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This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G. Phd, Mphil, Dclinpsychol) at the University of Edinburgh

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This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G. Phd, Mphil, Dclinpsychol) at the University of Edinburgh This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. THE POET AS TEACHER: WORDSWORTH’S PRACTICAL AND POETIC ENGAGEMENT WITH EDUCATION Xu, Hongxia PhD The University of Edinburgh 2013 Declaration I hereby declare that the thesis is my own work, and that it has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. All materials obtained from other sources have been duly acknowledged. _________________________ Xu, Hongxia Abstract This thesis revisits William Wordsworth’s practical and poetic engagement with education as epitomised in his claim that “Every Great poet is a Teacher: I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing.” By situating this claim in the larger contexts of Wordsworth’s writings and Britain’s educational development from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, it argues that Wordsworth advocated a poetic education of receptive and creative imagination as a corrective to the practical education of passive learning and reading, and that his authority as a poet-teacher was confirmed rather than challenged by the wide divergence of his reception in Nineteenth Century Britain. The introduction defines the research topic, argues for Wordsworth’s relevance as a poet-teacher against his dubious reception in contemporary educational institutions, and examines some mistaken notions of him as a poet of nature and childhood. Chapter One investigates Wordsworth’s lifelong critique of contemporary pedagogical theories and practices for their confusion of education with instruction and their neglect of religion. Chapter Two studies Wordsworth’s proposal for an alternative mode of poetic education that relies on nature, books, and religion to foster the individual’s religious imagination, which informed Wordsworth’s vocation as a poet, and underlay the revisions of the educational backgrounds of his major poetic speakers. Chapter Three explores Wordsworth’s endeavours to cultivate readers’ receptive and creative imagination against the prevalent literary taste through differentiating strategies of communication in his poetic theories and short poems written between 1794 and 1815. Chapter Four discusses the educational uses made of Wordsworth’s poetry through studying the representative selections of his poems edited by Victorian educators, so as to reveal the slow, winding, but steady process of his being recognised as a teacher in both practical and poetic senses. The thesis concludes with a reaffirmation of Wordsworth’s authority and relevance as a teacher, both then and now. Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude is due to my primary supervisor, Dr Tim Milnes, who has guided, encouraged, challenged and supported me during the past four years. His broad knowledge of the Romantic period and rich supervisory experience enabled me to become a better student of Wordsworth and a more responsible researcher of English literature. I owe special thanks to my secondary supervisor, Dr Simon Malpas, for his warmth, cheerfulness, and confidence in my project. My sincere thanks also go to the wonderful teachers in the English Department of Peking University, especially Professors Han Minzhong, Ding Hongwei and Su Weixing, who instilled in me a firm belief in the value of a liberal education and the relevance of English literature in modern China. I am indebted to the China Scholarships Council and the University of Edinburgh for funding my PhD programme, and introducing me to a supportive community of brilliant, hard-working yet fun-loving Chinese doctoral students in Edinburgh. I also accumulated debts of gratitude to some close friends I met in Scotland. Among them are Gao Jian and Charlie Ng who shared with me the pleasures and pains of life as PhD students; Dane Murdoch who demonstrated the best education of circumstances; Francesca Dixon, a former teacher of English who challenged me to argue more persuasively and write more clearly; and Eva Spevack, a kindred spirit who shared my love of nineteenth-century English literature, and, amongst many other things, has kindly proofread the whole thesis with sympathy, sensitivity, thoroughness and efficiency. I thank my parents for their unwavering support of my studies over the years. Their homely virtues have deepened my appreciation of Wordsworth. I owe most to my husband, Dr Li Qiujun, who, though working away in Beijing, has accompanied me through this programme with remarkable patience and reassuring love. I am grateful to all above, but any residual errors or oversights are mine alone. Table of Contents List of Abbreviations i Epigraphs ················ii Introduction ················1 Chapter One Wordsworth as a Critic of Practical Education ··············22 The Late and Early Wordsworth on Education ··············24 Book V of The Prelude: Wordsworth’s Responses to Rousseau and Godwin ··34 The Excursion, the Debate on National Education and the Madras System············· 52 The Later Wordsworth on the Place of Religion in National Education ··············70 Chapter Two The Poetic Education of Religious Imagination ··············80 Religious Imagination and Wordsworth’s Poetic Project ··············81 The Poetic Education of Wordsworth’s Speakers ----------89 Nature, Books, Religion and the Education of Poetic Imagination ··········114 Chapter Three The Poet as Teacher of the Reader ············138 The Poet-as-Teacher Claim: Its Past and Present Reception ············140 Wordsworth on Taste and the Writer-Reader Relationship before 1798 ············147 The “Pre-established Codes of Decision:” “Simon Lee” and “The Idiot Boy” ········160 Wordsworth’s Fit and Unfit Audiences: “A Poet’s Epitaph” ············172 The Poet, the Reader, and “The Solitary Reaper” ············185 Chapter Four Wordsworth Edited for Educational Purposes ············199 Joseph Hine and Selections from the Poems of William Wordsworth (1831)·········· 206 James Burns’s Illustrated Edition of Wordsworth for the Young (1843) ············215 Book I of The Excursion as a Textbook for Teacher Training (1863-64) ············224 Matthew Arnold’s The Poems of Wordsworth (1879): Its Rationale and Effects······236 Scholarly and School Editions of Wordsworth from the 1880s to the 1890s············246 222 Conclusion ············257 Appendices ············269 Bibliography 273 List of Abbreviations BL S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. Eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Vol. II. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. CL Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Vol. 1. 1785-1800. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956. EY The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Early Years: 1787-1805. Ed. Chester L. Shaver. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. HCR Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers. Ed. Edith J. Morley. London: Dent, 1938. Lectures S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819 on Literature. Ed. R. A. Foakes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987. Life Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. LMA The Letters of Matthew Arnold. 6 vols. Ed. Cecil Y. Lang. Charlottesville: UP Virginia, 1996-2001. LY The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Later Years. Ed. Alan G. Hill. Part I: 1821-1828, 1978; Part II: 1829-1834, 1979; Part III: 1835-1839, 1982; Part IV: 1840-1853, 1988. MY The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Middle Years. Part I: 1806-1811, ed. Mary Moorman, 1969; Part II: 1812-1820, eds. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 1970. Prose The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. 3 vols. Eds. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. P2V Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800-1807. Ed. Jared Curtis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. PW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Eds. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1940-49. WP Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787-1814. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971. WR Stephen Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. WV Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. i Epigraphs “I am condemned for the very thing for which I ought to have been praised; viz., that I have not written down to the level of superficial observers and unthinking minds.— — Every Great poet is a Teacher: I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing.” Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont, 1808. “Not that he [Wordsworth] did wrong to think himself a great teacher: he was a teacher no less beneficent than great: but he was wrong in thinking himself a poet because he was a teacher, whereas in fact he was a teacher because he was a poet.” Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Wordsworth and Byron,” 1884. ii Introduction William Wordsworth maintained a lifelong interest in education, an interest that finds expression
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