Global Spaces and Travel in the Literature of William Wordsworth

Boundless Explorations: Global Spaces and Travel in the Literature of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley by Alexander J. Willis A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Alexander J. Willis 2011 ii Boundless Explorations: Global Spaces and Travel in the Literature of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley Alexander J. Willis, Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto, 2011 Abstract This dissertation focuses on a Romanticism that was profoundly global in scope, and examines the boundary-crossing literary techniques of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. These authors saw identity as delimited by artificial borders, and we witness in their work competitions between local and global, immediate and infinite, home and away – all formulated in spatial terms. This thesis argues that by using motifs and philosophies associated with “borderless” global travel, these authors radically destabilized definitions of nature, history, and the home. Wordsworth and the Shelleys saw the act of travel as essentially cosmopolitan, and frequently depicted spaces outside of familiar boundaries as being rich in imaginative vitality. Their fiction and poetry abounds with examples of North American primitivism, radical modes of transportation, and unknown territories sought by passionate explorers. Importantly, they often used such examples of foreignness to rejuvenate familiar spaces and knowledge – these were individuals determined to retain a certain amount of local integrity, or connection with the reluctant minds who feared alien contexts. As such, they were each aware of the fragility of embedded minds, and the connection of these minds to bordered historical contexts. Aware of the dangers posed by uninhibited imaginative movements, they depicted travel as an artistically seductive activity. Their impulse as authors was thus to use global experiences as a tool of literary expression, while refraining from a total abandonment of local responsibility. This dissertation therefore argues that the imaginative experience of space in the Romantic period was profoundly split, tethered on the one hand to custom and familiarity, and on the other aspiring to boundless global freedoms. iii Acknowledgments Much of the primary research for this thesis took place at the British Library in London, UK, in the summers of 2004 and 2005. My first research trip to the Library was generously sponsored by Dan White. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity he presented to me, and for his honesty and encouragement. Karen Weisman, who joined the thesis committee late in the process, had the thankless task of catching up on several years of work in a short amount of time. This she did with aplomb, promptness and tact, for which this acknowledgment seems a paltry reward. Alan Bewell has guided this project since the beginning with wisdom and care. He was never afraid to challenge my deepest presumptions about the Romantic period, and I am a better and more self-aware scholar as a result of his mentorship. I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my grandparents Steen and Willis: for their love, spoken and unspoken; for their lessons, taught by patience and example. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments ...v Introduction: “Coaches and Connexions”: Thomas De Quincey and the Relativity of Travel i. ...1 Chapter One: “A home in every glade”: Wordsworth’s Disembedded Locales i. ...33 ii. ...39 iii. ...48 iv. ...55 v. ...69 vi. ...92 Chapter Two: “Wanderings Over Heaven”: Percy Shelley’s Aeronautic Explorations i. ...98 ii. ...103 iii. ...112 iv. ...129 v. ...158 v Chapter Three: “Undiscovered Solitudes”: Exiles, Explorers and Domestic Isolation in Mary Shelley’s Novels i. ...162 ii. ...175 iii. ...183 iv. ...190 v. ...199 vi. ...217 Conclusion: “The very world which is the world” i. ...228 Works Consulted …240 1 Introduction “Coaches and Connexions”: Thomas De Quincey and the Relativity of Travel i. Thomas De Quincey‘s The English Mail-Coach (1849) is deeply concerned with how the imagination adapts to new types of movement in a globally-connected environment. Using anecdotes associated with motion to quantify psychological acts of global travel, De Quincey describes measurable distance in affective and wholly distorted terms. He associates historically-grounded modes of travel with networks of trade and information, particularly mail-coaches and sea-vessels, in the process reflecting the types of visionary boundary crossing that were profoundly impacting the imaginative sensibility of a nation in the Romantic era. De Quincey‘s encounters with the mail-coach in particular are most interesting when they involve what he calls ―connexions,‖ effectively events which relativize psychic security based on the act or implication of travel. His work demonstrates how a mind embedded in local customs struggles to reconcile disparate global events with immediate social requirements. In essence, De Quincey describes how technologies and accounts of travel engender experiences that disembed minds from normative, local frameworks of knowledge. His mail- coach did threaten a sense of British security, but did not necessarily require direct contact with the spaces that were witnessed in the mind. As we shall see in De Quincey‘s The English Mail-Coach, visionary travel encouraged the fragmentation of what Anthony Giddens calls ―ontological security‖ – ―the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of 2 their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action‖ (92).1 In The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens discusses in detail the shattering of pre-modern routines that accompany a dissolved ontological security, and associates the consequent behavioural acts with altered perceptions of place. In essence, he describes the process by which thinking globally is absorbed into an unconscious imaginative zeitgeist. Even without immediate contact, the repercussions on local spaces could be felt; in the case of De Quincey‘s mail-coach, technology could facilitate a newfound proximity to exotic spaces and new modes of thinking. I have also borrowed the term ―disembedded‖ from Giddens, which he describes with reference to ―institutions‖ that link ―local practices with globalised social relations‖ (79). When thinking about a modern cognitive or emotional condition, one can employ this term to suggest the feeling of being uprooted, or taken outside of conventional or traditional sensibilities, knowledges, and identities. Furthermore, I have used the term ―global‖ to characterize the nature of tales of foreign lands, but the destabilizing principle still applied within extremely confined geographies as well. I open this dissertation with a look at De Quincey‘s The English Mail-Coach not because it is semiotically unstable (one finds this quality in superabundance in the author‘s work) but because, as a master-metaphor of negotiable identity, the mail-coach suggests how travel destabilizes the perception of the local, the immediate, and the familiar. The English Mail-Coach, published in two instalments in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, opens with an incongruous comparison between the famous promoter of the mail-coach system, John Palmer, and Galileo. Setting aside questions of intellectual legacy,2 De Quincey upholds this rhetorical licence by collapsing the astronomical implications of the Galilean invocation and 1 Giddens describes this condition in a phenomenological sense, borrowing terms from Heidegger, namely a ―being-in-the-world‖ (92). 2 De Quincey is merely being mischievous in equating Palmer‘s ―doubled‖ greatness with his advantageous (though historically untrue) marriage to a duke‘s daughter. See Milligan, 290n1. 3 noting that ―the satellites of Jupiter‖ were ―those very next things to mail-coaches in the two capital points of speed and keeping time‖ (191). Repeatedly, throughout the essay‘s four sections – ―The Glory of Motion,‖ ―Going Down With Victory,‖ ―The Vision of Sudden Death,‖ and ―The Dream-Fugue‖ – De Quincey relativizes the Waterloo-era coach- traveller‘s identity using similarly wild and disproportionate experiential dimensions. It is no easy task to link the subsequent affective experiences, although De Quincey often tries valiantly to do so. For example, the second published instalment (comprising the latter two sections) opens with a bracketed note, his attempt at a concise thematic and procedural summary: The Vision of Sudden Death contains the mail-coach incident, which did really occur, and did really suggest the variations of the Dream....Confluent with these impressions, from the terrific experience on the Manchester and Glasgow mail, were other and more general impressions, derived from long familiarity with the English mail...impressions, for instance, of animal beauty and power, of rapid motion, at that time unprecedented, of connexion with the government and public business of a great nation, but above all, of connexion with the national victories at an unexampled crisis, – the mail being the privileged organ for publishing and dispersing all news of that kind. From this function of the mail, arises naturally the introduction of Waterloo into the fourth variation of the Fugue; for the mail itself having been carried into the dreams by the incident of the Vision, naturally all the accessory circumstances

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