tree-worship

Using as a starting point Wordsworth's occasional booklet Kendal and Windermere Railway: Two Letters Re-printed from The Morning Post (1844), (1) a vehement appeal against "railway inundations" (KWR 350) into the woodlands of Kendal and Keswick, I will argue that acts of tree-worship and tree-felling acquire complex, though markedly different symbolic resonances in Hardy's novel The Woodlanders (1887) (2) and Mary Butts's preservationist pamphlet Warning to Hikers (1932) as well as her posthumously published memoir The Crystal Cabinet (1937).

Butts's articulation of embattled exclusivity and "separateness" (CC 4) applauds Wordsworth's "tree-worship" as one of his most important "spiritual specialities" (Butts, DFT 296), anchored in a sinister woodland milieu that "humbler classes" from the burgeoning industrial cities of "London" and "Manchester" (KWR 346) visit at their peril:

She portrays the archaic past of tree-worship as a compelling actuality, so bolstering urgent personal and cultural imperatives in "a new form of society" (Ashe 103).