WORDSWORTH's DEPICTION of the POOR in HIS WORK DATING from the 1790S to 1807
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SAD RELICKS AND APT ADMONISHMENTS: WORDSWORTH'S DEPICTION OF THE POOR IN HIS WORK DATING FROM THE 1790s TO 1807 by MARGARET MARY BEARD Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in the Department of English University of Natal Pietermaritzburg 1994 ABSTRACT Sad relicks and apt admonishments: Wordsworth's depiction of the poor in his work dating from the 1790s to 1807 by Margaret Mary Beard The aim of this thesis is to show, by means of a chronological study of poverty as treated in the poetry dating from the early 1790s to 1807, that Wordsworth's treatment of this topic was both highly politicized and unusually probing. To look at his treatment of poverty is also to gain some understanding of his changing political and social views over these years. He began writing about poverty and the poor in a period in which picturesque and/or sentimental ways of viewing poverty al ternated with moralistically judgemental ways. His approach and atti tudes are soon seen to be different. After a period of fervent protest at the very existence of poverty, he proceeds to probe the more hidden costs, to the indigent, of poverty, an approach which is less overtly polemical. This study seeks to demonstrate that this stage is no less committed and, indeed, comprises an insightful analysis of the social and psychological damage consequent on poverty, damage now widely recognised as one of the major costs of poverty both to the individual and to the state. Furthermore, Wordsworth becomes concerned wi th the alienation both from the self and from the other consequent on poverty. It is this that he recognises as a major, yet rarely acknowledged, component of poverty. He recognises, too, his increasing inability to understand the impoverished other. Conscious of the divide that separates the privileged from the indigent, he can only wonder at, and acknowledge, the powers of endurance of which some seem capable. From such examples he, in his precarious vocation of poet, can learn much. Such admiration of the resolution and independence apparent in some of the indigent leads him to espouse values and judgements which tend to differentiate clearly between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Although such attitudes become increasingly prevalent in Word~worth after 1807, the work of the preceding years remains a rare, forceful and ' mul ti-dimensional cry of protest against poverty. CONTENTS Preface 1 Introduction 3 Chapter One. Poverty, and the Debate on Poverty, in the 1790s. 11 Chapter Two. Figurations of the Poor in the Eighteenth Century: The Visual Arts. 44 Chapter Three. Literary Figurations of the Poor in the Eighteenth Century. 61 Chapter Four. From the Vale to the Plain: Wordsworth's Journey from Innocence to Experience. 97 Chapter Five. Ruined Cottages and Neglected Minds: Wordsworth's interest in the eroding effects of poverty. 140 Chapter Six. Alfoxden and the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. 174 Chapter Seven. 'Tis Past, that melancholy dream'- Wordsworth's homecoming - the return to the past. 206 Chapter Eight. The plenitude of Grasmere 1802 - 1807. 240 Afterword. 278 Bibliography. 284 1 PREFACE I have followed the stylistic conventions set down by The MLA Style Manual (1985 edition). When quoting lines of poetry I have merely given the line numbers (omitting the word "line") except where confusion might arise with page references. I have not always given specific references for historical events which might be assumed to be generally familiar. Such general historical information has been garnered from C.B. Cone The English Jacobins and Albert Goodwin The Friends of Liberty. The following points should be noted with reference to the Bibliography: The Bibliography is made up of the works cited in the text. Under Primary Sources I have placed all the material emanating from the 18th - 19th century period even where the material has been edited in this century. When referring in the body of my text to particular works by William Wordsworth, I refer to the edition of those works under the editor's name only, although the bibliographic details appear under Wordsworth. In all other cases in my text I have indicated author and editor (e.g. Cowper:Spiller). Again, the entry will appear in the Bibliography under the original writer's name (e.g. Cowper). References to the Letters of Dorothy and William Wordsworth are taken almost wholly from the de Selincourt edition, the volumes being differentiated in the text by the titles Early Letters, Middle Years, or Later Years, and the appropriate volume number. I have used Alan G. Hill's revised edition on only two occasions and have indicated this by reference to Hill and the specific volume number. References to the Prose works of William Wordsworth are taken primarily from the two volume Owen and Smyser edition and, where necessary from A. D. Grosart' s three volume edition. The one exception is that all references to the Preface of Lyrical Ballads are taken from Butler and Green's edition of Lvrical Ballads. I have, of course, indicated these differing sources in 2 the references. The phrase used in the title of my thesis, "sad relicks and apt admonishments", is a linking together of two phrases from Wordsworth's writings." From the Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff I have taken "sad relicks", and "apt admonishments" is the pluralized form of a phrase from "Resolution and Independence". The intention is to convey, in brief, two of the ways in which Wordsworth regarded the poor and which frame the period covered in this study. The 1807 version of "Resolution and Independence" reads "strong admonishment" but I have chosen the 1815 epithet "apt" as more euphonious and more appropriate to the study itself. I formally declare that this thesis, unless specifically indicated to the contrary in the text, is my own original work. I would like to acknowledge and thank my supervisor, Dr Donald Beale, for his encouragement, coromi tted interest and expert guidance. Since, as I have been reminded, a thesis in submission is really an examination script, my personal expressions of thanks due to colleagues, friends and family are best reserved for another time and another place. 3 INTRODUCTION Wordsworth's poems which focus on the poor arise from a period when poverty was a major political issue. They are written by a man who thought seriously about social problems and showed a repeated interest in the problem of poverty. There were numerous conflicting voices arguing the merits and demerits of the poor and the reasons for their seemingly greater numbers or at least their greater visibility. Poverty was not a neutral issue - depictions of the poor cannot be seen in a neutral light. I firmly believe with the new historicist critics that literature is part of history, that it is a social practice, that our reading is enriched by a knowledge of the political beliefs of writers who were engaged with the political issues of their time and by an understanding of the social experience which helped to form those political beliefs. Like Raymond Williams, I believe that there is a fundamental error in declaring an arbitrary distance between acts of writing and other kinds of human action, that one ought to be alert to the "social context of utterance" and that often the relations between actual writing and actual historical events and conditions are interesting and important (Williams, Introduction to Sales, passim). More specifically, I acknowledge Jean Howard's dictum that "rather than passively reflecting an external reality, literature is an agent in constructing a culture's sense of reality", that literature does not merely reflect a context but that it is "traversed by - and produces - the ideologies of its time" ("New Historicism" 25, 30). One might well note in this context the words of Robert Bloomfield, the Suffolk labourer-poet, who, planning a poetic come-back in 1814 after the success of his earlier work, "The Farmer's Boy", wrote: I sometimes dream that I shall one day venture again before the public, something in myoId manner, some country tales, and spiced with love and courtship might yet 4 please, for Rural life by the art of cooking may be made a relishing and high flavoured dish, whatever it may be in reality. (qtd.in Sales 19) The insight that landscapes are not "merely innocent 'representations' of nature, but reflections of political and social ideologies" is noted by Andrew Graham-Dixon as being the contribution of John Barrell in Barrell's studies of painters like Gainsborough, Morland, and Constable (Listener 23 Oct. 1986: 23). It is Barrell's work, particularly on Constable, which has fired my interest in Wordsworth. Barrell emphasizes the hidden politics of the ideal of harmony with nature, and of the tendency to depict, as natural, conditions which have a specific social and political basis. In the paintings he studies, he notes the attempts to naturalize, to distance, to dehumanize, and to render abstract, the particularities of a world in which the social and economic relations were by no means idyllic. Partly this tendency arises from eighteenth-century notions of fidelity to nature. We read in Reynolds's Discourses that this proper fidelity to nature can be achieved only by abstraction from particulars (53, 61). Transient and contingent details, particularity of detail, are avoided, for the conditions are viewed as timeless and natural. The tendency to view particular historical conditions as timeless and natural can be deeply problematic. When Roland Barthes attacked the Family of Man photographic exhibition, he did so on the grounds that to show the universality of human actions, what we all share - birth, death, work - to depict, in fact, a "family of man", to concentrate on a human essence, is to verge on the merely sentimental, given the other known facts that show, on the contrary, the differences between persons and conditions (Mythologies 100-02).