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Wordsworth's Gothic Education

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Wordsworth's Gothic Education chapter 4 Wordsworth’s Gothic Education Tom Duggett William Wordsworth was strangely given to speaking of education in the language of Gothic Romance. In The Prelude, he imagined swearing fealty to ‘written lore’ as to a ‘liege lord’ among the ‘Gothic courts’ of Cambridge. And he echoed Edmund Burke’s account of the ‘Gothic and monkish education’ provided in the Universities with an image of the ‘glorious time’ ‘of old’, when Cambridge’s ‘Gothic regulation’ of ‘piety and zeal’, ‘Spare diet, patient labour, and plain weeds’, had brought youths ‘errant in the quest’ of knowledge.1 Similarly, in Reply to Mathetes (1809–10), an essay on education and the sense of history, Wordsworth likened ‘an aspiring youth, leaving the schools in which he has been disciplined’ to ‘a newly-invested Knight appearing with his blank unsignalized Shield, upon some day of solemn tournament, at the Court of the Faery-Queen . [H]e looks round him with a beating heart; dazzled by the gor- geous pageantry, the banners, the impresses, the Ladies of overcoming beauty, the Persons of the knights’.2 The analogy, Wordsworth lamented, could not hold, for ‘ours is . a degen- erate Age’. And as though to confirm Burke’s pronouncement that the age of chivalry had departed and that of economists and calculators arrived, Wordsworth soon moved towards endorsing a new plan of mass-education that was apparently wholly unromantic. This was the so-called Madras system of the Anglican clergyman Dr. Andrew Bell, which, in its most massified (and reactionary) formulation, was an ‘economical plan’ to give a rudimentary edu- cation to all ‘those doomed to the drudgery of daily labour’, allowing ‘the gen- erality . to read their Bible and understand the doctrines of our holy religion’, 1 See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 88; and William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (London: Penguin Books, 1995 [1850]), III, lines 379, 47, 450–69. In the summer of 1791 Wordsworth congratulated his old Cambridge friend William Mathews that his school’s hours ‘could not be complained of as being too much under what may be called a Gothic regulation’. See The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 49. 2 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), II, p. 20. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004306387_006 Wordsworth’s Gothic Education 67 but without necessarily teaching them to write, and hence without the ‘risque of elevating’ their minds ‘above their condition’ and ‘rendering them discon- tented and unhappy in their lot’.3 In the final book of Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814), the central character, the Wanderer, prays in similar (though somewhat more progressive) terms for ‘this Imperial Realm’ to ‘teach / Them who are born to serve her and obey’: Binding herself by Statute to secure For all the Children whom her soil maintains The rudiments of Letters, and to inform The mind with moral and religious truth, Both understood and practised,—so that none, However destitute, be left to droop By timely culture unsustained, or run Into a wild disorder; or be forced To drudge through weary life without the aid Of intellectual implements and tools . (IX, 294–307)4 Although The Excursion assumes what its preface calls ‘something of a dra- matic form’, there is clearly very little distance here between the ‘Author’ and the ‘Character speaking’.5 In a footnote to the Wanderer’s speech, Wordsworth described Bell’s scheme as likely to bring benefits whose importance would be ‘impossible to overrate’.6 Wordsworth knew whereof he spoke. By the time he was at work on the final book of The Excursion in late 1811, he had ‘been the means of introducing’ the ‘Madras’ system at the village school in Grasmere, had spent time teaching there himself, and had met and become friends with Bell.7 In November 1811, 3 Andrew Bell, An Experiment in Education, Made at the Male Asylum of Madras. Suggesting a System by which a School or Family may teach itself under the Superintendence of the Master or Parent (London: Cadell & Davies, 1805), p. 62. 4 Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and Michael C. Jaye, assisted by David García (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 283. All quotations of The Excursion are taken from the reading text in this edition. 5 Wordsworth, The Excursion, p. 39. 6 Wordsworth, The Excursion, p. 314. 7 See The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–1970), I, p. 514; and Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth, The Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800– 1815 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 679..
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