Wordsworth Museum(6). 글라스미어(Grasmere)

Wordsworth Museum(6). 글라스미어(Grasmere). 영국(England)

wordsworth.org.uk

 

 

Bayonet and scabbard, Loyal Warrington Volunteers 1798-1801

(Lancashire Infantry Museum)

 

 

Muzzle loading flintlock volunteer pistol,

marked 'Dublin Castle' and 'GR'

(Lancashire Infantry Museum)

 

Best Shot Medal, awarded to Simon Park, 1808. on reverse, 'Given by the Members of the Carlisle Volunteers to Simon Park Their Best Shot 1808'.

 

Musket balls from the Battle of Salamanca.

 

A selection of flints from guns of the period.

 

(Cumbria's Museum of Military Life; David and Janet Bromley collection)

 

 

---

 

'... drums beat, and trumpets blow!'

(William Wordsworth, 'Anticipation, October, 1803')

 

Piercy Roberts' cartoon shows a well-fed and bewhiskered John Bull preparing to battle Napoleon Bonaparte (or 'Bonny' as he is referred to here).

 

Notice how John's wife and son support his effort, a striking contrast to Gillray's 'John Bull's Progress' of ten years earlier. The war here is seen as a defence of home and the family in a time of national crisis.

 

Piercy Roberts, John Bull Arming, 1803

(Donald Coverdale collection)

 

Can you see me in the picture on the wall above? I've fetched father's guns so that he can fight against that terrible fellow Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon's the leader in France now. Mother's been helping too - she got father's old uniform ready. We call Napoleon 'Boney' or 'Bonny' and if he sails over here, we'll show him what for! Father's grown a new moustache specially and he looks very fierce. He's not a regular soldier like he used to be but has joined the volunteers to protect our family from the French. Lots of his friends have joined as well. They don't all have proper weapons. Some of them only have spades and pitchforks. Don't thick I'd want to fight against the French with just a spade. A pitchfork might do the job though!

 

---

 

 

This caricature shows an officer drilling four recruits.

 

G.M. Woodward was an amateur caricaturist who produced hundreds of images.

 

George Moutard Woodward, An Early Lesson of Marching, undated (The Wordsworth Trust, gift of Michael Broughton, in acknowledgement of many years of friendship with Robert Woof, 2006)

 

'- Then, for the first time, here you might have seen

The Shepherd's grey to martial scarlet changed,

That flashed uncouthly through the woods and fields.

Ten hardy Striplings, all in bright attire

And graced with shining weapons, weekly marched,

From this lone valley, to a central spot

Where, in assemblage with the Flower and Choice

Of the surrounding district, they might learn

The rudiments of war'

 

(Willam Wordsworth, The Excursion, 1814)

 

This is caricature of eleven volunteers undergoing drill training.

 

The various figures many remind viewers of a certain age of the characters in Dad's Army.

 

HBH, Symptoms of Drilling, 1805

(The Wordsworth Trust, gift of Jeffrey D. Jaye through The Royal Oak Foundation, 2001)

 

---

 

 

'the dog / Returning to his vomit'

'My whole soul was with those who were resolved to fight it out with Bonapart', wrote Wordsworth in 1816, a year after the French Emperor's defeat at Waterloo.

 

Napoleon Bonaparte was the dominant historical figure of the Romantic period and an important subject in Wordworth's poetry. A Corsican general in the French revolutionary army, Napoleon seized power as First Consul in a coup d'état of 1799, became Consul for Life in 1802, and crowned himself Emperor in 1804.

 

Wordsworth denounced Napoleon as 'of Men the meanest' ('October 1803') and criticized his militaristic, tyrannical regime in a number of sonnets. The poet saw Napoleon's coronation - when 'a Pope / Is summoned in, to crown an Emperor'(The Prelude) - as the final setting of the revolutionary sun that had risen in such splendour. Like 'the dog / Returning to his vomit', France had reverted to its pre-revolutionary state of absolute monarchy allied to Roman Catholicism.

 

---

'I see on Man, of Men the meanest too'

(William Wordsworth, 'October, 1803')

 

Gillray offers another imaginative vision of the defeat of Napoleon, this time with John Bull playing a central role.

 

James Gillray, Bounapartè, 45 hours after landing!, 1803

(Donald Coverdale collection)

 

---

 

                                       '... a Pope

Is summoned in to crown and Emperor'

(William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805)

 

Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on 2nd December 1804, with the Pope in attendance.

 

Napoleon is here presented centrally with his wife Josephine following Pope Pius VII. The illustration provides its own guide to the main participants.

 

Notice the spelling of Bonaparte's name as 'Napoleone', a reference to the original Corsican version. This iss one of the many ways Gillray punctures the grandeur of the occasion.

 

James Gillray, The Grand Coronation Procession of Napoleone the 1st Emperor of France, 1804

(Donald Coverdale collection)

 

---

 

            '... the dog

Returning to his vomit'

(William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805)

 

This is one of the world's greatest literary manuscripts. This home-made notebook contains the version of Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude completed at Dove Cottage in 1805. The poem was copied out by Wordsworth's wife Mary, only to be heavily revised by Wordsworth over ten years later.

 

This page contains the crucial passage in which Wordsworth describes his response to Napoleon's coronation in 1804. For him this event marked the final end of the hope he had had for the French Revolution. This passage is displayed with transcription. As you will see even professional specialists have trouble reading Wordsworth's revisions.

 

If you can do any better, please tell us!

 

William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805

 

---

 

 

 

---

 

'This is the happy Warrior; this is He

Whom every Man in arms should wish to be.'

(Willaim Wordsworth, 'Character of the Happy Warrior', 1805-1806)

 

Lord Horatio Nelson died at the Battle of Trafalgar which was fought on 21 October 1805. In a letter to Lady Beaumont written on 29 November, Dorothy describes how the news of his death was received in this area.

 

'... the tidings of Lord Nelson's Fate reached us at Patterdale. We were at Breakfast when Mr Luff's Maid-servant opened the door, and, shewing only her head, with an uncouth stare and a grin of pleasure told us that there had been a great victory, and Lord Nelson was shot. It was a blow. I was not collected enough to doubt, and burst into tears; but, William would not believe all at once, and forced me to suspend my grief till he had made further inquiries. At the Inn we were told that there were "great rejoicings at Penrith - all the Bells ringing". "Then, I exlaimed, he cannot be dead!" but we soon heard enough to leave us without a doubt, and bitterly did we lament for him and our Country.'

 

James Heath after Lemuel Abbott, The Right Honble  Lord Nelson, KB Vice Admiral of the Blue, Duke of Bronte, & c.

(David Alexander collection)

 

---

 

'Arguably the most famous caricature of all time.'

(Donald Coverdale, Wordsworth, War & Waterloo, 2015)

 

The British Prime Minister William Pitt and French Emperor Napoleon carve themselves portions of the globe. Notice which part of the plum pudding Pitt and Napoleon are helping themselves to. This reflects the relative spheres of influence in the middle of the 1800s. Notice also how Pitt wields a mini trident symbolic of British sea power.

 

This is one of the best examples of Gillray's representation of Napoleon as 'Little Boney', the great Emperor forced to stand to reach the pudding. The picture shows how the war was increasingly seen as a battle between the two world powers, Britain and France.

 

James Gillray, The Plumb-pudding in danger: - or - State Epicures taking un Petit Souper, 1805

(Donald Coverdale collection)

 

---

 

 

'It was the noble efforts of Spanish Patriotism, that first restored us, without distinction of party, to our characteristic enthusiasm for Liberty.'

(S.T. Coleridge, The Courier, 7 December 1809)

 

In 1808 Gillray produced Spanish-Patriots attacking the French-Banditti, depicting events at the recent Battle of Sierra Morena. The Spanish had routed the French who eventually surrendered with 18,000 Frenchmen laying down their arms. There had been no English involvement in Spain at that time but Gillray could not resist commenting on the dispatch of Napoleon's army: his terrified soldiers are depicted as suffering at the hands of both Spanish forces and a single British soldier.

 

Notice how Gillray depicts the force of Roman Catholic Spain as consisting of nuns, monks and the nobility. His version of the Spanish rising presents it as enacted by representatives of the Spanish monarchy and Roman Catholic church. This contrasts with the way it was seen by Wordsworth, Coleridge and others as a spontaneous outbreak of liberty and patriotism.

 

James Gillray, Spanish-Patriots Attacking the French-Banditti, 1808

(Donald Coverdale collection)

 

These Spanish nuns are very scary. I wouldn't want to fight them, would you? Look at what they're doing to the French soldiers, trampling on their necks and holding them by the hair whilst stabbing them with daggers. France and Spain used to be friends but now they're at war. The Spanish people didn't like Boney interfering with their government. So they started fighting against him. And now our own good old British redcoats have gone to help them. If we fight together, I think we can beat Bonaparte!

 

---

'The power of Armies is a visible thing'

(Wordsworth, '1811')

 

The Battle of Buçaco (or Bussaco, or Busacco) was fought on 27 September 1810 in Portugal as part of the Peninsular War. It resulted in a victory for Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese Army over those of France, led by Marshal André Masséna. The central action involved Wellington's forces defending the ridge of Bussaco, as depicted in this print.

 

The painter, Thomas Staunton St. Clair, joined the British Army in 1803 and was awarded an Army Gold Medal in 1814 as recognition of his successful command during the Peninsular War.

 

Thomas Staunton St. Clair, Battle of Bussaco, engraved by C. Turner

 

---

 

A replica of the French Imperial Eagle of the 22ième regiment du la Ligne taken by the 30th regiment of Foot of the Lancashire Infantry at the Battle of Salamanca, 22nd July 1812.

 

The eagle was a focal point for French soldiers, placed on the top of a pole with a flag beneath it. It would be carried and defended by a group of between 10 and 12 people, know as a 'colour party', who would be specially targeted by the enemy.

 

The capture of an eagle was a rare event, with only two being captured at Waterloo.

 

(David and Janet Bromley collection)

 

---

 

Officer's Waterloo pattern Shako of the Warrington Local Militia 1812-1815 with light company cockade, inscribed 'Lancaster'. As you will see on the Volunteer Army of Great Britain poster opposite, Warrington Local Militia fell within the district of Lancaster (or Lancashire).

 

Worn by Ensign (later Lieutenant) Henry Lyon.

 

(Lancashire Infantry Museum)

 

---

 

 

 

Warnscale: A Land Mark Walk

Reflecting on In/Fertility and Childlessness

written and designed by Louise Ann Wilson

 

Warnscale : A Land Mark Walk Reflecting on in/fertility and Childlessness is a walking guide and art book specific to, and created in, Warnscale, an area of fells to the south of Buttermere Lake. The book is aimed at women who are childless by circumstance. Society offers no rituals or rites of passage through which women who have missed the life-event of biological motherhood can be acknowledged and can come to terms with that absence. This book, however, offers imagivative and creative ways through which women can engage with landscape to reflect upon and even transform their experience of this circumstance. It provides a multilayered yet non-prescriptive means for the walker - whether walking alone, with a partner, friend or in a group - to make and perform their own journey, and can also be used by others who are in sympathy with women in this circumstance and persons in comparable situations.

 

I developed this book by drawing on my personal experience of age-related and circumstantial involuntary childlessness, an attempt at IVF, and the sense of loss, hopelessness and grief that I felt because I had not become a mother biologically. When, after a long silence, I began to talk about my situation, I realised that there area a growing number of women of my generation in a similar circumstance. Like me, they are navigating the un-mapped emotional landscape of isolation and emptiness that this situation brings.

 

Whilst working on The Gathering (2014), a walking performance in Snowdonia that I created with the National Theatre of Wales, I was struck forcibly by how shepherds used the word 'empty' to describe a ewe that has not become pregnant before being 'turned up' to the mountain. In Cumbria, such ewes are called 'gelds'. This book explores how walking and landscape can be harnessed to create new metaphors for the experience of childlessness and thus make possible futures that are rich in significance. This book seeks to 'fill the empty'.

 

For the location of the walk, I decided to look for an empty room on a mountain, 'a place', writes Graham Usher, 'traditinally associated with revelation, transition or inspiration'. I soon discovered Warnscale Head Bothy. Knowing that the project would pivot around this location, I went on to research the book through in-depth study of the landscape in which it is situated, and conversations with people with local knowledge of the place. I combined this with observational research in fertility clinics, and a close reading of the journal writings of Dorothy Wordsworth who walked in and wrote extensively about her experience of the landscape of the Lake District.

 

Most importantly, though, I researched the book through a series of mapping-walks with women who are biologically childless by circumstance. The women who took part are childless for a range of reasons including biological or medical factors, such as age-related or undiagnosed infertility; or social infertility factors, such as the absence of a relationship or a relationship with a person who does not want any or more children. A number had and/or were continuing to have infertility treatment, whilst others had decided to stop pursuing treatment after multiple attemps, and were seeking pregnancy through donor eggs, had adopted children or were deciding to adopt, or were unresolved as to what to do next.

 

Many of the women talked about the isolation that infertility and fertility treatment causes and their grief for the biological children they will ot beat, some had realised too late that their fertility window was limited and time was funning, or had run, out. Often there was the feeling that their lack of childbearing was disappointing for parents and grandparents, and the weight of that awareness was increased by the knowledge that their family line could end with them, many were reconsidering what their identity would be outside of biological motherhood.

 

The mapping-walks took place over a year and were undertaken in all weathers as one-to-one walks with me, or in small group. Each walk invited participants to respond to the landscape and environmental phenomenon of the place, and to notice sights and sounds, thus allowing the landscape, and its changing forces, to become a metaphor for each participant's personal experiences of childlessness. Whilst walking or sitting we not noly shared intimate personal stories but were also quiet and reflective. After the walk, we drew a memory map of our walk that highlighted places or moments of significance and meaning. It is these walks, maps and the words, and the feelings, images and conversations they provoked, that I have distilled into one map and, with the other research materials, developed into this book.

 

The book is divided into four phases based on the empty, waxing, full and waning moon, and each phase touches on themes and issues raised by childlessness by circumstance. You can undertake the walk as a whole or phase-by-phase. Within each phase there are a number of landmarks that act as stations or dwelling places. There are thirteen landmarks altogether, carefully selected for their physical and metaphorical reaonance. Each station has the same number of pages and layout pattern designed to incorporate and combine:

 

● a title page with a moon cut 'window' and texts extracted from Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals and geological, historical, botanical, and biological data;

● information specific to that landmark;

● a single photograph of an aspect of that landmark;

● invitations to perform actions which relate to Dorothy Wordsworth's way of dwelling in the landscape and what happened during the mapping-walks;

● a series of bio-medical, fertility, or landscape photographs;

● bio-medical and reflective texts about in/fertility;

● a series of key words and their definitions;

● a landscape or mapping-walk drawing;

● words distilled from the mapping-walks and directions to the next station.

 

After the thirteenth phase and completion of the walk there is a space for your own mapping.

 

The book seeks to help the walker find a place for quiet reflection and experience the element forces around and within, share their own story, acknowledge where they are at present and consider the future paths they might follow, express the worries and fears that otherwise they may not dare to think, or speak and find new ways of seeing that may lead to new ways of feeling.

 

Ways of looking are central to the development and design of this book which has been greatly inspired by two ways of perceiving landscape, namely, the picturesque (Warnscale Head Bothy has a window that frames the expansive view of the valley, and the lake below led me to create the walk in this area) and, secondly, the feminine sublime, both of which, I suggest, are embodied in the writing of Dorothy Wordsworth. The research on site and in fertility clinics revealed different sorts and scales of looking. A geological lens reveals the detail of a volcanic rock and the lichen growing on it. Binoculars bring the distant landscape closer. Microscopes enable the study of micro fauna in a tarn; the grading of human oocytes, sperm and embryos in a womb; and observation of the womb lining itself in preparation for the implantation of an oocyte then emptying itself when it hasn't. What these ways of looking do not reveal is the longing for a child.

 

Dorothy Wordsworth is a key figure who has informed this book and its desire to engage you in new, or different, ways of seeing and feeling the landscape. In her Grasmere Journals she describes how she walked in, and engaged with, the landscape and her environment in a manner that is embodied, sensory, and materially specific. Central to her writing is her ability to notice both the 'common-place' and the 'everyday' and also the 'otherness' of objects, people and experiences which are ordinarily overlooked, or on the edges of social and cultural discourses. It is through this 'noticing' that Dorothy Wordsworth 'sees' the world around her afresh and in so doing 'refigures the familiar'. She engages with the sensory effects of the fast changing phenomena around her; he epic-scale of the landscape stretching into the far distance; and the close-up detail of the flowers, plants and stones near to hand. It is this radical approach to walking that I wish to harness in this book and in you the walker. She walked to explore, collect letters, make visits, get to know a place, collaborate artistically as well as to be alone, think, and see things. Her writing, however, is full not only of sights but also of sound and noise, tactile and kinetic sensations and bodily feelings, as well as changes in emotion and mood. Above all, the Grasmere Journals is dynamic and overflowing with different sorts of motion: her own motion as she moves in and through the landscape walking for hours and miles and as she skids on ice, crawls on all fours, lies in ditches, swings on gates, and scrambles up glens searching for fungus or a waterfall; and the motion of the landscape itself as it moves, shifts and changes around her: as the moon waxes, crows fly overhead, and night falls. I hope that this book enables you to enter into this landscape as a place of metaphor, reflection and transition and, like Dorothy Wordsworth, that through walking you connect to place and in so doing connect to yourself.

 

Louise Ann Wilson

Lancaster

April 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

warnscale

Landscape and fertility clinic photos

Warnscale was researched through in-depth study of the landscape in which it is situated, and converations with people with local knowledge of the place which I combined this with observational research in fertility clinics, and a close reading of the journal writings of Dorothy Wordsworth who walked in and wrote extensively about her experience of the landscape of the Lake District.

 

With thanks to Joyce Harper, Institute for Women's Health, UCL; Celia Robers, Departments of Sociology, Lancaster University; Jody Day, Gateway Women; Wanda Georgiades and the CARE Fertility Group; the embryology team, The Centre for Reproductive & Genetic Health, London; the archivist at the Wellcome Trust.

 

The Museum of Lakeland Life & Industry; Honister Slate Mine; Mike Kelly, Geologist; Mark Astley, National Trust; Jean Johnston, Natural England; Denis Mollison and the Mountain Bothies Association; Richard Wlliamson of Gatesgarth Farm; Helen Turton, Mountain Leader.

 

Simon Bainbridge; Jeff Cowton and the archivist at The Wordsworth Trust; Deborah Walsh, Curator at The Armitt Museum; Pamela Woof for her inspirational work on Dorothy Wordsworth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---