Echoes in the Mountains: The Romantic Lake District’s Soundscape

In december 1844, william wordsworth wrote a pair of now infamous letters to the editor of the Morning Post, in which he decried the proposal to extend the railway to Windermere. One of Wordsworth’s central arguments was that the railway—and the countless numbers of visitors it would bring—would disrupt a much-loved characteristic of the Lake District: its quietness. “The wide-spread waters of these regions,” he declared, “are in their nature peaceful; so are the steep mountains and the rocky glens; nor can they be profitably enjoyed but by a mind disposed to peace.” A person who could enjoy quiet and solitude “profitably” by discovering meanings in them was the only kind of person Wordsworth considered qualified to appreciate his native region. He concluded with a damning suggestion of where minds disposed to noise could go: “[g]o to a pantomime, a farce, or a puppet-show, if you want noisy pleasure.”¹

These were personal judgments; as Peter Coates pithily puts it, “[j]ust as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, noise frequently resides in the ear of the listener. ”² One era’s noise might become another’s sound, or even another’s silence. Acoustic experiences were as subject to contemporary fashion as visual ones, and the late-eighteenth century catalyzed the emergence of hearing as what Sophia Rosenfeld calls “a cultural effect as much as a physiological one.”³ Wordsworth’s considerations of the relationship between noise, sound and silence in the Lake District advanced a debate on the role of sound in the artistic imagination, and in the environment, that was at the foreground of aesthetic thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This article is interested in that relationship between the Lake District’s landscape and its soundscape. I argue that the soundscape ecology portrayed in Romantic-era tourist guides, travel narratives and poetry about the Lake District developed a connection between the region’s natural features and its human visitors. The Lake District’s valleys and mountains formed a natural amphitheatre that witnessed what Martin Kaltenecker has called “the materialisation of a listening discourse,” whereby the venue for a sonic experience indicates how the listener should respond to the sounds heard there.⁴ In the Lake District, this “materialisation” resulted in a form of acoustic sublimity where sound was experienced as something tangible through its interactions both with the region’s geological forms and each listener’s body. That experience might be re-materialized through its written communication. “[W]ords work in the sounding,” Susan Wolfson writes, and sounds also work in the words; literary form could offer a vehicle through which to communicate and preserve the acoustic sublime.⁵

Stephanie Kuduk Weiner would class the acoustic sublime as an “aural aesthetic that raises a series of questions—about sensation and knowledge, reality and representation, words and things—analogous to those raised by the discourse of vision.”⁶ In this case, the unique acoustic affects created by the way sounds responded to the Lake District’s distinctive terrain encouraged listeners to place themselves in imaginative and embodied conversation with the source of the sound and the landscape that effected a deeper sense of belonging within the region’s ecology. I demonstrate here that Romantic-era visitors to the Lake District took advantage of its topography to emphasize certain acoustic experiences that, in turn, influenced their imaginative and written responses to the landscape.

What I am interested in, in short, is how sound functioned as what Henri Lefebvre called a “spatial code”; that is, I suggest that sound was used by historical travelers to the Lake District to read and interpret the space.⁷ My argument here contributes to the rapid growth of interest in critical sound studies that has occurred in both scientific and humanist study in the last decade. Indeed, Mark Smith has suggested that “ [h]istorians are listening to the past with an intensity, frequency, keenness, and acuity unprecedented in scope and magnitude.”⁸ R. Murray Schafer’s introduction of the term “soundscape” in...