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The relationship between centre and periphery is always politically and culturally charged. In this paper I will discuss how Wordsworth creates a new Romantic geography out of the Lake District by reversing the relationship between the centre and the margin. I use J. B. Harley's theory of reading maps as socially constructed texts, especially his discussion of the "omphalos syndrome" (the "centre of the world" syndrome), to show Wordsworth's method of decentralization.
According to Harley, the "omphalos syndrome," by which a people believes itself to be the centre of the world, is one of the most important organizing principles of maps and the universal feature of the world map. From the ancient Christian map, which centred on Jerusalem, down to the modern political map, any map-maker gives his nation a central position. How does it apply to Wordsworth's mapping of the Lake District? I will examine similarities and differences between the "omphalos syndrome" of political maps and Wordsworth's works. Wordsworth locates his native place in the centre of his geography. By doing so, he recentres the heart of England in a remote rural place, in the Lakeland, and decentres two centres of Britain, London and Windsor; London as the capital city and the financial centre, and Windsor which has a royal residence and has enjoyed its scenic beauty. His birth place, where humans coexist happily with nature, is structured as the opposite of the great capital city. In "Tintern Abbey," what is contrasted is not only the Wye five years ago and the present Wye, but also the beautiful healing nature and "the din / Of towns and cities" (26-7). These "towns and cities" are epitomized in the image of London in The Prelude; a type of the "mighty city" and "blancconfusion" (VII. 696-7). In The Prelude, London in Book 7 is countered by the Lake District in Book 8. The city is described as "unfenced" and "wilderness of lamps" (VII. 62, 124), whereas the Lake District is presented as a place surrounded by the mountains and where people cultivate their own small land passed down from their ancestors generation by generation. St. Bartholomew's Fair is likened to "one vast mill" (VII. 693) "vomiting, receiving, on all sides, / Men, women, three-years' children, babes in arms" (VII. 694-5). On the other hand, we have a very different kind of fair at the beginning of Book 8. We hear delightful sounds resounding from the green field to the top of Helvellyn. The sounds come from Grasmere Fair which has, as its core, "a little family of men, /Twice twenty-with their children and their wives" (VIII. 7-8).
In the political map, according to the Omphalos syndrome," a cartographer from the marginal area puts his native place in the centre, but keeps the tendency of centralization within that area: public places, such as municipal offices and churches, being considered as important, are printed conspicuous and big. What is interesting in Wordsworth's geography is the tendency of decentralization in the Lakes, which is a departure from the "omphalos syndrome" in the political map. No public institutions play an important role in Wordsworth's Lake District. A comparison with the use of the church in Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" and Coleridge's poems will be helpful. Goldsmith and Coleridge follow the "omphalos syndrome" in that the church functions as a centre of the community. In Goldsmith's poem, the centre of Auburn, the ideal village which is created by the poet's imagination, is the village preacher who takes pastoral care of the villagers, listening to the defeated people. In "Frost at Midnight," the hometown the young Coleridge yearned for in London is represented by the church:
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, So sweetly, that they stirs and haunted me With a wild pleasure. (27-32)
And in The Ancient Mariner, the Mariner starts from the church and returns to the same church. On the other hand, in "Brothers" and The Prelude, the church does not function well as a centre of the community. In Bk.4 (400-504) of The Prelude, the young Wordsworth leads the tired discharged soldier to a small cottage in the wood not to the church. It is a humble labourer who gives him food and a roof for the night. In Bk.5 (414-49), right after the episode which is incorporated from "There was a boy," Wordsworth, grieved that the church on the green hill forgets the Boy and all who sleep at her feet, wishes that she may long behold a "race of real children" (V. 436) like the Boy. In "The Brothers," Leonard, the mariner, has been on the sea for twenty years, longing for his native place, but ironically, the actual landscape is completely changed. What he sees when he comes home is a gravestone of his beloved brother and the priest who fails to recognize him and treats him as a "Stranger" (37). It is clear that Wordsworth criticizes The Ancient Mariner here. For, while Coleridge's Mariner sees the same blessed church shining brightly in the moonlight and is saved by a hermit in the wood, Wordsworth gives Leonard nothing but despair in the churchyard.
Leonard, deprived of all that connects him to his birth place, leaves home as a 'gray-haired mariner' (435) never to return. What occupies the central position in Wordsworth's geography then? As is most clearly seen in "Michael," it is cottages of the humble local people which are placed in the centre. In this respect, the structuring principal of Wordsworth's geography is exactly the opposite of that of the political map. In "Michael," surprisingly, a bird's-eye view is taken from a small cottage of a thrifty couple:
Their cottage on a plot of rising ground Stood single, with large prospect, north and south, High into Easedale, up to Dunmail-Raise, And westward to the village near the lake; And from this constant light, so regular And so far seen, the House itself, by all Who dwelt within the limits of the vale, Both old and young, was named THE EVENING STAR.(132-9)
These lines epitomize Wordsworth's Romantic geography. Though written in the tradition of the prospect poem, the passage presents a totally different landscape: the whole scene is dominated by a small cottage and an old lamp, which is lit for the couple working far into the night, is made to be the Evening Star, an image of eternity.
It is small independent proprietors of land that Wordsworth wants to focus on in his poems about the Lakeland. In a letter about "Michael" and "The Brothers" (to Charles James Fox, Jan. 14, 1801), Wordsworth thinks that their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances when they would otherwise be forgotten. The bond between man and land makes the affection for those who inherit one's one land stronger and more tangible. When the five-year-old Luke is described as having "two steady roses that are five years old" (179), he is identified with the land itself, which should be cultivated, tended and harvested.
Those people, however, are quickly losing their tie to the land. In Bk. 8 of The Prelude and "Michael," Wordsworth praises the fortitude of the real shepherds of the Lakeland, but in "Michael," we see contemporary political and economical conditions turning peasants into the manufacturing poor, who, nomadic and landless, are drifting into London. In London, Luke, who should inherit Michael's land, is ruined and forced to escape overseas. In Grasmere, Michael continues to build a sheep fold, waiting for his son, but, as the narrating poet says, "great changes have been wrought / In all the neighbourhood" (478-9). The great changes, which intrude even into the Lake District protected by mountains, destroy the traditional life of Lakelanders. Michael dies seven years after his son's departure with the sheep-fold unfinished. Nothing remains of the cottage called the Evening Star except an old oak beside the door, and what we see at the end of the poem is the remains of the unfinished sheep-fold. Similarly, in "The Ruined Cottage," we see only the ruined cottage of Margaret after the war and famine forces her husband to leave home as a recruit and she dies of despair.
These poems as well as Bk. 8 of The Prelude present Wordsworth's pastoral, which is not a utopia that exists nowhere, but real Grasmere, which is subject to changes of the age. An attempt is made to keep what is about to be lost by providing a narrating poet and a young poet who listens to (and therefore inherits) the story. In place of land, a story is passed down from an old poet to a younger poet. Michael's cottage as well as Margaret's are remembered and told by the next generation.
In the Guide to the Lakes, Wordsworth tries to keep, in the form of language, what is pushed further to the margin and is about to perish. The work is not a mere guidebook (a tourist map) with its detailed description of the natural and cultural features, and history of the Lake District. In fact, it is opposed to the tourist map such as Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye (1792). Whereas Gilpin, as a traveller, reconstructs the area from a picturesque point of view, Wordsworth writes as an inhabitant who is closely associated with the region. Indeed, Wordsworth's "omphalos syndrome" is most clearly seen in the Guide to the Lakes as he makes the Lakes compete against foreign scenic sites (34, 46, 110, etc.), but unlike picturesque travellers, Wordsworth's focus is on the people who live a daily life there. The bird's-eye view of the Lakes is taken from "the top of either of the mountains, Great Gavel, or Scawfell" or from "a cloud hanging midway between those two mountains" (22). A number of valleys are seen to be stretched like "spokes from thenave of a wheel" (22). What is the centre of this map is, as in "Michael," the cottages which are scattered over the valleys and they are likened to starts in a passage quoted from "Home at Grasmere" (61). They symbolize cooperation between man and Nature: as "these houses have been, from father to son, inhabited by persons engaged in the same occupations yet necessarily with changes in their circumstances" (62), they remind us of "the processes of Nature" and being "clothed in part with a vegetable garb, appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of the fields" (63).
Wordsworth sees an ideal small community in this small village protected by the mountains. Grasmere is "a perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturists" (67), and a "pure Commonwealth" (68). Its members "existed in the midst of a powerful empire like an ideal society or an organized community, whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it" (68). Grasmere as a small ideal republic here offers a contrast to the powerful "empire," Great Britain. Wordsworth's "omphalos syndrome" is based on his affection for humble people who are about to disappear and it centres on a small rural village, whereas the "omphalos syndrome" of the political map is a driving force of imperialism, expanding itself further and further outward.
In conclusion, in Wordsworth's Romantic geography, the centre is dislocated in favour of the peripheral. The political and financial centre, London, is countered by the Lake District. Within the Lake District, the religious centre, the church, is dismissed and instead humble cottages are given the central position. Wordsworth's sympathetic gaze toward the marginal was cast on those who were discarded by contemporary British political movements when Britain started to pave the way for imperialism. The age of Romanticism corresponded with the period in which British cartography developed, hand in hand with the government's political and military purposes. James Rinnel, the first surveyor-general of the East India company, made the first accurate map of India in 1782, the African Society was founded in1788, and in 1830 the Royal Geography society was established. Through the Napoleonic Wars, which was the first world war, Britain began expanding itself overseas, going further and further east. In this period, Wordsworth focused on what was forced to perish in the marginal part of the country. The poet, who chose to give the most important place to the Snowdon experience rather than that of the Alps in The Prelude, presented a new geography which located an ideal community in his native place and put in its centre what could not have been the centre in the political map, those small cottages of the humble people who were about to disappear in the big changes of the age.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earnest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912.
Gilpin, William. Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales & c: Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. 3rd ed. London: R. Blamire, 1792.
Goldsmith, Oliver. The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith. Ed. Roger Lonsdale. London: Longmans, 1969.
Harley, J. B. "Maps, Knowledge, and Power." The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Eds. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 277- 312.
Wordsworth, William. The Guide to the Lakes. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
---. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Eds. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. Rev. Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952-59.
---. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. Eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979.
---Dorothy Wordsworth. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. 2nd ed. Vol 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.