SOURCE: Jarvis, Robin. “Poetry in Motion: George Dyer's Pedestrian Tour.” Wordsworth Circle 29, no. 3 (summer 1998): 142-51.

[In the following excerpt, Jarvis discusses one of Dyer's poems about a walking tour with his friend Arthur Aikin, arguing that at least some of his poetry was at the forefront of Romantic and revolutionary sentiment.]

It is the fate of George Dyer, at least among scholars working outside the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, permanently to be confused with the author of The Fleece and “Grongar Hill.” John Dyer (1699-1757), anthologised in popular volumes like The Norton Anthology of Poetry, is reputedly—to borrow the imagery once loved by publishers—a “silver poet” of the eighteenth century; by contrast, George Dyer's metallurgical status must be bronze at best. Even among specialists in the Romantic period, his work is little-known and seldom read. He is remembered chiefly as an intimate of Charles Lamb, and Lamb's own amusing caricatures of his friend in the Elia essays set the tone for most observations, both contemporary and more recent. “Oxford in the Vacation” portrays Dyer as a deep denizen of the Bodleian Library, the kind of “Herculanean raker” of archives which Lamb himself is not. The image of an absentminded scholar is accentuated by an anecdote of Dyer calling twice the same day at a friend's town house, only realising his error when he saw his own name in the visitor's book. Lamb points out, however, that when “absent from the body” in this way Dyer is habitually meditating some general scheme or individual act of benevolence. The general terms of this humorous raillery reappear in “Amicus Redivivus,” which presents the celebrated story of Dyer's leaving Lamb's house in Islington and walking—indeed, completely submerging himself in—the nearby river; Lamb's mock-heroic protest at this near calamity extracts every ounce of satiric potential (Elia 11, 13, 237-42). It is tempting to think that Lamb's well-known objection to Coleridge's description of him as “gentle-hearted” in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” stemmed from its resemblance to the image of amiable buffoon he was constructing for Dyer. At any rate, the obituary of the “simple-hearted” Dyer in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1841 shows how perfectly this image had crystallised: “The memory of George Dyer will be ever cherished by his friends as of one who passed through the world without having contracted one blemish of wordliness; his guileless simplicity endeared him especially to his friend Charles Lamb, who would often indeed indulge his humorous vein at the expense of one whom he knew to be an invulnerable innocency …” (546).

The purpose of the present essay is to examine one particular poem he wrote in 1798, which offers a series of windows onto the literary and political culture of the revolutionary decade. It is also a poem which connects directly to a late eighteenth-century phenomenon—namely, the rise of pedestrian touring and the attendant travel literature—in which I have a special interest. By undertaking a close reading of this poem, I hope to further the efforts made by a small number of critics to restore to Dyer the “worldliness” of which Lamb persuaded posterity to deprive him.

In his Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism (1947; 1968), M. Ray Adams vigorously contested Lamb's representation of Dyer as “a queer specimen in the laboratory of human nature” (228), re-establishing his credentials as a key figure in Cambridge dissenting circles in the 1780s and in the metropolitan radical movement of the 1790s. Adams's account, which resonates with good sense and still reads well today, gives generous consideration to Dyer's main political writings, especially his Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription. He gives much less attention to Dyer's poetry, although interestingly he does single out, in a footnote, as a rare synthesis of “unaffected simplicity” and “humanitarian fervour” (232), the very blank-verse poem, “To Mr. Arthur Aikin,” which I reproduce below. (This is the only reference to the poem I have come across.) Adams's valuable labours towards recovering Dyer's seriousness as a political writer and reformer have sponsored very fresh critical interest. Winifred Courtney, in her biography of Lamb, emphasises Dyer's role in bringing people together (helping introduce Wollstonecraft to Godwin, for example) and acting as “informal coordinator and catalyst for many of his radical generation” (204); and Harriet Jump has cast fresh light on the notorious incident of the cancellation of Dyer's Preface to a volume of essays planned for 1800, which he had thrown into the fire on discovering a “principle of criticism” that was “fundamentally wrong” on the first page (A copy which Dyer rescued is prefixed to the British Library's edition of Poems, 1801). Nicholas Roe, however, has done most to resuscitate Dyer's reputation not only as a radical dissenter embroiled in contemporary issues but as a significant player in the literary culture of the day.¹ Roe is particularly enlightening on Dyer's role in introducing Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey to broader political and intellectual circles in London, and on the continuities between Dyer's moral philosophy and Wordsworth's and Coleridge's developing poetic vision in 1795-98. Roe's chief interest is, in common with Adams, in Dyer's major prose works, and he offers no reason to disturb the general neglect of his subject's “prolific output of undistinguished poetry” (Politics 33). While it would be a brave critic who sought to overturn this weight of critical judgment, there is, I believe, a case for giving serious attention to one quite accomplished poem which offers some different connections and contexts for evaluating his achievement.

Dyer was born in 1755, the son of a shipwright in Bridewell, East London, and received charitable support to go to Christ's Hospital, the school later attended by Lamb and Coleridge. Funded by the school, he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1774, and graduated four years later, overcoming any scruples he may have had about subscription. A fragment of his lost autobiography preserved in the Gentleman's Magazine obituary suggests he was lonely at Cambridge, but it was here that he got acquainted with intellectual dissenters who confirmed his disapproval of the Established Church and politicised his thinking. The Baptist minister, Robert Robinson, who had supported the local campaign for the abolition of subscription and who founded the Cambridge branch of the Society for Constitutional Information in 1780, was one of his close friends. After a spell of tuition at Dedham Grammar School, Dyer returned to take up lodgings in Robinson's house, both to act as tutor to his children and to be trained for the dissenting ministry himself. In 1781, he preached for a while at Oxford, but soon returned to Cambridge where, in the words of M. Ray Adams, he was “for the next ten years … one of that influential group of Cambridge Dissenters which for more than thirty years made a valiant fight for the removal of political and religious disabilities” (234). During this period both Dyer and Robinson were converted to Unitarianism. Dyer's Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, first published in 1789, was the culmination of this phase of his career as a political reformer, a phase which also saw the failure of a scheme to establish a dissenter's college at Cambridge, with Dyer as tutor.

In 1792, Dyer moved permanently to London, a transition made at different times by other prominent Cambridge dissenters, such as John Jebb, Gilbert Wakefield and William Frend. In London, as Nicholas Roe vividly describes, Dyer deepened his involvement in radical politics, associating himself not only with the Society for Constitutional Information but also with the more radical Paineite London Corresponding Society, and publicly maintained liberal, anti-government, pro-republican views through the years which saw the suppression of the revolutionary societies and the growth of a nervous, suspicious conservatism in the culture at large. Dyer supported himself in London by private tuition and writing, and, although his income was modest, he came to the financial help of others, like Coleridge, whose publishing career he materially aided. He seems to have had an irrepressible talent for making introductions, both commercial (as in introducing young writers to booksellers and publishers) and personal: Lamb remarked that “George brings all sorts of people together, setting up a sort of Agrarian Law or common property in matter of society” (Letters 1:243).

Dyer's main political writings in the revolutionary decade were the Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription, Complaints of the Poor People of England (1793), and A Dissertation on the Theory and Practice of Benevolence (1795). The Complaints is a comprehensive indictment of “things as they are,” taking in the iniquities of parliamentary representation, fiscal policy, crime and punishment, the poor law, the defects of national education, the scandal of public expenditure on the royal household and the civil list, the need to disestablish the Church, and so on. In his penultimate chapter, the “Address to the Friends of Liberty,” Dyer contrasts the present British government unfavourably with ancient Athenian democracy, defends the activities of the corresponding societies as consistent with the “genius of english liberty,” and, directly attacking the many government-sponsored, counter-propagandist organisations, concludes that ‘BRITAIN is ENSLAVED by FRIENDS to LIBERTY and PROPERTY’ (198, 211). Dyer carried his principles into practice by raising subscriptions to assist with the legal expenses of the defendants in the treason trials in the final quarter of 1794.

Dyer is still concerned with the situation of these men—acquitted, but materially injured by their treatment by the state—in his Dissertation on the Theory and Practice of Benevolence, published in 1795. He puts them forward as worthy objects of the moral disposition of which he speaks, defined as “a gentle and human propensity, that inclines to sympathy, and moves those who possess it to be interested in the happiness of others” (3). Although the Dissertation is a less obviously controversial and interventionist work—concentrating more on individual than on collective remedies for social evils—in stressing the independence and objectivity of true benevolence, Dyer maintains his focus on the degenerate state of political morality: “In a system, where besides the regular salaries of office, sinecures and douceurs are held out, corruption is inseparable” (7).

Among Dyer's later prose works, his Address to the People of Great Britain on the Doctrine of Libels and the Office of Juror, published in 1799 in the climate of fear, persecution, and war-fever that forced many radicals into silence or reaction, was a defence of fellow-classicist and reformer Gilbert Wakefield, recently prosecuted for publishing a work which suggested that the labouring classes of Britain had nothing to lose from a French invasion (Thompson 192). In 1802, Dyer took part in Sir Francis Burdett's successful election campaign. In 1814, he published Four Letters on the English Constitution, which resumed the confrontational political approach of his earlier writings—attacking, for example, the Test and Corporation Acts which still discriminated against dissenters. Nicholas Roe claims this pamphlet as “a testament to [Dyer's] consistency through decades when liberal and reformist politics had been energetically suppressed” (Politics 35), underlining the contrast with former jacobins like Wordsworth and Southey. And although M. Ray Adams rightly points to Dyer's guardedness on immediate questions of government policy, and his general disinclination for political activism, he concedes too that fighting the ideological war for reform in counter-revolutionary Britain demanded courage and commitment (263-64, 266)—something more than the watery benevolence with which Dyer, as the kindly, absent-minded clown satirised by Lamb, became too exclusively associated.

Roe, building on the work of Adams and others, has performed valuable service in resurrecting this alternative face of George Dyer. The poetic output, however, which runs to five volumes, several of them substantial, remains completely obscured. The seriousness with which Dyer took his poetry himself, which became something of a standing joke in the Lamb circle,² has not helped him in this regard. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that Dyer himself saw a continuity between democratic politics and poetic excellence: in the cancelled Preface of 1800, for example, he claims that Milton, Marvell, Akenside, Gray and Mason “raised their most rapturous notes” when “under the influence of good political principle,” and laments the tendency of illiberal or decadent society to subdue all speech, including poetic utterance, to “the service of the oppressor,” so that the poet becomes “a retailer of trifles, if not the propagator of scandal” (Poems [1801] xxxviii-xl). His first volume of poems, published in 1792, demonstrates his opposition to such repression: the “Ode to Liberty,” for example, surveys the various terrestrial homes of Liberty, including the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams, declares that he will emigrate to America if need be, and concludes by celebrating the “sacred day” of liberty in France. His “Monody on the Death of a Friend” is an elegy for his friends and mentor Robert Robinson, which in its consolatory final movement invokes the “sweet fields of vivid light” where the “sons of freedom” will meet again. Dyer appends an extra stanza to this poem at the end of the volume, which includes a reference to British liberty. In a footnote which displays his characteristic blend of political earnestness, pedantry and strained humour, he adds: “Where I speak on British liberty I speak in a comparative sense, and many grains of allowance must be made. It becomes this nation to give us a reality for a fiction, and not to force bards to use the licentia poetica.” This suggests that poetic license is a rhetorical sublimation of freedoms which the British people celebrate, but overestimate, in the constitution of their own country.

The 1792 collection is by no means exclusively political. Other poems variously anticipate strands within the later poem on which the present essay is focused. “Ode on the Spring” is conventional praise of the beauties of the season, notably common wild flowers which are the work of “a master's matchless hand,” and predictably looks ahead to “a brighter spring above.” “Ode on Pity,” in a review of situations where “virtue lies distress'd” or “blooming beauty sinks oppress'd,” rehearses in stock sentimental language the compassionate feelings to which Complaints of the Poor People of England gave concrete, practical application. “Ode on Pity” finds its subject nowhere on earth but in the soul of the man “who walks in holy fear / With God, and views him ever near,” and invokes fellow Protestant reformers such as Thomas Cranmer, Robert Tyrwhitt and William Frend. Enthusiasm for nature, sentimentalism, and contemplative devotion are common traits in Dyer's poetry, though not usually within a single text.

Dyer's 1800 Preface has other germane things to say about poetry. One such passage appears when he attempts to preempt criticism that his poems, as the product of an ardent scholar, will necessarily be imitative. In the face of the amused consensus among his contemporaries regarding his otherworldly bookishness, he claims that he has been “too wild to be confined to books” and “too confident … to be dictated to by pedantic rules”; he has determined, he says, “to impose no restraint on my feelings; to let my thought run loose to what extent they please; to seize the rudest ideas, while yet living and warm; and to invite impressions, in a kind of extemporaneous observation, from real objects, and breathing pictures. … Indeed, most of my little pieces are a kind of perambulatory amusements, meditated, when I have been rambling, and, generally, written on the spot” (xxxiv). Improbable as this last claim appears (it is, of course, a rhetorical commonplace), the notion of Dyer's poems possessing a “perambulatory” quality, whether of thought or execution, chimes with my analysis of “To Mr. Arthur Aikin” below. Dyer's defensive remarks here suggest that a perambulatory poetics is one which produces effects of spontaneity and practises verisimilitude with respect to external objects and events. There is also a sensuality present in the references to “the rudest ideas … yet living and warm” and “breathing pictures” which perhaps offers one gloss on Lamb's characterisation of Dyer as a “goodnatur'd Heathen” (Letters 1:222).

The idea of perambulation resurfaces later in the 1800 Preface when Dyer describes himself as a castle-builder who gets absorbed in lateral, digressive aspects of the project in hand: “He resembles a traveller, who is ever striking into byroads; at one time amusing himself in fields and gardens; at others bewildering himself in labyrinths; and then stumbling over rocks, or looking down precipices; when, on striking again into the old track, he finds himself but in the middle of the road, when he ought to have arrived at his journey's end” (lvi-lvii). (Typically, Dyer then apologises for the length of his apology.) This use of pedestrianism as a metaphor for mental wandering gives locomotive particularity to the centuries-old comparison between exterior and interior journeys, and is a familiar trope in late eighteenth-century literature. Dyer would doubtless have been aware, for example, of Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), which announce his intention to “keep a faithful record of my solitary walks and the reveries that occupy them, when I give free rein to my thoughts and let my ideas follow their natural course, unrestricted and unconfined” (30). Rousseau's association of perambulatory freedom with “unconfined” meditation, which itself alludes to the ancient tradition of the Greek peripatetic philosophers, was congenial to Romantic writers: John Thelwall, in his idiosyncratic but influential work, The Peripatetic, sets out with similar intent to “pursue [his] meditations on foot, and can find occasion for philosophic reflection, wherever yon fretted vault … extends its glorious covering” (1:9); like Dyer, he represents digression as a departure from the main road into lonely paths and lanes.

In answer to possible objections that his London existence sits oddly against the rural themes of many of his poems, Dyer notes that he spends a good part of each year “rambling, or at the rural seat of some friend.” He adds, though, that his perambulations “have been made subservient to some ardent pursuit” (xxxi-xxxii). The same note is struck in the Preface to his last collection of poems, Poetics (1812), where he states that, although poetry “easily rivets one to places,” he has also been “a great rover through England, Scotland, and Wales”; and though his wanderings were undertaken with a variety of aims and in a variety of moods, they were “generally in sober earnest” (xv). The unnecessary elaboration and scrupulous qualification, the moral earnestness offsetting the quixotic self-display, characterise the man. But it would be interesting to know more about Dyer's annual peregrinations, since contemporary references are mostly from his London acquaintance, and most biographical treatments convey the impression that from 1792, he became a fixture in the capital.

The 1812 Preface announces a forthcoming poem called “The Pedestrian, a descriptive poem in blank verse.” This poem was never written, so far as I know. The title, however, might equally well apply to the verse epistle on which this essay is focused. Another earlier poem from the 1801 collection, “Perambulatory Musings, from Blenheim House, at Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, the Seat of the Duke of Marlborough, to Titley House, in Herefordshire, the Seat of William Greenly,” gives credence to Dyer's self-representation as a rural rambler. This poem records, in a very idealised manner, the poet's pedestrian progress from Blenheim, where Vanbrugh's masterpiece recalls the splendours of the classical past; to the pastoral simplicity of Shenstone's residence at Leasowes; to Hagley, home of Lord Littleton and famously associated with Pope and Thomson, and which is praised as a setting for poetic composition; and finally to Titley House, where all pleasure in either nature or art is transcended by the joys of female company. (In the 1812 version, Dyer replaced this “melodious maid,” somewhat absurdly, with the more abstract virtues of “Fairy-Hall” as the grail of his expedition.) Dyer's pedestrian excursion in this poem is strictly subordinated to a programmatic exploration of the contrary attractions of a various landscape and landscapes improved by art; and the poet performatively mirrors this rapid scene-shifting in his oscillating moods:

Ever musing, ever ranging,
Ever pleas'd, yet ever changing,
Murmuring onward still I go,
As brooks thro' winding vallies flow. …

(lines 55-64)

Both the generalized nature-images and the representation of the loitering poet (“sometimes sad, sometimes as gay”) place the poem firmly within the tradition of eighteenth-century landscape verse, and beyond that the seminal instance of a divided nature-sensibility, Milton's companion-poems “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” What is perhaps distinctive is that Dyer's walk takes him from great houses of high social standing and cultural resonance, where he is no more than a disempowered, admiring tourist, to the modest “seat” of a friend where he is a welcome guest on equal terms. The levelling function of walking is thus mirrored in the horizontal progress of the text.

Something more needs to be said about the contemporary (Romantic) meanings of walking before discussing “To Mr Arthur Aikin,” a poem more rooted in the material realities of rural pedestrianism than “Perambulatory Musing.” The full title of Dyer's poem is “To Mr Arthur Aikin, on Taking Leave of him at Dunkel, in Perthshire, after a Pedestrian Tour.” The pedestrian tour, of which I have given a fuller account in Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (1997) was very much in vogue in 1798, the year in which the poem was published in the radical Monthly Magazine. The last quarter of the eighteenth century witnessed a rapid rise in recreational walking among the middle classes, the pedestrian tour being the most personally and socially challenging form of such activity. Such tours were taking place on the Continent in the 1780s—William Bowles and William Frend both made notable expeditions—and were not arrested by the upheavals of the revolutionary decade: William Wordsworth's famous walking tour of 1790 was repeated in most particulars by his schoolfriend Joshua Wilkinson in two tours in 1791 and 1793, the latter undertaken after the outbreak of hostilities between England and France.

The Revolutionary wars did, however, accelerate the growth of domestic touring, much of which was pedestrian. The Wye Valley, North Wales, the Lake District and the Highlands of Scotland were the most popular destinations, and a considerable body of travel-writing grew out of it. By 1798, the author of the Monthly Magazine's half-yearly retrospect of British literature takes the opportunity of reviewing Richard Warner's A Walk Through Wales to “observe [with pleasure] an increasing frequency of these pedestrian tours”; “it grieves one,” he says, “to see a man of taste at the mercy of a postilion.” Since walking had historically been identified with poverty, unrespectability and possible criminality, to recommend pedestrian travel to the “man of taste” indicates a decisive reversal of opinion regarding the social acceptability of walking. Ten years later, Robert Southey, in his Letters from England, writes to his imaginary Spanish correspondent of the convergence of pedestrianism with the cult of the picturesque, and observes that “Young Englishmen have discovered that they can walk as well as the well-girt Greeks in the days of old, and they have taught me the use of my legs” (166). By 1810, written tours for all parts of Britain, and specific information for pedestrians in general tourist guidebooks demonstrate that the unconventional or rebellious has become safely institutionalised, and, in 1815, the editor of the Bristol Journal, reporting the completion of a walk of 1000 miles in twenty days by a local resident, referred to it smugly as “the climax of what this age of Pedestrianism has afforded” (Gilbert and Howell 10).

The variety of motives that impelled the first generation of pedestrian tourists cannot be reduced to any simple formula. Undoubtedly there was an element of deliberate social nonconformism in the self-levelling expeditions of early pedestrians, many of whom were either undergraduates, as yet unincorporated into professional value systems and economic subservience, or members of the lower clergy, a famously impecunious and disaffected social group. In some cases, as in John Thelwall's tour of the southern counties of England in 1797, or Coleridge's tour of North Wales with Joseph Hucks in 1794, this nonconformism, a democratic urge to see life among the lower orders, amounted to an ideology of radical walking. Other motivations include, first, the Enlightenment model of scientific or philosophical travel, which required walking for the discipline of observation, note-taking and record-keeping; and, secondly, the evolving culture of aesthetic travel, in which walking exposed the spectator to the might of the sublime and to the stationary perspectives of the picturesque.

At the most general level, the origins of voluntary, pleasurable walking are related to changes in cultural semiotics which fashioned individuals as much as they fashioned the changes. The first pedestrians were intent upon challenging social complacencies and clearing an ideological space in which their actions could help redefine their identity. In a cultural landscape where there was strong peer and class pressure to declare one's status in the manner of one's travelling, walking was a performance of dissent: it signified a desired freedom from the context of their upbringing and education, of parental expectations and class etiquette, of a hierarchical and segregated society, and of a culturally defined and circumscribed self. The second generation of Romantic pedestrians inherited this ideology of walking readymade, and could be more relaxed, reflective and ironic about it, as Hazlitt was in his seminal piece of walking literature, “On Going a Journey.” But at the time when Dyer and Aikin went on their tour of Scotland it was still being forged and contested in the face of traditional attitudes and a public mood suspicious of anything resembling “French principles”—as the judge says at the end of Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria. The Monthly Magazine supported pedestrian tours by publishing prose and poetry devoted to pedestrian travel. …

Arthur Aikin was probably twenty-four when he and Dyer went on their pedestrian tour in Scotland. Like his father, he had attended the Warrington Academy as a child, later moving to his aunt Mrs. Barbauld's school at Palgrave in Sussex. He showed an early bent towards scientific pursuits, stimulated by acquaintance with Joseph Priestley, whom he helped in setting up a new laboratory. Following his family's religious traditions, he trained as a Unitarian minister, but soon resigned his post on conscientious grounds (I have been unable to establish whether he had this faith in common with Dyer in 1797). In 1796, he made a pedestrian tour of North Wales with his brother Charles and another friend, publishing an account of it the following year. His motives for this tour were partly recreational, and partly to assist the mineralogical studies to which he was now committed. Although he considered going on foot essential to his researches, he recommended it more generally to his readers: “On foot a man feels perfectly at ease and independent; he may deviate from the road to climb any mountain, or descend to any torrent that attracts his notice; whereas on horseback in many cases this is impossible …” (x). He is primarily a scientific traveller, and his occasional efforts to aestheticise his account are rather half-hearted: on the top of Snowdon, for instance, lost in cloud, he experiences frustration and inconvenience rather than sublimity. He is interested chiefly in three ring-ouzels discovered in the thickest of the clouds, and hurries on to describe in detail the basaltic columns which he observed on his descent.

Between 1803 and 1808, Aikin edited an Annual Review and History of Literature, which aimed to provide early reviews of books across a huge range of subjects straddling the arts and sciences. With the exception of the Review, however, his publications were almost exclusively scientific, and the story of his later life is one of growing professional distinction in his chosen field. In 1807 he was one of the co-founders of the Geological Society of London, and contributed to its Transactions, on his death in 1855, the Society published a generous obituary which recalled the observation of another early member that Aikin “had a very logical head, and a calm and imperturbable temper” (xlii). He died a bachelor—a prospect Dyer, at age sixty-nine, avoided by marrying his laundress.

On their tour of Scotland in 1797, Aikin and Dyer were compatible. Both came from Dissenting backgrounds, sided politically with the English “Friends of Liberty,” had broad, inquiring minds, and shared literary enthusiasms. Indeed, in 1797, Aikin's father, whom Dyer had praised in his “Ode to Liberty” in the Poems of 1792, was literary editor of the Monthly Magazine, a periodical to which Dyer had already contributed and in which he published the following commemorative poem.

“TO MR. ARTHUR AIKIN, ON TAKING LEAVE OF HIM AT DUNKELD, IN PERTHSHIRE, AFTER A PEDESTRIAN TOUR”

AIKIN, there breathes in friendship what beguiles
The heavy hours, when dark distended clouds
Burst o'er the head in torrents, or high heaven
Rolls muttering deep-mouth'd thunder, and from far
The forked lightning darts athwart the sky,
Quick travelling down to th'eye with dazzling rays:
Then, darkness all around, how sweet the voice
Of friend! In converse kind there dwells a charm,
That wakes a smile, and mocks the sounding storm.
Nor less, when 'mid the barren dreary heath
The traveller strays, where scarce a heath-flower blooms
Yellow, or purple, as where Pentland lifts
His ridge, or spread the poor unthrifty plains
Of Cardigan, (where Pity's eye surveys
Rude heaps of lime and stone, which industry
But mock, and scarce a hedge-rew deigns to smile,
Save the poor furze;—) or toiling when he climbs
Snowdon or hoar Plinlimmon's craggy sides,
Brecnoc, or Grampian summits:—Who surveys
Nature's grand scenery, may not always hope
To view the cultur'd garden, or the lawn
Of verdure softly smooth, or daisied vale:
Nor always may he meet the wilder charms
Of brighter picturesque; nor gaze entranced
The lake, whose fair expanse, like mirror clear,
What smiles upon the bank, of bush, or tree,
And heaven's blue vault, reflects; for nature's tints,
Various as bold, display no common tone.
She, skilful painter, from the wide extremes
Of rough and smooth, of light and shade, effects
The clair obscure, the glory of her work.
          Oh! ye who court the silent, calm retreats
Of contemplation, and who most prefer
The solitary walk, as suiting best
Their views, who sigh to pierce the secret haunts
Of nature, marking her vagaries strange,
And bold, and unrestrained as she, to muse
The free, the rapturous lay; still pace along
Your lonely way; and be your musings sweet!
Friendship has too its charms: for kindred minds,
Reflecting thought for thought, like travellers,
Bring each to each some unknown treasures home.
          Whether embosom'd deep in ocean's flood,
Or scaling high the cliff, or piercing deep
The secret mine, or silver-winding stream
Skimming in wanton vessel, or with staff,
Like jolly pilgrim, pacing with slow step
The pathless muir, where the short windlestray
Of silvery brown, dispersed with many a knob
And green tall rush, obstruct the doubtful foot;
Converse is doubly sweet—and such, my friend,
We have enjoyed; but now agree to take
A long farewell: and thus through human life;
For what is human life? a day's short journey,
With changes fraught;—now up the wond'rous height
Hope climbs, and wistful views, and views again
The lengthening prospect—calls the prospect fair;—
Now, like the lightsome kid, o'er verdant lawn
She springs; then, 'midst the solitary waste
Sings chearful, though no voice she hears around,
Save the rude north-east, or the querulous brook,
Or screaming eagle: then rude ocean heaves,
Ocean of griefs and cares, the boisterous wave,
Till, prison'd round, she sickens. Oh! my friend,
Sweet then is converse; for to man 'tis given
To chear the soul with converse: nobler man
Nature has diff'renced from the speechless brute
By voice, by reason:—how he rises high,
Proudly prospective! How he looks around,
With nobler front, and soul-inspiring joy!
          But, Aikin, now we part; tho' scene so sweet
Might tempt us still t'extend our social walk.
DUNKELD, oh! lov'd retreat, embosom'd deep
In boldest rocks, and woods, that graceful clothe
The mountain side, beside whose smiling cots
Rolls his pellucid stream the sprightly Tay,
Scotia's divider stream, descending quick,
Meand'ring wide, Braidalbin's silver lake,
Fast hastening to the Frith: Here browner elms,
The greener pine, and larch of paler hue
Spread their most wanton branches: every tree
A language borrows, as proclaiming thee,
DUNKELD, its favourite sweetest residence.
          Enchanting scene! farewell—So blest a spot
Might well allure the priest of ancient time;
(For prudent well he knew to choose the soil
Of fairest, sweetest promise, as most apt
For holy musings) well might it allure,
To rase his temple here: and still appears
The sainted abbey, whose time-mouldered walls
Bring to the memory the fair Gothic haunts
Of Tintern, Monmouth's fair sequester'd ruin,
Near which Wye pours the wild romantic flood.
          Low sunk in earth the gates! and round the stones
The shining ivy twines its wanton arms
In close embrace; and through the windows howl
Rude winds, and no fair fretted roof is seen,
Heav'ns arch its only roof,—and pavement none
Save the green grass, with here and there between
The moss clad monument, these still announce
Who liv'd, and—sleep, and wake to sleep no more.
The priest no more here chaunts, as measuring out
The hour, his matin and his ev'ning song,
Though still a portion of the stately dome
The Presbyter has claimed, and here he pours
The fervent prayer, thankful in happier hour
That popery sleeps;—and thus turns strangely round
The world, and thus to contemplation's eye
Appears to play the wanton, fickle game.
          But ere were part, my friend, let us ascend
Yon stately mountain, and trace back our course.
Gentle th'ascent, and many a grateful herb
Has nature scatter'd round with skilful hand.
The modest heath-flower here its purple tints
Displays, and broom its yellow splendours; here
The fern spreads broad, and here the juniper
Puts forth its berry, by the prickly green
Guarded, and many a flower of rarer hue
With her own hand she waters:—pleasing heights!
          Now we have gain'd the mountain's sacred brow!
How glows the landskape! for no shadowing cloud
Obstructs the sight: How heav'ns own varying hues
Shine on the face of nature! Mount on mount
Here climbs, and there the lessening hills retire!
The towering wood, where trees innumerous spread,
Shrinks to the slender copse, while stately Tay
Seems a poor streamlet to the astonish'd sight!
How many a day's long journey now appears
To th'eye, quick traveller, a short summers walk!
As fades a series of long wasting cares,
When joy mounts high, and distance veils the scene.
          Now pleas'd each roves a lonely traveller.
For need not seem the solitary path
Or sad, or irksome:—for what voice so sweet
As natures' songsters! And what scene so gay
As the still changing, still delightful change
Of hill and dale, and deep romantic glen,
Quick-gliding stream, and ever babbling brook!
And, oh! what sound so sweet as western gales
Kissing the trembling trees! And fancy can
Wake sounds still sweeter, can create new scenes,
Fresh, gay, ambrosial, such as purer sense
Of museful bard sees, hears, and grows inspir'd.
          There are t'whom humbler walks have charms: their feet
Can visit the close cot, where poverty
Sits patient, and where industry retired
From daily toil, drinks-in the poisoned air.
Nor need they scorn to tread the dark retreat
Of prison, and point out to Britain's sons
What may demand redress: subjects like these
Soften the heart: nor shall the humble muse
Blush at these themes, though now perchance compell'd
To different musings:—there she learnt to scorn
The low disdains of contumely, there caught
The fire of indignation, there the glow
Of mercy, and the mercy tunes her lyre.
          Ye generous rich, for 'mid the numerous tribe
Of gold-gorg'd wealthy, Britain boasts her few
Of rich, and generous, scorn not to contrive
How best to house the labourer,(3) let him taste
The sweets of cleanliness, and know to breathe
Pure air; nor let him tremble at th'approach
Of every wind that rides the pelting storm.
He, for your luxuries labours, he to you
Like the poor patient ox, and gentle sheep,
Raiment and food supplies: ah! say, shall he
Meet nothing but contempt, and low neglect?
Who deems his fellow mean, for man's his fellow,
Himself is mean—is worthless—a mere nothing,
And though he force the poor man's outward worship
Knee-bent to th'earth, shall have his heart's contempt.
          My friend, be thine to rove no fruitless path
For science guides thee, and thyself hast rais'd
Fair hope,(4) and pointing thee to rural haunts
And pleasing themes, thy parent leads the way.
The months, with all their songs, and fruits and flow'rs,
Vapours, and sullen clouds, and frosts, and snows,
In ceaseless change, to Britain's studious youth,
Well he describes; and Britain's studious youth
Shall bless his toils—nor less with EV'NING TALES,(5)
With critic rules, and soft poetic lays,
Moulds tender hearts, than with a modest skill
To art and science lifts the manly breast.
Nature's fair walks invite the various mind
Of man, who all around, beneath, above,
Views what may fire the genius, to pursue
Studies diverse, yet useful, which unite,
Like the rich hues, whose fair varieties
Each into other melting, all conspire
To crown with one grand arch the lofty heav'n;
Or, like the many-darting rays of light,
Which quick converge, and form one lustrous point.
Thy task is toil and patience to survey(6)
The form, position, and proportions due
Of mountains, and their natures thence deduce.
Hence shall determine well the distant eye,
What treasures sleep within, or slates or lime,
Granites, or porph'ries, nor shall vain ascent
Thy feet beguile; to thee research shall bring
Its pleasures due, to others profit bring.
'Twas thus, where circled in immortal snow,
Alps rear their tow'ring summits, Saussure(7) rais'd
His fam'd high monument; nor less shalt thou
On Scotia's barren rocks, though not to thee
Those rocks shall long prove barren, thou shalt gain
From Scotland's sons, the meed of fair renown.

The poem begins with a tribute to the comforts of friendship. The reference to ‘heavy hours’ in line 2 encourages a metaphorical reading of the ensuing storm images, as though the virtues of friendship will be defined against the background of a conventionally moralised landscape. And indeed, a little further on Dyer openly deploys the life-as-journey allegory, following the progress of Hope from its youthful “prospect fair” to its show of resistance in the “solitary waste” of adult life, and then to its final defeat in the “Ocean of griefs and cares” (57, 59, 63). However, there is a counter-tendency with the introduction of place-names in lines 12-19, and amplified in the second apostrophe to Aikin in lines 71-83, where the picturesque images evoke a local rather than ideal landscape. This tension between rhetorical strategies derived from the topographical poetic tradition, which seeks to extract moral lessons from the “clair obscure” (31) of nature's works, and a representational attachment to the physical realities of place which I would identify as the Romantic, pedestrianising impulse, is one example of the peculiar congeries of voices in this poem.

The overarching theme of the first seventy lines is companionate travel: Dyer does not decry solitary walking, which he associates with the “bold unrestrained” mental excursiveness of the poet, but his overt preference is for the comforts of the “social walk” (72). In later Romantic travel writing, sociability is widely commended: in “On Going a Journey,” Hazlitt cannot “see the wit of walking and talking at the same time” (136), but welcomes companions on any form of foreign travel: “In such situations, so opposite to one's ordinary train of ideas, one seems a species by one's-self, a limb torn off from society, unless one can meet with instant fellowship and support” (146). Leigh Hunt writes of “weekly voyages of discovery into green lanes and rustic houses of entertainment” (77) with a friend, and typically addresses his reader as a surrogate of the companion whom he considers indispensable to his excursions. And the record which Keats has left in his letters of his northern tour in 1818 is coloured importantly by the exuberant, bantering relationship he enjoyed with his companion, Charles Armitage Brown, a relationship in key with the “programme of cheerfulness and sociality” which Jeffrey Cox has aligned with the Cockney School (Romanticism 2 [1996]:27-29). In Romantic travel writing of the 1790's, however, the companion is usually a nominal presence, invisible and inarticulate, alongside the central and normative narrating subject. In writing so openly and warmly of the pleasures of companionate travel, Dyer anticipates the socialising literary tendencies of the next generation.

Taking leave of Dunkeld in line 84, Dyer finds that the Abbey and the wooded valley in which it stands call to mind another monastic site, Tintern (89-93). Like Dunkeld, Tintern was by this time on the tourist trail, a station on the picturesque Wye tour, though Wordsworth was yet to make his defining visit. Dyer's description of Dunkeld offers the image of human structures partially reclaimed by nature—“round the stones / The shining ivy twines its wanton arms / In close embrace” (94-96)—central to the picturesque appreciation of ruins. He also incorporates two other forms of conventional response to ruins, as helpfully categorised by Malcolm Andrews (45-46): the moral memento mori which the poet reads in the monuments announcing “Who liv'd, and—sleep, and wake to sleep no more” (101), and the political celebration of Britain's emancipation from Catholicism (102-107).

The picturesque calm is disturbed from line 144 onwards, as Dyer engages in a sentimental digression on social deprivation and injustice. He takes a mental walk to “visit the close cot, where poverty / Sits patient, and where industry retired / From daily toil, drinks-in the poisoned air” (145-47). He mentions, and defends as poetic subject-matter, the “dark retreat / Of prison” (148-49), perhaps recalling for readers of the Monthly Magazine his humanitarian critique of crime and punishment in Complaints of the Poor People of England, where he condemned the imprisonment of teenagers in “seminaries of vice,” where they were “instructed in a knowledge which led them to the gallows” (62). Dyer appeals to the better instincts of the “generous rich” (157) to give more attention to housing the poor, underlining the point with a prose note, and shifts the tone from one of social compassion to one of political morality in pleading the labourer's rights (164-69). Again, Dyer echoes sentiments he expressed in Complaints five years earlier: “The prosperity of nations depends on the poor. They dig the ore out of the mine, and the stone out of the quarry. They build our houses, work our vessels, and fight our battles: yet, while the rich enjoy almost all the benefit, the poor undergo all the labour. The rich have little to do, but to give orders, or to sign their names, and sometimes not even that” (4-5). While the introduction of such radical sentiments occlude the topographical functions of the poem, they are consistent with the views Dyer had expressed on the role of nature in promoting “universal tenderness”: “The GOOD MAN from the appearances of nature derives tender affections, generous principles, and humane conduct. From the glowing and variegated scenes around him he derives something which warms his heart, and throws a smile over his countenance” (Dissertation 19). In the Dissertation, the sentimental pietism of these assertions is girded by the writer's detailed knowledge of the way public life is organised in Britain, and by his concern with the material and contemporary distress, such as the plight of the defendants in the Treason Trials of 1794. Similarly, in “To Mr. Arthur Aikin,” Dyer translates the “language” (82) of nature, essentially one of delight, into the rhetoric of social protest.

If the progress of Dyer's poem up to this point has been, in pedestrian terms, a meandering one, then his final verse paragraph, which begins with another valedictory apostrophe to Aikin, strikes off in equally unpredictable directions. He notes that Aikin's travels are motivated by science, and that in this, as well as other ways, his father “leads the way” (176-83). As his footnote makes clear, Dyer is alluding to John Aikin's Calendar of Nature, an instructional book for ten to fourteen-year-olds which gives, with some poetic embroidery, general views of the “grand system” of nature; his Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry; and his compilation of children's stories, fables and dialogues, Evenings at Home. Dyer's reminder of John Aikin's diverse literary accomplishments points to the combination of poetic sensibility and “manly science” to which he believes his son Arthur should aspire. This exemplarily “various mind” (184) is figured in two strikingly apposite images: nature, he says, inspires different forms of attention, which conspire happily towards mental growth just as the several colours are harmonised in a rainbow, or as scattered light can converge in “one lustrous point” (192). Although either analogy would misrepresent the uneven, progressional structure of Dyer's poem, both demonstrate his belief in the importance of “Studies diverse” in the fashioning of a self. “To Mr. Arthur Aikin” shows that an educated person could be simultaneously a man of feeling, a picturesque tourist, a scientist and a political controversialist. Dyer's loose, conversational blank verse displaces these elements into a simple narrative chain, revealing a self driven to perform its differences.

In the concluding lines (193-206), after hoping that Arthur Aikin will be as variously endowed and accomplished as his father, Dyer acknowledges the real interest of the future founder of the Geological Society. In a last eulogistic act, he compares Aikin in anticipation to Horace Benedict de Saussure—a “celebrated Mineralogist,” as his note says, and author of the Voyages dans les Alpes, a mixture of travel writing, geology and scientific essays published between 1779 and 1796. For both mountaineers and geologists, this innocuous note would do Saussure too little justice. As a mountaineer, he has a distinguished place in the history of Mont Blanc: he promised a big reward to the first man to climb the mountain, and took part in two unsuccessful attempts himself before losing the race to Balmat and Paccard in July, 1786. Saussure became the third man to complete the ascent the following year, and typically regarded the observations he made with his thermometer, hygrometer and electrometer, over a period of four and a half hours on the top, as the main point of his achievement. As a geologist, Saussure asserted the value of fieldwork over speculative theory, advanced the nascent discipline of paleontology, studied the relations of different strata, and approached an understanding of geophysical processes. In the Voyages, which Dyer cites, dealing with his conquest of Mont Blanc, he blended aesthetic delight and intellectual excitement which Dyer preferred to a dispassionate ‘distant eye’ (196): “I could hardly believe my eyes, it seemed a dream, when I saw under my feet these majestic peaks, these formidable Aiguilles du Midi, d'Argentiere, du Géant, of which I had found even the bases so difficult and dangerous of approach. I seized their connections, their relation, their structure, and a single glance cleared away doubts which years of work had not sufficed to remove” (Freshfield 232).

Saussure, great-grandfather of Ferdinand de Saussure, who was to revolutionise the study of language in the twentieth century, came from a prominent Genevan family whose forebears had been religious refugees from France in the mid-sixteenth century. Like Aikin, he showed an early bent towards science, becoming Chair of Philosophy (incorporating natural sciences as well as logic, ethics, and so on) at the age of twenty-two. Although a member of the city's patrician elite, he advocated reform, welcomed the fall of the Bastille, urged the ruling Council to draft a new constitution acceptable to the common people, guided the new-model administration, and withdrew from active politics only after the local Reign of Terror in 1794. In political terms, therefore, there is good reason for Dyer to advert to Saussure with the same respect he shows for the scientific “monument” (203) he left behind.

There is, moreover, a personal link between Dyer and Saussure: they had a common acquaintance in Charles, third Earl of Stanhope (1753-1816), another prominent British reformer and distinguished inventor. Stanhope began his education at Eton, but lived from 1764 to 1774 in Geneva, where he learned both revolutionary sympathies and a love of science, and where his family socialised with the Saussures. His consumptive brother, Philip, was treated by the Saussures' close friend and family doctor, Theodore Tronchin. Later, Stanhope married William Pitt's sister, became an MP, supported the parliamentary reform, and championed religious liberty, chaired the Revolution society meeting in November, 1789, at which Richard Price delivered his famous sermon on the love of country, and, having succeeded to his peerage, brought pro-French motions before the House of Lords as late as 1795, earning his nicknames of “Citizen” Stanhope and “The minority of one.” In another life, he was a celebrated inventor, producing innovations in fire-prevention, marine steam-engines, printing presses and calculating machines (see Stanhope and Gooch). At some stage in this colourful life, perhaps as early as the 1780s (Adams 233-4), he became acquainted with Dyer, and employed him for a while as tutor to his sons. When Stanhope made his will in 1805, he appointed Dyer an executor and left him £200—much to the amusement and bafflement of commentators then and since. Crabb Robinson writes: “One day Mrs. Barbauld said to me, ‘Have you heard whom Lord Stanhope has made executor?’—‘No! Your Brother’—‘No, there would have been nothing in that. The very worst imaginable.’—‘Oh, then it is Buonaparte.’—‘No, guess again.’—‘George Dyer?’—‘You are right. Lord Stanhope was clearly insane!’” (Robinson 1:62).

However, if Dyer seemed a comical choice for someone charged with executing a will, Stanhope's partiality is more explicable when put in the context of Dyer's public activities in the 1780s and 1790s. Stanhope would have found common political cause with Dyer on a wide range of issues, not least the campaign to remove discrimination against Dissenters, and he would have known that there was a lot more to Dyer than the lovable eccentric caricatured by Lamb. It is tempting, therefore, to see a transnational, cross-class fellowship of minds, and a certain commonality of experience, being invoked between the lines of Dyer's valedictory address. Saussure, Dyer, and their mutual acquaintance, Stanhope, were all industrious, public-spirited men, active in reforming politics, and catalysts for a radical generation, though all were in retreat, at least temporarily, from political life at the time of Dyer's tour in 1797. They all achieved considerable distinction in their particular fields of learning, and offer themselves as perfect exemplars of the “various mind” of which Dyer speaks in “To Mr. Arthur Aikin.” In addressing the younger Aikin within this context of personal and public allusions, Dyer flatters his companion by incorporating him poetically into the universal brotherhood of the friends of liberty, thereby effecting a continuity of belief and commitment across the generations.

Notes

1. Roe first looked at Dyer in his essay, “Radical George: Dyer in the 1790s,” and later in chapter 3 of Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, and as “‘Unremembered Kindness: George Dyer and English Romanticism’,” in The Politics of Nature 17-35.

2. Lamb, for instance, writes to Coleridge in August, 1800, “George Dyer hath prepared two ponderous volumes, full of Poetry and Criticism—they impend over the Town, and are threaten'd to fall in the winter” (Letters 1:226).

3. [Dyer note] To those who have visited the wretched unhealthy hovels in the Highlands of Scotland, and in Ireland, it cannot be deemed unseasonable to recommend an attention to the more decent accommodation of the cotters, or cottagers. Men of fortune, who in future may build on their estates habitations for their poor tenants, would do well to study a most interesting publication entitled, “Heights and Elevations for Cottages,” by Wood.

4. [Dyer note] See a Journal of a Tour through North Wales and part of Shropshire, with Observations on Mineralogy, and other branches of Natural History, by Arthur Aikin.

5. [Dyer note] “Calendar of Nature,” “The Use of Natural History in Poetry,” and “Evenings at Home,” etc. by Dr. Aikin.

6. [Dyer note] The leading object of Mr. A.'s Tour into Scotland, was a mineralogy survey of the country.

7. [Dyer note] A celebrated Mineralogist, Author of a work entitled, “Voyage dans les Alpes.”

Works Cited

Aikin, Arthur. Journal of a Tour through North Wales and Part of Shropshire: with Observations on Mineralogy. 1797; An Address to the Dissidents of England on their Late Defeat. 1790; Adams, M. Ray. Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism. 1947; Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800. 1989; Cox, Jeffrey N. “Keats in the Cockney School,” Romanticism 2 (1996):27-39; Dyer, George. Complaints of the Poor People of England. 1793; A Dissertation on the Theory and Practice of Benevolence. 1795; Poems. 1792; Poems. 1801; Poetics; or a Series of Poems, and of Disquisitions on Poetry. 2 vols. 1812; Freshfield, Douglas W. The Life of Horace Benedict de Saussure. 1920; Gilbert, Joseph, and Thomas Howell. A Correct and Minute Journal of the Time Occupied in Every Mile By Mr John Stokes, of Bristol, During his Walk of Fifty Miles per Day for Twenty Successive Days, making One Thousand Miles. 1815; Hazlitt, William. “On Going a Journey.” Selected Writings. 1970; Hucks, Joseph. A Pedestrian Tour through North Wales, in a Series of Letters. 1795; Hunt, Leigh “A Walk from Dulwich to Brockham,” Selected Essays. Ed. J. B. Priestley. 1929; Jarvis, Robin. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. 1997; Jump, Harriet. “‘Snatch'd out of the Fire’: Lamb, Coleridge, and George Dyer's Cancelled Preface.” Charles Lamb Bulletin 58 (1987):54-67; Lamb, Charles. Elia and The Last Essays of Elia. Ed. Jonathan Bate. 1987; The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb. Ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr. 3 vols. 1975-78; Obituary of Arthur Aikin. The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 2 (1855):xli-xlii; Obituary of George Dyer. The Gentleman's Magazine ns 15 (1841):546-47; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Trans. Peter France. 1979; Southey, Robert. Letters from England. 1807. Ed. Jack Simmons. 1951; Thelwall, John. The Peripatetic; or, Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society. 1793; Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. 2nd ed. 1968; Rev. of A Walk through Wales, in August 1797, by Richard Warner. Monthly Magazine 5 (1798):492; Wilbur, Earl Morse. A History of Unitarianism: In Transylvania, England, and America. 1945.