This chapter reveals how the atlas as a cartographic format is more than a collection of maps. The British Atlas (1810) by John Britton and Edward Wedlake Brayely was published to accompany their The Beauties of England and Wales, a county-by-county survey with extensive letterpress illustrated by engraved views. Initially a highly commercial success as a national work during the war with France, The British Atlas was an integral part of Britton’s ambition to raise the reputation of topography as a cultural genre. The county maps and town plans were redrawn from the finest available surveys; packed with information and allusion, the plans in particular contained striking composite images. As so often in his career, Britton’s ambition ran ahead of his achievement, however. Complex and sometimes contentious relations between the various partners and contributors on The Beauties of England and Wales, including Britton and Brayley, affected research, authorship, design and production, and The British Atlas was unfinished, with just a fraction of the projected urban views published. The chapter details the ways in which the project’s fate was a familiar story of how material cartography with high production values and up-to-date information fared in the commercial market.

The three-part structure of this introduction reflects the larger organization of the volume as a whole into three linked and overlapping sections that each represent a wide range of approaches to the cartographic culture of the Romantic period but also reflect on and contribute to each other. Anticipating the structure of the main volume then, Part I of the Introduction is written by Damian Walford Davies; Part II by Julia S. Carlson; and Part III by Sally Bushell.

Past ten, she has the desk lamp

in my study lit, to lure me

like a moth, she taunted,

home. Through the saplings

of Sophia Gardens, I see

the light prick darkness

like a spiteful eye.

She meets me on the landing

still in black—gaunt hand

resting on the newel post's

carved artichoke. Did I not also hold

the stillbirth in my palm

before they wrapped it in a pall

no bigger than my handkerchief?

I loathe her pallor, hate the acrid

odour when I douse the lamp.

I was in The Packet's parlour

with our dandy Clerk of Works,

toasting our foundation stone—

my name carved deep

in stark sans-serif. We were

on our fourth French brandy

when they lugged a docker

screaming through a side door

in a sail—his crushed and cockeyed

peg appalling. From nowhere,

someone set to work: knifestrokes,

sawstrokes, reef knot

to the artery, and the grey girl

watching from the far side

of the room, indifferent

as they let the waste leg go.

From this gothic bay, flung out

above the cab stand

where O'driscoll's pony

rests a ruined fetlock

on a backturned hoof,

I can see St Mary Street run plumb

until, a quarter-mile away,

it curves to kiss itself

beyond the French arcades.

I lead each client to this

balanced brink; instinctively,

he backs away. Revelationthin,

O'driscoll's nag

evacuates the day in coarse, tan

gobs, heady sweetness

mixing with my new bay rum.

In Crucial, inescapable ways, all evaluative writing in English Studies is life writing – a historicisation of professional and personal selves. Thus the seemingly rarefied academic exercise of charting the ‘(re)turn to history’ in Romantic Studies in the introduction to a recent collection of essays on the legacies and current modalities of New Historicist practice became for me a kind of biographia literaria. In the process of anatomising what is still the dominant methodology in the field, and identifying the characteristic moves of my own, and others’, critical negotiations with Romanticism, I was invoking and interrogating not only another age, but also past critical selves. (‘Sir, / I write from less than / ideal times to you in less than / ideal times …’) The introduction to this volume also seemed, rather uncannily, to identify the creative-critical footholds of the poetry that was taking shape alongside my critical-theoretical work, revealing the extent to which the historicist paradigms I had signed up to as a critic informed my practice as a poet.

I had always assumed that the critical and the creative were importantly related in my work, but had not previously dissected my own poetic methods. That would necessarily have involved a kind of (self-)demystification that poets find hard to bear. But New Historicism’s analysis of the strategies of Romantic lyrics within the context of their various constitutive ‘histories’ (cultural, economic, political, readerly) offers the poet-critic who has been trained to be suspicious of Romanticism’s own modes of representation a template for salutary self-evaluation. The present essay is an opportunity to consider the receptivity of my own poems to New Historicist analysis (thus revealing their ‘Romantic’ genetics), and – more intriguingly for me – to ask how the poetry itself might ‘perform’ New Historicism (and thus be configured as a critical tool, resisting insertion and collusion in the so-called ‘Romantic Ideology’).

There was always something ‘creative’ at the heart of New Historicism’s most troubling ‘troubling’ of a Romantic text – Marjorie Levinson’s 1986 reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’. Levinson’s ‘deconstructive materialism’ saw Wordsworth’s poem as an ‘artfully assembled’ ghost, an ‘allegory by absence’ that suppressed the poet’s knowledge of the harsh socio-economic realities of the Wye Valley and the political traumas of his ‘radical years’ in the service of a High Romantic argument in which Nature is rendered subservient to an imaginative reconstitution and transvaluation of the scene.