Vile Things: William Gilpin and the Properties of the Picturesque

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.