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Vile Things: William Gilpin and the Properties of the Picturesque
- Huntington Library Quarterly
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 80, Number 4, Winter 2017
- pp. 585-607
- 10.1353/hlq.2017.0032
- Article
- Additional Information
abstract:
This essay explores the picturesque writer William Gilpin's problematic relationship with English gardens. While his earliest works seem to champion the landscape garden as a great national art, the manuscripts for his picturesque tours are full of sharp criticisms and withering insults aimed at both gardens and their owners. A close reading of the deletions and rephrasing in these manuscripts, set alongside the published tours, helps us to see both Gilpin's desire for landscape as a cue for imaginative reverie and his unease about a landowning vision of nature. Gilpin's writings are often caricatured as the visions of a dissociated traveler, but his manuscripts insist on the immediacy of shifting emotional states.