Map of a Nation (38 page)

 

T
HREE YEARS LATER
, in the summer of 1811, Bootle received another visitor. When William Wordsworth arrived in the village, he was forty-one.
His poetry seemed to have temporarily dried up and his personal life was in tatters. He had fallen out with his great friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge the previous summer and there was no sign of a reconciliation. His family had recently moved house and at the same time his two children had caught severe bouts of whooping cough. The symptoms persisted, so William’s wife Mary had suggested a summer holiday by the sea, where the fresh air might clear the children’s lungs. The family found themselves in Bootle.

The holiday was initially a disaster. Eight years previously, Wordsworth’s brother John had been given command of an East India Company ship,
The
Abergavenny
, on a voyage to Bengal and China. The ship had struck a reef and foundered only two hours after leaving the Isle of Portland, on the Dorset coast, killing 250 men on board, including John. The whole Wordsworth family had invested a great deal in the voyage in hopes that the profits would enable William to continue writing. The tragedy had left him with a huge sense of guilt, ambivalence towards his own career and a debilitating fear of the sea. But Bootle’s proximity to water was unavoidable. To the settlement’s
north-west
, west, south-west and south, there was nothing to set eyes on but the Irish Sea, nothing to hear but ‘Ocean’s ceaseless roar’, as Wordsworth dismally put it. To the north and east of this ‘bleakest point of Cumbria’s shore’, his eyes met a wall of black rock: Corney Fell, Waberthwaite Fell and ‘grim
neighbour
! huge Black Combe’. South-west Cumberland is an exposed, dramatic, but stark and rather unpicturesque area of the Lake District. It was a world apart from the Wordsworths’ home in Grasmere, among the region’s warmer, greener peaks: ‘the loveliest spot that man hath ever found’. Wordsworth felt the change of scene cruelly. And his mood was not helped by the terrible weather that summer, which battered the region with biting winds and rain and planted a permanent dark cloud over the summit of Black Combe.

Wordsworth spent much of his time in Bootle indoors. He wrote a peevish letter in poetry to his friend and patron Sir George Beaumont, complaining that, despite being on holiday, ‘rough is the time’. He stared out of his window at the huge black bulk of the mountain that thwarted the sun. And he worked fitfully on his intended magnum opus,
The Excursion
. One
morning
, however, he was cheered by a visit from Bootle’s rector, the Reverend Dr James Satterthwaite, whose vicarage was just around the corner from the
Wordsworths’ melancholy cottage. Satterthwaite happened to be a friend of William’s brother Christopher, and he was a fellow of a college in the University of Cambridge, Wordsworth’s own alma mater. Satterthwaite was a welcome presence and full of local anecdotes. He thought Wordsworth might be interested to hear about the rarely visible view from the top of Black Combe and the map-makers who had visited Bootle three years
earlier
and revelled in its panorama.

Satterthwaite was right. Wordsworth was well acquainted with the progress of the Ordnance Survey through England and Wales in the 1790s, in whose footsteps he had stepped during many of his own wanderings. He had already referred to Mudge in print as ‘the best authority’ on the Lake District’s complex, dramatic scenery. But there was something in Satterthwaite’s story that particularly enthralled the poet and inspired him to sit down and compose two poems that told the tale of Mudge’s ascent up Black Combe. ‘Inscription: Written with a Slate Pencil on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Combe’ and ‘View from the Top of Black Combe’ were both published in a two-volume collection of poetry that appeared in 1815, four years after his visit to Bootle. Wordsworth’s
imagination
was transfixed by the thought of the wonderful panorama from Black Combe’s top. In one poem, he wrote of how,

He described how the observer’s eyesight leapt from ‘low dusky tracts, Where Trent is nursed, far southward!’ to

And finally Wordsworth imagined Mudge’s speechless delight upon discovering that not only ‘Mona’s Isle’, the Isle of Man, was visible from Black Combe’s summit but even ‘the line of Erin’s coast’, Ireland, too. (Mona’s Isle sometimes refers to Ynys Môn, Anglesey, but was used here by Wordsworth to designate the Isle of Man.) In his guidebook to the Lake District, Wordsworth elaborated on this poetic description by recounting how ‘that experienced observer’ William Mudge declared that ‘the solitary Mountain Black Combe … commands a more extensive view than any point in Britain. Ireland, he saw more than once, but not when the sun was above the horizon.’

The panoramic vista from the top of Black Combe was not just a
breathtaking
and sublime experience: it provided a revelation of the entire United Kingdom – Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland – all at once. The
mountains
of Scotland merged with the Lake District’s peaks, the West Pennines and Lancashire coast dissolved into the mountains and beaches of North Wales, and Ireland was a phantasmagoric haze melting seamlessly into the Isle of Man. None of the regional tensions that had rocked the nation through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were remotely evident in that vast prospect. There were no traces of the Jacobite rebellions that had followed the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 or of the intense disturbances around the Act of Union that had joined Britain and Ireland together in 1801. In his Black Combe poems Wordsworth exploited the political
significance
of the view from the mountain to the full. He described the panorama as ‘a revelation infinite’, a ‘grand terraqueous spectacle,/ From centre to circumference, unveiled!’ And his poem rose to a nationalist crescendo: the view from the top of Black Combe was a utopian vision of a happily united kingdom, a ‘display august of man’s inheritance,/ Of Britain’s calm felicity and power!’

 

W
ORDSWORTH’S POETIC RESPONSE
to Mudge and Colby’s
triangulation
from Black Combe is a revealing example of the way in which cartography excited the cultural imagination in the early years of the
Ordnance Survey. The maps inspired emotional and imaginative responses in their readers, then as now. Mentions of maps and surveys in British novels, poems and plays increased dramatically during the first thirty years of the Ordnance Survey’s existence. Britons had become ‘map-minded’ over the eighteenth century, and maps were popular subjects for embroidery and board games. In 1787 ‘A New Geographical Pastime for England and Wales … a very amusing Game to play with a Teetotum, Ivory Pillars and Counters’ was released, in which players made their way across a map of England and Wales, travelling on lines that ricocheted from town to town and closely resembled a nationwide triangulation. Such public fascination with cartography continued through the following decades. The popularity of maps in British culture during the early years of the Ordnance Survey had a variety of causes, notably Britain’s entry into a prolonged war that was fought on an international stage and was heavily dependent on maps both as tactical military tools and as illustrative aids used to describe the conflict to the reading public. The upsurge in ‘literary maps’ in this period was also indebted to the Enlightenment’s celebration of cartography as the language of reason and political equality. The fact that knowledge of the Ordnance Survey’s activities was easily available to the public in newspapers and journals, which covered them in enthusiastic detail, and in its map-makers’ own publications and surveys helped to bring cartography to the attention of those engaged in artistic and literary creation.

This is not to deny that maps had a noteworthy place in English culture before the Enlightenment. But in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries
, they acquired specific contemporary associations. First and foremost, writers associated maps with the military and particular martial events. In James Fennell’s comic play
Lindor and Clara: or, The British Officer
(1791) the soldier Firelock was introduced ‘reading, with a Map before him, a Musket lying near him’. In his long poem
The Excursion
(1814) Wordsworth described the enrolment of a young shepherd called Oswald in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars, imagining how ‘at some leisure hour’ he ‘stretched on the grass … / Among his fellows, while an ample map/ Before their eyes lay
carefully
outspread’. Thomas Dermody’s poem ‘The Invalid’ (1800) told the other side of the story and pictured a badly injured soldier returning from the
Continental theatre of war, who referred to a ‘shatter’d map’ to explain the cause of his ‘maim’d stump’. Some writers in this period used maps as the insignia of ‘lost lovers’ (as the twenty-first-century novelist Nadeem Aslam put it). Thomas Tickell’s poem
An Epistle
(1810) told the story of a woman who became ‘a mere geographer by love’ while estranged from her soldier boyfriend, and ‘taught her finger’ to ‘stray … o’er the map’ in order to ‘span the distance that between us lies’.

The military associations of maps also made their way into literature in more subtle ways. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became popular in poetry and painting to describe the landscape as if from an
elevated
viewpoint. This trend was known as ‘prospect’ poetry or painting, and its proponents often linked the physical elevation offered by a hill with moral superiority. For example, in 1726 John Dyer composed a poem called ‘Grongar Hill’ in which the speaker ascended that peak and, at the same time as enjoying its panoramic view, offered the moralising reflection that ‘Hope’s deluding glass’ can cause one to ‘mistake the Future’s face’. The idea that a figure becomes more morally or physically powerful by attaining a ‘commanding height’ (a standard phrase in prospect poetry) arguably derived from military reconnaissance and surveying, whereby map-makers’ elevation above the ground gave them a very real power over the subject landscape and its population. Eighteenth-century poetry is full of
descriptions
of the panoramic views that are available from various summits across Europe, views which are often explicitly compared to maps. In 1735 the poet John Hughes described a vista over ‘
Hertford
’s ancient town’ and its
surrounding
‘flow’ry Vales, and moistened Meads’ that ‘far around in beauteous Prospect spreads/ Her Map of Plenty all below’. This notion made its way into the vocabulary of the reading public, and when one young nobleman went walking in the Lake District in 1770, he described in his journal the view from the summit of Skiddaw. He recounted that he could see ‘all the coast of Galloway – the Solway Firth, Carlisle, Cross fell in Yorkshire – Workington – Cocker mouth and Wigton – Here under your feet is the Lake upon which you were – it is like a map’.

The military associations of surveying were reflected in the cultural sphere, and so too was the idea that cartography was the language of Enlightenment.
Many writers in the eighteenth century used maps as emblems of
rationality
and republicanism. In her novel
The Young Philosopher
Charlotte Smith pictured a group of characters consulting a world atlas, from which they derived the message that ‘true philanthropy does not consist in loving John, and Thomas, and George, and James, because they are our brothers, our cousins, our neighbours, our countrymen, but in benevolence to the whole human race’. A year after the publication of the Ordnance Survey’s first map in 1801, a play called
Americana
was published by an anonymous author. In it, one character functioned as an overt emblem of ‘genuine liberty’ and ‘the ever venerated voice of freedom’ and she spoke in the language of Enlightenment cartography, describing how ‘Europe’s continent’ was ‘spread out like some extensive map beneath’. (However, many writers associated maps with royalism and privilege. The dramatist William Henry Ireland wrote a play called
Henry II: An Historical Drama
(1799), in which the King pointed out on a ‘poor dwindled map’ the outline of England ‘when Harry First, my grandsire, reign’d’.)