Wordsworth's Objections to the Picturesque

Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

Note 53 to Chapter 8 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

John Murdoch, "English Realism," p 321n., has suggested an analogue for this passage of Adam Bede in Caspar David Friedrich's Tetschen Altarpiece, also known as A Cross in the Mountains (1808). There is no evidence that Eliot knew or admired the work of Friedrich, but her affinities with him are nonetheless strong.

Last modified 20 September 2000