John Brown's Description Of The Lake At Keswick: New Clues and Clarifications

John Brown (1715–1766), the moralist and theologian, was one of the more gifted men of his generation. A graduate of St John's College, Cambridge (BA 1735, MA 1739, DD 1755), and an accomplished poet, painter, and musician, Brown was regarded by his contemporaries as an artist of 'uncommon ingenuity'.¹ A tutor and advisor to William Gilpin (whose picturesque tours helped to define the aesthetic culture of the later Georgian era), Brown was, moreover, recognised as one of the earliest and most influential celebrants of the English Lake District. Indeed, as William Wordsworth went on to acknowledge, it is Brown who should be credited with having shaped the sensibility that first brought the Lakes region widespread renown.²

Brown's most important work in this context is a short prose sketch, which he appears to have written in the early 1750s: A Description of the Lake at Keswick. Widely consulted and frequently reprinted, this brief text has long been ranked among the earliest and most influential aesthetic appreciations of the Lakes. As Peter Bicknell observes in his authoritative bibliography of Lakeland tourist publications, Brown's account, though little more than 1,000 words in length, effectively set 'the pattern for picturesque writing about the Lake District', and consequently did more than many much longer works to shape the taste for mountain scenery in Britain during the latter half of the eighteenth century.³

The historical significance of Brown's Description has thus been generally acknowledged. The bibliographical history of this important text has not, however, been fully documented, and this lack of documentation has resulted in mistaken assumptions and misinterpretations. Most sources, including Bicknell's bibliography, refer to either 1766 or 1767 as the date of the Description's first publication. Recent research, though, has turned up a group of earlier, anonymous printings of the text which have hitherto escaped notice. These printings appeared in metropolitan periodicals during the Spring of 1762. Their existence pushes the publication date of Brown's Description back by half a decade and accordingly requires the bibliographical record to be brought up to date.

In addition to providing this update and presenting the text of these early printings (see Appendix below), the purpose of this article is to clarify a few scholarly misunderstandings that they bring to light. In making these clarifications, moreover, I want to examine a unique insight that these early versions of Brown's Description afford: namely, the role played by the private circulation of unpublished print in shaping Georgian appreciations of Lakeland scenery. Taking notice of this heretofore undocumented aspect of Brown's account adds a new dimension both to the reception history of the text and to the cultural history of early Lake District tourism.

In order to understand the significance of these early printings of Brown's Description, it is first necessary to summarize the history of the text's genesis and publication. This task is not a simple one, though, as the dating and dissemination of Brown's Description are matters of more uncertainty than previous discussions of the text have acknowledged. It is hoped that a detailed bibliographical synopsis will help to clarify what we currently know about the Description and to establish a stable foundation for future research.

It is generally thought that Brown's account formed part of a personal epistle to George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton (1709–1773), and that this epistle was written in either 1751 or 1753.⁴ Neither this dating nor the identity of Brown's addressee can be confirmed, however, as no manuscript of the letter is currently available to consult.⁵ In the absence of such evidence, we are forced to rely on a combination of circumstantial and conjectural clues, most of which have been gleaned from other eighteenth-century sources.

That Brown's Description originally formed part of a personal epistle is affirmed by nearly every printing of the text from the early 1760s onwards. Some sources specifically refer to the Description as an 'extract of a letter' or as being 'communicated...