Christopher Wordsworth’s Greece: popular topography from the illustrated serial to the gift book

In the decades prior to Greece’s independence, topographical books were a crucial means for mediating the country’s landscapes for foreign audiences. Less well known today, however, is the adaptation of these publications as copiously illustrated popular editions after the foundation of the Greek state. As a landmark of British serial publishing which remained in print as a “gift book” from the 1830s to the 1880s, Christopher Wordsworth’s Greece, Pictorial, Descriptive, and Historical serves as a valuable case study for understanding how earlier books on Greek topography were remarketed and steeped in a new visual idiom for a growing non-specialist audience. Arguably Greece’s chief innovation to achieve this was the liberal inclusion of sublime and picturesque wood engravings in its letterpress. By examining a selection of the book’s illustrated landscapes in dialogue with Wordsworth’s text and reviews in the Victorian press, this chapter interrogates the tension between classical and Modern Greece and academic and popular readings of the country.