George Smith of Wigton: Gentleman's Magazine Contributor, Unheralded Scientific Polymath, and Shaper of the Aesthetic of the Romantic Sublime

The evolution of the Romantic sublime is well-ploughed ground; and Samuel H. Monk's 1935 classic The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England recounts with admirable clarity the genesis of the new aesthetic concept in Boileau-Despréaux's 1674 translation of Longinus' seminal treatise, Peri Hupsous (On the Sublime), and its mutation through John Dennis' awe-struck account of the ruggedness and geological asymmetry of the Alps in 1688, Shaftesbury's evocation of the grandeur of high places and immensity of space in The Moralists, Addison's panegyric to "huge Heaps of Mountains, high Rocks and Precipices" in Spectator 412, Charles Leslie's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful in his Essay on Design and Beauty (Edinburgh, 1739), Thomson's explicit linkage of the power of untamed nature with Romantic terror in The Seasons (London, 1726-30), and finally Burke's integration of his predecessors' ideas into a clear and coherent whole in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757).¹ Building upon Leslie's differentiation between two groups of aesthetic qualities, those conducive of the sublime and those conducive of the beautiful, Burke reinforced the distinction, favoring the vast, rugged, asymmetrical, magnificent, and terrifying over the small, smooth, delicate, regular, and beautiful. Borrowing from Addison (and, in Marjorie Hope Nicolson's view, from Thomas Burnet's widely read Sacred Theory of the Earth [London, 1684-90]),² Burke was intrigued by the irregular and misshapen, especially praising the sublimity of jagged mountain peaks, cliffs, and gorges. Inspired by Shaftesbury, he celebrated the awesomeness of infinity and immensity, the "Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence" (125) of what in the third century Longinus had called "the vast universe."³ Following in the footsteps of Dennis and Thomson, Burke linked sublimity with terror and "delightful horror," a horror engendered by "vast cataracts, raging storms, [and] thunder" and encountered in "the gloomy forest, [and] in the howling wilderness" (129, 151, 114). By drawing together, amplifying, and clarifying a host of fragmentary and sometimes disparate earlier aesthetic theories, Burke's Philosophical Enquiry immediately became the touchstone of all subsequent discourse on the sublime and a text of enormous importance to the later evolution of English Romanticism. All of this is well known, but a brief summary seemed in order.

Before Burke had giventheories of the Romantic sublime coherence, however, George Smith of Wigton, Cumbria, wrote an astonishing series of articles and letters for the Gentleman's Magazine (hereafter GM). Considering the number and importance of Smith's contributions to the GM (over a hundred pieces), it is amazing that he has so long gone unnoticed. His name never appears in any of the host of accounts of Romanticism of the sublime, and there are no entries for Smith in standard histories and bibliographies of British natural science. Though Smith and Gilbert White of Selborne were contemporaries and though Smith's meteorological diaries for the GM predated those of Gilbert White by twenty-seven years, Smith receives no mention in Paul G. M. White's Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988). Neither does he merit even a footnote in Esther Moir's The Discovery of Britain: The English Tourists,⁴ which claims erroneously that published accounts celebrating the Lake District made their appearance only in the late 1750s and 1760s, years after George Smith began writing about Cumbria in the GM.

The reason why Smith has long escaped notice is clear. Until recently his known contributions to the GM were few and scattered, noticed only peripherally within the context of studies focused on far broader topics, principally Albert Pailler's Edward Cave et le "Gentleman's Magazine" (1731-1754...