworth...

 and spent much of his life living there. Wordsworth and his friends Robert Southey
Robert Southey
Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called "Lake Poets", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from 1813 to his death in 1843...

 and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...

 became known as Lake Poets
Lake Poets
The Lake Poets are a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review...

 not only because they lived in this area but also because its landscapes and people inspired their work.

By 1810, Wordsworth was living near Grasmere
Grasmere
Grasmere is a village, and popular tourist destination, in the centre of the English Lake District. It takes its name from the adjacent lake, and is associated with the Lake Poets...

 with his sister and collaborator Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth was an English author, poet and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close for all of their lives...

, his sister-in-law, his wife, and their four small children. A fifth child was born to them in 1810. Several commentators have suggested that Wordsworth agreed to write text for a new book of engravings because he needed money, a suggestion supported by Wordsworth's scathing description of the engravings in an 1810 letter to Lady Beaumont:
"The drawings, or etchings, or whatever they may be called are ... intolerable. You will receive from them that sort of disgust which I do from bad poetry ... They will please many who in all the arts are most taken by what is worthless."

Publishing history

The beauty of the Lake District was already well known in 1810, the year Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes was first published, as an anonymous introduction to a book of engravings of the Lake District by the Reverend Joseph Wilkinson. For example, in 1775 the poet Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray was a poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University.-Early life and education:...

 published a journal of his visit to the area, describing the vale of Grasmere
Grasmere
Grasmere is a village, and popular tourist destination, in the centre of the English Lake District. It takes its name from the adjacent lake, and is associated with the Lake Poets...

 as "an unsuspected paradise." The first Lakeland visitors' guide (as opposed to a traveller's journal) appeared in 1778, when Thomas West
Thomas West (clergyman)
Thomas West was a Jesuit priest, antiquary and author, significant in being one of the first to write about the attractions of the Lake District...

 published a route for travellers that included advice on viewing the landscape.

Wordsworth explained his goal to a reader in May 1810, saying, "What I wished to accomplish was to give a model of the manner in which topographical descriptions ought to be executed, in order to their being either useful or intelligible, by evolving truly and distinctly one appearance from another."

In 1820, Wordsworth published a second, longer version of the Guide attached to a book of sonnets he had written about the River Duddon
River Duddon
The Duddon is a river of north-west England. It rises at a point above sea level near the Three Shire Stone at the highest point of Wrynose Pass . The river descends to the sea over a course of about before entering the Irish Sea at the Duddon Sands. For its entire length the Duddon forms the...

. He explained his reasoning as follows:
This Essay, which was published several years ago as an Introduction to some Views of the Lakes, by the Rev. Joseph Wilkinson, (an expensive work, and necessarily of limited circulation,) is now, with emendations and additions, attached to these volumes; from a consciousness of its having been written in the same spirit which dictated several of the poems, and from a belief that it will tend materially to illustrate them. (page 214)


In 1822, Wordsworth's text was first published as a separate volume. Fourth and fifth revised editions followed in 1823 and 1835; the last of these is generally considered definitive.

Modern editions are based on the expanded fifth edition, published in 1835.

Directions and information for the tourist

Wordsworth begins this section as follows:
"In preparing this Manual, it was the Author's principal wish to furnish a Guide or Companion for the Minds of Persons of taste, and feeling for Landscape, who might be inclined to explore the District of the Lakes with that degree of attention to which its beauty may fairly lay claim. For the more sure attainment, however, of this primary object, he will begin by undertaking the humble and tedious task of supplying the Tourist with directions how to approach the several scenes in their best, or most convenient, order."


Wordsworth's emphasis on the word "Minds" reflects (says the Norton Anthology) "his constant interest in subject-object interactions," evident throughout the book and in his poetry in general.

Description of the scenery of the Lakes

What the Norton Anthology calls Wordsworth's "Lake District chauvinism" is evident in his comparisons of its lakes and mountains to those of Scotland, Wales, and Switzerland. He finds much to praise even in the region's climate, which is marked by changeability, with frequent clouds, rain, or even gales:
Such clouds, cleaving to their stations, or lifting up suddenly their glittering heads from behind rocky barriers, or hurrying out of sight with speed of the sharpest edge, will often tempt an inhabitant to congratulate himself on belonging to a country of mists and clouds and storms, and make him think of the blank sky of Egypt, and of the cerulean vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a sad spectacle. (page 58)

Miscellaneous observations

Wordsworth begins by discussing the relative advantages of different seasons for a visit to the Lakes.

Next he embarks on a long comparison of Lake District scenery to the much-praised landscapes of Switzerland, although with this initial disclaimer (page 98):
Nothing is more injurious to genuine feeling than the practice of hastily and ungraciously deprecating the face of one country by comparing it with that of another ... fastidiousness is a wretched travelling companion; and the best guide to which in matters of taste we can entrust ourselves, is a disposition to be pleased.

Excursions

Here Wordworth describes several itineraries a traveller might choose leading to some of the Lake District's finest views. He includes in this section a long passage transcribed nearly intact from the 1805 journal of his sister Dorothy Wordsworth about a trip they took from their home in Grasmere
Grasmere
Grasmere is a village, and popular tourist destination, in the centre of the English Lake District. It takes its name from the adjacent lake, and is associated with the Lake Poets...

 to Ullswater
Ullswater
Ullswater is the second largest lake in the English Lake District, being approximately nine miles long and 0.75 miles wide with a maximum depth of slightly more than ....

 (see Sélincourt footnote pp 181 – 182).

Ode ("The pass of Kirkstone")

Throughout this Guide, Wordsworth includes poems (by himself and by others) expanding on topics being discussed in prose. This section of the guidebook is an ode
Ode
Ode is a type of lyrical verse. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also exist...

 in blank verse
Blank verse
Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...

 by Wordsworth evoking the hard ascent and joyful descent of Kirkstone Pass
Kirkstone Pass
Kirkstone Pass is a mountain pass in the English Lake District, in the county of Cumbria. It is at an altitude of .This is the Lake District's highest pass that is open to motor traffic and it connects Ambleside in the Rothay Valley to Patterdale in the Ullswater Valley - the A592 road. In places,...

, a high mountain pass between Ambleside
Ambleside
Ambleside is a town in Cumbria, in North West England.Historically within the county of Westmorland, it is situated at the head of Windermere, England's largest lake...

 and Patterdale
Patterdale
Patterdale is a small village and civil parish in the eastern part of the English Lake District in the Eden District of Cumbria, and the long valley in which they are found, also called the Ullswater Valley....

.

Itinerary

This section of the book contains mileages measured between various Lake District destinations. According to the fifth edition text (page 123), "The Publishers, with the permission of the Author, have added the following Itinerary of the Lakes for the Benefit of the Tourist." Hence the last part of the Guide that was written by Wordsworth was his ode concerning the pass of Kirkstone.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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