Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60

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Journal of Historical Geography

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Locating the beautiful, picturesque, sublime and majestic: spatially analysing the application of aesthetic terminology in descriptions of the English Lake District

* Christopher Donaldson , Ian N. Gregory, Joanna E. Taylor

Lancaster University, Department of History, Bowland Main, Lancaster, LA1 4YT, UK article info abstract

Article history: This article introduces and implements an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of historical Received 20 May 2016 text corpora. It presents a case study that combines corpus analysis, automated geoparsing and Received in revised form geographic information systems (GIS) to investigate the geographies associated with some of the key 16 January 2017 aesthetic terms historically used in writing about the English Lake District: a culturally prestigious region Accepted 25 January 2017 of lakes and mountains in northwest England. The basis of this investigation is a corpus of travel writing and topographical literature about the Lake District containing more than 1.5 million words. The corpus Keywords: mainly consists of works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In investigating this corpus we English Lake District Landscape aesthetics identify and analyse a correspondence between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and the use of the Picturesque terms beautiful, picturesque, sublime and majestic in contemporaneous and later accounts of the Lakes Geographic information systems (GIS) region. Our analyses afford new insights into the historical use of these four aesthetic terms. Our findings, Corpus linguistics moreover, reveal how ephemeral publications, such as tourist guidebooks, helped to consolidate the Digital humanities application of the aesthetic principles and vocabulary formulated by canonical thinkers, including Wil- liam Gilpin and Edmund Burke. In presenting this research, we demonstrate how a hybrid geographical and corpus-based methodology, which we call geographical text analysis, can advance the study of the connections between literature, aesthetics and physical geography. © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

In matters of aesthetic judgement much depends on choosing desirous to continue the conversation’.1 one's words with care. Yet, as an incident in the life of the English The humour here, of course, comes from the ironic coincidence poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772e1834) proves, this does not of Coleridge's desire for precision and the unexpected imprecision always happen. While visiting the Falls of Clyde in 1803, Coleridge of his interlocutors. Beautiful, sublime and majestic are, after all, is said to have encountered a ‘lady and gentleman’ with whom he words with appreciably different meanings, especially when they fell into a friendly exchange about the highest fall, Cora Linn. The are used as judgments of appearance. Treatises such as Edmund gentleman, we are told, ‘observed that it was a majestic waterfall’. Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the This judgment pleased Coleridge greatly since ‘he had been settling Sublime and Beautiful (1757) make the differences between these in his own mind the precise meaning of the words … majestic, words clear. For Burke (1729e1797), who exerted a strong influence sublime, etc.’, and he happened to agree with the man's opinion. on Coleridge, the terms beautiful, sublime and majestic corre- ‘Yes, sir’, the poet replied, ‘it is a majestic waterfall’. To this, how- sponded to distinctive sensations that different types of phenom- ever, the lady assented by adding that it was ‘sublime and beautiful’ ena produce in the mind.2 Beautiful, in this context, properly as well. Coleridge, disheartened but not a little amused, is said to signifies forms that are small, smooth and pleasing; sublime, by have turned away from the couple at this point, feeling ‘not very contrast, usually denotes entities whose incomprehensible

1 D. Wordsworth, Sunday, August 21st, in: J.C. Sharp (Ed.), Recollections of a Tour * Corresponding author. Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, Edinburgh, 1874, 37. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (C. Donaldson), i.gregory@ 2 C.D. Thorpe, Coleridge on the sublime, in: E.L. Griggs (Ed.), Wordsworth and lancaster.ac.uk (I.N. Gregory), [email protected] (J.E. Taylor). Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper, Princeton, 1939, 192e219. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2017.01.006 0305-7488/© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 44 C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60 massiveness terrifies or overawes; majestic, for its part, refers to suggests that women are less aesthetically intelligent than men. For forms whose impressiveness inspires reverence or admiration. Yet, the purposes of this article, however, we are less concerned with as the anecdote above confirms, contemporary admirers of land- such issues than with ascertaining whether or not the sort of verbal scape scenery did not always use these words with such discrimi- fastidiousness that compelled Coleridge finds a counterpart in the nation. Thus, for instance, one comes across an article in the works of other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors. Do European Magazine for April 1789 that praises the ‘beautiful, other authors indiscriminately apply terms such as beautiful, majestic and sublime’ prospect of Skiddaw: an iconic mountain in picturesque, sublime and majestic to similar geographical features the English Lake District.3 and locations? Or do they use these terms to describe distinctive This indiscriminate mixing of terminology typifies an oft- types of features and locations? If so, what do the geographies of ridiculed aspect of the Picturesque movement: an influential these features and locations tell us historically about the way these trend in art criticism and aesthetic taste that arose in Britain during terms were understood? Do these geographies indicate any corre- the late eighteenth century. The effects of the Picturesque move- lation between the ways these terms were defined by thinkers such ment on British culture have been explored at length elsewhere, as as Burke and Gilpin and the ways they were applied in contem- have the different ways the term picturesque was defined by the poraneous guidebooks, travelogues and topographical literature? movement's principal exponents.4 For some thinkers, the pictur- In what follows we propose to address these questions by esque signified a specific pictorial quality. Notably, the artist and implementing an interdisciplinary approach called geographical theorist William Gilpin (1724e1804) affirmed that the term was text analysis to examine the application of beautiful, picturesque, ‘expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a sublime and majestic in writing about the English Lake District: a picture’.5 Significantly, though, later connoisseurs, including Uve- region of lakes and mountains in northwest England, which has dale Price (1747e1829) and Richard Payne Knight (1750e1824), long been represented in different genres of travel writing and contended that the picturesque constituted an aesthetic ideal topographical literature.9 We have chosen to focus on these terms concerned with the appeal of rough and irregular forms. not merely because of the interest they held for Coleridge, but We shall return to these distinctions below. At present, it is rather because they are exemplary of the ‘new language of [land- enough to observe that although the sensibilities of the picturesque scape] appreciation’ that emerged in Britain during the later eigh- broadly informed the polite culture of the eighteenth and nine- teenth century.10 Combining methods from corpus linguistics, teenth centuries, the Picturesque movement was also often asso- cultural history and geographic information science, our objective ciated with false taste and false feeling. Thus, one finds writers is to explore the ways this ‘new language’ was used to describe the ranging from Tobias Smollett (1721e1771) to Jane Austen Lakeland's landforms. Specifically, our goal is to determine whether (1775e1817) playfully associating the picturesque with vanity and or not eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers used the terms affectation. Edward Ferrars's disavowal of such pretentiousness in beautiful, picturesque, sublime and majestic in relation to different Austen's Sense & Sensibility (1811) is exemplary: ‘I have no knowl- parts of the Lake District. More than this, though, our intention is edge of the picturesque’, Edward stolidly asserts when asked his also to demonstrate what a geographically orientated interpreta- opinion of a tract of countryside; ‘You must be satisfied with such tion of aesthetic diction can reveal about the ways regions like the admiration as I can honestly give’.6 Even more typical is Coleridge's Lake District were perceived in the past. later retelling of his encounter at Cora Linn, wherein the gentleman The basis of this investigation is a corpus of writing about the declares that the waterfall ‘is very majestic, it is sublime & it is Lake District and its immediate environs. The composition of this beautiful … & picturesque’ e to which the lady rejoins, ‘it is the corpus, which has been assembled through the support of the prettiest thing I ever saw’.7 European Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, has already These examples raise important sociopolitical issues, of course.8 been described elsewhere.11 It is worth noting here, though, that Indicatively, in both versions of Coleridge's anecdote the couple's the corpus consists of eighty works (comprising over 1.5 million lack of discernment implies a lack of cultivation and refinement. words), which have been manually transcribed and georeferenced The obtuseness attributed to the lady, moreover, chauvinistically using a modified version of the Edinburgh Geoparser. The texts included in this corpus were mostly identified using Peter Bicknell's bibliography The Picturesque Scenery of the Lake District and Martin and Jean Norgate's Guides to the Lakes, which contain records of 3 Skiddaw, The European Magazine 15 (1789) 343. works written about the Lake District from several different 4 See, for example, C. Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, London, 1927; W. Hipple, The Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, Carbondale, 1957; M. Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760e1800, Stanford, 1986; I. Ousby, The Englishman's England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism, Cambridge, 1990 and J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, New York, 1997. 9 I.N. Gregory and C. Donaldson, Geographical text analysis: digital cartographies 5 W. Gilpin, An Essay upon Prints: Containing Remarks upon the Principles of of Lake District literature, in: D. Cooper, C. Donaldson and P. Murrieta-Flores (Eds), Picturesque Beauty, London, 1768, x and W. Gilpin, Observations on the Western Parts Literary Mapping in the Digital Age, Abingdon, 2016, 67e87; and I.N. Gregory, C. of England, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, London, 1798, 328. Donaldson, A. Hardie and P. Rayson, Modeling space in historical texts, in: F. 6 J. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, volume 1, London, 1811, 225e226 (emphasis Flanders and F. Jannidis (Eds), The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities: Modeling Text added). and Text-based Resources, London, 2017 (in press). 7 J.P. Collier, Collier's diary: transcripts of lectures 1 and 2, in: R.A. Foakes (Ed.), 10 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 634. Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the Lectures of 1811e12, London, 1971, 49. 11 C. Donaldson, I.N. Gregory and P. Murrieta-Flores, Mapping Wordsworthshire: a 8 On the sociopolitical and socioeconomic implications of the Picturesque GIS study of literary tourism in Victorian Lakeland, Journal of Victorian Culture 20 movement see J. Barrell, The Dark Side of Landscape: The Rural Poor in English (2015) 287e307; Gregory and Donaldson, Geographical text analysis; P. Murrieta- Painting, Cambridge, 1980; D. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, Flores, C. Donaldson and I.N. Gregory, GIS and literary history: advancing Digital Beckenham, 1984; W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, London, 1994; S. Copley and Humanities research through the spatial analysis of historical travel writing and P. Garside (Eds), The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics topographical literature, Digital Humanities Quarterly 11 (2017) 39 paragraphs, Since 1770, Cambridge, 1994. A different perspective is provided by R. Mayhew, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/1/000283/000283.html/ last Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660e1800: Samuel Johnson and accessed 17 November 2016. For additional information, see Spatial Humanities: Languages of Natural Description, Basingstoke, 2004, which offers a critical assess- Texts, GIS, Places, Lancaster University, 2012e2016, http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/ ment of certain tendencies of this body of scholarship. projects/spatialhum.wordpress/ last accessed 17 November 2016. C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60 45

Table 1 Corpus of Lake district writing.

Author Title Date

Michael Drayton Poly-Olbion 1622 [Lt. Hammond] A Relation of a Short Survey of 26 Counties 1634 Celia Fiennes Through England on a Side-Saddle 1698 Daniel Defoe A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain 1727 George Smith ‘Survey of the Northwest Coast of England’ 1746 George Smith ‘A Journey up to Cross-Fell Mountain’ 1747 George Smith ‘A Journey to Caudbec Fells’ 1747 John Brown Description of the Lake and Vale at Keswick 1751 John Dalton A Descriptive Poem, Addressed to Two Ladies 1755 John Wesley An Extract of the Rev. Mr. John Wesley's Journal 1759 Thomas Gray Journal of A Visit to the Lake District in 1769 1769 Thomas Pennant A Tour in Scotland. MDCCLXIX 1769 Arthur Young Six Months' Tour Through the North of England 1770 William Gilpin Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty 1772 Thomas Pennant A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides 1772 William Hutchinson An Excursion to the Lakes 1776 R. Cumberland Odes 1776 Thomas West A Guide to the Lakes 1778 W. Wilberforce Journey to the Lake District from Cambridge 1779 William Cockin Ode to the Genius of the Lakes. A Poem 1780 R.J. Sullivan Observations Made During a Tour 1780 Thomas Newte A Tour in England and Scotland, in 1785 1785 James Clarke A Survey of the Lakes 1787 Stebbing Shaw A Tour in 1787 1787 Henry Skrine Three Successive Tours in the North of England 1787 Adam Walker Remarks Made in A Tour from London to the Lakes 1792 Joseph Budworth A Fortnight's Ramble to the Lakes 1792 Ann Radcliffe A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 1794 J.H. Manners Journal of a Tour 1796 William Gell A Tour in the Lakes, 1797 1797 John Housman A Topographical Description 1797e1798 James Plumptre The Lakers: A Comic Opera in Three Acts 1798 Richard Colt Hoare The Journeys of Sir Richard Colt Hoare 1800 S.T. Coleridge Letters and Notebooks 1802 [Anonymous] Observations, Chiefly Lithological 1804 James Denholm A Tour to the Principal Scotch and English Lakes 1804 Thomas Thornton A Sporting Tour 1804 Priscilla Wakefield A Family Tour through the British Empire 1804 [Anonymous] Gleanings of a Wanderer 1805 Joseph Mawman An Excursion 1805 Robert Southey Letters from England 1807 William Combe The tour of Doctor Syntax 1812 John Keats Letters 1818 John Robinson A Guide to the Lakes 1819 Catherine Hutton Oakwood Hall: A Novel 1819 S.H. Spiker Travels through England, Wales, & Scotland 1820 W. Wordsworth The River Duddon: A Series of Sonnets 1820 W. Wordsworth A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes 1822 Jonathan Otley A Concise Description of the English Lakes 1823 Thomas Wilkinson Tours to the British Mountains 1824 Charles Cooke The Tourist's and Traveller's Companion 1827 Nathaniel H. Carter Letters from Europe 1827 Edward Baines A Companion to the Lakes 1829 Samuel Leigh Leigh's Guide to the Lakes and Mountains 1830 John Ruskin Iteriad; or, Three Weeks Among the Lakes 1830e1832 John Bree Saint Herbert's Isle: A Legendary Poem 1832 John Robinson Views of the Lakes in the North of England 1833 W. Wordsworth Guide through the District of the Lakes 1835 James Thorne Rambles by Rivers 1844 Charles Mackay The Scenery and Poetry of the English Lakes 1846 A.C. Gibson The Old Man 1849 [Anonymous] Keswick and its Neighbourhood: A Hand-book 1852 James F. Clarke Eleven Weeks in Europe 1852 [Anonymous] Black's Shilling Guide to the English Lakes 1853 N. Hawthorne English Notebooks 1855 Harriet Martineau A Complete Guide to the English Lakes 1855 [Anonymous] The English Lakes 1859 Edwin Waugh Over Sands to the Lakes 1860 Harriet Martineau ‘The Lights of the English Lakes’ 1861 Edwin Waugh Rambles in the Lake Country and its Borders 1861 William Dickinson Cumbriana: or Fragments of Cumbrian Life 1875 Ellis Yarnall ‘Walks and Visits in Wordsworth's Country’ 1876 Henry Frith ‘Wanderings in Wordsworthshire’ 1881 (continued on next page) 46 C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60

Table 1 (continued )

Author Title Date

John Burroughs ‘In Wordsworth's Country’ 1884 C.N. Williamson ‘The Climbs of the English Lake District’ 1884 W.G. Collingwood Coniston Tales 1889 F.A. Malleson Holiday Studies of Wordsworth 1890 Samuel Barber Beneath Helvellyn's Shade: Notes and Sketches 1892 Herbert Rix ‘Down the Duddon with Wordsworth’ 1893 M.J.B. Baddeley Black's Shilling Guide to the English Lakes 1900

historical periods.12 Taken as a whole, the corpus we have compiled area once viewed as threatening and inhospitable (at least by spans nearly three centuries: from 1622 to 1900 (see Table 1). In the outsiders), had become a district invested with aesthetic signifi- main, however, the items in our corpus can be subdivided into cance and cultural prestige. Keeping this in mind, we now want to three periods e the Age of Sensibility (1740e1788), the Romantic move forward by explaining the methodology employed in our period (1789e1836) and the Victorian era (1837e1901) e each of research. which constitutes a significant stage in the development of modern perceptions of the Lakes region. Methodology: geographical text analysis As Table 1 indicates, our corpus includes a diverse collection of guidebooks, travelogues and works of topographical literature. Collocation analysis and placename co-occurrences (PNCs) Some of these items are only partly concerned with the Lake Dis- trict: for example, Joseph Mawman's Excursion to the Highlands of In order to determine the geographies associated with our four Scotland and the English Lakes (1805). On the whole, however, the aesthetic terms in the corpus of Lake District writing, it is first corpus includes works entirely devoted to the region. Among the necessary to identify the features and locations to which these latter one finds not only works by canonical authors (such as the terms are applied. This process could be performed manually by Romantic poet William Wordsworth's sonnet sequence The River reading through each work in the corpus and logging every Duddon [1820]), but also less commonly known publications instance in which a placename appears in close proximity to one or including Joseph Budworth's A Fortnight's Ramble to the Lakes more of our chosen terms.15 When working with a large corpus, (1792), Catherine Hutton's Oakwood Hall: A Novel (1819) and Har- however, it is more efficient to employ approaches such as collo- riet Martineau's Complete Guide to the English Lakes (1855). cation analysis, which is a standard method for automatically This mixture of sources is significant. One of the benefits of identifying relationships between co-occurring elements of lexis or working with corpora of diverse historical materials is that it allows annotation. As Tony McEnery and Andrew Hardie remind us, one to perform contextually enriched analyses. By examining the collocation analysis is more than a technique for identifying word accounts found in canonical works alongside those provided in pairings; rather, it is a way of examining those ‘aspects’ of a word's more ephemeral publications, we can both deepen and broaden our understood ‘meaning’ that are not ‘contained within the word it- understanding of the language used to describe the Lake District in self’, but ‘subsist’ in the syntagmatic structures in which that word the past. When performing this sort of aggregate analysis one loses ‘participates’.16 In implementing collocation analysis in this study, some of the insights that more traditional methods of textual in- then, our aim was not only to identify the Lake District placenames quiry can afford. Nevertheless, compiling information from multiple with which the terms beautiful, picturesque, sublime and majestic works and assessing those works collectively allows us to identify frequently co-occur, but also to explore what those co-occurrences broader trends more efficiently and, in the process, guide the indicate about what the works in our corpus understand these four application of more minute interpretive approaches. Much depends aesthetic terms to mean. on choosing or creating the right corpus with which to work. Collocation analysis can be used to investigate different types of Crucially, as hinted above, our corpus covers a timespan during linguistic relation, but when working with a large corpus it is often which popular perceptions of the Lake District changed signifi- efficient to use collocation searches based on proximity. Principally, cantly. Whereas early modern travellers tended to describe the this latter approach requires one to establish a criterion of nearness Lakeland as a wasteland (‘nothing but hideous, hanging Hills, and for measuring the significance of any frequently co-occurring word great Pooles [sic]’, as one seventeenth-century traveller despaired), pair. In this study we experimented with using different colloca- from the mid eighteenth century it attained renown as a haven for tional ‘windows’ as determinants of significant proximity. These tourists drawn by the ‘savage grandeur’ of the local scenery.13 By windows included both grammatical units (such as sentence the turn of the nineteenth century, the region was widely cele- boundaries) and more arbitrary benchmarks (such as the number brated as a ‘country … ornamented with many beautiful and of word positions to the right or left of the search term). Working extensive lakes’.14 The difference between these appraisals signifies with sentence boundaries proved difficult given the conventions of more than just a change of opinion; instead, it calls attention to a many of the earlier works in our corpus, several of which use decisive transformation in ideas about the Lake District's value. An punctuation and capitalization in ways that had become nonstan- dard by the time the later texts in the corpus were printed. After a process of trial and error, we decided to use a window of ± tenword tokens to the right and left of the search term as a measure of 12 P. Bicknell, The Picturesque Scenery of the Lake District, 1752e1855: A Bibliog- significant proximity. This word span is wider than the one used in raphy, Winchester, 1990; M. Norgate and J. Norgate, Guides to the Lakes, University of Portsmouth, 2014, http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/thelakes/ last accessed 17 November 2016. 13 L.G. Wickham Legg (Ed.), A Relation of a Short Survey of 26 Counties [1634], 15 See D. Cooper and I.N. Gregory, Mapping the English Lake District: a literary GIS, London, 1904, 41 and J. Dalton, A Descriptive Poem Addressed to Two Ladies, London, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36 (2011) 89e108. 1755. 16 T. McEnrey and A. Hardie, Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice, 14 J. Bailey and G. Culley, General View of the Agriculture of Northumberland, Cambridge, 2012, 122e123. See also, S. Adolphs, Introducing Electronic Text Analysis: Cumberland, and Westmorland, third edition, Newcastle, 1805, 204. A Practical Guide for Language and Literary Studies, London, 2006, 56e59. C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60 47 research on modern corpora, but it makes sense given that the we used a modified version of the Edinburgh Geoparser: an open- average sentence length in our corpus (29.8 words) is nearly twice as access georeferencing system which consists of two interlinked long as the average modern sentence.17 Working with this window components: a geo-tagger and a geo-resolver.21 The first of these helped to minimize the number of false positives resulting from the components uses a named entity recognition (NER) sub- identification of placename/search term pairings across clause and component that facilitates the automatic identification and sentence boundaries. It also assisted us in monitoring whether any of extraction of placename entities in any plain text input file. The these pairings were the consequence of a negative semantic rela- placenames identified by the geo-tagger are then fed into the geo- tionship (for example, ‘x is not beautiful’). Careful inspection of the resolver, which disambiguates them and allocates them co- output of the collocation analysis demonstrated that although the ordinates using either a prefabricated digital gazetteer (such as corpus does contain statements such as ‘The old church, though not Unlock Places or Geonames) or a customized gazetteer (such as our beautiful, is suitable’, the placename co-occurrences (PNCs) identified Lake District gazetteer, which incorporates data from the Digital by performing collocation analysis generally did not stem from this Exposure of English Place-names project and from the Old Cumbria type of negative construction.18 Gazetteer). The latter process, known as georeferencing, involves Our next task was to assess the frequency with which the named encoding each of the texts under analysis with XML tag elements places in the corpus co-occur with one or more of our four aesthetic that contain coordinate data for every recognized placename. These terms. For this step we used t-scores, which like mutual information georeferenced text files can then be converted into a shape-file (MI) scores, enable one to determine whether a placename that co- format to facilitate visualization and analysis in a GIS environment. occurs with one of our search terms does so more often than would It is best to use computational geoparsing tools in tandem with be expected given the number of times that placename appears in systematic manual intervention. Placenames can be complex en- the corpus. T-scores are a more reliable indicator than MI scores tities, and it can be difficult for even the most sophisticated NER when the frequency of co-occurrences is relatively low, which it is software to identify them accurately. Errors of omission can occur if likely to be when searching for examples of a specifictypeofnamed the geoparser does not recognize that a word is a placename. entity (such as placenames) that appear in close proximity to a Similarly, errors of inclusion can arise from failures to disambiguate discrete set of search terms. Accordingly, in this study, we have used between placenames, personal names and toponymic titles (for a t-score of 2.0 as a determinant of statistical significance. example, the placename Lancaster, the personal name William de Lancaster and the honorary title Duke of Lancaster). There is, moreover, the additional difficulty of disambiguating between GIS and geoparsing places that have the same name. To check for these errors we have implemented an iterative method of reviewing and correcting the fi Having recorded all of the statistically signi cant placename co- outputs of the Edinburgh Geoparser, which involves repeated occurrences (PNCs), the next step was to use GIS to determine manual checks of select subsets of the geoparser output to make whether or not these placenames refer to geographical features in any necessary corrections and updates, which are then automati- the same locality. GIS are a type of database software that facilitates cally applied to the entire dataset.22 the storage, organization and analysis of spatial information. Though cognate with other forms of geospatial technology, including Satellite Navigation Systems and virtual globe platforms Spatial analysis: density smoothing and spatial scan statistics (such as Google Earth), GIS have data management capabilities that surpass these other technologies in enabling the researcher to In order to analyse the distribution of the PNCs with beautiful, combine information from different sources and to engage with picturesque, sublime and majestic in our corpus, we used a com- that information both in a tabular form and in a digital mapping bination of dot maps and density-smoothed maps generated in environment. Every item of data in a GIS is assigned coordinates ArcGIS. These two visualization approaches work especially well that link it to a mappable location, which, accordingly, allows the when used in tandem. Whereas dot maps assist with assessing the data to be spatially represented and analysed.19 geographical extensiveness of our data, density-smoothed maps In order to analyse the spatial distribution of the PNCs in our enable one to differentiate between those areas where PNCs cluster corpus in a GIS, we had to assign each PNC a set of mappable co- and those areas where they occur more sparsely. In essence this is ordinates. This process, known as geoparsing, involves the imple- because density smoothing generalizes the underlying pattern of mentation of computational techniques from the field of Natural the dot map in a way that renders visible both the number of times Language Processing (NLP) to pinpoint the placenames contained in each PNC occurs in the corpus and the spatial proximity of all the text data and to assign them mappable coordinates.20 In this study, PNCs to one another.23 In short, locations which the density- smoothed map distinguishes as sites of denser clustering are those whose names most frequently co-occur with our four search 17 The average length of sentences in the British National Corpus, for example, is terms. just 16 words; see E. Reiter and S. Williams, Generating texts in different styles, in: The results of density-smoothed analysis are, however, suscepti- S. Argamon, K. Burns and D. Shlomo (Eds), The Structure of Style: Algorithmic Ap- ble to quantitative bias. This is because the pattern created by density proaches to Understanding Manner and Meaning, Berlin, 2010, 64. fl 18 H. Martineau, A Complete Guide to the English Lakes, Windermere, 1855, 41. It is smoothing may be in uenced by the number of times the name of the worth noting that even if a PNC were to be the result of this sort of negative location associated with any given PNC appears in the corpus. In order construction it would have a bearing on our understanding of the use of search to check for this bias, it is necessary to use statistical measurements, term with that PNC nonetheless. such as Martin Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic, to assess the degree to 19 I. Heywood, S. Cornelius and S. Carver, An Introduction to Geographical Infor- mation Systems, second edition, Harlow, 2002; I.N. Gregory and P. S. Ell, Historical GIS: Techniques, Methodologies and Scholarship, Cambridge, 2007. 21 20 See I.N. Gregory and A. Hardie, Visual GISting: bringing together Corpus Lin- See C. Grover, R. Tobin, K. Byrne, M. Woollard, J. Reid, S. Dunn and J. Ball, Use of guistics and Geographical Information Systems, Literary and Linguistic Computing 26 the Edinburgh Geoparser for georeferencing digitized historical collections, Philo- (2011) 297e314; C.J. Rupp, P. Rayson, I.N. Gregory, A. Joulain and D. Hartmann, sophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 368 (2010) 3875e3889. Dealing with heterogeneous big data when geoparsing historical corpora, Pro- 22 See Rupp et al., Dealing with heterogeneous big data. ceedings of the 2014 IEEE Conference on Big Data 2015 (2015) 80e83; Gregory and 23 See C.D. Lloyd, Local Models for Spatial Analysis, second edition, Boca Raton, Donaldson, Geographical text analysis. 2010. 48 C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60

Table 2 Burke especially, the sublime was integrally associated with the Total Instances, PNCs and PNC frequencies for each search term. emotions of terror and wonder, and could be used to describe both Total Instances PNCs PNC Frequency phenomena that induced these emotions and the emotions them-

Beautiful 1233 486 39.4% selves. Consider, for instance, the poet and dramatist Richard Cum- Picturesque 554 190 34.3% berland's ‘Ode to the Sun’ (1776), which extols the valley of Sublime 270 87 32.2% Patterdale as a ‘Great scene of wonder and sublime delight’.26 Tell- Majestic 173 79 45.7% ingly, the ‘great scene’ celebrated here is not described as being sublime in itself, but as inspiring sublime feelings. which the spatial pattern of the density-smoothed analysis has been A comparable set of conclusions can be drawn about the use of 24 affected by the underlying geography of the corpus. Applying beautiful, which occurs more often in the corpus than the other Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic can help us to determine whenever three terms combined and stands second in terms of the ranking of the perceived prevalence of any given placename/search term pairing PNC frequencies. Like sublime, beautiful can also be associated with has been influenced by the number of times the placename associated an emotional disposition as much as with objects and appearances with that pairing appears in the corpus. Take the placenames Keswick that induce that disposition. Hence, one finds James Denholm and Coniston, for example. Keswick co-occurs with our four search expatiating on the ‘pleasing and beautiful’ scenery of Bas- terms more frequently than Coniston. Crucially, however, Keswick senthwaite, and on the charms of Dalemain, near Ullswater, ‘the also appears in the corpus more often than Coniston does. Imple- beautiful and sweetly secluded seat of Edward Hasell, Esq.’.27 menting Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic allows us to determine the Similarly, Samuel Spiker writes admiringly of ‘the beautiful and extent to which the unequal representation of these two placenames agreeable Ambleside’.28 Picturesque, which co-occurs with a spe- has affected the number of times our search terms co-occur with cific placename in thirty-four per cent of its occurrences, also has a them. Accordingly, in the maps examined in the following section we range of potential applications. It is often used to describe specific not only consider the clusters identified through density-smoothed locations and landmarks, but it can also describe the position of analysis, but we also use Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic to assess those locations or landmarks, and the way they present themselves the degree to which the distribution of these density clusters has been to the eye. Thus, for example, whereas Richard Colt Hoare com- influenced by the underlying geography of the corpus. Following the ments on the ‘picturesque manner’ in which the Bowder Stone (an conventions of spatial data analysis, we use the expression ‘hot spot’ iconic boulder in the Borrowdale valley) ‘is balanced on its side’, to designate any area that the Spatial Scan Statistic identifies as having John Robinson accounts for the village of Grange (also in Borrow- more PNCs than expected given the geography of the corpus. Simi- dale) as being situated in ‘one of the finest and most picturesque larly, we use the expression ‘cold spot’ to describe any area that the scenes to be found in this country’.29 Spatial Scan Statistic determines to have fewer PNCs than the geog- Another important issue to consider is the frequency with raphy of the corpus might lead one to expect. Wherever a cluster which each of our four search terms occurs across the different determined by density smoothing overlaps with a hot spot, the PNCs epochs represented in the corpus. As Fig. 1 shows, the number of 25 in the cluster are particularly important. instances of each term roughly follows the distribution of words in the corpus: increasing across the Age of Sensibility and the Geographical text analysis: results and findings Romantic period before tapering off during the Victorian era. Intriguingly, however, instances of beautiful and picturesque follow Search term and PNC frequencies the distribution of words in the corpus much more closely than instances of sublime and majestic do. The use of these latter two It is useful to begin with a brief overview of the ways the terms words rises steeply in the Romantic period (where they are beautiful, picturesque, sublime and majestic feature in our corpus noticeably overrepresented) before falling away over the remainder of Lake District writing. Table 2 tallies the number of times each of of the nineteenth century (where they are comparatively the four words appears in the corpus, the number of PNCs for each underrepresented). fi and a percentage indicating the frequency with which these PNCs All four of our search terms gure prominently in the Romantic- occur. period works in our corpus. But as Fig. 1 suggests, sublime and This rather simple summary directs attention to a number of majestic were particularly prominent terms in writing about the salient issues. Firstly, it indicates a noteworthy tendency in the use of Lake District at this time. Following the work of scholars such as the word majestic, which has the highest PNC frequency of the four Marjorie Hope Nicolson and, more recently, Simon Bainbridge, one terms even though it occurs the fewest number of times. In other might attribute this trend to the contemporary quickening of in- terest in the power of mountainous regions to inspire the imagi- words, although majestic appears less frequently in our corpus than 30 the other three terms, when it does appear it co-occurs with a pla- nation and exhilarate the mind. (One might, moreover, also relate e e cename remarkably often: indeed, in nearly every other instance. this development to the particular and widely recognized in- fl This suggests that, within our corpus, majestic is not merely a term uence of Burke's theory of the sublime on Romantic topographical used as a modifier for different types of entities, but one repeatedly associated with specific named locations. Sublime, by comparison, appears more than twice as often as majestic does, but only co- 26 R. Cumberland, Odes, London, 1776, 19. occurs with a named location in about one in three instances. This 27 J. Denholm, A Tour to the Principal Scotch and English Lakes, Glasgow, 1804, 248, implies that, on average, sublime occurs slightly more regularly as a 285. modifier for non-toponymic entities than majestic does, which 28 S.H. Spiker, Travels through England, Wales, & Scotland in the Year 1816, volume 1, makes sense if we recall the full significance that the term sublime London, 1820, 276. 29 possesses in the writings of thinkers such as Gilpin and Burke. For W.M. Thompson (Ed), The Journeys of Sir Richard Colt Hoare Through Wales and England, 1793e1810, Gloucester, 1983, 133; J. Robinson, A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire, London, 1819, 134. 30 M.H. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the 24 M. Kulldorff, A spatial scan statistic, Communications in Statistics: Theory and Aesthetics of the Infinite, Ithaca, NY, 1959; S. Bainbridge, Writing from ‘the perilous Methods 26 (1997) 1481e1496. ridge’: Romanticism and the invention of rock climbing, Romanticism 19 (2013) 25 See R. Haining, Spatial Data Analysis: Theory and Practice, Cambridge, 2003. 246e260. C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60 49

Fig. 1. Instances (%) of each search term across the three key epochs represented in the corpus. writing.) The subsequent decline of the use of sublime and majestic ‘self-contained phase’ in British history, but rather as a persistent, can, for its part, also be seen to complement broader cultural prevalent and characteristically modern mode of perception.34 trends. Specifically, it coincides with the onset of a new age in the Indeed, as we shall see below, the use of picturesque in our history of Lakeland tourism, in which the adventurousness of early corpus affirms that the term remained a key aesthetic ideal for tourists broadly gave way to the more leisurely pursuits of the writing about the Lakes region well into the later nineteenth modern holidaymaker, and in which the ideals of sublimity and century. majesty, though still relevant, became less explicitly prevalent.31 The terms beautiful and picturesque, as noted above, follow the Search term geographies distribution of words in the corpus much more closely than sub- lime and majestic do. Fig. 1 does, however, show that both beautiful We shall now examine the geographies with which our four and picturesque are slightly over-represented in works from the search terms are associated. Attending to each term in turn, we first Romantic period, whereas beautiful is more prevalent than survey the distribution of its PNCs and then analyse the causes picturesque in pre-Romantic works and picturesque more preva- underlying the clusters identified by the density-smoothed map- lent in works from the Victorian era. Closer inspection reveals that ping and Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic. Investigating the place- picturesque does not occur in the corpus until 1770, when it first names with which our search terms co-occur reveals significant appears in Arthur Young's Six Months' Tour Through the North of similarities and differences between the locations and features to England. So it is not entirely surprising that it is the least prevalent which they are applied (Fig. 2). Taking note of these similarities and of our chosen terms in texts from the Age of Sensibility. What is differences offers a new perspective on how these words were used surprising, however, is that the term picturesque should remain so historically in writing about the Lake District. In particular, it draws prevalent in works from the Victorian period. Some cultural his- attention to a correlation between the use of beautiful and pictur- torians have, after all, preferred to treat the picturesque as a cate- esque, on the one hand, and an important contrast between the gory more germane to the Age of Sensibility and the Romantic application of these two terms and the use of sublime and majestic, period than to the Victorian era.32 Norman Nicholson, for example, on the other. unequivocally declares that ‘after Wordsworth’ and the Romantics ‘the true Picturesque was dead’.33 In a strictly technical sense this may be true. Certainly, the great debates over the nature of the Beautiful picturesque as an aesthetic ideal were chiefly a concern of the 1790s. But, as our findings demonstrate, that does not mean that Fig. 3 displays the density-smoothed and Kulldorff's Spatial Scan the term ceased to be relevant as part of the aesthetic lexicon on Statistic clusters for the 486 beautiful PNCs in the corpus. As this which later writers drew to describe the Lake District. As Malcolm visualization affirms, although these PNCs are spread around the Andrews reminds us, the picturesque is best understood not as a Lakes region, they form discernible density clusters in a handful of locations e most notably, the area around the town of Windermere and the villages of Ambleside and Grasmere. Moving north, there are also prominent clusters around the lake of Thirlmere (near 31 See N. Nicholson, The Lakers: The Adventures of the First Tourists, London, 1955, Helvellyn), as well as near Keswick and its neighbouring lake, e 108 109 and J.D. Marshall and J.K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the Mid- Derwentwater. Further northward still, clusters appear in the Twentieth Century: A Study in Regional Change, Manchester, 1981, 178. 32 See, for example, Hussey's notion of the ‘picturesque interregnum’, The Picturesque,4. 33 Nicholson, The Lakers, 182. 34 Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, 239e240. 50 C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60

Fig. 2. Key features and locations mentioned in the corpus. vicinity of Skiddaw and, moving to the west, the lake of Bas- associated with the term beautiful, the apparent strength of this senthwaite. To the east, there are additional clusters around Pat- association owes much to the amount of attention these places terdale and the lake of Ullswater. The clusters identified by historically receive in writing about the Lakes region. Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic generally correspond with this Turning to the southern portion of the district, one notices pattern. Here, again, one identifies groupings of beautiful PNCs another key difference between the Spatial Scan Statistic and around Grasmere, Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite. Noticeably, density-smoothed patterns. Whereas the former pattern contains a however, in the Spatial Scan Statistic pattern there are no clusters cluster in the area around the Furness and Cartmel peninsulas, the around Ambleside, Thirlmere, Skiddaw or Ullswater. This is an latter does not. At a glance, the shape of this cluster implies that it is intriguing result since it suggests that the prevalence with which both highly diffuse and geographically diverse. It extends over a beautiful co-occurs with places in the vicinity of these latter loca- wide area: one which, incidentally, receives comparatively less tions has been influenced by the frequency with which their names attention than others in our corpus, and which comprises not only appear in the corpus. In short, although they are evidently locations upland and lowland terrain, but also estuarine rivers and coastal C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60 51

Fig. 3. Density and Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic clusters of beautiful PNCs. foreshore. A tally of the PNCs that constitute the cluster confirms its gravity as a genre’ specifically by ‘feeding off one another’.35 Here, geographical heterogeneity. The cluster consists of fifty-two in- for example, the observed co-occurrence of beautiful and Esthwaite stances of twenty unique placenames. These placenames refer both Water has been influenced by the quotation of material from to settlements (such as Cartmel and Ulverston) and landmarks Thomas West's seminal Guide to the Lakes (1778) in Charles Cooke's (such as Conishead Priory and Holme Island), as well as to bodies of Tourist's and Traveller's Companion to the Lakes (1827); Cooke re- water (such as Esthwaite Water, the River Leven and Morecambe prints West's description of ‘the road’ that runs ‘part of the way … Bay), which, collectively, are associated with beautiful in nineteen along the beautiful banks of Esthwaite Water’.36 The salient point is different works. An examination of these works, however, exposes that this kind of intertextuality is an essential feature of our corpus, an unexpected feature of the cluster: its size has been affected by and, moreover, that its significance as a feature is something that the duplication of an account of the Furness and Cartmel peninsulas geographical text analysis can make meaningfully apparent. In the written by the Victorian poet and essayist Edwin Waugh. The present instance, implementing geographical text analysis can help corpus, as closer inspection reveals, contains both the first edition us to recognize how influential accounts of the Lakes region occa- of Waugh's guidebook Over Sands to the Lakes (1860) and a later sionally establish a vocabulary that comes to define descriptions for version of the same work, which was reprinted in Waugh's years e even decades e afterwards. collection Rambles in the Lake Country and Its Borders in 1861. In Returning to the Spatial Scan Statistic pattern displayed in Fig. 3, both editions, the text of Over Sands to the Lakes contains beautiful it is notable that none of the beautiful PNC clusters are located PNCs that refer to locations around Furness and Cartmel, and this around mountains. Instead they are mainly grouped around set- has, therefore, affected the size of the Spatial Scan Statistic cluster. tlements or waterways. The Spatial Scan Statistic cluster around the What is more, it has also increased the frequency of beautiful in the valley of Grasmere (which contains forty-nine beautiful PNCs) is Victorian portion of our corpus. indicative. Seventeen of these co-occurrences are instances of the This finding draws attention to an important feature of our placenames Grasmere and Grasmere Water. Another thirteen are corpus: it contains duplicated material that results either from the elaborations of Rydal, the name of the village which neighbours reprinting of specific works or, as we shall see, from quotation. One Grasmere to the south. These include landmarks such as Rydal Hall, might be tempted to remove these duplications from the corpus Rydal Mount and Rydal Pass, as well as Rydal Lake, Rydal Mere and and, thereby, to normalize the dataset. To do this, however, would Rydal Water: three different names for the same body of water. be to strip away one of the corpus's distinctive qualities: its in- Three other PNCs in this cluster are instances of Elterwater (the tertextuality. Many of the works in our corpus reproduce phrases, name of a village and tarn in the Langdale valley, which lies to the passages and even entire sections from previously published ac- west of Grasmere) e and the list goes on. What matters is that all of counts of the Lake District, and, in some cases, these earlier ac- the PNCs in this cluster refer to low-lying locations. In fact, the only counts happen to be included in the corpus as well. As John Brewer, upland formation named in the cluster is Loughrigg, a low but among others, has observed, this sort of repurposing and repub- distinctive fell that rises to 335 metres at the southern end of the lishing of material (whether acknowledged or unacknowledged) is an essential feature of travel literature and topographical writing as these genres developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth 35 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 634. centuries. This is especially true of guidebooks to regions such as 36 T. West, A Guide to the Lakes: Dedicated to the Lovers of Landscape Studies, the Lake District, which, as Brewer avers, ‘gained weight and London, 1778, 13; C. Cooke, The Tourist's and Traveller's Companion to the Lakes, London, 1827, iv. 52 C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60

Fig. 4. Density and Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic clusters of picturesque PNCs.

Grasmere valley. Beautiful, it would seem, is a term most commonly countryside. Hence, Thomas West's Guide advises that the valley applied in our corpus to individual locations situated in areas of affords a ‘most astonishing view of the lake [Derwentwater]’, which comparatively low elevation. These findings accord with the defi- ‘spread[s] out to the north in the most picturesque manner’.37 nition of beautiful provided in the works of thinkers such as Burke. Consequently, then, one might associate the picturesque PNCs in Intriguingly, though, the geographical pattern revealed by plotting the Borrowdale cluster with those in the general vicinity of Der- the 190 PNCs for our second search term, picturesque, shows wentwater, which is also, as noted above, the location of a promi- similar characteristics. nent cluster of beautiful PNCs. A more notable difference between the picturesque and beau- tiful PNCs becomes apparent when we consider the Kulldorff Picturesque clusters for these two terms. Whereas applying the Spatial Scan Statistic revealed the presence of a handful of beautiful PNC hot There is a noticeable correlation between the distributions of spots, it did not reveal any hot spots for the picturesque PNCs. fi the beautiful and picturesque PNCs in our corpus. Fig. 4 con rms Instead, it only identified a cluster of cold spots to the north of that, like beautiful, the term picturesque co-occurs with locations Ullswater. This outcome shows that the clusters identified by around the Lake District, but only forms prominent density density smoothing the distribution of the picturesque PNCs have clusters in a few key areas. The largest of these clusters roughly been affected by the number of times the placenames in those follows the contours of the two most substantial beautiful den- clusters appear in the corpus. Accordingly, these locations (though sity clusters in being found in the vicinity of Windermere, they are undoubtedly associated with picturesque) are not quite as Ambleside and Grasmere. As with the beautiful PNCs, moreover, strongly associated with the term as the density map might initially the next most prominent density clusters of picturesque PNCs are lead us to conclude. found near Keswick and Derwentwater, with additional, less This finding is important, but the correlation revealed by map- prominent clusters stretching to the east towards Thirlmere and ping the beautiful and picturesque PNCs is remarkable nonetheless. Ullswater. As with the beautiful PNCs, the picturesque PNCs indicate that the fi Signi cantly, the few noticeable differences between the beau- term picturesque is often associated with lower-lying locations, tiful and picturesque density clusters appear to be ones not of kind including settlements and waterways. This similarity is noteworthy but of degree. As noted above, for example, a sizable proportion because it implies that the terms beautiful and picturesque are used fi ( fty-two per cent) of the picturesque PNCs in the corpus is found in our corpus in a broadly complementary manner. Tellingly, the in works from the Victorian era. But unlike the beautiful PNCs these expressions ‘picturesque beauty’, ‘beautiful and picturesque’ and later picturesque PNCs are not the consequence of the duplication ‘picturesque and beautiful’ occur in particular relation to a number of material from earlier publications. Beyond this, it is also notable of the picturesque PNCs. The recurrence of such phrases, when that the clusters of picturesque PNCs are much more intensely coupled with the results of the spatial analysis documented above, focussed than the beautiful PNCs in localities such as Borrowdale suggests that the similarity of beautiful and picturesque PNC clus- (to the south of Derwentwater) and, to a lesser extent, the area ters might reflect a general reliance on the conception of the term around Brougham Hall, which lies to the south of Penrith. Closer inspection of the PNCs in these locations, though, reveals that the Borrowdale cluster is partly a consequence of the valley being described as a good place from which to gaze on the surrounding 37 West, A Guide to the Lakes,97. C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60 53 picturesque advocated by Gilpin.38 In other words, instead of being the term to describe multiple landmarks that are either physically applied as an aesthetic category distinct from the beautiful (ala or perspectivally massed together. Waugh, for instance, calls the Price and Knight), picturesque seems to be generally used in our reader's attention to a ‘sublime group of mountains, Yewbarrow, corpus in a way that accords with Gilpin's notion of the picturesque Pillar, Great Gable, Kirkfell, Lingmell, and Scawfell [sic]’.43 Similarly, as a particular type of pictorial beauty. Mackay informs us that Birkrigg (a hill near Conishead Priory) af- Taking a closer look at the types of places associated with fords a view of the ‘sublime confusion’ of ‘the mountains of picturesque offers further evidence for this conclusion. In partic- Blackcomb, Scawfell [sic], Coniston Old Man, Helvellyn, Fairfield, ular, one discovers that picturesque is often associated with sites Hill Bell [sic], and a long range of nameless elevations [stretching] defined by a sense of visual containment e or ‘framing’. Hence, in as far as Ingleborough, in Yorkshire’.44 Elsewhere, Mackay also his account of Glenridding (near Ullswater), Joseph Mawman re- alerts us to ‘the sublime chain [of fells] extending from Coniston to marks on the ‘highly picturesque’ manner in which the nearby Ennerdale’.45 Baines, for his part, reports that ‘the mountains of Red ‘mountains enclos[e]’ the local fields and farm-houses.39 Pictur- Pike, High Stile, and High Crag rise precipitously to a sublime esque is, moreover, also regularly associated in our corpus with elevation’.46 Such quotations draw attention to an aspect of sub- prospects and viewpoints. Thomas Pennant, for example, calls limity that was much discussed in eighteenth- and nineteenth- attention to ‘an eminence near Dale Head house’ that affords ‘a century aesthetics: namely, its association with forms whose picturesque view’ of Thirlmere.40 The use of picturesque in these astonishing magnitude defies discrete comprehension.47 Mackay's contexts accords with Gilpin's conception of the term as a desig- notion of ‘sublime confusion’ speaks directly to this point. The nation of pictorial beauty. Like beautiful, then, picturesque is implication is that these mountains are too spatially extensive to frequently used in our corpus to describe specific features and lo- comprehend individually. In short, then, in addition to being cations that are visually bounded and can thus be surveyed in their strongly associated with sites of high elevation, especially in the entirety. This, as we shall see, sets it at variance with the geogra- area around Wasdale, sublime is frequently used in our corpus to phies associated with our third search term: sublime. described groups of geographical features whose undifferentiated massiveness overwhelms the eye. In both of these aspects, the use Sublime of sublime is distinct from that of beautiful and picturesque. The four other density clusters identified in Fig. 5 offer addi- Fig. 5 indicates the presence of five density-smoothed clusters tional proof of these impressions. The PNCs in these clusters all rank and one Spatial Scan Statistic cluster for the eighty-seven sublime among the most frequently named places in the corpus: Der- PNCs. The patterns formed by these clusters are very different, with wentwater, Keswick, Ullswater, Coniston, Coniston Old Man and the Spatial Scan Statistic cluster being concentrated in one area and Windermere. Collectively, these places co-occur with sublime a the density clusters being distributed around the Lake District. total of thirty-two times, which accounts for nearly forty per cent of These two patterns do, however, overlap in the mountainous areas all the sublime PNCs. Closer study of these PNCs, however, once around Wasdale and Ennerdale, where the Spatial Scan Statistic hot again reveals the influence of material reproduced from previously spot appears. The remainder of the density clusters are located near published works. The most outstanding example in this instance is a handful of other often discussed locations: Keswick, Derwent- the frequent quotation of a passage from Cumberland's Odes (1776). water, Ullswater, Coniston Water and Windermere. The over- In his dedication to his friend, the celebrated painter George lapping density and Spatial Scan Statistic clusters around Wasdale Romney (1734e1802), Cumberland avows that ‘our own lakes of and Ennerdale attest to the particular influence of four guidebooks, Ulswater [sic], Keswick and Windermere exhibit scenes in so sub- which together account for all of the sublime PNCs in this region. lime a stile that … they are indispensably such as no English trav- 48 These are Cooke's Tourist's and Traveller's Companion (1827), eller should leave behind him’. This patriotic assertion is Edward Baines's Companion to the Lakes (1829), Charles Mackay's reprinted in four later guidebooks: Robinson's Guide to the Lakes Scenery and Poetry of the English Lakes (1846) and Waugh's Rambles (1819), Cooke's Tourist's and Traveller's Companion (1827), Baines's in the Lake Country and its Borders (1861).41 That these guidebooks Companion to the Lakes (1829) and Samuel Leigh's Guide to the Lakes should establish a strong association between sublime and loca- and Mountains of Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (1830). tions near Wasdale and Ennerdale makes sense, especially when Nearly half of the sublime PNCs in the density clusters occur as a one recalls that these valleys are flanked by seven of the ten highest result of quotations of this kind. This is particularly true of works mountains in England e including the towering peaks of the Scafell from the Victorian portion of the corpus. Ten of the eleven sublime massif. Sublime, as noted above, principally denotes that which in PNCs that occur in works published after 1837 are the result of its massiveness terrifies, confuses or overawes. ‘Greatness of quotations from earlier texts. That sublime should be so seldom dimension’, as Burke advises, ‘is a powerful cause of the sublime’.42 used (except in quotations) in our corpus during the latter half of More surprising, however, is the fact that these guidebooks tend the nineteenth century fits with the general change in aesthetic not to label individual summits as sublime. Rather, they tend to use attitudes mentioned above. What matters here, though, is that the results of the collocation analysis direct our attention to a decided difference between the application of beautiful and picturesque, on 38 It is noteworthy that Gilpin's definition of the picturesque is the one preferred the one hand, and sublime, on the other. Whereas the works in our by English lexicographers. See, H.J. Todd (Ed.), A Dictionary of the English Language, corpus tend to use beautiful and picturesque to refer to individual volume 3, London, 1818, 846; A. Chalmers (Ed.), A Dictionary of the English Language, low-lying locations, they tend to use sublime in a more sweeping London, 1853, 541; J.A.H. Murray (Ed.), A New English Dictionary on Historical manner to refer to either masses of undifferentiated upland Principles, volume 7, Oxford, 1909, 832. 39 J. Mawman, Excursion, to the Highlands of Scotland and the English Lakes, London, 1805, 208. 40 T. Pennant, A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides, MDCCLXXII, Chester, 43 1774, 42. E. Waugh, Rambles in the Lake Country and Its Borders, Manchester, 1861, 174. 44 41 The relevant PNCs from Waugh's Rambles in the Lake Country and its Borders C. Mackay, The Scenery and Poetry of the English Lakes, London, 1846, 97. 45 come from a different section of the collection than the reprinted portion of the Mackay, Scenery and Poetry,176. book discussed in the previous section. 46 Baines, Companion to the Lakes, 167. 42 E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and 47 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry,43e54. Beautiful, London, 1757, 51. 48 Cumberland, Odes,6e7. 54 C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60

Fig. 5. Density and Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic clusters of sublime PNCs. formations or (chiefly due to the quotation from Cumberland's these, he asserts, are instead regarded as ‘majestic’ forms that Odes) to the areas around three of the region's largest lakes. ‘inspire a sort of reverence’. Contemporary sources, such as Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755), offer further support for this link be- e Majestic tween majestic and feelings of reverence. For Johnson (1709 1784) especially, the ‘majestick’ is an ideal informed by ideas of loftiness Of our four search terms majestic is the one least rigorously and elevation, on the one hand, and augustness and grandeur, on 52 analysed in the works of writers such as Gilpin and Burke, and this is, the other. Majestic, then, would seem to constitute a relatively one suspects, not irrelevant to Coleridge's particular interest in the ambiguous aesthetic category: one distinct from the beautiful, the correct application of the word. Gilpin, for his part, does not appear picturesque and the sublime, but one that nonetheless combines to use majestic in an overtly systematic manner, but he does use it in certain qualities of each of these other ideals. Intriguingly, this combinations such as ‘more majestic, and more detached’.49 This is ambiguity contrasts with the consistency with which majestic co- fi slight evidence, but it suggests that unlike sublime (which, as we occurs with speci c named places in our corpus. have seen, is often associated with massed features and formations), Fig. 6 shows that the seventy-nine majestic PNCs in our corpus majestic is a quality of things that stand out e or apart e from their are mostly concentrated in two places: in the upland area around settings. This aspect of majestic also implicitly sets the term at Skiddaw (where the density and Spatial Scan Statistic clusters variance with the kind of framing and enclosure that Gilpin associ- overlap) and along the banks of the River Duddon, in the southwest ates with the picturesque. More explicitly, though, Gilpin's use of of the Lake District. There are three less prominent density clusters majestic indicates a connection between majesty and ideas of in the vicinity of Windermere, Wasdale and Derwentwater. impressiveness and power. In his commentary on the Lorton valley Collectively, though, the clusters around Skiddaw and the Duddon (in the northwestern corner of the Lake District), for instance, Gilpin are the most substantial. Taken together, they account for half of the observes that ‘Nature, in this scene, lays totally aside her majestic majestic PNCs in our corpus. frown’.50 The idea here is, of course, that the natural world is capable Closer inspection of the Duddon cluster again attests to the in- fl of striking us as powerfully elevated or exalted. In other words, it is uence of intertextuality in shaping local associations. Here the key e capable of commanding our esteem and awe. source is a sonnet by William Wordsworth (1770 1850), whose This sense of a connection between majestic and notions of effect on the development of Lake District tourism has recently 53 elevation and exultation complements Burke's observation that been explored at length. Majestic is a term that appears no fewer majestic connotes ‘robustness and strength’.51 As such, he con- than twenty-eight times in Wordsworth's poetry, wherein it is 54 tends, majestic must be distinguished from beautiful, for which ‘an frequently used to describe the movement of water. In the thirty- fi appearance of delicacy … is almost essential’. In order to illustrate rst sonnet in Wordsworth's sequence The River Duddon, for this point Burke draws attention to the power of particular organic example, majestic is used to characterize the river's appearance fl ‘ j forms, explaining that ‘[i]t is not the oak, the ash, or the elm, or any from the shore where it ows into its estuary: now expands of the robust trees of the forest which we consider as beautiful’;

52 S. Johnson, Majestick, A Dictionary of the English Language, volume 2, London, 49 W. Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, volume 2, London, 1755, 86. 1786, 229. 53 S. Yoshikawa, William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, Farnham, 2014. 50 Gilpin, Observations,7. 54 L. Cooper, A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth, New York, 1911, 51 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry,101. 576. C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60 55

Fig. 6. Density and Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic clusters of majestic PNCs.

Majestic Duddon, over smooth flat sands’.55 These lines exerted a continued to be associated with the term well into the Victorian era. strong influence on later accounts of the Duddon valley. They are Unlike the Duddon cluster, moreover, this association is not merely quoted in five of the Victorian works in our corpus: James Thorne's the result of the reprinting of material from earlier accounts.57 Rambles by Rivers (1844), Mackay's Scenery and Poetry (1846), It must be acknowledged, of course, that majestic also occasion- Waugh's Rambles in the Lake Country (1864), Fredric Amadeus ally co-occurs with the names of other upland formations. The Malleson's Holiday Studies of Wordsworth (1890) and Herbert Rix's Skiddaw cluster itself includes PNCs for a number of lower-lying ‘Down the Duddon with Wordsworth’ (1893). In so many words, summits that stand in Skiddaw's shadow. These include Latrigg, a Wordsworth's influence is chiefly responsible for the strong asso- hill at the southern edge of the same massif, and Blencathra (also ciation between the Duddon and majestic in our corpus.56 known as Saddleback), a prominent fell that rises to the east of The PNCs in the Skiddaw cluster (which accounts for more than Skiddaw. Examining these co-occurrences, however, actually con- a third of the majestic PNCs in the corpus) are also centred on a firms our inferences about the enduring association between Skid- single landmark, but they come from a more varied set of sources. daw and majestic. For Blencathra, the first PNC comes from Mackay's The placename Skiddaw alone co-occurs with majestic twenty Scenery and Poetry (1846), which makes note of ‘majestic Skiddaw, times in eleven different works composed between the 1770s and with Blencathra … on its right’.58 The second appears in Keswick and the 1850s. Four of these PNCs are found in works from the later Its Neighbourhood (1852), where one reads of ‘majestic Skiddaw and eighteenth century: two in William Wilberforce's journal (1779), Blencathra’.59 The third is found in Wilkinson's Tours (1824), which and one each in William Hutchinson's Excursion to the Lakes (1776) refers to ‘majestic Helvellyn, [and] the mighty Blencathra’ while and West's Guide to the Lakes (1778). A further eleven PNCs appear surveying the prospect from Cross Fell.60 Significantly, though, in this in works from the Romantic period. These latter PNCs are mostly case Blencathra is referred to as mighty rather than majestic. In other found in Robinson's Guide to the Lakes (1819) and Baines's Com- words, at most, Blencathra is only described as majestic in the corpus panion to the Lakes (1829), though a handful of others appear in when it is mentioned in close association with Skiddaw. works such as Mawman's Excursion (1805), Jonathan Otley's Concise This is a highly significant finding because it suggests that in Description of the English Lakes (1823) and Thomas Wilkinson's spite of the relatively ambiguous status of majestic in eighteenth- Tours to the British Mountains (1824). Finally, the other five co- and nineteenth-century aesthetic theory, the writers in our corpus occurrences of majestic and Skiddaw are from Victorian guide- routinely associate majestic with the same mountain. What is the books, including Mackay's Scenery and Poetry (1846), Keswick and reason for this long-lasting association? Its Neighbourhood (1852) and Black's Shilling Guide to the English Taking account of the way majestic is used in relation to the pla- Lakes (1853). So, in spite of the relatively infrequent use of majestic cenames with which it co-occurs in our corpus affords a few impor- in the corpus in the later nineteenth century, Skiddaw nonetheless tant clues. Jonathan Otley's use of the term in his panoramic survey of the countryside around Wansfell (to the north of Windermere) is indicative. From this prominence, writes Otley, one can obtain

55 W. Wordsworth, The River Duddon, Vaudracour and Julia, and Other Poems, London, 1820, 32. 57 56 The only other PNC for majestic in the area around the river occurs in Cooke's The only exception is the description of the ‘majestic height’ of Skiddaw in Tourist's and Traveller's Companion (1827) 21, which records the author coming West, Guide to the Lakes, 127, which appears as a quotation in Keswick and Its ‘within sight of the mountain Black Comb [sic], rising dark and majestic on the Neighbourhood, Windermere, 1852, 93. 58 other side of the vale of Duddon’. Notably here, majestic is used to describe not the Mackay, Scenery and Poetry,77. Duddon but Black Combe: a fell that rises some six kilometres to the west of the 59 Keswick and Its Neighbourhood, 40. river valley. 60 Mawman, Excursion,176. 56 C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60

‘excellent views of Windermere, Grasmere, and Rydal lakes; the Beyond the bright space where the Derwent lake flows, towns of Ambleside and Hawkshead …. Further distant are seen the More majestic in the distance huge Skiddaw arose[.]66 sands of Milnthorp, Lancaster and Ulverston, with the majestic Here, as in Turner's landscape, Skiddaw's colossal form arises from mountains of Coniston and Langdale’.61 Compare this with Thomas ‘beyond’ the brightness of the lake and the darkness of the valley. Wilkinson's description of the prospect from Cross Fell (just noted Here again, the perception of the mountain's majesty depends on it above): ‘From the summit of Crossfell is seen an extensive, though not being viewed in its full, lofty expansiveness from a distance. Here a level plain. It stretches south and westward in many places, perhaps again, moreover, there is an affinity between the technical twenty or thirty miles, till it is intercepted by … the majestic Hel- conception of majestic and a more impressionistic and descriptive vellyn, the mighty Blencathra, and the circumscribing ocean’.62 Or application of the term. consider, furthermore, Thomas West's aforementioned account of the In sum, then, implementing geographical text analysis confirms ‘majestic height’ of Skiddaw as admired from his station on the banks that the writers in our corpus tend to associate beautiful and of Beck Wythop, on the western shore of Bassenthwaite: ‘Skiddaw picturesque with rather different parts of the Lake District than appears no where of such majestic height as from this place’.63 they do with either sublime or majestic. A comparative mapping of Notably, in all three examples majestic is associated with the Spatial Scan Statistic hot spots identified for each term offers mountains viewed from a considerable distance. West's station at further support for this conclusion (see Fig. 8). Whereas beautiful Beck Wythop is some five kilometres west of the summit of Skid- is mainly associated with the area around Grasmere (and, to a daw, whereas Cross Fell is nearly forty kilometres west of Helvellyn. lesser extent, with places in the South Lakes and between Der- Wansfell, for its part, lies more than ten kilometres to the east of the wentwater and Bassenthwaite), sublime is exclusively associated Coniston and Langdale fells. In each of these instances, moreover, with the valleys of Wasdale and Ennerdale. Majestic, for its part, is the implication is that the mountain described is rising in a almost entirely grouped around Skiddaw. These findings are prominent, yet readily discernible expanse above the surface of the meaningful in their own right, but e as with the account of earth. This sense of expansiveness, so integral to the aesthetic Skiddaw e they also invite us to consider what the physical ge- conception of majestic, is inherent in the notion of the term implied ographies of the features and locations principally associated with by its geographical associations in our corpus e and not least each search term tell us about the application of beautiful, because it also recalls Wordsworth's lines: ‘now expands j Majestic picturesque, sublime and majestic in our corpus. An efficient way Duddon, over smooth flat sands’. As in Wordsworth's sonnet, the of developing this discussion is by using GIS to examine the use of majestic in these accounts of Coniston, Langdale, Helvellyn topographical and geological profile of the areas associated with and Skiddaw evokes not only a sense of tremendous magnitude, each search term. but also the impression of a singular form differentiated from its surroundings. The image called to mind in each case could not be Integrating datasets: topography and geology more different from the one conjured up by the ‘sublime confusion’ of the summits surveyed in Mackay's account. Digital terrain models The use of majestic in our corpus, then, would seem to depend both on the prominence of the feature being described and on the The data integration capabilities of GIS technology make it easy perspective from which it is viewed. This is especially evident in the to combine the spatial data from the geographical text analysis with case of Skiddaw, which is most frequently characterized as majestic topographical relief data in order to determine the relative eleva- when being viewed from a distance as it expands above the terrain tion of the locations and features associated with each search term. that surrounds it. As early as the 1720s, Daniel Defoe conjectured Taking topographical relief into account in this way enables us to that this aspect of the mountain contributed to its being mistaken achieve a more precise understanding of how the physical geog- for the ‘highest [hill] in England’. ‘Skiddaw’, he writes, ‘indeed is a raphy of the Lake District affected the language that writers used to very high Hill, but seems the higher, because [it is] not surrounded describe the region. The most straightforward way to add topo- with other Mountains, as is the Case in most Places’.64 But equally graphical relief data to a GIS is to use a digital terrain model (DTM), indicative is John Ruskin's reading of the iconic view of the which is a raster image that uses pixel data to represent the con- mountain captured in J.M.W. Turner's Skiddaw, Seen from Der- tours of the earth's surface.67 Once a DTM layer has been added to wentwater (1832) (Fig. 7). For Ruskin, the ‘mountain’ in Turner's the GIS environment, one can then superimpose other datasets depiction appears to lie ‘in the morning light, like a level vapor; … it (such as the data for the search term PNCs) and use an overlay rises without effort or exertion, by the mightiness of its mass; every operation to establish the elevation of each item in those datasets slope is full of slumber; and we know not how it has been exalted, (see Table 3). until we find it laid as a floor for the walking of the eastern The figures arranged in Table 3 indicate the PNC frequencies for clouds’.65 Admittedly, this is an account of an image of Skiddaw each search term when stratified according to elevation. As a point rendered by the ‘majestic moderation’ of Turner's technique. But it of reference, we have also added a row that shows the frequency is telling that Ruskin's own first-hand accounts of Skiddaw portray of all PNCs in the corpus within each elevation category. Calcu- the mountain in this same light. Thus, as one reads in his juvenile lating the difference between the PNC frequencies for each search poem Iteriad: term and the PNC frequencies for the corpus allows us to measure And then we looked back upon Keswick's sweet vale, the degree to which the percentage of beautiful, picturesque, Ere we entered the gorges of dark Borrowdale. sublime and majestic PNCs in each elevation category either ex- ceeds or falls short of the corpus average. These figures confirm our observation that beautiful and picturesque tend to co-occur with locations situated at lower elevations more often than 61 J. Otley, Concise Description of the English Lakes, Keswick, 1823, 57. 62 T. Wilkinson, Tours to the British Mountains, London, 1824, 176. 63 West, Guide to the Lakes,127. 64 D. Defoe, A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or 66 J. Ruskin, The Iteriad, or three weeks among the Lakes, in: W.G. Collingwood Journeys, volume 3, London, 1727, 231. (Ed.), The Poems of John Ruskin, volume 1, Orpington and London, 1891, 65e66. 65 J. Ruskin, Modern Painters: Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All 67 P.A. Burrough and R.A. McDonnell, Principles of Geographical Information Sys- Ancient Masters, London, 1843, 300. tems, second edition, Oxford, 1998. C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60 57

Fig. 7. J.M.W. Turner's Skiddaw, Seen from Derwentwater (1834). Original watercolour: whereabouts unknown. Engraving by W. Miller in Illustrations to the Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Edinburgh, 1834. Courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, UK.

sublime and majestic do. needs to import raster images such as the ones in Fig. 9, which The patterns apparent in the figures for our other two search shows the British Geological Survey's digital maps of (a) the major terms are equally telling. Whereas the distribution of the majestic rock groups and (b) the bedrocks of the greater Lakeland region. PNCs suggests that majestic mainly co-occurs with sites at low and These two maps are generally similar, but it is useful to examine high elevations, comparing its PNC frequencies with those for the them together, as the bedrock layer helps us to subdivide large rock whole corpus reveals that majestic is, in fact, most strongly asso- groups, such as the Borrowdale Volcanic group, which covers much ciated with features above 600 m. Similarly, although the sublime of the central Lake District. As with the DTM, once these raster PNCs seem to be grouped around areas of low to moderate eleva- images have been uploaded to the GIS environment, it is then tion, when set against the frequencies for the corpus it becomes possible to determine the geological group and bedrock type clear that sublime actually tends to co-occur with sites at moderate associated with the PNCs for each of our four search terms (see and high elevations. One is, once again, put in mind of the ‘sublime Tables 4 and 5). confusion’ of mountains and fells surveyed in Mackay's Scenery and Among the more interesting patterns apparent here is the Poetry of the English Lakes. Equally, though, one comes to the relationship between the grouping of the majestic and sublime conclusion that in spite of the sublime PNC clusters observed PNCs. Both groups are strongly associated with areas comprised of around Derwentwater, Ullswater and Windermere, the term is only andesitic and rhyolitic lavas, but whereas the majestic PNCs are infrequently associated with such comparatively low-lying especially concentrated around the argillaceous rocks of the Skid- features. daw group, the sublime PNCS are particularly associated with the tuffs in the Borrowdale Volcanic group. Observing this difference Geological data deepens our appreciation of the way these two terms are applied to locations in our corpus. The argillaceous rocks of the Skiddaw group Another type of information we can combine to explore possible are, after all, mainly the soft marine shales that form the rounded correlations between physical geography and the distribution of shape of features such as the fells of the Skiddaw massif. The vol- our search term PNCs is geological data. Not all of the works in our canic tuffs of the Borrowdale group, by contrast, have a decidedly corpus are specifically interested in the Lake District's geology, but, craggier and more escarped appearance. This difference in like topographical relief, geology exerts a significant influence on geomorphological aspect is suggestive of an association between the region's aspect and profile. Taking geological data into account the composition of the environment and the aesthetic terms his- can, therefore, enrich our understanding of the degree to which torically used to describe it. This difference is, moreover, also sug- physical geography affected the language used to describe different gestive of a relationship between the way the terms majestic and parts of the region.68 sublime are commonly applied in the discourses of travel writing In order to work with geological data in a GIS environment, one and topographical literature and the way they are defined in contemporaneous aesthetic theory. Whereas the shales of the Skiddaw group contribute to the sort of gradual expansiveness we 68 Only rock groups with more than 0.8% of collocating placename instances have have seen writers associate with majestic, the volcanic ash of the been included on the maps and in the subsequent analyses. 58 C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60

Fig. 8. Kulldorff's Spatial Scan Statistic hot spots for the beautiful, sublime and majestic PNCs; there were no hot spots for the picturesque PNCs.

are. The geological stratification of our data, in these instances, Table 3 usefully refocuses our attention on a pattern in our search term PNC frequencies arranged by elevation. PNCs, and this, in turn, reveals that the overlapping of beautiful and <300 m 300e600 m >600 m majestic PNCs around the Skiddaw group, and picturesque and fl % of PNCs sublime PNCs around the Borrowdale group, chie y proceeds from Beautiful 83.3 11.5 5.1 two causes. Firstly, it is due to the frequent use of these terms to Picturesque 84.7 12.6 2.7 describe different features in these localities: hence, Baines opines Majestic 50.6 13.9 35.4 that ‘[t]he vale of Bassenthwaite is beautiful, and Skiddaw rises Sublime 63.2 24.1 12.6 ’ 69 Corpus 78.1 13.9 8 majestically above it . In the second instance, however, we discover a few works that contain just the sort of mixing of % above expected aesthetic terms that so vexed Coleridge at Cora Linn. The culprits Beautiful 6.7 17.2 35.8 include Denholm's Tour (1804), which recommends the scenery Picturesque 8.5 9.7 65.9 around Patterdale as being ‘most picturesque and sublime’, and Majestic 35.1 0.1 342.6 Mawman's Excursion (1805), which dubs the ‘landscape’ around Sublime 19 73.5 57.9 Skiddaw ‘at once beautiful and majestic’, and elsewhere mentions ‘objects soft and beautiful, or majestic and sublime’.70 In this latter case especially one suspects that Coleridge would have sniggered. Borrowdale group contributes to the massiveness and precipi- tousness we have seen writers associate with sublime. Conclusions The beautiful and picturesque PNCs, for their part, are more strongly associated with the Coniston, Sandstone and Skiddaw Implementing geographical text analysis to analyse the appli- groups. The distribution of these PNCs, though, also aligns with our cation of the terms beautiful, picturesque, sublime and majestic in other two search terms in intriguing ways. For example, like our corpus of historical writing about the Lake District reveals a majestic, beautiful co-occurs with named locations within the great deal. In the first instance, it significantly enhances our argillaceous rocks of the Skiddaw group more often than the dis- tribution of PNCs across the corpus might lead us to expect. Equally, the picturesque PNCs are nearly as strongly associated with loca- 69 Baines, Companion to the Lakes,297. tions within the tuffs of the Borrowdale group as the sublime PNCs 70 Denholm, A Tour, 262; Mawman, Excursion, 212, 239. C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60 59

Fig. 9. Lake District Geology: Rock group (a) and Bedrock (b). Data taken from the British Geological Survey's Digital Geological Map of Great Britain DiGMapGB-625 data at 1:625,000 scale. Crown Copyright/Database right 2016. British Geological Survey/EDINA supplied service.

more especially, picturesque are often associated with geographical Table 4 features set within, and framed by, their environment, majestic is PNC counts and frequencies arranged by geology. more typically associated with features that rise above or extend fl All Beautiful Picturesque Majestic Sublime beyond their surroundings. Sublime, true to Burke's in uential conception of the term, stands apart from these other terms in PNC Count Borrowdale Volcanic 11,943 168 74 28 44 being associated with formations that are massed together in ways Skiddaw 6837 123 32 32 22 that make them difficult to differentiate. Appleby 1392 12 7 1 0 More than simply plotting the places associated with key Millstone Grit 803 6 2 4 2 aesthetic terms, then, our study has also afforded insights into the Coniston 721 15 7 0 0 way the works in our corpus relate both to key ideas in the history Sherwood Sandstone 717 15 10 1 1 of aesthetic theory and to one another. Beyond this, though, using % of PNCs geographical text analysis to investigate the application of aesthetic Borrowdale Volcanic 37.3 34.6 56.1 35.4 50.6 terminology reveals the extent to which the works in our corpus Skiddaw 21.4 25.3 24.2 40.5 25.3 draw intertextually on one another. As we saw in the case of Appleby 4.4 2.5 5.3 1.3 0.0 majestic, the works of writers such as William Wordsworth played Millstone Grit 2.5 1.2 1.5 5.1 2.3 fl Coniston 2.3 3.1 5.3 0.0 0.0 an especially important role in in uencing the aesthetic principles Sherwood Sandstone 2.2 3.1 7.6 1.3 1.1 and vocabulary deployed in more ephemeral works of Lake District travel writing and topographical literature. At the same time, our % above expected findings also indicate that these ephemeral works, in drawing on Borrowdale Volcanic 7.4 50.2 5.1 35.5 the authority of more famous writers, did much to consolidate the Skiddaw 18.4 13.4 89.5 18.3 Appleby 43.3 21.9 70.9 100 descriptive repertoire through which the aesthetic value of the Millstone Grit 50.8 39.6 101.7 8.4 Lakes region was expressed. In this way, these fugitive works can be Coniston 37 135.3 100 100 seen to have worked in tandem with their more canonical coun- Sherwood Sandstone 37.7 238.0 43.5 48.7 terparts to shape the sensibilities of their contemporary and later readerships. awareness of the different parts of the Lakes region associated with The distinctive geographies associated with the terms beautiful these four key aesthetic terms and, thereby, our understanding of and picturesque, on the one hand, and majestic and sublime, on the the way the works in our corpus conceive of the meanings of these other, confirm that the authors of the works in our corpus were, as a terms. Most notably, this approach has helped us to trace the long whole, relatively discerning about the ways they used aesthetic shadow cast by Gilpin's characterization of the picturesque as a terminology. One of the next steps to take in responding to these type of pictorial beauty. Although this conception of the pictur- findings is to expand the number of search terms employed and to esque is certainly significant for Romantic and pre-Romantic develop a larger corpus, and we are currently engaged in research writing about the Lake District, it is also, as we have shown, high- to these ends. At the same time, we are also exploring ways of ly relevant for Victorian accounts of the region. In addition, establishing parameters to determine more precisely the function applying geographical text analysis has also enhanced our under- of intertextuality in our corpus by differentiating between, for standing of the influence of geographical profile on the application example, the selective quotation and bulk reproduction of material of aesthetic terminology. As we have seen, whereas beautiful and, from other sources. For the present, the results and findings 60 C. Donaldson et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017) 43e60

Table 5 PNC counts and frequencies arranged by bedrock type.

All Beautiful Picturesque Majestic Sublime

PNC Count Argillaceous rocks 11,581 198 63 41 36 Tuff 9282 141 66 18 32 Sandstone & Argillaceous 2354 36 18 2 1 Limestone 1975 35 13 3 1 Sandstone 1952 15 9 4 2 Andesitic lava 1844 21 7 7 8 Rhyolitic lava 798 5 1 3 4 Granitic rock 770 9 4 0 2 Conglomerate 539 15 1 0 1

% of PNCs Argillaceous rocks 36.2 40.7 32.5 51.9 41.4 Tuff 29.0 29.0 34.0 22.8 36.8 Sandstone & Argillaceous 7.4 7.4 9.3 2.5 1.1 Limestone 6.2 7.2 6.7 3.8 1.1 Sandstone 6.1 3.1 4.6 5.1 2.3 Andesitic lava 5.8 4.3 3.6 8.9 9.2 Rhyolitic lava 2.5 1.0 0.5 3.8 4.6 Granitic rock 2.4 1.9 2.1 0 2.3 Conglomerate 1.7 3.1 0.5 0 1.1

% above expected Argillaceous rocks 12.5 4.4 43.4 14.3 Tuff 0.0 25.0 21.5 26.8 Sandstone & Argillaceous 0.7 34.4 65.6 84.4 Limestone 16.7 15.7 38.5 81.4 Sandstone 49.4 19.0 17.0 62.3 Andesitic lava 25.0 33.3 53.7 59.5 Rhyolitic lava 58.8 78.0 52.2 84.3 Granitic rock 23.1 8.7 100 4.5 Conglomerate 83.2 67.4 100 31.8

reported in this article demonstrate the efficacy of combining Claire Grover, the Unlock Text support team, and Professor Jayne geographical technologies and corpus-based approaches to study Carroll and the Digital Exposure of English Place-names project for the qualitative features of historical text corpora. Given the flexi- access to the their data. We are also grateful to Martin and Jean bility of this methodology, we are hopeful that other scholars will Norgate, creators of the Old Cumbria Gazetteer. The research find it to be helpful for pursuing corpus-based geographical leading to these findings has received funding from the Leverhulme research. Trust (RPG-2015-230), as part of the Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities project, and from the European Research Acknowledgements Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Pro- gramme (FP7/2007e2013)/ERC grant Spatial Humanities: Texts, Thanks are due to Drs Katherine Baxter, Oliver Herford and GIS, places (agreement number 283850). Rebecca N. Mitchell, and to audiences at conferences at the Uni- versity of Exeter and the University of Nottingham. The authors are Appendix A. Supplementary data grateful to the editors of the Journal of Historical Geography, and to three anonymous referees for their perceptive and thoughtful re- Supplementary data related to this article can be found at http:// sponses to an earlier draft of this article. We are also grateful to Dr dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2017.01.006.