Notes

Introduction

1 Here, I am influenced by Andrew Stauffer’s erudite and moving account of the Victorian enthusiasm for placing botanical inserts in printed books: ‘Found (and plucked) as flowers, saved (and then lost) as souvenirs, found again through chance encounters, and speaking primarily of loss (of the past, and of one’s own mortality) when found – these bookish flowers signal both preservation and absence, their fort-da alternations seemingly overcharging them with nostalgia’s recursive narratives’. Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), p. 53. Citing Michel de Certeau’s commentary on history writing as ‘a labor of death and a labor against death’, Kevis Goodman writes in related vein of the elegiac status of historiography: ‘It is a “labor against death” because the historiographer claims the epistemological compensation of knowledge and the aesthetic reward of historical form, but “of death” because de Certeau recognises that this recompense is always compromised, that conveying the past is also betraying it’. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 109.

2 Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, ll. 19–20. ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 184–5.

3 Stevie Smith, The Holiday (London: Virago, 1981), p. 31.

4 Wordsworth to Henry Crabb Robinson, 6 April 1826. LY I. 440. Lamb’s observation is taken from the Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, ed. Edith J. Morley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), I. 151–2.

5 ‘Ode. The Morning of the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving. January 18, 1816’, ll. 163–7; passim. Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 180–9. See Simon Bainbridge’s illuminating commentary on this passage in Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 176–7, and ‘Wordsworth, War and Waterloo’, in Wordsworth, War and Waterloo, ed. Simon Bainbridge and Jeff Cowton (Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust, 2015), pp. 16–28.

6 Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. (London, 1869), III. 321–2.

7 Wordsworth to James Losh, 11 March 1798. EY 212.

8 Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 59–60.

9 Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Curtis, p. 22.

10 William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 511.

11 A thoughtful and exacting account of Hegel’s account of war and self-fashioning can be found in Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 41–5.

12 For commentary on how eighteenth-century thinkers distanced themselves from ‘the codes of ‘patriotism and honor that had imbued most previous writings on war’, leading to ‘the reframing of war as violence, suffering, and carnage’, see Madelaine Dobie, ‘The Enlightenment at War’, PMLA 124.5 (2009), pp. 1851–4 (p. 1852).

13 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘The State of War’, in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd edn., trans. Donald A. Cress (New York: Hackett, 2011), pp. 253–65 (p. 256). Published in 1761, appearing in English translation in the same year, and republished in 1767, 1774, and 1795, Rousseau’s abstract of Abbé Saint-Pierre’s 1713 treatise Projet pour render la paix perpétuelle en Europe, and his posthumously published critique of the Projet, shows further the extent of Rousseau’s simultaneous admiration for and suspicion of absolutist and utopian plans for universal perpetual peace. See ‘The Plan for Perpetual Peace, on the Government of Poland, and Other Writings on History and Politics’, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly; trans. Christopher Kelly and Judith Bush, 14 vols. (Hanover: University Press of New England at Dartmouth College, 2005), XI. 25–49.

14 Ibid., p. 254. For excellent commentary on the aporia at the heart of Rousseau’s account of peace, war, nature, and the social contract see Chris Washington, ‘Romantic Postapocalyptic Politics: Reveries of Rousseau, Derrida, and Meillassoux in a World without Us’, in Romanticism and Speculative Realism, ed. Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 133–56.

15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. and trans. Walter S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1987), p. 122.

16 Ibid., p. 320.

17 Ibid., p. 122.

18 Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795), in Political Writings, 2nd edn., ed. H. S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 93–130 (p. 93). Kant’s essay appeared in English, first in 1796 in an edition published by Vernor and Hood and then in 1798 in Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, and Various Philosophical Subjects, by E. Kant […], trans. J. Richardson, 2 vols. (London, 1798–9). For discussion of the English reception of Kant’s essay see Monika Class, Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817: Coleridge’s Responses to German Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 93–120.

19 Peter Melville, Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007), p. 86.

20 Ibid., p. 87. Derrida’s commentary on the trace of violence in Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace’ can be found in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 88–101. See also ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki 5.3 (2000), pp. 3–18, and Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

21 Thomas Beddoes, ‘Kant: Zum Ewigen Frieden’, Monthly Review 20 (1796), pp. 486–90. For discussion of Beddoes’s reading of Kant’s essay, see Class, Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817, pp. 99–101. The background to the distinction between negative and positive peace is advanced by Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6.3 (1969), pp. 167–91. John Bugg presents a detailed and persuasive reading of how the movement for positive peace was advanced by Romantic period writers and activists in British Romanticism and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). For general discussion of the representation of peace in English writing see R. S. White, Pacifism and English Literature: Minstrels of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

22 Debates on the comparative merits of Wordsworth’s early and late poetry were initiated by Richard Hutton in a paper delivered to the Wordsworth Society in 1882: ‘The Earlier and Later Styles of Wordsworth’, in Wordsworthiana: A Selection from Papers Read to the Wordsworth Society, ed. William Angus Knight (London, 1889), pp. 61–78. With the passing exception of Edith Batho’s vigorous defence of Wordsworth’s late poetry in The Later Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933) and Geoffrey Hartman’s and William Galperin’s thoughtful and occasionally provocative pronouncements on selected late poems, the idea that Wordsworth’s later poetry marked a falling off from the visionary power of the early work has remained largely unchallenged. Two recent studies, Tim Fulford, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815–1845 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) and Jeffrey C. Robinson, Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1825–1833: Fibres of These Thoughts (London: Anthem Press, 2019), look set to significantly modify this idea. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 325–8, and the essays on the late verse collected in The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): ‘Blessing the Torrent’, pp. 75–89; ‘Words, Wish, Worth’, pp. 90–119; ‘Diction and Defence’, pp. 120–8. See also William H. Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

23 See Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 163. On Coleridge’s opposition to war in the 1790s and his change to a pro-war position in the 1800s see Dorothy A. Stansfield, ‘A Note on the Genesis of Coleridge’s Thinking on War and Peace’, The Wordsworth Circle 17.3 (Summer 1986), pp. 130–34; Charles de Paolo, ‘Kant, Coleridge and the Ethics of War’, The Wordsworth Circle 16.1 (1985), pp. 3–12.

24 The number of books that engage with the turn towards conservatism in Wordsworth’s politics is vast, but James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Fulford, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815–1845, while very different in focus and approach, understand that Wordsworth’s engagement with contemporary political affairs cannot be reduced to a case study of radical apostacy.

25 ‘Fragment [“There is an active principle alive in all things”]’, ll. 1–15 (c. 1798–1800). ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 309–10. The material is adapted after 1800 for The Excursion, Book IX, ll. 1–152.

26 For the historical background to the emergence of organised peace societies in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries see J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1982) and Martin Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730–1854 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 6.

27 The phrase is used by Wordsworth in correspondence with Francis Wrangham, 26 April 1814. MY II. 144.

28 William Hazlitt, ‘Character of Mr Wordsworth’s New Poem, The Excursion’. Originally published in three parts in The Examiner, 21 August 1814, 28 August 1814, and 2 October 1814. CWWH XIX. 9–25 (18).

29 ‘Strangeness’ is the quality that Hartman ascribes consistently to Wordsworth’s late poetry. See Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814, p. 331, and The Unremarkable Wordsworth, p. 83.

30 ‘The effect even of genuine sublimity, therefore, is impaired by the injudicious frequency of its exhibition, and the omission of those intervals and breathing-places, at which the mind should be permitted to recover from its perturbation or astonishment’. From a review of Southey’s Thalaba, The Edinburgh Review 1 (October 1802), p. 70. Cited by Jerome C. Christensen, Romanticism: At the End of History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 113.

31 ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 65–9.

32 Epigraph added in 1815. As quoted in ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, p. 65.

33 Jacques Khalip, ‘Dead Calm: The Melancholy of Peace’, The New Centennial Review 11.1 (Spring 2011), pp. 243–75 (p. 251).

34 Khalip discusses the contours of this feeling at length in ‘Dead Calm: The Melancholy of Peace’, invoking Christensen’s ‘temporality of peace’ in which ‘postwar survival’ becomes ‘a continuation of wartime, a conservative mode of exhausted living that “presupposes no future of its own” and generates no capacity for progress. Such peace convalesces – it hopes for the return of a time that was, a time of “robust, belligerent health”’, p. 249. Quotations from Christensen, Romanticism: At the End of History, p. 7.

35 Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 202.

36 The broadly positive responses of British authors to the announcement of the Peace of Amiens are described by J. R. Watson in Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 84–90.

37 Despite the chalk-emblazoned coaches, festive transparencies, and painted signs, concerns remained that the peace would lead to a slackening of the nation’s moral character. From the signing of the peace preliminaries onwards, journalists sympathetic to Pitt’s view that the war against France had taken on an ideological character and should thus be prosecuted with the utmost severity lest the nation sink into degeneracy maintained their influence. See, for example, John Bowles, Reflections at the Conclusion of the War (London, 1801): ‘when the paroxysm of joy, which has been produced by the unexpected arrival of a most ardently desired event shall be over, it will be found that the Peace, which is the subject of so much exultation, is at best but a bold and hazardous experiment’, p. 2. While an uneasy alliance of radicals, Foxites, and pro-Addington Tories remained resolute in their defence of the social, economic, and moral benefits of the peace, the pro-war faction continued to express dissatisfaction with the terms of the peace. As one preacher gloomily pronounced, ‘the arts of peace […] are not without their snares. If they promote the comforts, they also minister, and often fatally, to the luxuries, and the vices of mankind […] it is well if they do not enervate the corporeal and mental faculties, or alienating the affections from higher and nobler objects, direct them to sordid and unworthy concerns’. Samuel Butler, The Effects of Peace on the Religious Principle Considered. A Sermon, Preached in the Chapel of Berwick, on Tuesday, June 1, 1802, Being the Day Appointed by Proclamation for a General Thanksgiving (Shrewsbury, 1802), p. 18. That national antipathies might be exacerbated rather than vanquished by the peace was also widely expressed. Thus, for example, the author of A Review of the French Revolution complained of ‘the fatal mischiefs occasioned by long peace and prosperity’ that ‘by spreading corruption through the whole community’ must lead to civil war. William Cameron, A Review of the French Revolution (Edinburgh and London, 1802), pp. 1–2. For a nuanced account of how writing of the period gave vent to fears that the end of the peace would grant license to the forces of reaction to double down on the repression of revolutionary politics, see Jeffrey N. Cox, Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 26–7; pp. 56–7. See also John Bugg’s scholarly defence of the Peace of Amiens and his sympathetic readings of the literature of the peace in chapter 2 of British Romanticism and Peace.

38 Between December 1801 and April 1802, Wordsworth returned to the composition of ‘The Pedlar’, from which these lines, added to the MS D addendum in 1799, are taken. Omitted from the 1802 version of ‘The Pedlar’, the lines eventually become Excursion, IV, ll. 1207–98. Transcription of Additions to ‘The Ruined Cottage’, MS. D, 68^v, ll. 1–28; passim. The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 374. The ‘one life’ passage from MS. D 64^r, ll. 1–27, was added to the 1799 Prelude, ll. 446–64. The Prelude, 1789–1799, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

39 Gregory Leadbetter, ‘The Lyric Impulse of Poems, in Two Volumes’, in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, ed. Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 221–36 (p. 227).

40 Fears of enervation attendant upon the end of war are endemic in religious, political, and philosophical writings of the period. Jacques Derrida’s commentary on Levinas, from which the notion of peace as the ‘silent horizon’ of speech is taken, is perhaps the most recent example of how critical thought attempts to negotiate the idea that ‘war dies out only at the end of discourse’. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 117.

41 Ibid., p. 37.

42 For further discussion of the liberatory potential of Fancy in Romantic poetry see Jeffrey C. Robinson, Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Robinson maintains that for Wordsworth in the 1815 Preface, Fancy, for all its ‘considerable vitality’, remains in the shadow of Imagination (p. 31).

43 Note on ‘The Thorn’. ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 350–2 (p. 351).

44 Ibid., 33.

45 Ibid., 36.

46 Kelly Grovier, ‘“Shades of the Prison House”: “Walking” Stewart, Michel Foucault and the Making of Wordsworth’s “Two Consciousnesses”’, Studies in Romanticism 44.3 (Fall 2005), pp. 341–66 (p. 345). As Grovier recounts, Wordsworth met ‘Walking’ Stewart in Paris in the autumn of 1792. Impressed by his ‘eloquence’ ‘on the subject of nature’, Wordsworth, according to De Quincey, agreed that Stewart was ‘by instinct’ ‘a true philosopher’, p. 344.

47 David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 53–4.

48 ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’, ll. 82–3. ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 116–20.

49 For Spinoza, ‘the actual essence of the thing [res]’ is that ‘each thing strives [conatur] to persevere in its being’. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 1996), III. p. 6 (p. 75). Conatus thus names a power that is shared by human and non-human entities. As Jane Bennett comments, ‘Spinoza’s conative bodies are also associative’ or ‘social bodies, in the sense that each is, by its very nature as a body, continuously affecting and being affected by other bodies’. Further, since ‘modes’ are assemblages or mosaics of ‘simple bodies’ it no longer makes sense to think of individual things as autonomous, inviolable singularities. See Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 21–2. ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, ll. 17–18. ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, p. 76.

50 Spinoza, Ethics, L1. p. 97 (p. 41).

51 Marjorie Levinson, ‘A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza’, Studies in Romanticism 46.4 (Winter 2007), pp. 367–408 (p. 377). Here it is worth noting ‘Walking’ Stewart’s later political writings, which set radical critique of the ‘feuds and wars of local and selfish interest’ and advocacy of equality and freedom within eccentric and increasingly authoritarian proposals for social reform. See John Stewart, The Apocalypse of Human Perfectuability [sic.], to Consummate the Great Science of Man and Nature, as Revealed in the Opus Maximum (London, 1808), pp. 11–12. For commentary on the development of Stewart’s thought see Gregory Claeys, ‘“The Only Man of Nature That Ever Appeared in the World”: “Walking” John Stewart and the Trajectories of Social Radicalism, 1790–1822’, Journal of British Studies 53.3 (July 2014), pp. 636–59.

52 ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 238–9.

53 ‘Nam fuit ante Helenam cunnus taeterrima belli/causa’. ‘Satire 1’, 3, ll. 107–8. Horace: Satires, trans. Emily Gowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 40.

54 In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot provides a suggestive account of the event that ‘takes no account of being or not-being […] it is the advent of what does not happen, of what would come without arriving’, of that which is ‘outside being’. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 5. In Blanchot’s sense, peace remains ‘outside being’ because the very possibility of being has been denied. For commentary germane to this discussion see David Collings, ‘Blank Oblivion, Condemned Life: John Clare’s “Obscurity”’, in Romanticism and Speculative Realism, ed. Washington and McCarthy, pp. 75–92 (pp. 83–4).

55 See John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), Book IV, ll. 260–8 (l. 268); William Cowper, The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London and New York: Longman, 1994), Book VI, ll. 759–77 (l. 770).

56 The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007), p. 113.

57 For reflections on the role of the apostle during the end of days, relevant to this discussion, see Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 68.

58 ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 608–14.

59 The Letters of John Wordsworth, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 112.

60 Here I am influenced by Spinoza’s veiled critique of Hobbes in Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN, and Cambridge: Hackett, 2000), p. 62. The far-reaching implications of this critique are explored by Antonio Negri in ‘Peace and War’, in Empire and Beyond, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), pp. 53–63.

61 Walter Benjamin, Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition, ed. Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021), p. 50.

62 Ibid., pp. 57–8. For further discussion of the relationship between language, conflict resolution, and divine violence in Benjamin’s thought see Judith Butler, The Force of Non-violence: An Ethico-political Bind (London and New York: Verso, 2020), pp. 122–41.

63 Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 81–2.

64 Ibid., p. 82.

65 Helmut Illbruck, Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012). See also Philip Shaw, ‘Longing for Home: Robert Hamilton, Nostalgia and the Emotional Life of the Eighteenth-Century Soldier’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.1 (2016), pp. 25–40.

66 Agamben, Idea of Prose, p. 82.

67 For insight into the relations between wartime suffering and social care relevant to this discussion, see Neil Ramsey, Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

68 The Augustan Review 1 (May–December 1815), pp. 343–56 (p. 345).

69 Quarterly Review 14 (October 1815), pp. 201–25 (p. 208).

70 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975/2000), p. 79.

71 ‘The Poet for 1916’. Hull Daily Mail 9360 (5 October 1915), p. 6. In Britain, the war years were marked by a growth of interest in Wordsworth’s patriotic poetry, initiated in 1914 by Frederick Samuel Boas’s essay Wordsworth’s Patriotic Poems and Their Significance Today (London: The English Association, Pamphlet 30, 1914), followed by Arthur H. D. Acland’s The Patriotic Poetry of William Wordsworth: A Selection (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915) and Albert Venn Dicey’s The Statesmanship of Wordsworth: An Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917).

72 Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 245.

73 Wordsworth, ‘I would not strike a flower’, ll. 1–12. ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 312–14.

74 ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 77–9.

75 Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 97. As Bainbridge and Philip Martin have noted, Wordsworth’s poem responds also to Robert Southey’s ‘The Sailor’s Mother’ (1799), a poem that itself responds to the figure of the intermediary in ‘Old Man Travelling’. Bainbridge argues that Wordsworth’s description of the sailor’s mother, ‘Majestic in her person […] And like a Roman matron[…]’ (ll. 6–7), ‘fulfils exactly the function that the “good old cause” of English republicanism will serve in the sonnets’ and that the poem refigures the sailor’s mother ‘for the period of the invasion threat’. It should, however, be noted, that the date of composition situates the poem as a response to the peace, rather than as an expression of that ‘ancient Spirit’ on which England’s defence will depend. See pp. 96–7. Also, Philip Martin, Mad Women in Romantic Writing (Brighton and New York: Harvester Press and St Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 76.

76 ‘The Barberry-Tree’, l. 113. ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 576–9.

77 ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, p. 137.

78 See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Book 5, pp. 116–18.

79 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology at the End of the World (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 146–7.

80 For an account of the fate of the volume’s ‘advertisement’ and the likely decisions that led to the printing of the Virgilian motto on the title page see: ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 26–7.

81 Brian Folker, ‘Wordsworth’s Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War’, ELH 69.1 (Spring 2002), pp. 167–97 (p. 180).

82 ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 271–7.

83 Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 83–9.

84 ‘Calais, August 15th, 1802’, l. 11. ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 158–9.

85 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 51.

86 Eric C. Walker, Marriage, Writing and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen after War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

87 Readings of the Calais sonnets that bear on this discussion include: Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 428–36; Stephen C. Behrendt, ‘Placing the Places in Wordsworth’s 1802 Sonnets’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 35.4 (1994), pp. 641–57; Judith W. Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 54–76; Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, pp. 99–119.

88 ‘To a Friend, Composed near Calais, on the Road leading to Andres, August 7th, 1802’, l. 4; l. 11. ‘It is a beauteous evening calm and free’, l. 12. ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 156–7; pp. 150–1.

89 Judith Page observes how the strong and, for Wordsworth, uncharacteristic, line break at the end of line 8 (‘A sound like thunder – everlastingly./Dear Child! Dear Girl! that walkest with me here […]’, ll. 8–9) ‘divides the child from the divinity of the scene created in the octave’. By means of this formal separation and the allusion to the sacrificial and eschatological significance of ‘Abraham’s bosom’, ‘Wordsworth not only disavows his paternity in this sonnet, but he also symbolically kills the child’. Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women, pp. 64–5.

90 Ibid., pp. 162–3.

91 Morning Post 10774 (16 April 1803), pp. 2–3.

92 ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 157–8.

93 Ibid., p. 150.

94 Ibid., pp. 164–5.

95 Ibid., pp. 166–7.

96 Ibid., p. 170.

97 Ibid., p. 171.

98 Ibid., p. 173.

99 See the transcription and photographic reproduction of MS. D (DC MS. 76) in Home at Grasmere. Part First, Book First, of The Recluse, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 413.

100 The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and Michael C. Jaye (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2007).

101 Spinoza, Ethics, ‘Definition of the Affects’, XII (p. 106).

102 John Wilson, ‘Essays on the Lake School of Poetry. No. 1. Wordsworth’s White Doe of Rylstone’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine III (July 1818), pp. 369–81 (pp. 380–1).

103 Ibid., p. 381.

104 ‘The Force of Prayer; or the Founding of Bolton Priory. A Tradition’, l. 1. The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Kristine Dugas (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 147–9 (p. 147).

105 Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Ketcham, p. 188.

106 P. B. Shelley, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, ll. 57–8; l. 30. Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy (London: Penguin, 2016), pp. 132–3.

107 Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Ketcham, pp. 200–1 (p. 200).

108 ‘Occasioned by the Same Battle. February 1816’, l. 10. Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Ketcham, p. 172.

109 For the idea of the peaceable commonwealth, see Spinoza, Political Treatise: ‘For peace is not just the absence of war, but a virtue which comes from strength of mind: for obedience is the steadfast will to carry out orders enjoined by the general decree of the commonwealth’, p. 62. This notion is explored further in Chapter 4.

110 Ecclesiastical Sketches. Part II. ‘XIV. Dissolution of the Monasteries’, l. 4. Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Geoffrey Jackson (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 171.

111 ‘After Visiting the Field of Waterloo’, l. 14. Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Jackson, p. 361.

112 TWDQ XVI. 269–88 (278).

Chapter 1 Conscripting ‘The Recluse’

1 Among prominent Whigs, opposition to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy was confined to a minority of Foxites and liberals, such as Charles Grey and Henry Holland. Surprisingly, the notable radical member Samuel Whitbread declared cautious support for the restoration. See Rory Muir, Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807–1815 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 328.

2 For discussion of the spectrum of attitudes to Napoleon’s abdication and the ensuing peace see Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 147–58.

3 Monthly Magazine 37 (July 1814), p. 553. Quoted in Semmel, Napoleon and the British, pp. 156–7.

4 The Times 9178 (25 March 1814), p. 3.

5 The Excursion, ed. Bushell, Butler, and Jaye, p. 37. All quotations from The Excursion are from this edition. Wordsworth sought formal permission for the dedication to Lord Lonsdale on 14 June 1814. MY II. 148–9.

6 See Jeffrey N. Cox’s detailed and exacting account of how Shelley, Byron, Hazlitt, and members of the Cockney School responded to The Excursion in William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

7 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71), IV. 574–5.

8 John Finch persuasively argues that these poems make up the 1,300 lines of the long poem that Wordsworth initiated in 1798. See ‘Wordsworth, Coleridge, and “The Recluse,” 1789-1814’, doctoral thesis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1964) and Bicentenary Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 14–15.

9 See ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 309–16.

10 The Prelude, 1789–1799, ed. Parrish.

11 Hazlitt, ‘On the Late War’, 3 April 1814, CWWH VII. 72–6 (72). Hazlitt’s determination to discover hope in the Solitary’s despair foreshadows the redemptive view of failed revolutionary action announced in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Commenting on Benjamin’s idea of historical redemption, Giorgio Agamben writes: ‘What cannot be saved is what was, the past as such. But what is saved is what never was, something new […] in historical redemption what happens in the end is what never took place. This is what is saved’. ‘Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 158.

12 Home at Grasmere, ed. Darlington, l. 169. Unless stated otherwise, quotations from this poem are taken from the MS. B manuscript.

13 The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re-press, 2011), p. 3.

14 The title given to the final draft of the poem. See the transcription and photographic reproduction of MS. D (DC MS. 76) in Home at Grasmere, ed. Darlington, p. 413.

15 Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and ‘The Recluse’ (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 88–9.

16 Note on ‘The Thorn’. ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, p. 351.

17 Kevis Goodman, ‘“Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading’, Studies in Romanticism 49.2 (Summer 2010), pp. 197–227 (p. 220).

18 Clare’s pleasure in listing the objects he perceives in nature can be understood in terms of ontography, a term used in object-oriented ontology to describe the many and varied forms of being and their interconnectedness. For Ian Bogost, ‘Ontographical cataloging hones a virtue: the abandonment of anthropocentric narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail’. See Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 41–2.

19 Book IV. l. 321; l. 774.

20 Derrida’s critique of Levinas is apposite here: ‘according to Levinas, nonviolent language would be a language without the verb to be, that is without predication. Predication is the first violence.’ Writing and Difference, pp. 146–8. The deconstruction of the performative-constitutive distinction is explored by Derrida in ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 307–30.

21 Johnston, Wordsworth and‘The Recluse’, pp. 231–2.

22 Here I am inspired by Theresa Kelley’s persuasive commentary on these lines in Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 44–5.

23 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 130.

24 ‘Among the chief of these reasons [why “apparent tautology” is a beauty of the “highest kind”] is the interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, which are themselves part of the passion.’ Note on ‘The Thorn’. ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, p. 351.

25 Goodman, ‘“Uncertain Disease”: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading’, p. 225.

26 All quotations from the 1808 ‘Recluse’ poems are taken from ‘The Tuft of Primroses’, with Other Late Poems for ‘The Recluse’, ed. Joseph F. Kishel (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1986).

27 Goethe’s response to Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modifications of Clouds (1804) is quoted by Mary Jacobus in ‘Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible’, in Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2012), p. 25.

28 ‘To the Clouds’ (1842), ll. 87–94. ‘The Tuft of Primroses’, ed. Kishel, pp. 63–71.

29 ll. 1601–9; passim. The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Dugas.

30 James A. Butler, pre-empting Johnstone’s reading of the poem as a litany of architectural ruins in Wordsworth and ‘The Recluse’ (pp. 243–60), writes: ‘what was “Perfect Contentment, Unity entire” in Home at Grasmere is the victim of “an unrelenting doom” in The Tuft of Primroses’; the poem ‘records a decay in the physical environment of Grasmere’ that is at odds with the earlier poem’s confident assertions of rural stability. ‘Wordsworth’s “Tuft of Primroses”: An “Unrelenting Doom”’. Studies in Romanticism 14.3 (Summer 1973), pp. 237–48 (p. 244). My reading of the poem’s pessimistic account of the Vale differs from Butler’s in the extent to which, along with Johnston, I view the drive towards decay and displacement as no less pervasive in ‘Home at Grasmere’.

31 Jessica Fay, Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 113.

32 Ibid., p. 114.

33 Mary Moorman suggests that Wordsworth may have read St Basil’s letters in Latin while staying with his brother Christopher in Lambeth in March 1808. William Wordsworth: A Biography. The Later Years, 1803–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 133. However, as Joseph Kishel points out, it is more likely that Wordsworth adapted his account of Basil’s biography from William Cave’s Apostolici: or, the History of the Lives, Acts, Death, and Martyrdoms of Those Who Were Contemporary with or Immediately Succeeded the Apostles […] (London: 1716), a copy of which was kept at Rydal Mount. See ‘The Tuft of Primroses’, ed. Kishel, p. 21, and Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 44. See also Fay, Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance, p. 117.

34 Cave, Apostolici, p. 471.

35 Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 130.

36 Cave, Apostolici, p. 503.

37 Ibid.

38 Quotations taken from Descriptive Sketches, ed. Eric Birdsall (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1984).

39 Tellingly, Allan Bank was identified by Wordsworth, in a letter to William Sharp dating from February 1805, with the very forces of despoilation that the poem laments: a ‘temple of abomination’ that will ‘entirely destroy’ the village’s ‘character of simplicity and seclusion’ (EY 534).

40 See Richard Gravil, ‘Wordsworth as Partisan’, in Concerning the Convention of Cintra. A Critical Edition, ed. Richard Gravil and W. J. B. Owen (Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009), pp. 17–19, and the essays by David Bromwich, Timothy Michael, and Patrick Vincent in this collection: ‘Vicarious Feeling: Spanish Independence, English Liberty’, pp. 34–42; ‘The State of Knowledge in “The Convention of Cintra”’, pp. 43–52; ‘Sleep or Death? Republicanism in “The Convention of Cintra”’, pp. 53–62. For the background to this debate see: Gordon Kent Thomas, Wordsworth’s Dirge and Promise: Napoleon, Wellington and the Convention of Cintra (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), Michael H. Friedman, The Making of a Tory Humanist: William Wordsworth and the Idea of Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, pp. 42–4, and Deirdre Coleman, ‘Re-living Jacobinism: Wordsworth and the Convention of Cintra’, The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989), pp. 144–61.

41 Quotations from Concerning the Convention of Cintra are taken from William Wordsworth, Concerning the Convention of Cintra. A Critical Edition, ed. Gravil and Owen, the text for which is derived from Prose, I. 220–457. References are to line numbers in the HEB edition.

42 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 122.

43 For discussion of Aristotle’s conception of energeia see Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 60–7.

44 ‘Preface’ to Poems, in Two Volumes (1815). Prose III. 31.

45 Ibid., p. 37.

46 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 53.

47 See ‘The State of Knowledge in “The Convention of Cintra”’, especially pp. 50–2.

48 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800). Prose I. 128.

49 For further discussion of Wordsworth’s strained attempts to discriminate between political power and civic virtue in his analysis of the ‘military spirit’ see Folker, ‘Wordsworth’s Visionary Imagination: Democracy and War’, pp. 194–6.

50 Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, pp. 140–1.

51 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1980), p. 24.

52 Adam Ferguson, Lecture 89, 9 April 1776. Quoted by David Kettler in his survey of Ferguson’s lecture notes in ‘Political Education for Empire and Revolution’, in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress, and Human Nature, ed. Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 87–115 (pp. 108–9).

53 Sally Bushell, Re-reading ‘The Excursion’: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 88. Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories, trans. Roger Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 4.

54 Mary Favret writes movingly of the relationship between Margaret and the Solitary, observing how the characters’ experience of spatial and temporal precarity responds to ‘wartime as a particular and recurrent (retraceable) geopolitical condition, the very ground of an experience that is nevertheless always in some sense removed, re-moved’. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 29.

55 Spinoza, Ethics, III, Definition XII, p. 106.

56 Meditating on the advent of a ‘World of Justice’, Meillassoux posits that the hope for such a world enables the ‘possibility that it could arise as if this hope were the source of it’, noting further that the ‘as if’ of justice, like the ‘as if’ of the Kant’s idea of the beautiful, is no longer to be conceived ‘as if the divine had made it happen’ but ‘as if human hope had made it happen’. From L’Inexistence divine’, translated by Graham Harman. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 269; p. 163.

57 Underlying this reading is Agamben’s account of a post iudicium world in which life is accepted as ‘irreparable’ and no longer in need of salvation. In this world without remedy, being is informed by ‘the world as it is’ rather than oriented towards a realm of transcendental plenitude with which it can never coincide. See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 89–90.

58 Home at Grasmere, ed. Darlington, pp. 187–99.

59 DC MS. 48. The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols. (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), II. 427.

60 On Wordsworth’s interest in and developing understanding of the idea of the commonwealth, see John Rieder, Wordsworth’s Counterrevolutionary Turn: Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790s (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), pp. 46–52. See also Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority, pp. 163–8.

61 Francis Jeffrey, ‘Review of The Excursion’, Edinburgh Review 24.47 (November 1814), pp. 1–30 (p. 1); John Herman Merivale, ‘Review of The Excursion’, Monthly Review 76 (February 1815), pp. 123–36 (pp. 128–9).

62 Charles Lamb, ‘Review of The Excursion; a Poem. By William Wordsworth’. Quarterly Review 12 (October 1814), pp. 100–11 (p. 105).

63 For detailed commentary on the biblical, Miltonic, and self-referential allusions in this speech, see Brandon Chao-Chi Yen, ‘The Excursion’ and Wordsworth’s Iconography (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), pp. 65–6.

64 Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth, 9 August 1814. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs Jnr, 3 vols. (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), III. 95–9.

65 Hazlitt, taking a less sympathetic view of the celebrations, observes in his review of The Excursion that Wordsworth’s ‘mind is […] coeval with the primary forms of things’, pointing out that ‘Every one wishes to get rid of the booths and bridges in the Park, in order to have a view of the ground and water again’. CWWH XIX. 10n. For further discussion of the peace celebrations see Cox, Romanticism in the Shadow of War, pp. 161–4.

Chapter 2 Peace Out of Time: The White Doe of Rylstone

1 ‘We do not think [the poem] his best. The narrative part will be most attentively pursued by readers, and it does not seem to be most successfully accomplished.’ [John Scott], ‘Mr. Wordsworth’s Poems’, Champion 129 (25 June 1815), pp. 205–6 (p. 205). As a measure of the uncertainty and rapidity of the times, Scott noted the publication of The White Doe on 4 June. On 11 June, the Champion carried a three-column report from Paris on Napoleon’s restoration. A week later, on the day of the Battle of Waterloo, the paper announced that Napoleon was ‘generally believed to have left Paris, and to have joined his troops: the awful blow may therefore be hourly expected’. See Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 273.

2 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Griggs. III. 112.

3 The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Marrs. III. 148.

4 Alan Forrest notes that among the measures supported by Parliament to substantiate Waterloo as a locus for national unity was the Church Building Act of 1818, which resulted in some 600 ‘Waterloo Churches’, raised in thanks to the glory of God for his help in defeating the Usurper. ‘Contrasting Memories: Remembering Waterloo in France and Britain’, War, Demobilization and Memory: The Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions, ed. Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann, and Michael Rowe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 353–70 (p. 367).

5 John Wilson, ‘Essays on the Lake School of Poetry. No. 1. Wordsworth’s The White Doe of Rylstone’, p. 369.

6 Ibid., p. 370.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 380.

9 Ibid., p. 381.

10 ‘Occasioned by the Same Battle. February 1816’, l. 10. Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Ketcham, p. 172.

11 Peter J. Manning, ‘The White Doe of Rylstone, The Convention of Cintra, and the History of a Career’, chapter 8 of Reading Romantics: Text and Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 165–94. See also chapter 9 in this study, ‘Tales and Politics: The Corsair, Lara, and The White Doe of Rylstone’, pp. 195–216. As Manning suggests, Wordsworth’s defence of the poem’s ‘pure and lofty Imagination’ (MY II. 276) may also have been prompted by resentment towards the success of Byron’s cheaper and far more popular Corsair.

12 The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Curtis, pp. 102–3.

13 Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London, 1851), II. 313.

14 Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Ketcham, pp. 147–52.

15 Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women, pp. 79–84.

16 Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Ketcham, pp. 151–2. For a suggestive reading of the circumstances that led to the revision of Laodamia’s fate, see John Barrell, ‘“Laodamia” and the Moaning of Mary’, Textual Practice 10.3 (1996), pp. 449–77.

17 Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women, p. 100.

18 Quotations from The White Doe, referenced by canto followed by line number(s), are from The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Dugas.

19 Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, p. 154.

20 Jessica Fay has made a persuasive case for linking The White Doe to Wordsworth’s efforts, in the ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’, to delineate the co-operative relationship between poet and reader. See chapter 1, ‘Wordsworth’s Creation of Taste’ in Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance, pp. 28–62.

21 Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814, p. 330.

22 Ibid., p. 329.

23 Text taken from The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Dugas, pp. 78–80.

24 Ibid., p. 57.

25 Ibid., p. 58.

26 Fay provides an illuminating reading of how the Spenserian influences acknowledged in ‘In trellis’d shed’ are developed in The White Doe. See Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance, pp. 32–53.

27 ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 133–9.

28 ‘Weak is the will of Man’, l. 9. The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Dugas, p. 76.

29 Earlier in the poem, the doe is likened to a ship ‘In sunshine sailing far away […] that hath the plain/Of ocean for her own domain’ (ll. 59–66), a smile that, according to Theresa Kelley, responds to Milton’s comparison of Satan to the image of a fleet when seen from a distance (‘So seem’d/Far off the flying fiend’; Paradise Lost, II. ll. 642–3). Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, p. 153. In the 1815 Preface, Wordsworth uses this comparison as illustration of the power of the Imagination. Here, however, the doe’s mastery of the ocean yields to an image of loss that, in its self-conscious artistry, implies that Imagination may yet find accord with the powerless, the marginalised, and the dead.

30 Note on ‘The Thorn’. ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, p. 351.

31 Fay, for example, follows Hartman’s account of Wordsworth’s ‘Miltonic’ understanding of the ‘difference between the Protestant and the Catholic imagination’ (Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814, p. 326) by claiming that in The White Doe Wordsworth ‘favours the Protestant model by which truth is reached through individual spiritual effort and, at the same time, denounces the Catholic ritual practices of the rebels and their superstitious attachment to external symbols such as the banner’. Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance, p. 42.

32 On 5 May 1825, in a letter to Lord Lowther, Wordsworth declared his opposition to the Catholic Relief Bill. See LY II. 347–8 and LY I. 63. In the same month, writing to Sir George Beaumont, he expressed an admiration for the Gospel of St John that, according to Jeffrey Robinson (citing Edith Batho), ‘indicates his preference for the Incarnation (Catholic) over that of the Atonement (Protestant) in ethical and by extension poetic thinking’. See LY II. 351 and Robinson, Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1825–1833, p. 246.

33 21 January 1824. LY I. 244–5.

34 On doctrinal responses to monastic ruins see Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990) and Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

35 John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther. A Poem, in Three Parts, l. 1. The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 352–421 (p. 355).

36 Dating from the period when composition on The White Doe began, ‘Song, at the Feast of Brougham Castle’, first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), and then classed among ‘Poems of the Imagination’ from 1815 onwards, the ‘Song’, like The White Doe, takes inspiration from Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s account of the life of Henry Lord Clifford in The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven (London, 1805). Wordsworth notes that ‘Henry, the subject of the poem, was deprived of his estate and honours’ by the House of York as an act of revenge for his father’s role in the slaughter of the Earl of Rutland, Son of the Duke of York, in the aftermath of the Battle of Wakefield. The poem, which frames a purported translation of a minstrel’s song (ll. 5–88), recounts Henry Clifford’s years of exile when, after twenty-four years spent living as a shepherd, he became ‘softened’, and Other Poems, 1800-1807’ into feeling, sooth’d, and tamed’ (l. 164). ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 259–64. Richard Gravil observes that the ‘Song’, which shares the ‘twice-told’ technique of ‘Hart-leap Well’ and ‘The Thorn’, sets the minstrel’s martial enthusiasm against a concluding sequence of reflective lyricism. Clifford thus becomes the embodiment of military virtue, a happy warrior who, following the restoration of his estates and honours, would go on to distinguish himself at Flodden while yet sustaining ‘in lofty place/The wisdom which adversity had bred’ (ll. 171–2). Like The White Doe, the poem provides a lesson in how the savage passions that lead to sectarian conflict can be tempered by pastoral virtue. See Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, pp. 267–73.

37 Tomko argues convincingly that the melding of nature and history in England’s Catholic ruins is envisaged by Wordsworth as ‘a fountainhead to revitalize the national community’, anticipating the Tractarian call for a synthesis of Protestant and Catholic theology in Anglican worship. British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829, p. 18. For a reading sympathetic to Wordsworth’s support for the repurposing of Catholic monastic practices see Tonya Moutray, ‘Remodelling Catholic Ruins in William Wordsworth’s Poetry’, European Romantic Review 22.6 (2011), pp. 819–31. See also Fay, Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance, pp. 23–5.

38 For a fuller account of how the poem deploys the feminine category of the beautiful as a corrective to the masculine investment in ‘sublime suffering and guilt’, see Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, pp. 150–6 (p. 151).

39 Transcription of MS. 61, 20^v. The White Doe of Rylstone, ed. Dugas, p. 365.

40 The story of how ‘the boy of Egremond’ met his death in the rocky channel called the Strid in the woods between Bolton and Barden is recounted by Whitaker in The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven.

41 For a reading of the doe’s role as chronicler of historical trauma, see Barbara Gates, ‘Wordsworth’s Symbolic White Doe: “The Power of History in the Mind”’, Criticism 17.3 (1975), pp. 234–45.

42 Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 225–6.

43 The question of whether non-human life can participate in a Levinasian face-to-face encounter, and therefore enter an ethical relationship with the human, is debated by Jacques Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louse Mallett, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 105–18.

44 Walter Benjamin’s thinking on the relations between language, nature, and sadness is relevant to this reading. In the essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, Benjamin speculates that ‘all nature would begin to lament if it were endowed with language’. As the conditional sentence implies, were nature able to use language it would express only the sorrow over its inherent linguistic loss. One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London and New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 115–36 (p. 113).

45 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 157.

46 Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women, p. 96.

47 For Levinas, ‘the contrariety that permits its terms to remain absolutely other is the feminine’. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (and Additional Essays), trans. R. A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1986), p. 85.

48 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. Osmaston (London: G. Bell, 1920), III. 16–17. For Derrida, Hegel’s commentary on the affective power of music ‘demonstrates very well the strange privilege of sound in idealization, the production of the concept and the self-presence of the subject’. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 12.

49 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. xvii–xviii.

Chapter 3 Thanksgiving after War

1 Wordsworth dined with Byron, Rogers, and Lamb in London on the evening of the Battle of Waterloo. A pencil memorandum by Charles Wordsworth records that ‘Ld B [?argued] & seemed to wish that Buonaparte wd be victorious. My Uncle on the Contrary maintained He had no chance whatever if the allies kept together.’ Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 498–9.

2 Prelude, Book III, ll. 279–80. The Thirteen-Book ‘Prelude’, ed. Reed.

3 Spenser’s role in Wordsworth’s post-war self-fashioning is examined in Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 153–64.

4 Eight years after the volume’s publication, only 164 copies had found purchasers. Duncan Wu notes that in 1834, 220 copies ‘continued to gather dust in its publisher’s warehouse’. ‘Wordsworthian Carnage’, Essays in Criticism 66.3 (July 2016), pp. 341–59 (p. 342).

5 See Wu, ‘Wordsworthian Carnage’; Richard Gravil, ‘A “Hideous Rout”: Wordsworth’s “Thanksgiving Ode” in Context’, The Coleridge Bulletin 46 (Winter 2015), pp. 59–78; Philip Shaw, ‘On War: De Quincey’s Martial Sublime’, Romanticism 19.1 (2013), pp. 19–30.

6 Unless noted otherwise, quotations from the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ and other poems printed in the Thanksgiving volume are taken from Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Ketcham.

7 For an influential reading of this passage see Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, pp. 176–7.

8 Bob Tennant notes: ‘Purely in the numbers of words published in 1815–16, sermons constitute the largest nonjournalistic literary genre about the Battle of Waterloo’. ‘On the Good Name of the Dead: Peace, Liberty, and Empire in Robert Morehead’s Waterloo Sermon’, Religion in the Age of Enlightenment 1 (2009), pp. 251–77 (p. 251).

9 A FORM OF PRAYER, TO BE USED in All Churches and Chapels […] upon Friday the Nineteenth of April next, being the Day appointed by Proclamation for a General FAST and Humiliation Before Almighty God […] By His Majesty’s Special Command (London, 1793), title page. Material in this and the following section has been adapted from ‘Wordsworth, Waterloo, and Sacrifice’, in Sacrifice and Modern War Literature, ed. Alex Houen and Jan-Melissa Schramm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 20–48.

10 For a detailed account of Wordsworth’s publishing activities in this year see Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), pp. 334–40.

11 A FORM OF PRAYER […], p. 6.

12 ll. 263–74. The Thirteen-Book ‘Prelude’, ed. Reed. II. 274.

13 Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, p. 388.

14 A FORM OF PRAYER AND THANKSGIVING TO ALMIGHTY GOD; TO BE USED […] on Thursday the Eighteenth of January, Being the Day appointed by Proclamation for a General THANKSGIVING to Almighty God […] (London, 1816), p. 10.

15 Waterloo is remembered for its high casualty rate yet, as Tennant remarks, ‘the proportion of Anglo-Allied casualties was not unusually heavy – perhaps 35 percent of British personnel were killed or wounded’. ‘On the Good Name of the Dead’, p. 257.

16 ‘NO. I’. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register [London, England] 24 June 1815: n.p. 19th Century British Newspapers. Web. Accessed 8 February 2022.

17 ‘LONDON’. Morning Post [London, England] 11 July 1815: n.p. 19th Century British Newspapers. Web. Accessed 21 April 2022.

18 ‘Caledonian Mercury’. Caledonian Mercury [Edinburgh, Scotland] 26 June 1815: n.p. 19th Century British Newspapers. Web. Accessed 8 February 2022.

19 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 8. See also René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 81–4 and p. 249. For a subtle and far-reaching reading of the soldier as Girardian scapegoat see Laura Wittman, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 98–9.

20 Neil Ramsey, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 94.

21 Henry Cotes, Another Mite for Waterloo. A Sermon, Preached in the Parish Church of Bedlington, in the County of Durham, on Sunday, the Twentieth of August, 1815 (Newcastle, 1815), p. 13.

22 For further detail see Tennant, ‘On the Good Name of the Dead’, pp. 258–66.

23 Daniell Mathias, Waterloo Subscription. A Sermon, to Recommend the Same, Preached at St. Mary’s Church, Whitechapel, August 13, 1815 (London, 1815), p. 17. Subsequent references in parentheses.

24 Peter Roe, A Sermon Preached in the Episcopal Chapel of Harrogate, Sunday, July the 30th, 1815, in Behalf of the Sufferers of the Battle of Waterloo (Knaresbrough, 1815), p. 28.

25 Robert Morehead, On the Good Name of the Dead, in The Sunday Library; or, the Protestant’s Manual for the Sabbath-Day, 6 vols. (London, 1831), VI. 198–207 (206–7). Subsequent references in parentheses.

26 A FORM OF PRAYER AND THANKSGIVING TO ALMIGHTY GOD, p. 10.

27 William Howley, A Sermon Preached on Thursday, January 18, 1816, Being the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving […] (London, 1816), p. 12. Subsequent references in parentheses.

28 Archibald Allison, Discourse Preached in the Episcopal Chapel, Cowgate, Edinburgh, Jan, 18, 1816 […] (Edinburgh, 1816), pp. 23–5; passim.

29 The Critical Review 5.5 (November 1815), pp. 523–8 (p. 523). Subsequent references in parentheses.

30 Thomas Chalmers, Thoughts on Universal Peace: A Sermon, Delivered on Thursday, January 18, 1816 […] (Glasgow, 1816), p. 28, p. 30.

31 Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination, pp. 140–64. See also Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842, pp. 319–46.

32 Latin Vulgate (Clementine). Web. Accessed 8 February 2022.

33 House of Commons Debates, 29 June 1815. Web. Accessed 8 February 2022.

34 Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London: Profile Books, 2010), pp. 361–2.

35 ‘The Bard, whose soul is meek as dawning day’, l. 11.

36 House of Commons Debates, 23 June 1815. Web. Accessed 8 February 2022.

37 Quotations from The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

38 See Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, pp. 54–94.

39 That an encounter with the abject matter of war might have its own imaginative appeal is seen in the efforts of some ecclesiastics to persuade their congregations to meditate on the sufferings of dead and wounded soldiers. In a few cases the appeal to ‘Imagination’ in these sermons runs the risk of supplanting the drive towards exultation with a morbid fixation on death and ruin. See, for example, Edward Patteson, A Sermon Delivered in the Parish Church of Richmond in Surrey, on Sunday the 30th Day of July 1815 […] (London, 1815): ‘Remembering for what purposes we are endued with the powers of imagination […] let us keep a steadfast eye on the horrors attendant and consequent upon war, until we can appreciate the miseries of those, who actually groan under them’, p. 23.

40 See Edmund Burke, Revolutionary Writings, ed. Iain Hampshire-Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 101.

41 Gravil, Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode in Context, pp. 17–18.

42 Peter Bell the Third, ll. 634–40. Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Donovan and Duffy, p. 393.

43 Don Juan, Canto VIII, stanza 9. ll. 70–2. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), V. 367.

44 Ibid., 732.

45 The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: De Capo Press, 1965), pp. 371–3.

46 ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, ll. 106–9. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940–49), III. 155.

47 Samuel Humfrays, The Sword Is the Lord’s. A Sermon Preached in the Parish-Church of Daventry, January 19th 1794 […] (Northampton, 1794), p. 13.

48 As quoted in Gravil, Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode in Context, p. 18.

49 Ibid., pp. 200–1.

50 Ibid., pp. 201–6.

51 Don Juan, Canto VIII, stanza 9. ll. 70–2. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. McGann and Weller, V. 367.

52 Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, p. 390.

53 Walker, Marriage, Writing and Romanticism, pp. 73–8.

54 Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1819–1850, ed. Jackson, p. 361.

55 Horace, ‘Satire 1’, 3. ll. 107–8. Horace: Satires, p. 40.

56 Text taken from Shorter Poems, 1807–1822, ed. Ketcham, pp. 142–51.

57 The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), II. 464. This incident is discussed by John Barrell in ‘“Laodamia” and the Moaning of Mary’, Textual Practice 10.3 (1996), pp. 449–77.

58 The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, II, p. 464.

59 Quotations from Shorter Poems, 1807–1822, ed. Ketcham, pp. 213–21.

60 Walker, Marriage, Writing and Romanticism, p. 80. Walker quotes from Thomas North’s 1579 translation that Wordsworth used.

61 As quoted in MY II. 355.

Chapter 4 ‘Returning, Like a Ghost Unlaid’: Peter Bell and The Waggoner

1 ‘IV. Near the Spring of the Hermitage’, ll. 1–4. Quotations from the 1818 inscriptions taken from Shorter Poems, 1807–1822, ed. Ketcham, p. 270.

2 William Wordsworth, The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia and Other Poems. To Which Is Annexed, a Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England (London, 1820), pp. 164–72.

3 l. 13. Shorter Poems, 1807–1822, ed. Ketcham, p. 279.

4 ‘Immortality’ ode, ll. 149–50. ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 269–77.

5 Shorter Poems, 1807–1822, ed. Ketcham, pp. 279–80.

6 Ibid., p. 277.

7 ‘Composed during One of the Most Awful of the Late Storms’, l. 12 and l. 1. Shorter Poems, 1807–1822, ed. Ketcham, p. 280.

8 Ibid., pp. 281–2.

9 Fulford, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815–1845, p. 186.

10 See Jeffrey N. Cox, William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic; Fulford, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815–1845, pp. 177–92.

11 Cox, William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic, p. 110.

12 For a review representative of the hostility directed towards Peter Bell, see The Monthly Review 89 (August 1819), pp. 419–22: ‘All past, present, and (probably) future performances, by the same author, must sink into nothing before Peter Bell. No lisping ever more distinctly lisped than the versification of this poem; and no folly was ever more foolishly boasted than that of the writer, whether in style or subject-matter’, p. 419.

13 The Letters of Sara Hutchinson, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 154.

14 Noted in MY II. 543.

15 The Examiner 592 (2 May 1819), pp. 282–3.

16 ‘To Kosciusko, Who Never Fought Either for Buonaparte or the Allies’, l. 11. From Leigh Hunt, Foliage; or, Poems Original and Translated (London, 1818), p. 58.

17 Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, ed. Lawrence Houston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Columbia Press, 1956), p. 23.

18 The Examiner 592 (2 May 1819), p. 282.

19 Peter Bell, l. 106. This reference and all subsequent references to the poem are taken from William Wordsworth, Peter Bell, ed. John E. Jordan (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985).

20 Cox, William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic, p. 124.

21 The Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Politics etc 119 (1 May 1819), pp. 273–6 (p. 275).

22 The Edinburgh Monthly Review 2 (July–December 1819), pp. 654–61 (pp. 656–7).

23 Paul H. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 106–7.

24 Bernard Groom, The Unity of Wordsworth’s Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 128.

25 ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798), l. 583. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 147–66.

26 Groom, The Unity of Wordsworth’s Poetry, p. 130.

27 The Eclectic Review 12 (July–December 1819), pp. 62–76 (p. 63).

28 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, p. 12.

29 The Theatrical Inquisitor, or, Monthly Mirror 14 (January–June 1819), pp. 447–9 (p. 447).

30 The Eclectic Review 12 (July–December 1819), p. 62.

31 ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 64–7.

32 Kant, The Critique of Judgement, p. 108.

33 The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal 90 (September–December 1819), pp. 36–40 (p. 37).

34 The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal 89 (May–August 1819), pp. 309–21 (p. 314).

35 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, l. 237; Don Juan, Canto I, stanza 90. l. 720. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. McGann and Weller, V.

36 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, l. 236, ll. 245–6.

37 Don Juan, Canto I, stanza 4. l. 28.

38 The British Critic 11 (January–June 1819), pp. 464–79 (p. 465).

39 MS 1. l. 752. William Wordsworth, Benjamin the Waggoner, ed. Paul F. Betz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 82. Quotations from the poem are taken from this edition.

40 MS 1. l. 500. Benjamin the Waggoner, ed. Betz, p. 82. See Betz’s introduction: pp. 9–10.

41 Ibid., pp. 23–4.

42 John Williams, William Wordsworth (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), p. 118.

43 Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years, p. 306.

44 In the A-B Stage Book 1, lines 186–220, Wordsworth conjures with the idea of an epic poem recounting, variously, the decline of the Roman empire and the persistence of ‘Liberty’ (l. 197) in the subsequent course of European history. The Thirteen-Book ‘Prelude’, ed. Reed, I. 111–12.

45 ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, l. 6. Gray, Collins and Goldsmith: The Complete Poems, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 103–41 (p. 119).

46 See Betz’s comments in the ‘Introduction’ to Benjamin the Waggoner, ed. Betz, p. 4.

47 Williams, William Wordsworth, p. 115.

48 Entry from Quillinan’s notebook dated 1836. Quoted in Benjamin the Waggoner, ed. Betz, p. 29.

49 Letter to Wordsworth, 7 June 1819. The Letters of Charles Lamb, to Which Are Added Those of His Sister Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1935), II. 249.

50 Anya Taylor, Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780–1830 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), p. 52.

51 As noted by Betz. Benjamin the Waggoner, ed. Betz, p. 21.

52 Ibid., p. 22.

53 Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1981), pp. 117–18.

54 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 21.

55 John Williams, Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 171.

56 For an informed account of the measures adopted by discharged seamen to survive in this period see Simon Houfe, ‘Poor Jack: The Mendicant Sailors of Regency London’, Country Life (3 May 1979), pp. 1381–2.

57 Williams, Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics, p. 172.

58 Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, pp. 147–8.

59 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 136.

60 Ibid., p. 139.

61 Ibid., p. 23.

62 The long history idea of war as a marker of authenticity is explored by Yuval Noah Harari in The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

63 Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, p. 146.

64 Kant, Critique of Judgement, p. 98.

65 ‘There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye Cliffs’, l. 10. ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 139–40.

66 Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Ketcham, p. 43.

67 Commenting on the idea that ‘peace is not just the absence of war, but a virtue [.] enjoined by the general decree of the commonwealth’ (Spinoza, Political Treatise, p. 62), Willi Goetschel argues that for Spinoza, the active pursuit of peace is coeval with the principle of ‘autonomous self-determination’ that is central to the res publica. Spinoza’s Modernity: Medelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 78. In recent years, the notion of an autonomous, self-regulating multitude has been adapted by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt as a counterforce to ‘global civil war’. See Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 100.

68 Spinoza, Political Treatise, p. 62.

69 As previously noted, Negri, in seeking to break the ‘monstrous hybridization of peace and war’, argues that it is not peace but ‘the constituent cooperation of singular multitudes that creates the common existence of the world’. Empire and Beyond, p. 61.

Chapter 5 Violent Waters: The River Duddon and Ecclesiastical Sketches

1 The Letters of Mary Wordsworth, 1800–1855, ed. Mary Elizabeth Burton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), pp. 55–6. Important historical studies of Peterloo include Donald Read, Peterloo: ‘The Massacre’ and Its Background (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), Robert Walmsley, Peterloo: The Case Reopened (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), and the two special issues of the Manchester Region History Review: Peterloo Special Edition 3.1 (1989) and Return to Peterloo, ed. Robert Poole, 23 (2012). The cultural significance of Peterloo is examined by Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), and Anthony Jarrells, Britain’s Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). See also Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). This chapter draws on material initially presented in ‘Wordsworth after Peterloo: The Persistence of War in The River Duddon … and Other Poems’, in Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-Making during the Romantic Era, ed. Michael Demson and Regina Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 250–71.

2 The next day the party was joined by a Manchester magistrate who was ‘most agreeable […] quite a gentleman of the right sort of principles. His presence cheered up Wm.’ The Letters of Mary Wordsworth, 1800–1855, ed. Burton, p. 56.

3 Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Jackson, p. 361. All quotations from The River Duddon sonnet sequence are taken from this edition.

4 For further discussion of battlefield tourism, with a focus on Waterloo, see Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination, pp. 67–82.

5 Peterloo Massacre, Containing a Faithful Narrative of the Events Which Preceded, Accompanied and Followed the Fatal Sixteenth of August 1819 […] Edited by an Observer (Manchester, 1819), p. 124. Anne Jones of Windmill Street informed the inquest that she had seen ‘the cavalry cutting and slashing men on the way to the hustings. After getting to the hustings, they turned their horses round, and rode over the people in all directions, still cutting and slashing […] One of the special constables came into my house, and with great triumph exclaimed, “This is Waterloo for you, – This is Waterloo”’, p. 178.

6 The Letters of Mary Wordsworth, ed. Burton, p. 55.

7 Ibid.

8 Archibald Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester Intended to Illustrate the Progress of Public Opinion from 1792 to 1832 (London, 1851), p. 159.

9 Book VI, l. 558. The Thirteen-Book ‘Prelude’, ed. Reed, p. 190.

10 Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 152.

11 Quotations from Peter Bell, ed. Jordan, l. 27.

12 Wordsworth, The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets, preliminary matter.

13 Ibid., endpapers.

14 For further discussion of this ‘most fugitive’ publication see Walker, Marriage, Writing and Romanticism, pp. 66–7 (p. 66), and Eric C. Walker, ‘Wordsworth’s “Third Volume” and the Collected Editions, 1815–20’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 80 (1986), pp. 437–53. See also Brian R. Bates, Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), chapter 7: ‘The River Duddon Volume and Wordsworth’s Canonical Assent’, pp. 141–61, and Jalal Uddin Khan, ‘Publication and Reception of Wordsworth’s The River Duddon Volume’, Modern Language Studies 32.2 (Autumn 2002), pp. 45–67.

15 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), II. 195–6. For discussion of the influence of ‘the Warton school’ on the Duddon sonnets see David Fairer, Organising Poetry, pp. 95–117, and A. Harris Fairbanks, ‘“Dear Native Brook”: Coleridge, Bowles, and Thomas Warton, the Younger’, The Wordsworth Circle 6.4 (Autumn 1975), pp. 313–15.

16 ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 142–3.

17 Edward W. Said, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 12. For a reading of style in late romanticism relevant to this discussion, see Ben Hutchinson, Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

18 Julia S. Carlson, ‘Charting the Stream of Time: William Wordsworth and Joseph Priestley’. Conference paper delivered at ‘After Wordsworth: Water, Writing’. University of Leicester, 8 January 2021.

19 Horace, Ode 3.29, ‘To Maecenas’. Odes and Epodes, ed. Niall Rudd, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 33 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 214.

20 Joseph Priestley, A Description of a Chart of Biography; with a Catalogue of All the Names Inserted in It, and the Dates Annexed to Them, 7th edn. (London, 1778), p. 6, p. 24. For discussion of Priestley and Strass’s time charts, see Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), pp. 116–47; passim. See also Alan Liu, Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 176–84.

21 Joseph Priestley, A Description of a New Chart of History, Containing a View of the Principal Revolutions of Empire, That Have Taken Place in the World, 4th edn. (London, 1777), pp. 15–19; passim.

22 Horace, Epistle 2.43. Epistles, Satires and Ars Poetica, trans. H. B. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, issue 194, vol. 2 of Horace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 265. Wordsworth owned an 1807 edition of Philip Francis’s 1746 translation, which renders the line as ‘Still glides the River, and will ever glide’. A Poetical Translation of the Works of Horace […] by Philip Francis D. D. A New Edition, with Additional Notes, by Edward Du Bois, 4 vols. (London, 1807), IV. 27.

23 Friedrich Strass, Descriptive Guide to the Stream of Time; or, General Outline of Universal History, Chronology, and Biography, at One View, trans. William Bell, 4th edn. (London, 1817), p. 9.

24 Ibid., pp. 34–5.

25 The relations between the Duddon sequence and the formation of national identity are explored by Benjamin Kim in ‘Generating a National Sublime: Wordsworth’s “The River Duddon” and “The Guide to the Lakes”’, Studies in Romanticism 45.1 (Spring 2006), pp. 49–75. See also James M. Garrett, Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), chapter 5: ‘The River Duddon Sonnets and the Writing of the Nation’, pp. 125–48, and Bates, Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections.

26 The River Duddon, Sonnet I, l. 9. Ecclesiastical Sketches, Part 1, ‘I. Introduction’, l. 2. Ecclesiastical Sketches, Part 3, ‘XXVIII. Conclusion’, ll. 13–14. Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820, ‘Sonnet. Local Recollections on the Heights near Hockheim’, l. 14. Quotations from Ecclesiastical Sketches and Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820 are taken from Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, ed. Jackson. Andrew Raven comments astutely on how the Duddon sequence ‘seeks to render explicit Wordsworth’s Christian loyalty, augmenting the spiritual power of the poem’s final stages with a vision of Duddon Valley’s connectedness to the British nation in its entirety’. See Andrew Raven, ‘“Now Expands Majestic Duddon”: Wordsworth’s Textual Expansion of the “The River Duddon” and Its Theological Implications’, The Wordsworth Circle 51.1 (Winter 2020), pp. 20–34 (p. 33).

27 Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 61. Significant critical responses to McGann’s original 1979 article ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’ include Paul H. Fry’s ‘History, Existence, and “To Autumn”’, Studies in Romanticism 25.2 (Summer 1986), pp. 211–19, and Nicholas Roe, ‘Keats’s Commonwealth’, in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 194–211. See also the essays in this volume by Vincent Newey, Michael O’Neill, and Theresa M. Kelley.

28 Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, p. 48.

29 James Chandler makes brief mention of Wordsworth’s response to Peterloo in England in 1819, p. 10. More recently, Brian R. Bates has pointed out that the dramatic shift from negative to positive appraisals of Wordsworth’s poetry in the wake of Peterloo corresponds with George Canning’s bold proclamation that ‘November 1819 and March 1820 effectively belonged to different “epochs” in the nation’s history’. See Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections, pp. 143–4.

30 Text taken from Shorter Poems, ed. Ketcham, pp. 283–4.

31 See Roe, ‘Keats’s Commonwealth’, pp. 207–9.

32 Wordsworth, The River Duddon, p. 249.

33 ‘Upon the Same Occasion’, l. 30. Text taken from Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, ed. Ketcham, pp. 284–6.

34 MS of ‘Upon the Same Occasion’. Shorter Poems, ed. Ketcham, p. 285.

35 In Canto 1 of Don Juan Byron attacks Wordsworth as a ‘shabby’ civil servant (stanza 6. l. 47), as ‘unintelligible’ (stanza 90. l. 720. and as ‘crazed beyond all hope’ (stanza 205. l. 1635.). Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. McGann and Weller, V. For Ketcham’s comments on the allusion to Byron see Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, ed. Ketcham, p. 550. Wordsworth’s critique of Byron is sustained in another poem from the Duddon volume, ‘The Pilgrim’s Dream; or, the Star and the Glow-Worm’. See Jalal Uddin Khan, ‘The Allegories of “The Pilgrim’s Dream; or, the Star and the Glow-Worm”’, Studies in Philology 94.4 (Autumn 1997), pp. 508–22.

36 Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, ed. Ketcham, p. 175.

37 DC MS. 86/1. See the transcription in Shorter Poems, ed. Ketcham, pp. 284–6.

38 Coleridge, The Collected Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, ed. Engell and Bate, III. 195–6.

39 Wordsworth, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, ed. Jackson, p. 76. In 1833, Wordsworth uses ‘the image of an orbicular body, a sphere or dew drop’ to describe the ‘intense unity’ of his preferred sonnet forms, arguing that in ‘the better half’ of Milton’s sonnets ‘the sense does not close with the rhyme at the eighth line, but overflows into the second portion of the meter’ (LY II. 604–5). For commentary on the scientific, geometric, intertextual, and theological aspects of Wordsworth’s fluvial poetics see Ralph Pite, ‘Wordsworth, The River Duddon, and John Dalton’s Ultimate Particles’, The Wordsworth Circle 50.2 (Spring 2019), pp. 180–201; Bates, ‘The River Duddon Volume’s Golden Ratio Wheel and Spiraling “Orbicular” Sonnets’, and Raven, ‘Now Expands Majestic Duddon’.

40 Daniel Robinson, ‘The River Duddon and Wordsworth, Sonneteer’, in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, ed. Gravil and Robinson, pp. 289–308 (p. 295).

41 Fulford, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815–1845, p. 224.

42 Ibid.

43 Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 41.

44 For further analysis of the politicisation of ‘simple natural life’ see Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 1–8.

45 Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, ed. Jackson, p. 56. In broader terms, Cox reads Wordsworth’s focus on ‘the native, homey Duddon’ and his corresponding endorsement of poetry that is ‘pure, vigorous, free, and bright’ as an attack on the cosmopolitan pretensions and unbridled sensuality of the Cockney School. See William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic, pp. 147–9.

46 Wordsworth’s allusions to Ode 3.13 are numerous. See The Dog: An Idyllium (1786); An Evening Walk, ll. 72–85; his translation of 1794; ‘To Liberty’ (1820), ll. 91–110; ‘Musings near Aquapendente’ (1837), ll. 256–7. For discussion of Wordsworth’s translation of Horace’s ode see Bruce Edward Graver, Wordsworth’s Translations from Latin Poetry (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 53–4. See also Edward W. Clancey, Wordsworth’s Classical Undersong: Education, Rhetoric and Poetic Truth (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 56–8.

47 Latin quotations taken from Horace, The Odes, ed. Kenneth Quinn (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1980), p. 75.

48 For an excellent reading of this poem see Dan Curley, ‘The Alcaic Kid (Horace, “Carm.” 3.13)’, The Classical World 97.2 (Winter 2004), pp. 137–54.

49 Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo, l. 110, The Hymns, trans. Susan A. Stephens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 81.

50 Quotations taken from Wordsworth, ‘[Ode] (from Horace)’, Early Poems and Fragments, 1785–1797, ed. Carol Landon and Jared R. Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 769. In An Evening Walk (1793) Wordsworth makes clear his wish to supplant Horace’s ‘ruthless minister of death’ (l. 74) with a ‘more benignant sacrifice’ (l. 78). An Evening Walk, ed. James Averill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 41.

51 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1995), p. 300. The connections between war and pastoral are explored by Kate McLoughlin in Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 97–106.

52 The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets· Neuer Before in Any Languag Truely Translated. With a Co[m]ment vppon Some of His Chiefe Places; Donne according to the Greeke by Geo: Chapman (London, 1611), p. 287. Wordsworth’s library held at least two early modern editions of Chapman’s translation. See Chester L. Shaver and Alice C. Shaver, Wordsworth’s Library: A Catalogue (New York and London: Garland, 1979), p. 126.

53 The Iliads of Homer, p. 291.

54 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 88.

55 Quotations taken from Wordsworth’s translation in Translations of Chaucer and Virgil, ed. Bruce Graver (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 248. Wordsworth’s account of the bleeding and speaking tree owes much to Dante, Tasso, and Spenser.

56 Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library. Issue 194, vol. 1 of Horace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 113.

57 Ibid., p. 115.

58 Ibid., p. 7.

59 On the accenting of ‘now’ as an effort to overcome the vitiating effects of time, see Paul de Man, ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’, in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, ed. Kevin Newmark (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 74–94 (p. 91).

60 The octave of 31 and the sestet of 32 originally formed one sonnet. See Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, ed. Jackson, p. 109.

61 Along similar lines, Cox, citing Garrett (Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation, pp. 145–8), reads the closing sonnets of the sequence as an attempt to free the Duddon from ‘the increasingly imperial history of combat and commerce’. William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic, p. 151.

62 Kim, ‘Generating a National Sublime’, pp. 65–7.

63 See also Kim’s observations on the martial significance of flood imagery in Regarding the Convention of Cintra (1809) and the conclusion of the Duddon sonnets. Ibid., pp. 63–4.

64 ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’, ll. 12–18. ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 84–6.

65 Steven Miller, War after Death: On Violence and Its Limits (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 4.

66 Ibid.

67 The copies of the three-volume Poems that I have examined in the Jerwood Centre attest to this eclectic response to the recommended order of binding.

68 James Chandler has suggested that the positioning of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ alludes deliberately to the placing of the ‘Immortality’ ode at the end of the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes and the 1815 Poems. ‘“Wordsworth” after Waterloo’, in The Age of William Wordsworth, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene Rouff (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 84–111 (p. 474).

69 Quotations from Duddon sonnet XXXII, line 9, and Duddon sonnet XXXI, line 4.

70 As noted by Cox, William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic, pp. 166–7.

71 Shorter Poems, ed. Ketcham, pp. 201–6.

72 Ibid., p. 43.

73 Ibid. pp. 200–1.

74 Peter Manning, ‘Wordsworth Reshapes Himself and Is Reshaped: The River Duddon and the 1820 Miscellaneous Poems’, The Wordsworth Circle 50.1 (Winter 2020), pp. 35–53 (pp. 41–2).

75 Ibid., pp. 42–3. Quotation from ‘Written in London, September, 1802’, ll. 13–14. ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, p. 165.

76 Quotations taken from The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth. In Four Volumes (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820).

77 Homer: The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1990). Book XXI, ll. 246–50, p. 527.

78 Fenwick note. Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, ed. Jackson, p. 235.

79 Joseph Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (New York: Palgrave, 2005), p. 14. In Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815–1845, Fulford argues that the ‘sonnet sequence bespoke an exemplary program of almost daily literary self-discipline. Each was an exercise in movement from free thought to historical form, an act of self-definition by submission to rule, ranged against what Wordsworth saw as the disruptive forces of political and religious reform’ (p. 225).

80 For commentary on the ideological purposes of Ecclesiastical Sketches see: Regina Hewitt, ‘Church Building as Political Strategy in Wordsworth’s “Ecclesiastical Sonnets”’, Mosaic 25 (1992), pp. 31–46; Anne L. Rylestone, Prophetic Memory in Wordsworth’s ‘Ecclesiastical Sonnets’ (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006); Michael Tomko, ‘Superstition, the National Imaginary, and Religious Politics in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sketches’, Wordsworth Circle 39 (2008), pp. 16–19; Fulford, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815–1845, pp. 214–39.

81 Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, ed. Jackson, pp. 241–2.

Chapter 6 Wordsworth after Byron: Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820

1 Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography. The Later Years, 1803–1850, pp. 386–8. A full account of the Wordsworths’ itinerary in Paris is given in Mary Wordsworth’s travel journal, DCMS 92. A transcription of the journal is available at www.day-books.com/assets/daybooks_wordsworth_diary.pdf.

2 Helen Maria Williams, Poems on Various Subjects: With Introductory Remarks on the Present State of Science and Literature in France (London, 1823), p. 203.

3 Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth, 9 August 1814. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Marrs. III. 95–9.

4 Robert Southey to Henry Herbert Southey, 23 August 1815. The Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Four, ed. Lynda Pratt and Ian Packer, Romantic Circles: n.p. Web. Accessed 9 July 2021.

5 ‘Brighton Herald’. Morning Chronicle [London, England] (21 August 1815): n.p. British Library Newspapers. Web. Accessed 9 July 2021.

6 Jane Austen, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 118.

7 My thinking on the social significance of Romantic-era continental tour writing has been shaped by the following: James Buzzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Carl Thompson, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

8 Austen, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, p. 111.

9 Critical studies of Memorials include: Donald E. Hayden, Wordsworth’s Travels in Europe I (Tulsa: The University of Tulsa, 1988), pp. 41–109; John Wyatt, Wordsworth’s Poems of Travel, 1819–1842: ‘Such Sweet Wayfaring’ (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), chapter 4: ‘Memorials of a Tour, 1820: The Lessons of Europe’, pp. 55–79; Robin Jarvis, ‘The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820’, Studies in Romanticism 40.3 (Fall, 2001), pp. 321–43; Pamela Woof, William, Mary and Dorothy: The Wordsworths’ Continental Tour of 1820 (Grasmere: Wordsworth’s Trust, 2008); C. E. J. Simons, ‘Itinerant Wordsworth’, in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, ed. Gravil and Robinson, pp. 97–115 (pp. 107–11).

10 Austen, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, p. 130; p. 143.

11 Ibid., p. 132.

12 Simons, ‘Itinerant Wordsworth’, p. 108.

13 Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘Journal of a Tour on the Continent’, in Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1970), II. 297.

14 Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 13.

15 Ibid., p. 12.

16 Jarvis, ‘The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820’, p. 333.

17 Tim Fulford, The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 202.

18 Peter J. Manning, ‘The Other Scene of Travel: Wordsworth’s ‘Musings near Aquapendente’, in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading, ed. Helen Reguiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 191–211 (p. 206). See also Jeffrey Cox’s thoughtful and illuminating discussion of Wordsworth’s reaction to ‘the Byronic version of European travel’ in William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic, pp. 170–99 (p. 177).

19 Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses, p. 13.

20 Francis Jeffrey, ‘Review of Memorials of a Tour on the Continent’, The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 37 (June–November, 1822), pp. 449–56 (pp. 450–1).

21 The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review 187 (14 December 1822), p. 791.

22 ‘Dedication’. Quotations from Memorials are from Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Jackson, pp. 358–411.

23 Although plans for a publication combining Dorothy’s prose account of the tour with William’s poetry did not come to fruition, a fair copy manuscript circulated within the family for many years. See Michelle Levy, Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), chapter 4: ‘The Shelleys, the Wordsworths, and the Family Tour’, pp. 108–42.

24 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads. ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, p. 743.

25 Jeffrey, ‘Review of Memorials of a Tour on the Continent’, p. 451.

26 Pliny, Natural History, Volume III: Books 8–11, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 353 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), pp. 164–5.

27 Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Jackson, p. 412.

28 Ibid., p. 419.

29 Compare the poem, for example, with the account of the subterranean sea in Endymion, II. ll. 600–32.

30 Fulford, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815–1845, pp. 181–2. Jeffrey Cox’s reading of Keats’s and Byron’s attempts to radicalise the Ovidian leanings of the representation of myth in Book IV of The Excursion is especially pertinent here: William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic, pp. 48–54.

31 ‘Calais, August 15th, 1802’, l. 11. ‘To a Friend, Composed near Calais, on the Road Leading to Andres, August 7th, 1802’, l. 11. ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Curtis, pp. 158–9; pp. 156–7.

32 William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty: With the Rejected Passages from the Manuscript Drafts, and Autobiographical Notes, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), pp. 227–8.

33 See Jarvis’s complementary account of this poem: ‘The twilight beauty Wordsworth cherishes seems all too brief an interlude between the imperial “robe of power” constituted by full sunlight and the “gentle Power of Darkness” to come – suggesting that peace may be an uncertain intermission in the “desolating storms” of war’. ‘The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820’, p. 334.

34 Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, pp. 88–9.

35 Don Juan, ‘Dedication’, l. 5, l. 46. From volume 5 of Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. McGann and Weller.

36 Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, ed. Lord John Russell, 8 vols. (London, 1853), III. 161.

37 Added as a conclusion to the Memorials sequence in 1840, the sonnet ‘At Dover’ was initially sent to Dora as a ‘peace offering’ during a period of estrangement from her father in February 1838. SNL, p. 238. Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Jackson, p. 411. For a reading of the biographical and literary significance of this poem see my ‘Wordsworth’s “Dread Voice”: Ovid, Dora, and the Later Poetry’, Romanticism 8.1 (2002), pp. 34–48.

38 Quotations from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are from volume 2 of Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. McGann and Weller.

39 Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron with Thomas Medwin, ESQ (London, 1832), pp. 24–5.

40 Ibid., p. 25.

41 Stanzas 71–5 were cited in early reviews of the poem as containing distinctive echoes of Wordsworth’s poetry, with ‘Tintern Abbey’ being the most-cited touchstone. See, for example, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Third. By Lord Byron’, The Critical Review; or, Annals of Literature 4 (1816), pp. 495–506 (p. 505).

42 Notable studies of Byron’s imitations of Wordsworth in Canto III include: Robert R. Harson, ‘Byron’s “Tintern Abbey”’, Keats-Shelley Journal 20 (1971), pp. 113–21; Michael G. Cooke, ‘Byron and Wordsworth: The Complementarity of a Rock and the Sea’, in Lord Byron and His Contemporaries, ed. Charles E. Robinson, (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1982), pp. 19–42; James L. Hill, ‘Experiments in the Narrative of Consciousness: Byron, Wordsworth, and Childe Harold, Cantos 3 and 4’, English Literary History 53.1 (1986), pp. 121–40; Vincent Newey, ‘Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III and IV’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), pp. 148–90; Drummond Bone, ‘Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron: The Detail of Nature’, The Wordsworth Circle 20.1 (1992), pp. 43–50; Jerome McGann, ‘Wordsworth and Byron’, in Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2002), pp. 173–202; Daniel Westwood, ‘“Living in Shattered Guise”: Doubling in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III’, The Byron Journal 44.2 (2016), pp. 125–37.

43 See, for example, Mark Kipperman’s reading of the storm scene in Beyond Enchantment: German Idealism and English Romantic Poetry (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 187–9. See also Jerome McGann, ‘Byron and the Anonymous Lyric’, in Byron and Romanticism, pp. 93–112 (pp. 103–5).

44 Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 95.

45 Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Jackson, p. 413.

46 Note to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanza 40. Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life by Thomas Moore, Esq, 17 vols. (London, 1836), VIII. 159.

47 Jeffrey, ‘Review of Memorials of a Tour on the Continent’, p. 453.

48 Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Jackson, p. 368.

49 The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. Kinsley, p. 574.

50 Noting how a ‘parallel vocabulary of flood and destruction characterises French discussions of the Revolution in the 1790s’, Kelley asserts that the poem ‘illustrates the two views of the sublime which [Wordsworth] had kept separate for so many years: the mind’s capacity to resist revolutionary torrents and remain free; and its parallel capacity to participate in those torrents and in doing so also remain free’. Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, pp. 182–4. See also Jarvis’s response to this reading: ‘The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820’, pp. 334–5.

51 Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses, p. 24. Jarvis, ‘The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820’, pp. 335–6.

52 Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Jackson, p. 414.

53 Ibid.

54 Wyatt, Wordsworth’s Poems of Travel, p. 65.

55 Jarvis, ‘The Wages of Travel: Wordsworth and the Memorial Tour of 1820’, pp. 336–40. See also Alan Liu’s influential discussion of this poem in Wordsworth: The Sense of History, pp. 540–1.

56 Peter J. Manning, ‘Cleansing the Images: Wordsworth, Rome, and the Rise of Historicism’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33.2 (Summer 1991), pp. 271–326 (p. 307).

57 Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. McGann and Weller, II. 311.

58 MS. 177; ll. 9–14. Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Jackson, p. 395.

59 27 August 1820. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Sadler, I. 357.

60 Eric Walker points out that although Wordsworth was in London at this time, aside from the watercolour, the documentary status of which is itself weakened by the inclusion of a portrait of Byron, who remained in exile in Europe, no other evidence has been found to corroborate the poet’s attendance at the trial. Marriage, Writing and Romanticism, p. 245.

61 The Task, Book VI. l. 325; l. 364. Cowper, The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. Sambrook.

62 Ibid., l. 368.

63 Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, ed. Jackson, p. 355.

64 See Ernest De Selincourt’s account of the relationship in Wordsworthian and Other Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), pp. 34–56. Also Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography. The Later Years, 1803–1850, pp. 584–9.

65 For a related approach to the poem see Keith Hanley, Wordsworth: A Poet’s History (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 65–6.

66 Comparison should be made with Keats’s frank and unabashed treatment of the legend in Endymion, Book II, ll. 915–1009.

67 C-Stage Reading Text. Book X, ll. 1069–73. The Thirteen-Book ‘Prelude’, ed. Reed. II. 201–02.

After Wordsworth

1 The Peace Almanac and Diary, for 1846, under the Superintendence of the Manchester and Salford Peace Society (Manchester and London, 1846), p. 5.

2 ‘On the Poetry of the Age’, The Grange Magazine. A Series of Papers in Prose and Verse (Edinburgh, 1846), pp. 195–203.

3 The view of Wordsworth as the poet of ‘peace – above all, peace’ that prevailed in discussions of the poet in the 1840s was initiated in ‘Wordsworth’, an article for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 49 (January–June 1841), pp. 359–71 (p. 367). Wordsworth’s doctrine of ‘peace and silence’ was the subject of ‘Mr George Dawson’s Lectures on Wordsworth’, as reported in the Manchester Times, 24 October 1846, British Library Newspapers, link-gale-com.ezproxy4.lib.le.ac.uk/apps/doc/BC3206363709/GDCS?u=leicester&sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=d247cd1a. Accessed 23 September 2021. See also ‘Thoughts on the Poets’, The Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences &c. 1598, 4 September 1847, pp. 637–40.

4 Robert Hopkins, ‘De Quincey on War and the Pastoral Design of The English Mail-Coach’, Studies in Romanticism 6.3 (1967), pp. 129–51 (pp. 130–3).

5 Anonymous, ‘A Moral from Walmer’, Blackwood’s Magazine 72.445 (November 1852), pp. 630–3 (p. 631).

6 Ibid., p. 632; p. 630.

7 For discussion of Cobden and the Peace Societies see Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention, pp. 414–69. See also Hopkins, ‘De Quincey on War’, pp. 130–1, and Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 19–27.

8 See Timothy Ziegenhagen, ‘War Addiction in Thomas De Quincey’s The English Mail-Coach’, Wordsworth Circle 35.2 (2004), pp. 93–8.

9 Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination, pp. 203–9.

10 The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H. S. Milford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), pp. 687–8.

11 Ibid., p. 688.

12 Ibid., p. 697.

13 Ibid.

14 Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, I. 73.

15 ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. Butler and Green, pp. 277–82.

16 Mark Offord, Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 77.

17 Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 117. In a carefully mounted rejoinder to new historicist takedowns of the poem’s ‘ideology of transcendence’, Mark Offord argues that new historicism should recognise that ‘it is history itself that has aestheticized or sacrificed – “discharged” – the man. A historical suffering, effected by causes of personal “importance” to its conscripts, has subsided into “weakness” and “indifference”. This is what dissociates the figure from context. The lapse registers a historical experience’. Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel, p. 80. Offord is responding to readings of the poem by Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on ‘The Prelude’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 73, and Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 194–5.

18 Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler.

19 Offord, Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel, p. 83.

20 The Fourteen-Book ‘Prelude’, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985).

21 Ll. 209–24, passim. Interestingly, the poem makes frequent allusion to the association of noise with violent conflict, noting the ‘shrieks, that revel in abuse/Of shivering flesh’ (ll. 9–10), the ‘martial pageant’ that ‘spreads/Incitements of battle-day’ (ll. 73–4), and the revelatory ‘Trumpet’ that ‘we, intoxicate with pride,/Arm at its blast for deadly wars’ (ll. 213–14). Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Curtis, pp. 116–24.

22 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 400.

23 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 2020), p. 212.

24 Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Curtis, pp. 388–9.

25 C. M. Ingleby, ‘Modern Metaphysicians. The Late Sir William Rowan Hamilton’, The British Controversialist and Literary Magazine (London, 1869), pp. 161–77 (p. 167).