Julia S. Carlson's Romantic Marks and Measures contributes valuably to the critical literature articulating a spatial turn in the humanities. Carlson contextualizes a selection of William Wordsworth's poetry and prose in relation to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British cartography, elocutionary theory, and print culture and shows how his writing registers, responds to, and sometimes produces changes in contemporary material topography and typography. Combining close readings of literary texts with equally close readings of maps, tour guides, grammars, lectures on elocution, and dissertations on prosody, Carlson opens Wordsworth to important new readings—sometimes, as is the case with “The Discharged Soldier” (1798), providing the basis for what should become standard approaches—and explores areas of history deserving of continued study.

Romantic Marks and Measures looks, at a glance, like two books in one. In the first three chapters Carlson addresses Wordsworth's writing in relation to tour literature and maps, including the maps emerging from Britain's first Ordnance Survey. In the final four chapters, Carlson addresses Wordsworth's writing in relation to elocutionary theory and “the Visual Display of Speech” (ix). An “interchapter” addresses the connection between the two parts, though, and by the end of the study, Carlson demonstrates that topography and typography cohere in—and because of—Wordsworth's and others' writing.

Carlson shows that Wordsworth published his writing as “new practices of measuring and marking … reconfigured topographic and typographic fields and brought verse into heightened visibility and meter into national importance” (9). His poetry and prose engage with, in, and sometimes against these practices.

In chapter 1, dealing with texts on the Lake District, Carlson shows how poetry, including Wordsworth's, often appeared on the pages of tour guides and how the topographic lines of the guides became manifest in the lines of poetry, especially blank verse. The engagement extends beyond thematic language: it occurs through the formatting and typography of poems on the page.

In the following two chapters Carlson turns to Wordsworth's engagement with eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cartography. She argues that Wordsworth's famous description of crossing the Alps in The Prelude narrates the failure of contemporary maps to articulate the space around Simplon Pass adequately. She goes as far as to suggest that Wordsworth, as he recalls his journey, “engages in cartospection under the grammatical aegis of retrospection” (68). Such “cartospection” becomes resistance when Wordsworth's Black Comb poems (1811–13) address the geometrically and trigonometrically regulated land depicted by the Ordnance Survey, which began in the final years of the eighteenth century. These poems, Carlson argues, “foreground the competing epistemologies of topographical media and how their particular graphical-lexical expressivity emerges in reflexive relation to national cartographic pressures on the terrain” (104). In place of a landscape ruled by rigid mathematics, Carlson suggests, Wordsworth's poems align more closely with maps using hachures, lines that designate topographic relief through shading.

In chapters 4–6, Carlson shifts to Wordsworth's accentual and graphic practices (often involving punctuation) in a world in which the visual semiotics of maps and other print artifacts were unstable. Drawing from elocutionary guides and other texts, Carlson demonstrates persuasively that in “The Discharged Soldier,” the soldier “figures the inversion of the emphatic ideal [then of interest to elocutionists and Wordsworth alike] in his disarticulated body and speech” (174). The metrical strategies Wordsworth first uses in this blank verse poem develop further in the blank verse narratives of the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Carlson focuses on Wordsworth's use of the exclamation point (which was occasionally called a “wondering point”) and the dash (which signified a long pause) (185). As Lyrical Ballads went to press, Wordsworth concerned himself with the particulars in the physical layout of his poems on the page, much as a mapmaker designing the visual face of a map. Such concerns contributed to “Wordsworth's topographical inflections of the typographical field,” inflections that appear also in The Prelude, especially through his use of the exclamation point (226). Carlson makes a strong case for the semantic necessity of this punctuation, which is often ignored (and sometimes edited out of publications).

Carlson concludes by reading the radical John Thelwall's work on elocution and prosody in relation to Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814). Thelwall elaborated “a physiological prosody and elocutionary pedagogy that privileged blank verse,” Carlson says, articulating “the therapeutic effects of meter within an injurious culture of print” (262). As part of this process, he scanned the meter of all nine books of The Excursion. As Carlson shows, meter was a political and ideological concern for both Thelwall and Wordsworth. Both represented metrical verse as having visual patterns: as spatial. Through such representations, the typographical once more merges with the topographical.

If anything is to be faulted in this excellent study, it is the occasional overdetermined interpretations that come from such a close reading of the interdisciplinary nexuses. Does Wordsworth's use of words such as “point” and “line” really signify regularly and dominantly as a geographical concern? What indicates that the blank space Wordsworth asked his publisher to insert between printed lines in “Michael, A Pastoral Poem” speaks of a blankness on the land he describes? Does one miss key details by holding one's eyes so close to a map or page? (In “Michael,” Michael's wife is Isabel, not Sarah.)

Even such readings, though, push an understanding of Wordsworth's writing and the world in which it first appeared in valuable and necessary directions. Grounded in extensive and impressive research, Romantic Marks and Measures contributes a lucid and important argument about material print culture during the British Romantic period.