Building a Home

MARTINEAU BEGAN CONSTRUCTING The Knoll in 1845, when she was forty-three years old. The construction of a house marked the end of her six-year confinement to the sickbed and her miraculous cure by mesmerism. Martineau claimed in her Autobiography that her decision to settle in the Lake District was motivated by her “thirst for foliage” as well as her desire for a “domestic life…among poor improvable neighbors” (2: 211, 225). Yet on some level Martineau's decision may have been motivated in part by her desire to put herself on the literary map of England–both literally and figuratively. By 1845 Martineau was well known as the author of Illustrations of Political Economy, Society in America, and Deerbrook. During her years as an invalid, Martineau found it difficult to maintain the kind of publishing agenda that would ensure her literary reputation. She published several works during this period, including The Hour and the Man, Life in the Sickroom, and Letters on Mesmerism. Though these works succeeded in keeping her in the public eye during her illness, they did not enhance her literary reputation in a significant way. In fact, looking back on the period of her illness, Martineau decided to “ignore altogether the five years at Tynemouth…and proceed as if that awful chasm had never opened in my path which now seemed closed up, or invisible as it lay behind” (213). A move to the Lake District was a way of resuming her earlier life of health, domestic enjoyment, and literary productivity. The process of building a house was inseparable from the goal of rebuilding her life. She writes to Emerson in 1845,

In this passage, Martineau's mobility and engagement with the landscape are reflected in the syntax of her sentences: running phrases and active verbs set off by commas and dashes. This gives the prose a sense of movement that toward the end of the passage settles in short end-stopped sentences and, finally, in the building of her cottage. The cottage thus serves as a stationary point of reference in the passage and in Martineau's immediate life experience– a home base upon which to center her physical and literary activity.

In her Autobiography, Martineau describes the construction of her home as the creation of a distinctly literary space. One of the reasons she decides to build rather than rent is that her bookcases are too tall to fit into the local cottages (2: 225). Indeed, in her plans for The Knoll, the study dominates the ground floor design (Figure 1). James Payn would later remark that “there were bookshelves everywhere at The Knoll” (103). After the success of her translation of Comte's Positive Philosophy in 1853, Martineau rewards herself with a “first-rate regular Chancery-lane desk, with all manner of conveniences” (2: 411). But most importantly, in her Autobiography, Martineau demonstrates the compatibility of literary and domestic pursuits within the space that she has constructed. She describes a typical day in 1854 this way:

In this passage, Martineau's literary work is distinguished from her domestic responsibilities but is inseparable from them. This relationship is also demonstrated in other parts of the Autobiography, where she locates the scene of writing within the geographical context of the Lake District. When recounting her first trip to the area, Martineau writes, “It was on the 2nd of September that we drove through Ambleside, from Bowness to Grasmere, passing the field in which I am now abiding,–on which I am at this moment looking forth” (2: 139). The inclusion of illustrations of The Knoll in the Autobiography adds to this sense of Martineau's writing location as an essential part of her book's appeal. As the author and protagonist of her Autobiography, she defines herself as a Lake District habitué, whose home, as much as her life and work, is designed to fascinate readers–and ultimately to inspire literary tourism.

Chronicling the Lake District: Periodical Essays

INDEED, BY THE TIME THAT the Autobiography was published in 1877, just after Martineau's death, The Knoll had already become a well-known tourist destination–partly due to Martineau's own efforts. During the 1840s and 50s, Martineau published articles on the Lake District in literary periodicals.⁵

Two of the most important of these articles were written for an American audience: “A Year at Ambleside,” a series of essays published in Sartain's Union Magazine in 1850, and “Lights of the English Lake District,” an essay published in Atlantic Monthly in 1861. These articles, aimed at a middle-class audience of men and women, were intended to entertain armchair travellers and literary tourists with personal accounts of the landscape and culture of the Lake District. They also reveal how Martineau conceived of her relationship to the landscape and literary history of the region, especially the ways she actively promoted literary tourism and attempted to remap the district according to the details of her own life experiences.

“A Year at Ambleside” describes changes to the Lake District landscape month by month and highlights the region's scenic and literary points of interest. Martineau is careful to point out the Swan Inn, where Walter Scott had “his daily draught and chat with the landlord,” and Dove Cottage, “where Wordsworth lived with his sister before he married” (69–70). She even depicts herself as a literary tourist, who sometimes stops at the local parsonage to “hear something of Mrs. Hemans (who was guide and friend to the curate in his youth)” (96). Throughout her description of the literary sites of the Lake District, Martineau adopts the narrative persona of a tour guide. For example, in her description of the Rydal Valley, she gives the impression that readers are participating in a guided walking tour:

Here and elsewhere in the narrative, Martineau describes her surroundings with precision–the locations of various homes and the identities of their inhabitants. This reveals the level to which Martineau's narrative was shaped by the discourse on literary tourism, which relied on specific, spatially located descriptions of literary relics and points of interest.

Punctuating Martineau's walking tour of the region are segments of personal memoir and nature writing that seem aimed at fusing her literary identity with the Lake District landscape. The organizing principle for the first half of the series is not only the seasonal changes in Ambleside but also the stages in the construction of Martineau's home. She describes selecting the land and watching the house take shape. In the articles focusing on her garden, she describes how she plants trees, builds a terrace, and walks ten miles to collect ferns and mosses (61, 70). Martineau thus invites readers to participate in this process of constructing her home and to view this process as an organic series of stages that begins in winter, grows in the spring, and flowers in the summer months as a completed project.⁶

Like Martineau, Mother Nature herself is “eternally busy” reshaping the landscape through landslides, floods, and windstorms. And like Martineau, she focuses her energy on gardening and home improvements: Here Martineau brings together the two themes of the first half of the book –the passing of the seasons and the building of domestic space. And she, like Mother Nature, works at improving her surroundings and repairing the mistakes of the uneducated.

Indeed, the second half of the series is dominated by a second construction project: Martineau's plan for building cottages for the local workers, who live in ignorance of modern advancements in education and sanitation. “I made up my mind,” she writes in her October installment, “that the true way to improve the health and morals of our neighborhood was, by putting the people in the way of providing wholesome dwellings for themselves” (134). She institutes a series of lectures for working people and establishes a local building society. As the summer season yields to the months of illness and hardship among the workers, Martineau hatches her plan for the construction of “a hamlet of thirty or forty wholesome dwellings” to be completed over a term of thirteen years (137).⁷

She also reports that a Board of Health has been established in the region and that “large subscriptions have been made for building a new church–partly for the sake of a new place of burial” away from the village so as to prevent the outbreak of disease caused by an overcrowded and unsanitary churchyard (137–38).

Martineau thus depicts the Lake District as a location constantly in flux, not only due to seasonal changes and the work of Mother Nature but also due to her own tireless activity, which is directed toward improving and shaping her surroundings. Her efforts to construct houses and gardens are mirrored by her construction of a literary text, which reconstructs these spaces yet again for an American audience. Martineau finds the Lake District an ideal site for these activities because she is surrounded by women who live a life of useful activity. Anticipating Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, Martineau points out that the region is inhabited primarily by “Amazons” (52). She notes that “gentlemen soon grow tired” of country life and “go off somewhere to find something to do–some business, or foreign travel, or hunting” (52). Since there are so few men at home, “three times out of four, our little parties are composed wholly of ladies; and they happen to be such ladies as leave nothing to be wished” (53). Even Wordsworth, the most famous man in the region, “likes to see his friends at home, but does not visit” (52). Thus, the social and geographical space of the Lake District is interpreted by Martineau as a female-dominated environment, ruled by Mother Nature herself, where women are able to achieve freedom from the social constraints faced by those in more conventional environments. In her description of one of the Lake District Amazons, a German boat builder named Fredrika Meyer, Martineau remarks, “What grace there is in her freedom of action! Who would have thought of boat-building being a graceful operation? Yet now, when she cannot hold her hand off the work, how beautifully she uses the hammer, and rapidly makes a row of copper-headed nails shine along the side!” (96–97). Fredrika often reappears in the series as a symbol of the kind of independent feminine spirit that dominates the region. In addition to building boats, she is an avid fisherwoman, artist, and walker (97). Like Martineau, she has traveled widely and is a gifted storyteller (98).

In a sense, Fredrika becomes an externalization of what Martineau feels she cannot tell about herself: that she is an artist. Martineau makes few references to her own artistic life in “A Year at Ambleside,” perhaps because she wants to focus on her domestic virtues. Since Martineau had the reputation of being an unwomanly writer due to the political subject matter of her work, she no doubt felt the need to present her feminine side to the world.⁸

She does mention her literary pursuits, but it is in the context of discussing her engagement with the landscape as a builder and walker. In her December segment, she describes taking an early morning walk and then returning home to feel the “glow from exercise, and one's mind all awake for the work of the day!” (149). The nature of this work is left ambiguous, though on some level readers familiar with Martineau's career would imaginatively insert the word “writing” into her sentence. Though she makes only indirect reference to her literary pursuits, she does demonstrate in one anecdote the way that her books contribute to the shaping of her home. During the period in which she is establishing her lawn, she awakens one day to discover that grass sods have been placed over her wall as an anonymous gift. She writes, The building of the house is thus facilitated by her writing, which produces the kind of good will that benefits the writer by helping her to construct a domestic space, rather than providing public accolades or monetary reward. Writing thus becomes a kind of good work that, through a barter system, produces good trade which indirectly facilitates the writer's craft.

Though references to Martineau's writing life are indirect or vague, her presence as a narrator reminds the reader that she is the creator of the narrative. Martineau sometimes uses diary-like techniques: present tense verbs and dated entries. She also emphasizes the inclusivity of her narrative by using the pronoun “we” to describe her jaunts outdoors. In her description of a hike to the top of Kirkstone Pass, for example, she writes,

Throughout “A Year at Ambleside,” Martineau retains this sense of vividness in her description and presents her own perception as a filter through which the reader can participate in constructing the landscape. In this way, she invites American readers to come to the region and see the Lake District through her eyes.

Perhaps even more importantly, Martineau reinforces the connection between place and her individual identity by fashioning her own home as a site of literary interest. She establishes the noteworthiness of her home as a tourist destination not only by emphasizing its connection to her own domestic activities but also by marking its association with the life and career of William Wordsworth. For example, in her description of the construction of her garden, Martineau tells this tale:

This account establishes the stone pine tree as an object of tourist interest.¹⁰ The phrase “on this spot” when followed by other particularizing detail would seem to invite readers to locate and then view the tree (along with Dove Cottage and other sights) on their visits to the Lake District. In focusing on this commemorative tree, Martineau was calling on a tradition which was well established in the field of literary tourism. For example, an article titled “Literary Relics” published in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal in 1846 discusses the tourist activity surrounding the mulberry tree planted in honor of Milton by his tutor in the garden of Christ's College, Cambridge. The article notes that “the smallest fragments from this tree are religiously cherished by the poet's numberless admirers” (382).¹¹ Likewise, by focusing on the Wordsworth tree located on her property, Martineau creates a historical relic that memorializes Wordsworth's visit while at the same time emphasizing her own literary celebrity. After all, the tree is planted in her honor.

In “A Year at Ambleside,” Martineau depicts Wordsworth as a literary associate whose fame was necessary for establishing the tourist worthiness of the Lake District and her own home. She often mentions Wordsworth and the locations that inspired his poems. She depicts herself as an intimate of the Wordsworth family who is invited over for tea and attended Hartley Coleridge's funeral. Indeed, in her letters and essays, Martineau often speaks of Wordsworth as an important mentor and role model.¹²

However, Martineau also often identifies Wordsworth as a literary competitor, whose work and lifestyle could be usefully contrasted to her own achievements.¹³ Though in her Autobiography, Martineau claims to have “worshipped Wordsworth” in her youth, she argues that his work produced more “disappointment than pleasure” in her later years (2: 238). She complains that his work lacks “sound, accurate, weighty thought” as well as “genuine poetic inspiration” (238). She continues, “Those who understand mankind are aware that he did not understand them; and those who dwell near his abode especially wonder at his representation of his neighbors” (239). She then recounts how Wordsworth entertained five hundred literary tourists per year by guiding them in groups around his terraces, “relating to persons whose very names he had not attended to, particulars about his writing and other affairs which each stranger flattered himself was a confidential communication to himself” (241). Martineau suggests that Wordsworth's approach to writing, like his approach to entertaining tourists, is superficial and self-aggrandizing.

If William Wordsworth's career served as a kind of master narrative she must both replicate and challenge, then Dorothy Wordsworth's story served as a cautionary tale. In her essay “Lights of the English Lake District,” Martineau tells literary anecdotes associated with the region, focusing her attention primarily on the Wordsworths. In her descriptions of William Wordsworth's career and domestic life, Dorothy haunts the text, appearing as a specter of a woman whose gift was subsumed by a masculine literary genius. When describing the Wordsworths' decision to settle at Dove Cottage, it is Dorothy's writing, not William's, that takes center stage. “Many years afterwards,” Martineau reports,

Martineau seems to identify with Dorothy Wordsworth's search for a home and her desire to process this experience through writing. Indeed, this passage recalls Martineau's own epiphany as described in her Autobiography–her own spontaneous decision to set down roots in the Lake District. Though Dorothy Wordsworth's journals would not be published until 1897, Martineau's references to Dorothy's writing in “Lights of the English Lake District” imply that she was aware of Dorothy's literary activity. Martineau is careful to note that Wordsworth possessed “the true poet's, combined with the true woman's nature” (545).

However, this point of identification soon becomes lost as Martineau recounts Dorothy's eventual loss of purpose and mental balance. Martineau writes, “Too late it appeared that she had sacrificed herself to aid and indulge her brother” (545). According to Martineau, Mary Wordsworth explains Dorothy's loss of sanity as the consequence of over-exercise from accompanying her brother on extended walking excursions in the district. “To repair the ravages thus caused she took opium,” Martineau reports Mary Wordsworth as saying, “and the effect on her exhausted frame was to overthrow her mind” (545). Martineau allows this explanation for Dorothy Wordsworth's decline to stand until later in the essay, where she finally discounts it, though only indirectly. Martineau tells of how the Wordsworths accused her, too, with “the mischief of overwalking in the case of women” and “took up the wholly mistaken notion that I walked too much” (556). By extension, their explanation for Dorothy Wordsworth's decline is also mistaken. Indeed, Martineau suggests that Dorothy “had sacrificed herself to aid and indulge her brother” in other ways, perhaps by suppressing her own talent (545).

Refusing to be cast in the same mold as Dorothy Wordsworth, Martineau seems to view the older woman's life as a warning for herself–a ghostly reminder of the possible fate of a spinster aunt with frustrated literary ambitions. In the end, Martineau reports that Dorothy Wordsworth becomes a haunting presence at Rydal Mount:

In this narrative of Dorothy Wordsworth's final years, she becomes a nameless object. The traveler notices the chair before noticing the “emaciated old lady,” whose identity is unknown until revealed at the end of the passage. She becomes a kind of anti-relic for literary tourists, who come to Rydal Mount to gaze upon the familiar and significant objects that help to vivify the memory of William Wordsworth. In this case, the gate is locked and the space is defamiliarized by the presence of an unknowable, objectified individual.

On some level, Martineau's depictions of Dorothy Wordsworth in “Lights of the English Lake District” express her fears about her own career and domestic life in the Lake District being subsumed into the mythology surrounding the life and work of William Wordsworth. Would her life and her home become empty signifiers–fragments of the literary past interpretable only by a select few? Would tourists head straight for Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount without stopping at The Knoll? Clearly, Martineau fears the loss of identity that befalls women who sacrifice their talent for the men in their lives. Unlike Dorothy, she depicts herself as a solitary woman who continues to walk and to write–a presence embodied in the narrative voice of the essay itself, which confidently speaks to an American audience. Martineau emphasizes the congruence between her engagement with the landscape and her literary output, thereby once and for all putting to rest the idea that such an engagement will produce mental instability.

Martineau's Guides

IN 1854 A LOCAL PUBLISHER, J. Garnett, persuaded Martineau to publish the first in a series of guides to the Lake District. The success of Martineau's Guide to Windermere (1854), led her to write Guide to Keswick (1857), Survey of the English Lake District (1860), and most significantly, the Complete Guide to the English Lakes.¹⁴

As the most comprehensive of all of Martineau's guidebooks, the Complete Guide proved to be something of a challenge. Soon after agreeing to undertake the project, she writes to her friend Mrs. Ogden, “I have been very sorry not to be able to get over to call. But this Guide Book has made me work ‘double tides’ for a month past; & I have been obliged to refuse all invitations” (Letter). According to James Payn, Martineau researched the guide by taking friends on coach tours and walks in the district.¹⁵ He writes, “It was very literally a labor of love, nor did the pleasure to be derived from it come, I think, short of her expectations. We made up a little party together, and ‘did’ the district…in ten days or so” (128).

In undertaking the Complete Guide, Martineau was of course following in the footsteps of Wordsworth, who began publishing his own guides to the region in 1810.¹⁶

Wordsworth's Guide went through nine editions before being repackaged as Hudson and Nicholson's Guide to the Lake District in 1842.¹⁷ Though Hudson and Nicholson dropped Wordsworth's name from the guidebook's cover in 1842, they included an introductory essay by Wordsworth and advertised the poet's name on the title page. Hudson and Nicholson's Guide continued to be published until 1864. Thus, Martineau's guide and “Wordsworth's” guide were in direct competition from 1854 to 1864.¹⁸ The two guidebooks were similar in structure and price. Both included fold-out maps, engravings, suggested itineraries, and lists. They were more scientific than earlier guides in the sense that they included tables recording the heights of waterfalls, the depth of lakes, as well as lists of native plants and geological features of the region. Such an approach was appropriate for the mass influx of tourists that began after the construction of a railway to Windermere in 1847.¹⁹ These tourists required practical information that would help them to make the most of their holidays: suggested hotels, restaurants, walks, and points of interest. As Clement Shorter put it, “Mr. Baedeker discovered that the German and the Englishman alike were principally concerned with their dinner, and that their wives were principally concerned with the price of it. And so guide-books reduced themselves to concise collections of hard facts” (248). Indeed, Martineau's Guide contains a wealth of such practical information, including the names and addresses of all residents of the region, but it provides a great deal more as well. She includes personal anecdotes describing her walks (127), locations for experiencing blissful solitude (57), social changes in the region (138), and the effects of railroads as a positive economic force (139). She even includes a view of the Lake District written from an eagle's perspective (62).²⁰

Her descriptions of sights, walks, and outdoor activities in the region provide a great deal of practical information, but they sometimes become more decidedly literary–passages requiring a closer, more sensitive reading. Martineau's nature descriptions, many of which are taken directly from her periodical essays, seem written as much to inform as to delight. Here, for example, is Martineau's description of Easdale Tarn:

Such passages were no doubt intended to be read by tourists after reaching the point of destination. Martineau provides enough information to guide the reader to Easdale Tarn and also provides vivid images and a ponderous tone that are designed to help tourists appreciate their surroundings. Indeed, elsewhere in the Guide, she sometimes locates the reader and the reading process in the outdoors. For example, in a passage describing the ascent of Skawfell Pike, Martineau retells Wordsworth's story about being caught on the peak in a rainstorm and then concludes with this exclamation: “May the tourist who reads this on the Pike see every cloud vanish from every summit!” (160). The guidebook is thus defined as a necessary addition to the literary walker's kit bag–the book that will guide and shape the traveler's experience of the natural setting. Thus the traveler experiences geography through the lens provided by a famous writer, whose interpretation of the landscape is more authentic, and therefore more real, than the literary tourist's unmediated experiences and impressions of place. The literary tour thus becomes what Peter Newby has called “as much a voyage of the mind as one of the body” (134). That is, the landscape is experienced physically as the tourist moves through space but also virtually though the mediating influence of the literary text.

Martineau, like Wordsworth, made the literary focus of her guidebook even more transparent by including her own name on the title page and integrating a variety of literary references to the region. Thus, Martineau's homes, writings, and social relations form part of the guidebook's appeal. This makes the guidebook seem as if it were designed specifically for literary tourists rather than for a more generalized traveler. Martineau mentions many Lake District luminaries in her Complete Guide, including Felicia Hemans, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Hartley Coleridge, whose homes were there. However, she gives special notice of Wordsworth's Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount as well as the location of various other stops on a Wordsworth tour of the region, including the location of the grammar school where he studied in Hawkshead (29) and the “old square church tower, beneath whose shadow Wordsworth is buried” (49). In addition to making reference to these literary shrines, Martineau employs a variety of strategies that locate her own home on literary tours of the Lake District. In most editions of the Complete Guide, Martineau mentions The Knoll in her description of walks around Ambleside. For example, in describing the approach to Ambleside from Rydal, she writes, “the house on the rising ground behind the chapel is The Knoll, the residence of Miss H. Martineau” (55). Besides displaying her own name prominently on the book's cover and title page (Figure 3), beginning in 1876, a picture of The Knoll is included as a frontispiece (Figure 4). The 1876 edition also includes an advertisement for notepaper and postcards featuring illustrations of Martineau's home (Figure 5).

What are we to make of all of these references to The Knoll in Martineau's guidebook? On one hand, Martineau, like Wordsworth, wanted to emphasize that she was a resident of the region, not a tourist, and thus had greater authority in describing the sights, geography, and culture of the Lake District. However, she may also have intended to capitalize on her celebrity as a marketing strategy for selling her guide. Given the fact that Martineau's Guide was modeled after Wordsworth's–and was at the same time literally in competition with it–it is likely that Martineau was also establishing her own authority as the creator of a literary guide to the District. By locating herself and her home within the hallowed geography of the Lake District, Martineau establishes her place within the literary landscape as a major author whose fame rivals Wordsworth's and whose home is equally rife with literary associations. This tendency toward self-promotion is reinforced by the fact that Martineau, like Wordsworth, claimed to detest tourists. In fact, as she points out in her Autobiography, soon after moving to the Lake District, she made a practice of letting her house during the summer months so as to avoid the “unscrupulous strangers who intrude themselves with compliments, requests for autographs, or without any pretence whatever” (2: 266). “Every summer,” she writes, “they come and stare in at the windows while we are at dinner, hide behind shrubs or the corner of the house, plant themselves in the yards behind or the field before; are staring up at one's window when one gets up in the morning, gather handfuls of flowers in the garden, stop or follow us in the road, and report us to the newspapers” (266).²¹

But was not this just the kind of attention Martineau was hoping to promote (or at least expected to endure) as a result of her tourist guides and essays? This is, of course, the same question we might ask about Wordsworth's guides to the Lake District. In his discussion of Wordsworth's guidebooks, James Buzard draws attention to this contradiction and explores ways that Wordsworth promoted a different kind of tourism, focused less on itineraries and defined points of interest than on deep forms of viewing and experiencing place. Likewise, Peter Newby points out that Wordsworth's “use of place was important for the tourist industry because it demonstrated where the experiences that gave rise to his philosophy and new standards of taste could also be experienced by others” (131). However, I am not convinced that improving tourist taste was the primary motivation of Wordsworth's Guide.²²

More crucially, Wordsworth, like Martineau, seemed to view the publication of a guidebook as a self-authorizing act meant to forge a connection between a sense of place and a sense of his own career as a writer. By creating textual representations of the landscape through literary acts of self-representation, both writers hoped to locate themselves and their writing careers on the map of England. Thus, their guidebooks, like their autobiographical texts, can be seen as a kind of self-memorialization. As Stuart Semmel points out in his article on Waterloo, the study of tourism is an investigation of how individuals “conceived their relationship to history” while at the same time coming “face to face with the problem of memorialization, the difficulty of capturing the past” (10). In a sense, the dilemma both writer faced was how to create links between their work and the Lake District landscape that would make one unreadable without the other.

Such connections were of course tenuous. Both Wordworth's and Martineau's guides went out of print in the late nineteenth century, reemerging as short-run reprints in the twentieth.²³

Thus, the specific multiple associations forged in the guides between text and landscape become reduced to a few points of interest: Dove Cottage, Rydal Mount, Wordsworth's grave, and The Knoll. For some late-nineteenth-century critics, these sites were in danger of losing their significations due to their commodification as tourist destinations.²⁴ For example, in an 1898 article, Clement Shorter notes that, although the “memory of Wordsworth…overrules this scenery,” Dove Cottage itself has become a vulgarized symbol of the poet's career. After the cottage was acquired by the Wordsworth Society, it was overtaken by a “multitude of visitors, who pay their sixpence readily enough to see the simple cottage” (7). As a result it is “too tidy, too well organised to have much suggestion of poetry, and when one of its little rooms is crowded up with all kinds of spick and span books about Wordsworth, most of which are worthless, the last touch will be given to the vulgarizing of the place” (7). Martineau, according to Shorter, has become only a “vague memory,” whose books have lost their appeal but whose house “will always be pointed out” (8).

Certainly by century's end Martineau's home, a richly nuanced and significant literary destination she had carefully constructed in her Lake District writings, was reduced to a single commodified image–an obligatory and empty stop on a tour of Ambleside. However, in the years just following Martineau's death, the complex significations of her life and work were revivified by her friends and admirers, who wrote narratives about their experiences at The Knoll.²⁵

Maria Weston Chapman, for example, in her “Memorials” published as part of Martineau's 1877 Autobiography, focuses on domestic objects as signifiers for Martineau's life and character. She gives a tour of Martineau's home, making note of the garden, décor, and relics associated with Wordsworth and other famous literary visitors. She highlights the “costly sundial” in the garden (2: 379), the “stone-pine planted by Wordsworth” (380), and Martineau's magnificent library, “probably the best woman's library extant” (382). She also minutely describes the gifts of Martineau's friends and family that adorn The Knoll, including “a marble-mounted sideboard, sent by her friend H. Crabb Robinson” and an “ebony papeterie, the gift of Florence Nightingale” (381).

Moving from room to room, Chapman positions these objects in three-dimensional space for the armchair traveler, providing a virtual tour and inventory of relics. Chapman writes, “What touching stories ought to be told of so many another useful and ornamental object, all brought together from different nations and kindred tongues and people” (381). The Knoll thus becomes a collection of objects that recall Martineau's broad social, political, and cultural affiliations–especially her transatlantic political connections. At the same time, The Knoll becomes a microcosm for the Empire itself, which makes a similar claim about binding together nations and “kindred tongues.” For Chapman, these layers of meaning and association make The Knoll a sacred space. Here, for example, is her description of Martineau's library:

In this way, Chapman establishes the posthumous list of must-see items relating to Martineau's domestic life. Indeed, memorial essays such as Chapman's fueled interest in The Knoll in the years just following Martineau's death. In the 1870s and 80s, her home became an essential stop on a literary tour of the region. As one Ambleside resident quipped, “If I had a penny for every time they stop the coachman to ask where Miss Martineau lives, I should be a rich woman” (qtd. in Chapman 401).

However, this revival of interest in Martineau soon faded–and The Knoll all but disappeared from the literary map of England. At the end of the nineteenth century, some guidebooks made brief mention of The Knoll.²⁶

Just as many guidebooks of the same period droped Martineau's home from their list of important sights.²⁷ By the early twentieth century, references to Martineau became even sparser,²⁸ and by the beginning of the twenty-first century they became all but non-existent.²⁹ Even today, the location of Martineau's home can only be determined by consulting the Martineau Society or the staff of the Armitt Library.

Martineau's attempts to construct her home as a literary shrine would thus appear to have been only temporarily successful. Since her books were rarely taught or read during the twentieth century, her home lost its literary significations to all but a select few. To these scholars, Martineau's home became a tourist destination experienced on a personal level and with the memory of the earlier mass of tourists in mind. Thus, with the rediscovery of a forgotten person and experience, modern scholars infuse the home with feelings of nostalgia. As David Lowenthal points out, “Like memories, relics once abandoned or forgotten may become more treasured than those in continued use; the discontinuity in their history focuses attention on them” (240). As scholars look upon The Knoll, they remember and resignify those places that have been forgotten, reasserting Martineau's vision of the land and its relics.³⁰

They do so with an awareness that they are creating textual geography–land shaped and marked by literary texts. The recovery of women writers is thus also a reinterpretation of geographical space–a remapping of literary landscapes, the places tourists visit, the relics they reconstitute as significant. Martineau, perhaps more than any other Victorian writer, understood (and was able to capitalize upon) this concept of textual geography. She thus serves as an excellent case study for exploring the ways that landscape is written and read by successive generations of literary scholars.