Chapter 5 - Switzerland in Miniature: Wordsworth’s “Visionary Mountain Republic”

Summary

Chapter 5 focuses on Britain, arguing that Wordsworth represents his native Lake District as a miniature Switzerland in order to appropriate the Swiss myth’s republican energies and to create the simulacrum of an autonomous community in Grasmere. Various texts in verse and prose that Wordsworth composed between 1800 and 1820 respond to the post-revolutionary problem of political sovereignty and the growing demands in Britain for popular rights by developing the comparison between Switzerland and the Lake District, using picturesque conventions to transpose the Alps onto the Lake District. By palimpsestically inscribing his ‘visionary mountain republic’ over his earlier representations of the Alps, and by casting himself as the true representative of the people, Wordsworth can claim a continuity between his past and present self, while at the same time arguing that demands for political reform are a dangerous misrepresentation of the sovereign will.