Entitled London from Greenwich Park this painting was first exhibited in 1809 by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851; he also painted the watercolour of Tintern Abbey that you can find on page C4 of your first volume, The Romantic Period, of the Norton Anthology.) Within the context of our course, this was two years after Wordsworth's great odes were published (our example is "Intimations of Immortality"). The painting is owned by the Tate Gallery, Millbank, London.

The Observatory at Greenwich was erected in the seventeenth century during the reign of Charles II. The Greenwich meridian was adopted as universal at an international conference of 1884 in Washington D. C. when "Greenwich Mean Time" came into existence. Symbolically, Britain thus became the temporal center of the Western world, a status which matched her assertion of spatial centrality as ruling imperial power. The cultural caché that still is attached to the study of British literature could be seen as a nostalgic relic of the international respect commanded by imperial Britain at this time.