Saeko Yoshikawa, William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways, Motorcars and the Lake District, 1830–1940. Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780–1850. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. xv+287 pp. US$120.00.

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-564
Author(s):  
Paul Westover
Author(s):  
Saeko Yoshikawa

This book explores William Wordsworth’s pervasive influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of transport revolutions, popular tourism, and the Great 1914-18 War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of travel. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage—a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period when the popularisation of motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of Romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. By revealing how Romantic ideas of nature, travel, liberty and self-reliance were re-interpreted and utilized in discourses on landscape, transport, accessibility, preservation, war and cultural heritage, this book portrays multiple Wordsworthian legacies in modern ways of perceiving and valuing the nature and culture of the Lake District.


Costume ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-221
Author(s):  
Ingrid Mida ◽  
Sarah Casey

Reading the clues embedded in extant clothing demands both imagination and patience since the subtle marks of wear, use and alteration may only become evident with extended observation and reflection. During the course of a project undertaken in conjunction with the bicentenary celebrations of John Ruskin's birth culminating in the exhibition of Sarah Casey's drawings in Ruskin's Good Looking! (8 February–7 April 2019), the authors studied the garments of John Ruskin at Brantwood, his former home in the Lake District. The life-sized drawings of these garments produced by Casey mapped the absent presence of the former wearer, allowed visitors the opportunity to better see and reflect on Ruskin's clothing, and also revealed the hidden histories of Ruskin's garments. Drawing, the making of marks with meaning, is not an obvious research tool in dress history and curatorial practice but, as this case study shows, can expose subtle details and reveal new insights.


Romanticism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Brandon C. Yen

Through hitherto neglected manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, the Bodleian Library, and the Wordsworth Trust, this paper explores the relationship between William Wordsworth and his Irish friends William Rowan Hamilton and Francis Beaufort Edgeworth around 1829. It details the debates about poetry and science between Hamilton (Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and Royal Astronomer of Ireland) and Edgeworth (the novelist Maria Edgeworth's half-brother), in which Wordsworth was embroiled when he visited Ireland in the autumn of 1829. By examining a variety of documents including letters, poems, lectures, and memoirs, a fragment of literary history may be restored and a clearer understanding may be reached of the tensions between poetry and science in Wordsworth's poetry, particularly in The Excursion, and of the Irish provenance of a memorable passage in ‘On the Power of Sound’.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-50
Author(s):  
Magdalena Opała ◽  
Leszek Majgier

Abstract Due to the lack of maintenance, abandoned cemeteries are often incorporated into the landscape. In many cases the information about the age of the cemetery is unavailable. To find out the approximate time of the formation of the cemetery the information recorded in the annual tree and shrub rings can be used. One of the most common tree species, planted for ornamental and symbolic purposes on the cemeteries, are Thuja orientalis and Thuja occidentalis. Alien to the Polish flora, these species adapted well to the local habitat and climatic conditions. The paper presents an attempt to apply dendrochronological dating to determine the age of the abandoned cemeteries in the region of the Great Masurian Lakes, part of the Masurian Lake District (north-eastern Poland). The study included five abandoned cemeteries. In total, 15 cores were taken from the trees. After applying the standard dendrochronological method, local chronologies for the studied species were established. The research indicated that the oldest found specimens - over 70 yrs old - are Thuja occidentalis individuals growing at the Słabowo cemetery. At the other sites the specimens of both Thuja species date back to the 1960s and early 1970s. Compared to the historical information regarding the age and origin of the studied objects, thujas growing there are much younger than the age of the cemeteries foundation. The presented method proved to be very helpful in understanding the time of Thuja occidentalis and Thuja orientalis introduction at the investigated cemeteries.


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