Keswick Romantics

Visitors to Keswick, the overwhelming majority of whom stay in Keswick’s famous guest houses, follow in the footsteps of the Romantic pioneers of the 18th century – people like John Dalton (1709-1763) and John Brown (1715-1766). Dalton certainly doesn’t fit the preconceived notion of the Romantic as a sophisticated southerner nauseated by an industrialising city. He was the son of the rector of Dean near Cockermouth. Brown also grew up in a religious family in Cumbria (Carlisle) and also had literary ambitions, and both wrote about the Lakeland landscape with an unprecedented veneration. Brown paid an annual visit to Keswick, seeing it “not as an idle amusement but as a religious act.” In his description the waterfalls in the Lakes tumble “in vast sheets from rock to rock in rude and terrible magnificence,” and the clouds are pierced by fell tops “where mortal foot never yet approached.” He described a trip to Walla Crag, where the “broken steeps form an immense and awful picture,” in contrasted to a later walk to Derwentwater by moonlight, “a scene of such delicate beauty, repose and solemnity as exceeds all description.”

Dalton’s Descriptive Poem in 1755 and Brown’s Letter describing the Vale and Lake of Keswick in 1767 show a fascination with the sublime – a fascination with what is immense, stupendous, somewhat menacing and savage. There is a curious pleasure felt when confronted by a natural scene that humbles the viewer – that reminds him of human frailty and powerlessness, and of the crushing power of Nature. Dalton saw nature in all its savagery and called it “a pleasing, though an awful sight.”

Brown analysed what drew him to the scenery around Keswick and identified three qualities: beauty, horror and immensity. To the visitor who has just parked his car in the car park and walked past the man from the National Trust with his green Land Rover trying to sell subscriptions, these early references to horror must seem a little far-fetched. But it is a common theme in the writings of early travellers making their pilgrimage to a landscape that is almost holy. Another 18th century visitor from Newcastle went to Friar’s Crag and described the view across Derwentwater to Borrowdale as “beauty lying in the lap of horror.”

Part of the attraction in the awful beauty of nature is the way it spurs the imagination; and the imagination tends to add greatly to what is seen. Here is John Housman describing a walk in October 1798. Nearing the summit, his party were astonished to see “a boiling sea of mountains, with pointed, conical and broken tops…rioting over each other in a most turbulent manner like a legion of raging monsters preparing to spread desctruction on every side.” At the top they were then impressed by the “horror” of the final ridge and the “profound precipice…chasms of enormous depth…steeps of slaty shiver.” One would think this was an ascent in the Himalayas, but no, it was just a stroll up Skiddaw on an autumn day.

One wonders how much of this sense of the sublime remains and how diminshed the chances of feeling it are, now that the area has all been fenced off and declared a National Park. Can anything within the boundaries of a National Park ever really seem to be sublime?