Research Associate
Lancaster University
United Kingdom
On July 24 this year, the new film adaptation of
Arthur Ransome’s children’s classic Swallows
and Amazons (first published in 1930, and set in summer 1929) had its world
premiere at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, one of the more
frequently-visited towns in the Lake District National Park. The film, like the
book on which it’s based, tells the story of the four Walker children – John,
Susan, Titty (renamed Tatty in the film) and Roger – and their adventures on
and around a Cumbrian lake. The film’s director, Philippa Lowthorpe, was drawn
to the project because Ransome’s book is about ‘getting out into the world of
your own imagination’. She is also ‘aware of how childhood now revolves around
screens, sitting on your bottoms and being indoors. There’s very little time
for adventure’. That is the tension at the heart of this film: it is an indoor
activity about the wonders of the outside world, as seen through children’s
eyes. There’s an irony, then, in using a screen to represent the Walker
children’s Lakeland exploits; it encourages children to stay inside to access
the outside.
Susan, Roger, Tatty and John bring the Swallow to
shore on
Wild Cat Island CREDIT: STUDIO
CANAL
|
The same irony is not true of the book. Books
can be taken outside – in fact, for the Walker children, books seem to belong
outside. Titty, for instance, has read Robinson
Crusoe enough to have memorised passages from it, and she uses it as a
guide when she’s left alone on the island. John, the eldest, takes with him The Seaman’s Handybook and Part Three of
The Baltic Pilot, whilst Susan
chooses Simple Cooking for Small
Households. Their reading material doesn’t simply reflect their roles in
this family structure (adventurer, Captain, ship’s mate and substitute mother
respectively); it also indicates how books can act as intermediaries between
the real world and the imaginary landscape constructed as part of the
children’s adventures. Robert Macfarlane writes that ‘to young children […]
nature is full of doors – is nothing but doors, really – and they swing open at
every step’ (Landmarks, p.315). In Swallows and Amazons, nature does
provide the doors through which the children pass to move from the real to the
imaginary landscape: the pike-filled lake becomes a shark-infested sea, for
example, and a river leading into it becomes the Amazon, complete with a group
of octopuses (actually lillies). But it’s from the books that they know how to
navigate these imaginary places, from shipwreck on a desert island to sailing
the high seas at night.
The most important book in Swallows and Amazons is an unnamed guide-book of the Lake District.
The novel’s geography is a composite version of the Lake District: the lake is
based on a mixture of Coniston, with the Old Man of Coniston looming above it,
and Windermere; the Peak of Darien draws on Derwentwater; Rio, the main town,
is reminiscent of the Lake District’s modern tourist hub, Bowness-on-Windermere;
the farm Holly Howe finds its real-life counterpart at Bank Ground Farm;
Cormorant Island is really Silver Howe on Windermere; and Wild Cat Island
reflects both Blake Holme on Windermere and Peel Island on Coniston. These
real-world locations, as the map below shows, are spread around the Lake
District; Ransome knew his Swallows and
Amazons geography so well that when he visited the real Lakes it sometimes
seemed ‘that some giant or earthquake [had] been doing a little scene-shifting
overnight’. That makes the children’s geography a complex one: it is an
imaginative interpretation of a re-imagining of the Lake District landscape.
Swallows
and Amazons geography (green text) beside
the real-world locations which inspired them (black text). Map created using
ArcGIS.
|
Mapping these sites onto a fact-based platform
like a Geographical Information System (GIS), as I’ve done here, indicates two
things: first, that the composite geography Ransome utilises in Swallows and Amazons creates a version
of Lakeland that reflects a child’s experience of it more than a factual
account; second, that databases like GIS struggle to represent fictional
literary geographies. A GIS requires real-world data: longitudes and latitudes.
It, like virtual globe environments such as Google Earth, cannot represent
imaginative geographies. In the study of this kind of unreal landscape, then, a
GIS’s use is limited – but it is not entirely irrelevant. Visualising the
real-world locations that inspired Ransome’s fictional geography in this way
indicates how circumscribed Ransome’s Lake District actually was; only the Peak
of Darien disrupts that pattern. And actually, that fits, because in the novels
Darien is a viewing station from which to gaze down on the primary settings for
the children’s adventures; it remains aloof from much of the narrative, and
informs the story mostly by blocking the children’s view from Wild Cat Island
to Holly Howe and the Amazon. Mapping these locations in a GIS emphasises the
geographical relationship between the fictional locations in a way that is
hidden behind the novel’s literary geography.
A GIS rendering of this fictional place-making
is interesting methodologically, too, because it recalls the children’s
mapmaking in the novel. The map that accompanied the novel after the
illustrated edition in 1931 is not a reproduction of the map that the children
use; rather, it is a depiction of the ‘chart’ that they see. When they are packing to set off, John decides that all
proper sea-voyagers and explorers meed a chart – but where to find a map that
depicts the region into which they are to venture?
‘John said, “What about a chart?”
Titty said that as the ocean had never been explored, there could not be any charts.
“But all the most exciting charts and maps have places on them that are marked
Titty said that as the ocean had never been explored, there could not be any charts.
“But all the most exciting charts and maps have places on them that are marked
Map of the Swallows and Amazons geography (Pigeon Post, 1936)
|
‘Unexplored’.”
“Well, they won’t be much good for those places,” said Titty.
“We ought to have a chart of some kind,” said John. “It’ll probably be all wrong, and it won’t have the right names. We’ll make our own names, of course.”
They found a good map that showed the lake in a local guide-book. Titty said it wasn’t really a chart. John said it would do.’ (Swallows and Amazons, p.33)
“Well, they won’t be much good for those places,” said Titty.
“We ought to have a chart of some kind,” said John. “It’ll probably be all wrong, and it won’t have the right names. We’ll make our own names, of course.”
They found a good map that showed the lake in a local guide-book. Titty said it wasn’t really a chart. John said it would do.’ (Swallows and Amazons, p.33)
Titty’s objection here highlights the explorer’s
problem with maps, both analogue and digital: they only depict places that
don’t need exploring. For where they’re going – a fictional reflection of the
mappable lake – there can’t be any charts, because no-one can have been before
to a place that exists only in the children’s minds. It turns out, though, that
the Blackett children also travel in this imaginative landscape – and even the
adults are complicit in it. In fact, the Blacketts’ uncle and mother both
explored a similar imaginary variation of the rJoannaegion as children. The
guide-book’s map offers a site on which to chart all of these fictional
variations of the area. The chart the children use in the book is over-written
with their fictional geographies, creating a complex representation that
reveals both the adult – or ‘native – world and the one the children overlay
onto it.
The children’s adaptations of the guide-book map
become a key means through which they express the ways they make place. Their
‘chart’ represents precisely those ‘doors’ that Macfarlane identifies, because
it places the factual locations beneath the children’s annotations. It makes
explicit the connection between the landscape and the children’s power to
imaginatively transform it. And that process – of physical into cartographic,
even analogue to digital, place-making – might still be one that unites the
inside with the outside. The kind of vicarious access to landscape that maps
have always represented need not, I don’t think, be imaginatively stifling in a
digital age. What a GIS rendering of the Swallows
and Amazons geography ultimately suggests, I think, is how much potential a
landscape has to be transformed in an endless multitude of ways by its
visitors, and how a map’s apparent failures can also be its most suggestive,
most lucrative, element.
Joanna
Taylor is the Research Associate on the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Geospatial
Innovation in the Digital Humanities: A Deep Map of the English Lake District’,
which runs at Lancaster University from 2015 to 2018. She completed her PhD,
titled ‘Writing spaces: the Coleridge family’s agoraphobic poetics’, at Keele
University in 2015. She is the British Association of Victorian Studies
Newsletter Editor, and can be found on Twitter: @JoTayl0r0