Chapter 2 - Walking, Climbing, Descending

Summary

“Walking, Climbing, Descending: Negotiating the Landscape” begins with Coleridge’s 1802 tour of the Lakes, culminating with his ecstatic ascent and near-disastrous descent of Scafell. The second section of the chapter explores the 1803 Scottish Tour undertaken by William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge, which Coleridge abandoned part way through. Drawing from Dorothy’s journal, Coleridge’s notebooks, William’s manuscript poems and various correspondence, a portrait emerges of their complex and evolving understanding of their responses to Scottish landscape and to the Scots themselves. The third section of the chapter discusses William Wordsworth’s aesthetic fragment on ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, and his struggles to account for his shifting feelings towards the Langdale Pikes. The chapter closes with an account of the climbing and writing of Wordsworth’s neighbour Elizabeth Smith, and, to a lesser extent, his friend Thomas Wilkinson. Wilkinson’s notebook of his Scottish tour served as guidebook for the Wordsworths.