Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Julia Sandstrom Carlson
University of Cincinnati

Water, earth, sky, and animals? At first glance, one of the four sections into which Technologies of the Picturesque is divided seems unlike the others. We come quickly to recognize, however, that the likeness of “animals” to the other categories lies in its also being an object of picturesque vision: one of the basic “elements of nature” (15) encountered, perceived, and composed in visual art according to the rules of picturesque aesthetics. Water, earth, sky, and animals are the basic vocabulary of the picturesque. Yet, as Ron Broglio shows, Romantic artists were not alone in representing these objects and fitting them to human use; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientists and surveyors encountered and inscribed the same elements according to their particular technological, cartographic, agricultural, and immunological agendas. In six tightly focused chapters, the author compares artistic and scientific encounters with nature, their tools and epistemologies, and their respective effects on human subjectivity and sense of space. Crossing disciplinary divides consolidated only after the Romantic period, Broglio brings to light the reliance of poets and artists on the technologies of scientific endeavor and, conversely, the employment by scientists of picturesque principles and tools. Both sorts of optical projects and systems made chaotic nature “legible” to humanity but in doing so enforced a Cartesian divide between human perceiver (eye, mind) and nature (body, matter) that materially distanced human beings and the environment.

Drawing on recent cultural-studies research and contemporary science studies, the book examines inscriptional technologies associated with nationally significant events of measuring the four featured elements of nature. Chapters consider the development of an accurate method for determining longitude at sea, the Ordnance Survey of Britain, the scientific classification of cloud types for weather prediction, and the selective breeding of cattle along with the principal tools these projects employed, including lunar charts, William Harrison’s H4 clock, the triangulation survey and map, the theodolite and measuring chain, cloud nomenclature, and the bodies of cattle and grazier guides. Broglio strikingly pairs these technologies of measurement and representation with the tools and aesthetics of picturesque tourism, prospect poetry, cloud paintings, and cattle portraiture, exposing thereby the analogous and sometimes mutually reinforcing effects of art and technology: both transform nature into culture, render the opaque thing an intelligible object with an economic or aesthetic use value, cultivate a possessional subject position, and abstract the perceiver from the visible scene. But Broglio does not stop here. In movingly persuasive sections throughout the book, he considers Romantic counter-currents to optical hegemony: instances of phenomenological encounters with nature that refigure relations between the human and the environment. Haptic engagements with nature in Wordsworth’s poetry, encounters governed by the sense of touch rather than sight, and durational depictions of nature in Constable’s painting, which prioritize time over figural space, offer radical constructions of subjectivity and space overlooked in other studies of the picturesque. In Wordsworth’s and Constable’s “bending” (20) of the picturesque aesthetic, Broglio locates an alternative syntax that distributes thought and agency across human and environmental entities. With increasing force as the book proceeds from “Water” and “Earth” to “Sky” and “Animals,” Broglio challenges ecocriticism’s assumption of a stable Romantic subject that pre-exists encounters with nature.

“Part I: Water” recounts the mid-eighteenth-century government-sponsored competition over the most accurate means of determining longitude at sea, comparing Nevil Maskelyne’s astronomical to George Harrison’s mechanical methods. Broglio argues that the determining of longitude by means of Harrison’s mechanical clock produces a worldview parallel to that of the picturesque tourist. The late-eighteenth-century navigator who looks to the face of the H4 clock performs an “inward turn” (29) away from the sea and the night sky to human-made instruments; this epistemological orientation toward the face of the mechanical object is reflected by the representation of abstract geometric lines upon globes and charts. Similarly, the picturesque tourist navigates by means of a cluster of inscriptions and tools (Claude mirror, picturesque poems, paintings, and guidebooks) that collectively produces a “syntax”: a set of compositional rules that render the land intelligible (43). While the grammar of picturesque landscape produces a worldview that values human representations of nature more highly than actual surroundings, tool use distributes cognition across “bodies, minds, and machines” (39).
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Reviewed by
Gary Harrison
University of New Mexico

In Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth, Tim Fulford revisits territory made familiar by Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), and most recently Elizabeth Helsinger’s Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Like Williams, Fulford attends to the opposition between the Country and the City, focusing in particular upon the works of Thomson, Cowper, Johnson, Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as upon the picturesque theories of Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight, Humphry Repton, and William Gilpin. Like Barrell and Helsinger, Fulford examines in fine detail the complex web of relations among landscape aesthetics, poetry, rural poverty, and politics. More carefully attending to the particularities of party politics than these writers, Fulford traces a genealogy of transformations in the political inflection of landscape poetry from The Seasons to Home at Grasmere. In so doing, this remarkable book offers an implicit critique of the new historicism, while detailing the relationships among party politics, agrarian change, landscape poetry, and each poet’s unique attempt—stylistically and thematically—to claim some moral, political and personal authority for his poetic voice.

As Fulford demonstrates with fine detail and with a stylistic grace all too uncommon to much contemporary critical discourse, landscape poetry, at least since the time of Thomson, was always fully imbricated in the changing social, political, and moral debates of its day. Eschewing the monolithic view of history as a succession of grand events, the sort of history that folds literary texts back into a Glorious, or American, or French Revolution writ large, Fulford focuses upon the local and contemporary, especially the agrarian, politics in which each poet was intimately involved. Fulford takes pains to describe how each poet’s particular version of landscape poetry is shaped by the way private concerns and local incidents intersect with national issues and party politics regarding the changing status and social function of the landed gentry. Beginning with Thomson’s landscape poetry of the 1730s and 1740s, Fulford argues, the erosion of moral authority and social responsibility of the landed gentry made increasingly problematic the British poet’s ability to “represent an uncontroversial ground of liberty in which a providentially arranged natural order could be observed at leisure, thus perpetuating the taste and disinterest by which the gentry might reproduce that liberty and independence in wise government” (8). As the moral authority, political integrity, and social stability of the landed gentry gave way to the encroachment of the market economy into rural England, and as the landscapes of rural England increasingly became the sites of political contest between landed and commercial interests, British landscape poetry, as it were, lost its pastoral innocence. Because the virtual landscape was now fraught with the troublesome contradictions over land and landed interest permeating the actual landscape, the universalizing strategies and tropes of earlier pastoral and georgic poetry rung increasingly hollow. The prospect view, by means of which “the propertied classes were able to present their political dominance as confirmed by the natural scene” (3), began to lose its universal appeal as the “independence and disinterest on which depended the gentry’s and nobility’s legitimacy as the people’s representatives in parliament was being undermined” by “a system of placement, pensioners and patronage” (8).

In their struggle to recover poetic authority and to preserve, or restore, the idea of liberty within a landscape poetry destabilized by its own politicization, British poets drew upon, modified, and sometimes challenged the landscape aesthetics of their precursors. Fulford shows that Thomson, Johnson, Cowper, the picturesque theorists, Wordsworth, and Coleridge engaged in a dialogical exchange that modified landscape poetry to meet the particular ideological problems faced by each writer as he engaged in his own version of pastoral politics. As Fulford explains in the introduction: “The representation of landscape was never simply a disguised ideology presenting gentlemanly aesthetic judgment as naturally, and by implication socially and politically, valid. It was also a discourse in which that judgment could be redefined, challenged, and even undermined . . .” (5). As these writers invoked the discourse on landscape to negotiate their own conflicted relation to the politics of the country and the city, they were also faced with the task of finding new ways to figure personal and public liberty and authority in a society that no longer would sustain the pastoral-georgic ideal of an earlier era.

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