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From the English Lake District to Colonial Banff

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From the English Lake District to Colonial Banff Victorian Travel and Spaces of Cultural Memory: from the English Lake District to colonial Banff Margaret Linley (SFU) But to describe what I have often felt in these romantic and wild regions where nature appears in all its forms is far above my slender abilities even was I possessed of more leisure and materials than I am. –Simon Fraser (Letters and Journals 1806-08) Simon Fraser University is home to one of the largest collections of rare books relating to the Lake District in the Northwest of England. This paper looks back at the cultural archive of English Lake District travel writing from the perspective of the Pacific Northwest in order to consider what’s at stake when the Victorian memorializing view of natural, common space, inherited from William Wordsworth and more than a century of domestic travel writing, itself begins to travel. Doing this work in Vancouver is crucial; from a location such as the Pacific Northwest we can take account of the current high stakes in cultural heritage, the environment, and the globalization of space. The larger project* upon which this paper is based is guided by two principal research Questions: i) How does it matter that a historical collection of English Lake District travel literature has migrated to Vancouver – that a collection of domestic travel writing about a region that has long been an icon of attachment to the local migrates to a distant global, and formerly colonial, destination? ii) In what ways might the physical migration of the collection from the English Lake District to the Canadian Pacific inform further migrations across media platforms? Wordsworth recognized travel writing and public parks as ecological spaces of collective consciousness. The global implications of the distinct discursive practices found within English Lake District travel writing become especially complicated when considered in the context of colonial communications and transportation networks, well documented in book history and travel writing in Canadian studies. The ecology of picturesque English Lake District travel writing helped convey and record nineteenth-century colonial exploration in the Pacific Northwest and eventually contributed to the railway transports of the touristic commercial imagination and the public consecration of natural space, beginning with Canada’s first national park in Banff in 1885. By charting and analyzing the SFU Lake District rare book collection, one as fundamental to the archives of Canada’s colonial memory as it is to today’s environmental and cultural heritage practices, the larger project aims to contribute to our understanding of the place of the history of the Victorian domestic travel book in networking and memorializing mobile spatialities from the local to the global, from a remote region in the Northwest of imperial England to the colonial Pacific Northwest. In thus reorienting the traditional perspective on the Lake District, this paper argues that the travel writing archive of the local English Lake District is profoundly informed by and linked to global geographic space. 1 In a recent discussion of the Lake District in the institutionalization of public space around an “ecology of authorship,” Scott Hess posits that the supposedly universal Wordsworthian vision of nature underwrote the designation of the Yosemite Valley as a public park in 1864 and the designation of Yellowstone as the world’s first national park in 1872. But the picturesQue mode that culminated by the late eighteenth century in the “high” picturesQue (Alan Lui) was in fact “institutionalized” (Ian Ousby) within English cultural memory as a public domain well before Wordsworth consecrated the region a “national property.” Significantly, Lake District travel writing archives cultural memory of common space in relation not only to continental geographies (especially the Alps) but also to colonial landscapes. In addition, it usefully complicates the history of the relationship between local cultural heritage, globalization of space, and the environmental movement. Indeed, Wordsworth’s own consolidating travel vision of the Lake District in his Guide is variously condemned as universalist (Scott Hess) and patriarchal (JacQueline Labbe) or celebrated as cosmopolitan (Lisa Ottum) and republican (Tim Fulford). Lake District travel writing is an established genre of historical and cultural significance dating back to the 1750s. The northwestern district of England, historically encompassing the counties of Westmorland and Cumberland (now Cumbria), has been a tourist destination since the mid-eighteenth century when a state-sponsored road-building program opened a major northern thoroughfare from Lancaster to Keswick. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the region was cherished for its combined natural beauty and poetic associations. It also, however, became the site of repeated conflict and confrontation over shared cultural heritage and environmental encroachment; and the landscape continues to this day to bear the imprint of philosophical ideas and picturesque tastes along with the scars of land use battles. The picturesQue movement in travel, painting, and poetry was associated, from the start, with the Lake District (Glickman 13). Around the mid-eighteenth century, a “gentlemanly coterie of correspondents” (Schellenberg 206) developed a communication network between London and the northern regions of Westmorland and Cumberland, thereby establishing a spatially distributed manuscript culture circulating between metropolis and periphery. By the 1780s, the domestic tour of the northern Lakes was thoroughly institutionalized by such events as the publication of the first picturesQue guide by Thomas West (1778), the articulation of the theoretical premises of the picturesQue by William Gilpin, especially in his Observations based on a tour of Cumberland and Westmorland in 1772 (1786), and the opening of the first museum for tourists in Keswick by Peter Crosthwaite (1779). Each of these key figures in the emergence of the Lakes region as a “natural” and bounded space of English national identity had significant metropolitan, continental, and global connections. West, who was born in Scotland and attended Jesuit College in Belgium before settling in the Lake District, dedicated his book to 2 “lovers of landscape studies and to all who have visited or intend to visit the lakes” (title page). He treated the landscape as a sort of museum or even theatre space, guiding visitors through a set tour organized around numbered “stations” for viewing the lakes. Scenery is thus constituted literally through a series of immersive pictorial practices mediated by such devices as the portable print guide book, with its instructions and descriptions for on-the-spot consultation, and the Claude glass, a convex tinted mirror which, ironically, necessitated turning one’s back on the landscape to examine it more closely. Animated by the traveller’s movement between scenes as well as through the moving effects of carefully framed landscape, the picturesQue set the stage for scripting the locally-identified region as a public, participatory, and virtual space. West’s methods derived from Gilpin, who hailed from just outside of Carlisle and was an avid participant in the manuscript network linking London and the Lake District, and principle theorist and chief arbiter of the picturesque in Britain. Defining the picturesque as “expressive of that peculiar beauty which is agreeable in a picture” (Essay on Prints 1768), Gilpin played a pivotal role in reorienting the concepts of nature and naturalness from the art academy and the classical garden to the countryside itself. This orientation stressed less “the methods of selecting and abstracting in art than the processes of observing, studying, and recording nature” (Bermingham 65). Crosthwaite, a Cumberland native who worked at sea and as an excise officer for the East India Company before returning to Keswick, became the “impresario of Lakes tourism” (Carlson 74). In order to draw tourists to the region, Crosthwaite tirelessly peddled the Lakes to the broader British public, commissioning sales agents and initiating subscription campaigns throughout Britain for his New and Accurate Maps of the Lakes (1783- 1719) while displaying “natural and artificial curiosities from every Quarter of the world” and selling his detailed regional maps alongside guides, prints, and curiosities in his museum (Bicknell 13-14). By the time Wordsworth wrote the text to accompany Joseph Wilkinson’s plates in Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire (1810), essentially the first version of what would eventually become his Guide (1835), he was responding to a heavily populated, dense, and over-determined tradition of writing and representation. Subscribing to Gilpin’s picturesQue methodology of description of physical characteristics and sensations, the poet Thomas Gray accordingly recommended during his Lakes tour of 1767 that “half a word fixed upon or near the spot, is worth a cart-load of recollection” (cited in Andrews 155). In contrast to this privileging of travel writing as the record of the spontaneous and immediate experience in transit, Wordsworth emphasized the hypermediacy of travel, stating that his guide aimed to: “communicate to the traveller, who has already seen the objects, new information; and will assist him to give to his recollections a more orderly arrangement than his own opportunities of observing may have permitted him
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