Writing in ruins: immediacy and emotion in the English landscape garden

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Acknowledgements

My thanks go especially to Luke Morgan for his careful reading of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: MIT Press, 2010), p. 32; in writing of emotion I draw on William Reddy’s historicized account of ‘emotives’ rather than assuming ahistorical emotional states authenticated by the body, for which see Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

2. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, p. 143.

3. Horace Walpole to Richard Bentley, September, 1753, in W. S. Lewis, ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), Vol. 35, p. 148.

4. For my earlier attempt to explore antiquarian responses to ruins, see, ‘The True Rust of the Barons’ Wars: Gardens, Ruins, and the National Landscape’, in Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz eds, Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice, 1650–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 83–93.

5. Note, too, of course, that the response is hardly peculiar at all: part of the thrust of Nagel and Wood’s account of Renaissance art is that under the logic of substitution, fakes occupy the same conceptual space as ‘originals’. Thus, there is no hierarchy derived from a notion of ‘authenticity’, and the physical antiquity of an object is of less importance than its capacity to evoke some notion of antiquity (real or imagined).

6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau: With the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Translated from the French, 2 vols (London: J. Bew, 1783).

7. Elizabeth Montagu to the Earl of Bath, Sandleford, 8 August 1762, Huntington Library Manuscript, MO4533.

8. Here I quote from Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 6th edn, with the Author’s last corrections and additions, 2 vols (Edinburgh: J. Bell & W. Creech, 1785).

9. For an account of the ruin as the result of nature’s transformation of ‘the work of art into material for her own expression, as she had previously served as material for art’, see Georg Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, reprint (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 262.

10. Elizabeth Carter to Elizabeth Vesey, 15 July 1776, in A Series of Letters Between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the Year 1741 to 1770: To which are Added, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Vesey, Between the Years 1763 and 1787; Published from the Original Manuscripts in the Possession of the Rev. Montagu Pennington‬, 4 vols (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1809), Vol. 4, p. 150.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

11. Carter to Vesey, 29 September 1764, in A Series of Letters, Vol. 3, pp. 244–245.

12. Carter to Vesey, 20 June 1766, in A Series of Letters, Vol. 3, pp. 289–290.

13. Elizabeth Carter to Elizabeth Montagu, 12 January 1761, in Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, to Mrs. Montagu, Between the Years 1755 and 1800: Chiefly Upon Literary and Moral Subjects‬, 3 vols (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1817), Vol. 1, p. 101.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

14. Carter to Montagu, 21 October 1763, in Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, Vol. 1, pp. 205–206.

15. ‘Vile Things: William Gilpin and the Properties of the Picturesque’ (forthcoming, Huntington Library Quarterly, 2016–17).

16. A fair copy of Gilpin’s description of Park Place appears in his Lakes Tour manuscript, Bodleian Library Ms.Eng.Misc.e. 488(1), the fair copy follows the corrections made in the Wye tour fairly closely, Ms.Eng.Misc.e. 486(8), ff. 162–170 and Ms.Eng.Misc.e. 488(1), ff. 3–7.

17. Bodleian, Lakes Tour, Ms.Eng.Misc.e. 488(1), ff. 4–6.

18. Bodleian, Wye tour notebook, Ms.Eng.Misc.e. 486(8), ff. 162–169.

19. Thomas Whately, Observations of Modern Gardening (London: T. Payne, 1771), pp. 131–132.

20. John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 71.

21. Macarthur, The Picturesque, p. 88.