Debatable Geographies of Romantic Nostalgia: The Redemptive Landscape in Wordsworth and Cobbett

Abstract

The impressive accumulation of historicist and materialist interpretations of romantic culture since the publication of Marilyn Butler’s seminal Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries in 1981 has helped to answer her central question asked in the introduction: ‘in quite what sense is English literature at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries a product and a part of social experience?’.¹ In her overview of the field, Butler also cautioned against the ‘isolationism of so many of the commonest approaches of the literary scholar’, but a different kind of isolationism has kept some of the most radical revisionist scholarship of the past twenty-five years from making the necessary transition from a practice of historical recovery to a re-engagement with the work of major figures in the romantic canon.² In this chapter, I would like to make a small gesture in that direction by comparing the construction of a politics of social geography in William Cobbett’s most significant single work of extended cultural criticism, Rural Rides, with the effort by William Wordsworth to develop a lasting structure of moral and social values from the thinly inhabited mountain landscapes depicted in his longest and most philosophically ambitious poem, The Excursion.³ Further, I hope to demonstrate that these rival geographies provide a compelling illustration of the way symbolic interpretations of landscape in the period were used to engage with urgent social and political issues, giving another meaning to romanticism’s ‘debatable lands’.