Shannon M. Stimpson and Dr. Nicholas Mason, English
Main Text
At the beginning of this project, I planned to research female-authored texts from the Romantic era and to explore patterns of consumerism found within them. After a few weeks of researching various pamphlets and printed visual images for this project, I started to wonder whether the relationship between printed visuals, texts, and consumer culture had a larger cultural impact than I had previously anticipated. I became interested in the ways that print culture influenced not only female authors, but also some of the foundational figures of the Romantic era, particularly William Wordsworth, who was referenced in much of the research I was looking at.
As my mentor and I discussed the different ways that I should proceed with my research, he suggested that I completely redesign my project to investigate Wordsworth’s relationship with printed images in the travel book genre (one of the most important consumerist endeavors at the time). We felt that this new project would fulfill the aims of the ORCA grant, while providing me with more opportunities to present my findings at several major academic conferences (specifically the Wordsworth Conference and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference) as well as increasing my chances to publish in a peer-reviewed journal.
I created a new proposal, which detailed the new project that my mentor and I worked together to create. Although the scope of this project was very different from my initial proposal, the new project still spoke to my primary scholarly interests, which are book history and consumerism during the Romantic era. I changed topics under the recommendation of my mentor, and I feel that this decision has provided me opportunities to learn from my professor in ways that my original proposal may not have.
My new project investigates Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, which has a fascinating textual history that incorporates visual images in important and interesting ways. The Guide to the Lakes was one of the most lucrative and fashionable of Wordsworth’s publications during his lifetime. The writing and distribution of the Guide coincided with advances in print technology and a craze for touring the Lake District. As Stephen Gill suggests, the Guide to the Lakes is “by far Wordsworth’s most attractive and accessible prose, and were it not for the utilitarian connotation of the Guide it would be recognized more freely for what it is, a gem of Romantic writing.”
Despite both its popularity in the first half of the nineteenth-century, and its accessibility to readers, I found that the Guide has been overlooked in academia primarily for two reasons. First, the Guide was commissioned as a commercial rather than an aesthetic piece, and there is significant evidence to suggest that Wordsworth originally participated in the project solely for economic gain. Scholars who fixate on the commercial incentives of the Guide have a tendency to ascribe a lesser aesthetic value to the guidebook than it deserves. To address this concern, I considered the personal correspondences of both William and Dorothy Wordsworth (his sister and closest confidant), which indicated that commerce and aesthetics were not mutually exclusive motivations for Wordsworth. Furthermore, my research indicated that the Guide was a lifelong project for Wordsworth that took on added aesthetic and artistic importance to him as he aged. I argue that Guide to the Lakes a critical text to understanding Wordsworth’s aesthetic position during the later years of his life and that current scholarship has greatly undervalued its worth. The second reason that I believe Guide to the Lakes has not received scholarly attention, is that many scholars argue that after his so-called “Great Decade” of 1797-1807, Wordsworth’s fell into a forty-year period of mediocrity. To the contrary, I found that a close analysis of the Guide reveals Wordsworth’s increasing awareness and skill in dealing with the printed visual image and the visual layout of printed texts. Wordsworth’s relationship with visual images, painted, printed, or part of the natural environment, is actually more fundamental to understanding and appreciating his often neglected later years than has been acknowledged in current scholarship.
Wordsworth oversaw five major revisions to Guide to the Lakes during his lifetime. I was interested in looking at the way that his incorporation of visual images changed over time. Although most modern reprints of Guide to the Lakes also include visual images, to my surprise, I found that in the original texts, only the first edition contained pictures. This was particularly intriguing to me because Guide to the Lakes actually began as collaborative effort between Wordsworth and an amateur artist. The published work included a textual introduction by Wordsworth and a series of sketches of the Lake District. One of my primary research questions throughout the project was why Wordsworth chose not include visual images in all of his later editions when the text originally began as part of a visual project.
One of the major challenges that this project presented, was getting a copy of the first edition of Guide to the Lakes. Because the first edition is a relatively obscure text, there are only a few libraries in the country that own copies of the book. I worked with Interlibrary Loan to try to get scans or facsimiles of the first edition, but most libraries that we contacted were unwilling to loan the book or to scan it. After weeks of waiting and rejection, I was finally able to procure high-resolution scans for the first part of the first edition. Although I was only able to get a partial copy of the first edition, this proved invaluable to my research and my conclusions. The inaccessibility of this text was an unexpected challenge, but it also supported my claim that the scholarship on Guide to the Lakes is limited. I had little trouble accessing the other editions of the text, because BYU Special Collections owns the second, third, and fifth editions.
It became clear to me that I would need to have a more general knowledge of how visual images were incorporated in the travel book genre generally. So, I researched how visual images were used in three of the most prolific travel books of the eighteenth century. Interestingly, I found that two of the three travel books, not only included visual images, but that the written text often played an inferior role to the visual images. Wordsworth would have been well acquainted with these seminal texts, which largely defined how the travel book should be designed. From my research, I concluded that Wordsworth wanted to redefine the genre of the travel book. Instead of relying upon visual images, which Wordsworth felt could not capture the full aesthetic beauty of the Lake District, he used increasingly “visual language,” incorporating artistic terminology and descriptive language to “paint” a picture of the Lake District that honestly represented his love for the landscape.
This project became the basis for my Honors thesis, and I am currently in the process of preparing my research for publication in an academic journal. I plan to present my research findings at both the Summer Wordsworth Conference and the 2011 NASSR Conference, both significant academic conferences within my field.
This project has proved to be both the most challenging and the most rewarding research experience I have ever had. More importantly, this project has given me an invaluable mentorship experience and I am very grateful for all the things that I have learned through this process.