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 to do; while it will be still more useful to the future traveller by directing his attention at once to distinctions in things which, without such previous aid, a length of time only could enable him to discover” (Select Views i). Wordsworth’s attention in this passage to repetition and recollection over

3 spontaneity is central to his redefinition of both the picturesque aesthetic and public space.

Toward the end of this same text, Wordsworth draws an explicit link between aesthetic taste, recursivity, patriotism, and community. His ethically inflected aesthetics deriving from a feeling as well as a responsibility for place, which together constitute the origins of British consciousness, will be mirrored, he asserts, in “persons of pure taste throughout the whole Island, who by their visits often repeated, to the Lakes to the North of England, testify that they deem the district a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy” (Select Views xxxiv). While Stephen Gill suggests that this first version of the Guide was “a publishing non-event” for Wordsworth (28), Tim Fulford (in contrast) argues that Select Views was in fact no mere picture book. The combination of prose and engraving led to a social and political vision as uncompromising as (and more explicitly republican than) anything Wordsworth had ever published (245). Fulford further argues that Wordsworth’s textual depictions to pictures not only demonstrate his willingness to experiment with publishing formats but also signal a topographic turn to his imagination, before he himself identified it as such, moving from place to place as a guide, rather than through spots of time, as in the Prelude (Tim Fulford 245). In short, this book marks Wordsworth’s spatial turn, one firmly rooted in a clearly identifiable local geography saturated with embodied cultural memory, as equally a turn to technological reproducibility.

Wordsworth’s political and environmental consciousness thus grew out of a lifetime of experience of the Lakes as media culture, to which he contributed an understanding that a medium “appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (Bolter and Grusin 65). As such, remediation of material practice is historically embedded in and inseparable from social arrangements. In addition, Wordsworth was attempting to address the set of paradoxes Malcolm Andrews has identified at the heart of the picturesque: first, that the tourist wants “to discover nature untouched” but cannot resist the impulse “to ‘improve’ it”; and, second, that while the domestic tourist extols the native beauties of British landscape she does so by invoking foreign models, especially Roman pastoral poetry or the seventeenth- century paintings of Claude Lorraine, Nicholas Poussin, or Salvator Rosa (Andrews 3). The local and scenic beauties of the Lakes exemplify the naturalization of media in processes of cultural memory while treating nature, no less than history, as a medium. At the moment when nature moves the viewer emotionally, immediacy names the feeling that one is directly in the presence of nature unmediated and that the experience is therefore authentic; for Wordsworth, one comes to nature through acts of mediation, not only through renderings of nature by poets and artists but through the recursions of travel and the repetitions during and afterward of memory. Moreover, in an inversion of the foreign frame placed around the domestic picturesque, Wordsworth insists that the local will reconstitute the distant with an

4 affectively charged, dynamically recursive sense of place. As such, Wordsworth’s political geography is “fundamentally relational,” Lisa Ottum observes, and aims, in the Guide especially, to “situate the Lakes within an imaginary network of global natures” (168).

The remainder of this paper will examine how the global production of space central to Wordsworth’s understanding of place was negotiated throughout the Lake District travel writing archive by following a specific visual trope that illustrates the implications of media shift characterizing the technological reproducibility inherent to the picturesque aesthetic and which thereby informs the embodied perception of landscape – a concept which in the nineteenth century was inherently inflected with imperial impulses. While the Lake District historically engaged English sensibilities and framed a particular vision of England, seeming to fix a certain idea of place, “no place can ever be abstracted from the social relationships, capital flows, cultural representations, and global forces…[of] ‘space’” (MacLean, Landry, Ward 1). Similarly, landscape representation is not only a matter of internal politics and national or class ideology but also an international, global phenomenon, intimately – as well as complexly, variably, and ambivalently – bound up with practices of imperialism (Mitchell 9). Hence the trope that will function as the vehicle that takes us from Windermere, England to Windermere, BC, responds to developments of global scope that were transforming the local region, including large scale economic changes and industrialization, improvements in transportation and communication, and the expansion of empire.

William Gilpin, Observations, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, made in the year 1772, on several parts of England: particularly the mountains, and lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland. 2nd Ed. Vol 2. London: Printed for R. Blamire, 1788.

This image sketched by William Gilpin is engraved from a manuscript of a six-day tour of the Lakes completed by 1774, which circulated widely for more than a decade before it was published in 1786. The engravings are oval sepia-hued aquatints for the most part, perhaps imitating the view through a Claude glass and thus instantiating an example of print remediation that would become especially amenable to the recursive temporality of nostalgia reinforced by the centrality of transience in the prevalence of the mirror and memory in picturesque iconography. The process of aquatint engraving was relatively new in English book production, having been introduced from France in 1775, and Gilpin’s Observations was the first Lake District book to be illustrated by this method (Bicknell 15, 43). The accompanying text is primarily theoretical and technical, explaining how to appreciate “those romantic scenes” around Lake Windermere, “which were the principal inducement to this tour” (87), and especially how to imitate such scenes oneself in art and writing. The narrative is interrupted repeatedly, however, by a number of digressions, the first recounting an English civil war story that gets resolved inconclusively by English folklore (invoking Robin the Devil, a.k.a. Puck, the shape shifter notorious for misleading travellers), followed soon after by a ramble into Greek myth, and yet a further excursion through continental painting. The interlacing of narratives of picturesque travel and expositions of techniques for reproducing picturesque images encountered during those travels with myth and history exemplifies the way picturesque rules and conventions are early manifestations of the very epistemological disposition of the what we now conventionally call (after Benjamin) the age of mechanical reproduction. It also suggests the extent to which the cultural memory of landscape is inherently embodied and mediated, reflecting the capacity for mobility through place and time as well as the backward looking processes by which social geographies generate embodied emotions.

The visual trope exemplified in Gilpin’s drawing, of two figures framed protectively by a single large oak tree in the foreground, glassy surface of the lake reflecting the sky in the middle ground, leading off to the multi-layers of mountain played upon by a chiaroscuro of light and shade, is cited in various guises throughout Lake District travel writing, for example in a drawing-room table subscription art book, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Durham, and Northumberland, compiled in 1832 from a series of prints commissioned by the London publisher Fisher and Sons and in Samuel Leigh’s pocket Guide to the Lakes and Mountains of 1835. Located in radically different kinds of books, both images (see below) are steel engravings, the state-of-the-art print illustration process of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In addition, both books share a self-conscious grasp of the English Lake District as an important site to think through the relationship between mobile British subjects and their relationship to the local and the global, linking the Lakes to British Empire as much as to Europe. The infinite reproducibility of such a trope rendered it inherently portable and transferable to other contexts, especially that of empire where its very cultural habituation or familiarity could mediate and remediate individual perceptions and memories as well as social values and political practices in different historical conditions and far-flung spaces.

View of Thirlmere or Wythburn Water, Cumberland, from Westmoreland, Cumberland, Durham, and Northumberland, illustrated from original drawings, illustrated from original drawings by Thomas Allom, George Pickering, etc. with topographical and historical descriptions by Thomas Rose. London: Fisher, 1832, p. 86.

In Westmoreland, Cumberland, Durham, and Northumberland, Thomas Rose firmly refuses the conventional travelogue dichotomy between domestic and foreign, attributing instead a healthy cosmopolitanism to the attachment to local place, proclaiming: “In no part of the world are tourists treated with more respectful attention, and on more reasonable charges, than at this health-restoring portion of the British empire” (31). The artist, Thomas Allom, reinforces this sentiment by exoticizing the domestic landscape (see above). Rose embellishes the engraving with a narrative that emphasizes the isolation of this margin of the Lake District, highlighting the harsh and dangerous conditions for travellers. He then recounts an oft-told local story about a young man who lost his way and perished in this spot in a snowstorm. The bodily remains were discovered three months later still being watched over by the young man’s loyal dog – a female terrier. This nostalgic narrative of displacement and utter failure to return home is interspersed throughout with quotations from Scott and Wordsworth commemorating the death, the narrative, and the place.

Nostalgia, as Helen Groth explains (via Susan Stewart), “is a constitutive part of the process of reading, viewing, and imagining our own relation to the past and the present” (6). Rather than claiming direct authority, nostalgia works through multiple media formats to evoke and familiarize the past, constituting a longing and a regret underwritten by unmoored loss. While this loss and its attendant nostalgia are typically associated with modern forms of collectable culture and emergent new media formats such as the photograph, here it appears in the recursive story-telling mode and fine engraving situated in a book now rendered ephemeral precisely

7 because it exists, if at all, as a result of a subscriber’s desire to bind the collection into a whole. This form of art book crystallizes the loss and its attendant nostalgia crucial to forms of cultural memory that might circulate without anchor the world over; through such processes, nostalgia for Britain melds seamlessly with modern print media practices themselves.

Cover. Leigh's Guide to the Lakes and Mountains of Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire: Illustrated with a map of the country, and maps of Windermere, Derwent Water, Borrowdale, Ullswater, Grasmere, Rydal Water, and Langdale. 3rd Ed. London: Printed for Leigh and Son, 1835.

Leigh’s preface (to the book shown above), in contrast, argues that “a strong love of country” is best expressed in worshipping Nature at her varied “shrines in Britain, before bowing to foreign idols” (vii). Accordingly, the “numerous beauties of the British empire” cannot compare to the “pre-eminent” Lakes. Above all, in a clichéd repetition of Wordsworthian recompense (notably, the poet is frequently quoted throughout both books), the Lakes “present charms that affect the mind,” which “linger in the imagination less to electrify than to soothe, [and] they achieve the great end of retrospection, which is rather a gentle passage of mild emotions than a series of abrupt and powerful transitions” (viii). On the eve of the Victorian railway revolution, the shocks of modern world travel would seemingly find amelioration in the pleasure of the home tour, prized for its familiarity and comforting repetitiveness; the lack of particularity of the well-trodden Lake District tour enabled emphasis on the experience of real-time travel, which de-emphasized the importance of the destination and allowed for a paradoxical mixture of suspension and control associated with the virtual (Byerly 84). In this way, the leisurely home tour offered the traveller a dual passport – travel in thoroughly familiar surroundings enabled simultaneous imaginative immersion in a

8 retrospective trip through cultural memory and the tranquil joys of “mild emotions.” It is especially the domain of the guidebook to preserve the fixity of place that the Lake District archive of travel writing represented in the newly mobilizing and expanding Victorian world.

The predictable and repetitive experience of the Lakes tour was equally suited to replication in books intended for display in the home rather than to accompany the traveller, such as the Fisher art book discussed above and the photographically illustrated Wordsworth reader, Our English Lakes, Mountains, and Waterfalls of 1865. This self-consciously cultured book (see image below) exemplified the latest in modern, industrial book production technology, combining photography, steam printing, and innovations in typography to reproduce excerpts from Wordsworth’s poetry and thereby recompose the Lake District for both actual and virtual travellers. Among the various players in the production, Thomas Ogle was a bookbinder, as well as photographer, born in Lancaster and eventually formed a company that specialized in Lake District photography. The book was printed by the venerable Gresham Press, founded in 1826, renamed the Gresham Steam Press in 1847, and renowned throughout the century for innovations in specimens of letterpress printing, lithography, engraving, bookbinding, and stationery. An 1862 type-specimen book describes the font featured in Our English Lakes as the “type of the old style of face [that] is now frequently used, more especially for the first class of books and ornamental works. The series in use at the Gresham Steam Press…possess all the peculiarities of the medieval letter” (Peterson 40). Publisher Alfred William Bennett, one of the first to use photography for illustrating books, was also a Quaker and a botanist, and, after selling his publishing business in 1868, turned to a full-time career as a lecturer, editor, translator, and writer on botanical research, a path that would include, for example, a sub- editorship (1870-74) at the newly established Nature, a journal associated with scientific liberality and progressive thought.

The letterpress consists of quotations from Wordsworth’s poetry, as well as a facsimile of the poet’s signature on the frontispiece, which was still under copyright with Wordsworth’s original publisher, Edward Moxon (during a period when Moxon becomes a global publisher). As a result, Wordsworth’s heirs, Moxon, and Bennett became embroiled in a Chancery Court lawsuit over the use of the signature and access to copyright of the verse – which Bennett won (Groth 68). The production process of Our English Lakes thus applied the most innovative technology, while pushing the legal boundaries of intellectual property rights and pursuing cutting- edge marketing strategies, to simulate an old world feeling – with antique fonts, ornate bindings, and quotations from Wordsworth – thereby evoking an uncanny echo in its disjunctive use of the past to point to the future. In this way, the most modern of books offers a high tech virtual trip to a familiar place and simultaneously recomposes the past in the image of the present. Technologically mediated nostalgia thus distances the viewer from place and questions its very status, hinting at an unsettling permanence to the temporary relocation that is entailed in travel, in so far as one can never get back to the Lake District represented in the book, a place, moreover, that perhaps never really existed as such.

“Grasmere from Red Bank, Helm Crag and Dunmail Raise in the Distance,” Our English lakes, mountains, and waterfalls as seen by William Wordsworth. London, A. W. Bennett, 1864, p. 64. Thomas Ogle’s photograph, taken “specially for this book” (“Introduction” v), illustrates Wordsworth’s “To His Brother” (63- 67). Published untitled originally (“When, to the attractions of the busy world,”) in the section “Poems on the Naming of Places” Poems, 2 vols., 1815.

The image shown here is paired with Wordsworth’s elegy in memory of his younger brother, John, who perished in a shipwreck just off the south coast of England while commanding an East India Company ship bound for India and China. The poem describes a spot on the slopes above the “peaceful vale” of Grasmere where a “stately fir-grove” forms a “cloistral place/Of refuge.” While the poet carefully observes the natural life that is sheltered within the grove, and “Full many an hour/Here did [he] lose,” he also fought with the trees and struggled against the confines of the space, seeking to find “A length of open space.” On returning later, he discovers a path impressed by his brother’s restless steps on one of his visits home from the “barren seas,” and subsequently consecrates the place, following the traveller’s fatal return to the “joyless Ocean,” a living monument to “a perfect love” now irrevocably lost.

The photograph shares some of the compositional elements of the picturesque visual trope under discussion, but the plane is more varied, the group of figures in the foreground is shown from a higher prospect looking over the lake from above, and the iconic tree is multiplied and situated at the border of the middle ground. The poem supplies a historically specific meaning to the scene, generalizing the landscape and its representation as deeply personal. This image also recalls the “Introduction,” which explains how, “with the assistance of the Photographic illustrations, the reader will be able “to appreciate more fully Wordsworth’s wonderfully true descriptions of the beauties of nature; but the Tourist will have the additional pleasure of identifying with his own favourite spot any of the Poet’s verses which refer especially to it” (v-vi).

10 Wordsworth’s ability “to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves” (“Preface to Poems 1815) is, this passage suggests, analogous to the mechanical exactitude of the camera. Additionally, the camera will help extend the perceptive capacity of the viewer and thereby enhance her powers of appreciation. The book as a whole becomes the medium through which the poet’s topographic imagination extends to the viewer, who now can identify his own favourite spots and use the poet’s poems as well as the photographer’s images to name them. Helen Groth posits that the rhetorical and aural aspects of Wordsworth’s language were marginalized in an effort to intensify its visual and mnemonic impact, but this is the case only when the poem and photograph are decontextualized from the multi- media context of the book itself. Rather the opposite happens, as the entire book mediates between the physical and perceptual experience of travel generating a strategic sense of presence as located and embodied.

While much more could be said about how the photographic and book production processes reinforce the idea of loss in Wordsworth’s poem and challenge the stability of photographic veracity as well as place itself, I want to emphasize the representation of boundaries. Ogle’s photo finds that opening onto the world that Wordsworth sought in the fir grove, but also suggests the vulnerability that results from such openness, as if the entire family will tumble down into the water and get washed into the “dreary sea” along with Wordsworth’s brother. Ultimately, the preservation of the poet’s, photographer’s, or any traveller’s favourite spots would require more than the picturesque illusions or photographic truth; rather it needed a politically organized public, manifest in the Wordsworth Society, which acquired Dove Cottage in 1900 and provided the locus for reserving the Lake District as the “national property” Wordsworth envisioned.

Fast-forward to American tourists on the shores of postcolonial Windermere located just outside Banff National Park in Canada; we find a postcard image (below) of two men in a pose that iterates Gilpin’s sepia aquatint of Lake Windermere almost two centuries earlier. Just as explorer Simon Fraser’s language of “romantic and wild regions” (in the epigraph to this paper) familiarizes the incomprehensible terrain he is charting, the picturesque idiom of the photograph asserts a “nostalgia connected to the primary colonial claim to the land” while also expressing the form of private introspection that picturesque images make possible. The colonial land claim combined with photographic techniques of desire and loss turn nostalgia into the very mode of affective belonging to colonial space. In this context, the picturesque photograph becomes indexical of nostalgia for home, and such nostalgia in turn transforms the nature of the aesthetic itself. The postcard intended to authenticate the experience ironically discredits its existence because it captures “a trace of the object simultaneous with its representation” (Chaudhary 24).

11 Postcard of Windermere Lake, showing view of the lake from the town of Windermere, British Columbia, Canada. Two men are shown viewing the lake in the foreground; postmarked Banff Alberta; [Front] Windermere Lake, Windermere, BC, 1947 [Back] Post Card: Made In Canada. Correspondence: “They say you can get some big ones from this lake. We have seen some beautiful country. The scenery is marvellous. We are in Canada now and expect to go to Banff and Lake Louise to-morrow. July 9-'47.” To: Address No. State St., Ansonia, Conn. U.S.A. Sent by Helen to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Burton.

The distance between the moment when the photo originated and its private contemplation is sustained even further in the postcard that records the travel experience only to be relinquished in sharing that experience with another. This secondariness of photographic temporality undermines the authenticity of the present moment that the camera so carefully records and also brings alarmingly to consciousness the passing of that moment. The photographic image is the ideal mechanism for conveying colonial longing for home as well as the violence of appropriation entailed in imperialist processes. However, the English Lake District associations of Windermere BC are political as well as aesthetic and ideological. The founders of Banff National Park and Lake Louise had ties to the Wordsworth Trust (Hall 107) and commercial and industrial activity allowed in the park before 1930 suggest that profit and preservation were not mutually exclusive in the Canadian context. Clearly the picturesque perspective travelled and enhanced travellers’ perception while it may also have performed aesthetic amnesia in the colonial context. We need to attend to the global relations of the Lake District travel writing archive and the continuing aftermath of such forms of cultural memory associated with localized nostalgia in the colonial context.

*This presentation is part of a work in progress, Globalizing the English Lakes: A Study in Book Ecology, linked to the Lake District Online, a digital research project based on the Lake District Collection of rare books at Simon Fraser University. I would like to thank the SFU Library for generously supporting this research, especially Eric Swanick, Head of Special Collections, Rebecca Dowson, English Liaison Librarian, and Mark Jordan, Head of Library Computing Systems.

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