William Wordsworth's Golden Age Theories

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William Wordsworth’s
Golden Age Theories during
the Industrial Revolution
in England, 1750–1850
Mark Keay
© Mark Keay 2001
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keay, Mark.
William Wordsworth’s Golden Age theories during the
Industrial Revolution in England, 1750–1850 / Mark Keay.
p. cm. — (Studies in modern history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-349-42018-6
1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Knowledge—History.
2. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850—Political and social views.
3. Literature and society—England—History—19th century.
4. Literature and history—England—History—19th century.
5. Pastoral poetry, English—History and criticism. 6. Industrial
revolution—England—History. 7. Lake District (England)—In
literature. 8. Golden age (Mythology) in literature. 9. Industrial
revolution in literature. 10 Social values in literature. 11. Country
life in literature. 12. Populism in literature. I. Title. II. Studies in
modern history (Palgrave (Firm))
PR5892.H5 K43 2001
821’.7—dc21
2001021203
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
Children form the most conservative of human societies.
Philippe Aries
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Contents
Preface viiii
Acknowledgements x
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1 Old Lakeland: a Golden Age Ideal 21

2 Land Tenure: a Lake District Survey 50
3 Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 68
4 Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast 128
5 Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 155
Appendix I Wordsworth’s Use of the Words ‘Peasant’ and

‘Peasantry’ in his Poems, 1787–1850 199
Appendix II Wordsworth and ‘the vices of an archaic
tenurial law’: a Rebuttal of Criticisms by V. G. Kiernan 201
Notes 204
Bibliography 274
Index 287
vii
Preface
This book should begin with a friendly warning. You will not find here
another work of Romantic scholarship or even a cradle-till-grave biog-
raphy of William Wordsworth. What you will find is a detailed case
study of social and economic change and continuity during the Indus-
trial Revolution in England. It does, of course, add something new to
our understanding of English Romanticism, as well as supplying a the-
matic biography of William Wordsworth’s life and work as a modern
poet. It is, however, primarily a work of social and economic history
and explanation. It starts moreover from a fresh perspective on
Wordsworth’s life and work which falls outside the tired (if not com-
pletely old-fashioned) frameworks of Marxist and post-structuralist
accounts of the topic. In other words, it has a revisionist aim – to
place Wordsworth within a living and historically credible world which
does justice to his own perceptive remarks on Man, Nature and Soci-
ety. In this respect it is based upon the social and economic research
and – to a point – the political conclusions of revisionist historians of
modern English society like J. C. D. Clark, William D. Rubinstein and
A. J. Mayer who have each redefined our view of the old landed order
between 1688 and 1914. Within this context of the ‘old regime’ in
England, Wordworth is shown to represent, in certain respects, an anti-
modernist tradition in politics and literature that was opposed to the
patchy class and industrial society and commercial values that were
evident in the period 1750–1850. He was always ‘a man speaking to
men’, but his views of social life and economic relations were arguably
more like those of agrarian radicals such as William Cobbett and Feargus
O’Connor than bona fide members of radical, whig or tory propaganda.
They were based in fact upon an abiding sympathy with the ‘common
man’, in general, and a Golden Age ideal of social life and moral rela-
tions, in particular, which arose from his experience of a vanishing
way of life in Old Lakeland in the years 1770–89. Above all, this book
reveals that Wordsworth’s ill-defined status in the old landed order was
the social cause of his need for, and satisfaction with, the populist per-
spective of the old-fashioned farmers, labourers and artisans of the remote
north. Sharing the values and ideals of the social class beneath him,
the ‘well-to-do’ Wordsworth sought to reform the effete culture and
feelings of those around and above him. His most radical poetry there-
fore was, socially speaking, complementary to, but not quite dependent
upon, the democratic aims and political objectives of the French Revo-
lution. Furthermore, his own revolution in art and culture was,
viii
Preface ix
emotionally speaking, based upon backward looking ideas and pre-modern

forms of thought and feeling, which were found in a particular histori-
cal context, namely the Lake District community. Hence my original
caveat to would-be reviewers and lay readers. Read this book as a con-
tribution to social and economic history or you will, probably, miss
the point.
MARK KEAY
Acknowledgements
I have a number of formal acknowledgements to make here. First, I

gratefully acknowledge the receipt of a Deakin University Postgraduate
Research Award, from the Faculty of Arts, which has enabled me to
study full-time for almost three years.
In the course of my primary research I have been helped by a number
of private and public libraries both in Australia and England. In par-
ticular, I would like to thank the staffs of the following libraries: the
Inter-library Loans Office at Deakin University, Geelong; the Baillieu
Library at the University of Melbourne; the Borchardt Library at La
Trobe University, Bundoora; the Rare Books Collection at the State Li-
brary of Victoria; the Institute of Historical Research, London; the
Wordsworth Room at the University of Lancaster; the Kendal Library
(Stricklandgate), Kendal; and the Kendal Records Office. Above all, I
would like to thank Professor Robert Woof of Dove Cottage Library, in
Grasmere, for permission to use material from the Trust’s collection
and for his hospitable reception of a young scholar ‘from down under’.
In the same vein I would like to thank his chief assistant, Dr Jeff Cowton,
for his friendly help on a number of occasions.
My next acknowledgements are, perhaps, the most important. I wish
to thank my assistant supervisor, Dr Roy Hay, for his earnest efforts to
keep my ‘conservative’ theory upon the straight and narrow path of
academic fairness towards my ‘left-wing’ opponents. Of course, I alone
am responsible for any problem which may yet remain on this score.
My debt to my principal supervisor, Professor Bill Rubinstein, is almost
too great to admit in a brief sentence: I will simply say that he is a
first rate teacher, mentor and historian.
Likewise Professor Jonathan Clark has been a superb representative
and editor for Palgrave. He has encouraged my labours at all stages of
publication and has now seen the work to its final destination in print.
I thank him most sincerely for the time and effort he has bestowed
upon my book.
I have also to thank my brother, Kevin Keay, for making the myster-
ies of Microsoft Word less esoteric to me.
Above all, I must dedicate this book to my wife, Veronica, and to
our children, Renwein and Stephanie, who have travelled to far away
places in search of history and truth. I hope their love and devotion
have not been wasted.
x
List of Abbreviations
AHEW Agrarian History of England and Wales

AHR Agricultural History Review
BPP British Parliamentary Papers
DNB Dictionary of National Biography
DNBMP Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons
ECHR Economic History Review
ECS Eighteenth Century Studies
EHR English Historical Review
HT History and Theory
HW History Workshop
IRSH International Review of Social History
JBS Journal of British Studies
JMH Journal of Modern History
JRSS Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
MEB Boase’s Modern English Biography
MP Modern Philology
NH Northern History
PP Past & Present
PR Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register
SH Social History
SIP Studies In Philology
CW2 Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland
Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 2nd Series
TIBG Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
VCH Cumb. The Victoria County History of Cumberland
comp. Date of composition.

pub. Date of publication.
xi
Introduction
This is a study of the origins in social and economic history of Golden

Age theories during the Industrial Revolution in England: 1750–1850.
It deals with the life and work of William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in
terms of his beliefs about Old England. His many arguments in favour
of rural life and agrarian society in the late eighteenth century are
here studied under the general heading of ‘Golden Age theories’. The
crux of these theories is the striking contrast offered by the recent or
remote past, as a supposed ideal of social life and moral relations, to
the conditions of life in the present. This work argues that Wordsworth’s
Romantic critique of industrial life and urban society was based upon
vanishing views of the Lake District community, in general, and the
old ‘statesmen’ system of farming, in particular.1 In consequence, his
poetry and prose reveal as much about the changing values, structure
and relationships of the old landed order as, say, Romantic art and
criticism.
Modern historians like M. D. George, E. P. Thompson, Christopher
Hill, Raymond Williams and Harold Perkin have each argued for the
detailed study of Golden Age ideas during the Industrial Revolution in
England.2 Each has found such ideas very useful in determining the
origins, growth and significance of different social, economic and pol-
itical ‘movements’ in the period which were fighting either for or against
the forces of change. Between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth
centuries, for example, several radical, whig and tory groups used Golden
Age ideals to justify their respective views of society: these included
the traditional rights of the ‘Free-born Englishman’, the ‘Norman yoke’
theory of ‘lost rights’, the supposed prosperity and happiness of ‘Merrie
Old England’, and the blessings of noblesse oblige – or ‘noble obliga-
tion’ between the ranks. The life of William Wordsworth, however, has
not been studied under the general heading of ‘Golden Age theories’ as
used and defined by such historians. In consequence, no one has yet
given a clear account of the social origins, growth and significance of
1
M. Keay, William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories during the Industrial Revolution in
England, 1750–1850
2 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
Wordsworth’s Golden Age ideas about Old England, in general, or the

Lake District community, in particular. Of course, literary critics have
sometimes used Golden Age ideas to explain Wordsworth’s Romantic
creed and political career from radical and whig reformer to tory placeman
and paternalist. Still, they have relied upon a very narrow range of
literary-cum-political traditions; especially, pastoral poetry, Rousseau’s
pre-Romantic notion of Nature, and English Republican thought.3 They
have therefore been content to ascribe the social cause of Wordsworth’s
Golden Age ideas to his formal education and academic studies at
Hawkshead Grammar School in Furness, Cambridge University, and his
several tours of the Continent in the 1790s. They have not considered
the structure of the Old Regime in England and the poet’s rural experi-
ence and assumptions as the most important social causes of his Golden
Age theories. Their focus upon formal schooling and academic knowl-
edge fails to explain: (1) the poet’s pre-disposition towards a Golden Age
view of rural life and society; (2) the historical truth of Wordsworth’s
Lake District ideal; (3) the anti-modernist elements in his social and
political criticism which lay outside the literary traditions of radical
and whig dissent; in particular, his ‘populist’ descriptions of farming
life and old-fashioned individualism; and (4) the logical progression of
Wordsworth’s political commitments from radical and whig reformer
to tory propagandist. This essay employs a range of Golden Age ideas
and traditions as used and defined by modern historians to explain all
four aspects of the problem. Such ‘theories’ give cogency to my orig-
inal synthesis of Wordsworth’s life and work around his Golden Age
ideal of Old Lakeland during the Industrial Revolution in England.
The historical study of Wordsworth’s life and work is made easier by
a clear definition of the term ‘Golden Age ideal’. This ‘ideal’ can refer
to fact, or to fiction, or to some fusion of the two. Christopher Hill,
for instance, has traced the Norman Yoke theory of ‘lost rights’ to the
general features of King Alfred’s Free Constitution and Anglo-Saxon society,
which were regarded by Englishmen, in feudal times, as a traditional
standard of legal and political freedom. It was, however, a social fic-
tion. ‘The free Anglo-Saxons [had] enjoyed equality before the law and
representative assemblies’, but ‘Anglo-Saxon society was already deeply
divided into classes before William the Bastard set foot in England’.4
Thus Golden Age beliefs are supposed to be true depictions of past
reality, regarded as ‘fact’. They are also used to define the conditions
or crises of the present. Social historians, therefore, face four tasks: the
first is to study the truth or falsity of such beliefs, regarded as ‘fact’.
Second, to discover their ends or goals as given by the agents involved
– for example, the Anglo-Saxons’ fight for ‘lost rights’. Third, to re-
assess the said agents’ writings or actions or both on the basis of the
truth or falsity of their beliefs – for example, Hugh A. MacDougall has
Introduction 3
argued that many seventeenth-century statesmen and antiquarian writers

erred in using Edmund Coke’s Golden Age ideas on the nature of Anglo-
Saxon society in their respective political and constitutional attacks on
the King and his Government; in other words, they wrongly regarded
Coke’s account of the past as a faithful copy of pre-Norman times rather
than as a fanciful synthesis of different documents and traditions by
an able but biased jurist.5 Fourth, the historian must define the Golden
Age in terms of broad historical understandings – for example, Hill
regards the Norman Yoke tradition ‘as a rudimentary theory of class
politics’ which ‘was entirely secular’.6 This logical definition of the Golden
Age ideal yields significant insights into the way in which William
Wordsworth coped with the great changes of the Industrial Revolution
to the old landed order into which he had been born.
The poet’s ideal of Lake District life and society was rooted in his
knowledge of the old ‘statesmen system of farming’ in the years 1770–
1814. The legal title referred only to holders of tenant right; that is to
say, the holders of ‘customary estates of inheritance’ in the Border
counties. It was less encumbered with post-feudal dues and obligations
than either copyhold or life-leases but was far from freehold. On the
other hand, the holder of tenant right could buy his estate outright; or
he could convert his several services into lump sums of money.
Wordsworth often used the term ‘statesman’ in its original sense of
tenant right but he did not restrict it to this legal meaning. For example,
in A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, 5th edn (1835), he reviewed
the history of the statesmen system of farming in Furness since medi-
aeval times and remarked correctly that its evolution lay towards small
farms such as copyhold rather than freeholds; moreover, he rightly
regarded the copyholders of Furness as a species of yeomen who had a
long-term stake in the land which they worked.7 (We shall see below
that ‘Border Tenant Right and duty’ was ‘not limited, as has been sup-
posed, to customary estates of inheritance, but [also] extended to
copyhold’ in these remote counties.8) Indeed, he concluded than the
yeomanry had been so constrained by the geography and political con-
ditions of the Border lands, such as the constant threat of Scottish
armies and brigands, called Moss-troopers, that they had become a dis-
tinct group of small independent producer who displayed a great deal
of freedom and independence in their domestic lives but retained a
large number of post-feudal dues and obligations to their landlords and
to each other: for example, the communal use of wastes and commons.
The third sense in which Wordsworth used the term ‘statesmen’ centred
upon customary tenants with some freehold land, enfranchised tenants,
and freeholders proper, but this extension of the term was dependent
upon the said farmers possessing the same social and economic out-
look as the customary tenants in question. Thus, in A Guide Through
the District of the Lakes, Wordsworth used the word ‘estatesman’ as a

blanket term for any Cumbrian yeoman – whether customary tenant
or freeholder – who worked his own family property for a length of
time rather than a tenant farmer who merely rented some land for a
share of the crop or for a short-term profit.9 This broad definition of
the term ‘statesmen’ was therefore a result of Wordsworth’s interest in
the social and economic features of Cumbrian farming as much as legal
notions of land tenure.
Indeed, Wordsworth’s definition of the term ‘statesmen’ was most
concerned with ‘Old English’ modes of thoughts, feelings and behaviour,
which he still observed amongst the small landowners and their families
in the Border counties, but which he believed had once been common
in the whole country. Consider, for example, his classic letter to Charles
James Fox, which accompanied a presentation copy of Lyrical Ballads,
in 1801. He wrote:
In the two Poems, ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’ I have attempted to

draw a picture of the domestic affections as I know they exist amongst
a class of men who are now almost confined to the North of Eng-
land. They are small independent proprietors of land here called
statesmen, men of respectable education who daily labour on their
own little properties. The domestic affections will always be strong
amongst men who live in a country not crowded with population, if
these men are placed above poverty. But if they are proprietors of
small estates, which have descended to them from their ancestors,
the power which these affections will acquire amongst such men is
inconceivable by those who have only had an opportunity of ob-
serving hired labourers, farmers, and the Manufacturing Poor. Their
little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point for
their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written which
makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances when they
would otherwise be forgotten. It is a fountain fitted to the nature of
social man from which supplies of affection, as pure as his heart was
intended for, are daily drawn. This class of men is rapidly disappear-
ing. . . . The poems are faithful copies from nature; and I hope . . .
that they may excite many profitable sympathies in many kind and
good hearts, and may in some small degree enlarge our feelings of
reverence for our species, and our knowledge of human nature, by
showing that our best qualities are possessed by men whom we are
too apt to consider, not with reference to points in which they resemble
us, but to those in which they manifestly differ from us.10
Wordsworth always admired the statesmen’s manly feelings, strong at-

tachments to the land, domestic economy, and independent characters.
Introduction 5
His vision of farming life and relationships, in fact, was so moving and
vivid that it convinced several influential reformers in the Victorian
Age, like John Stuart Mill, about the virtues of ‘peasant proprietorship’,
and so, for instance, to support the land schemes of Feargus O’Connor
and his fellow Chartists.11 Moreover, its main features were reflected in
the rural writings of leading general historians, in the present century,
such as Gilbert Slater, Paul Mantoux, G. M. Trevelyan, the Hammonds
and E. P. Thompson.12 Many local and regional writers, however, from
Alexander Craig Gibson in the 1850s to J. D. Marshall and J. V. Beckett
in the 1970s and 1980s, have argued that Wordsworth’s vision of Lake
District life and behaviour was largely distorted by his Romantic con-
ception of Nature and his ‘middle-class’ background.13 Above all, they
have argued that Wordsworth imposed a European model of the ‘peas-
antry’ upon the ‘statesmen’ which disfigured their English traits and
character. Whereas the Old English yeomanry were socially and econ-
omically mobile and both able and willing to move from one place to
another with comparative ease, the European peasants were basically
tied by convention and Roman law to their rural values and family
farms.14 Thus J. V. Beckett, for example, has objected to the poet’s belief
that the statesmen were: (1) self-sufficient farmers; (2) characterised by
social and economic equality; and (3) occupied the same lands or ten-
ements for several generations.15 Although Beckett is right to distinguish,
in general, between the two kinds of land ownership in England and
the Continent, it does not follow that Wordsworth’s views of the states-
men were simply the result of his Romantic pre-conceptions of the
Natural Man, or his fleeting experience of the peasantry in France and
Switzerland during the 1790s. On the contrary, a detailed study of land
tenures in the Lake District strongly suggests that Wordsworth’s views
of the ‘statesmen’, and their dependent ranks of live-in labourers and
domestic servants, were rooted in widely held traditions about the area
and its people, commonly experienced ‘facts’, or both. Thus his Lake
District ideal is here reconsidered as Golden Age ‘fact’ in the sense already
defined. It can no longer be dismissed uncritically as ‘more appropriate
to poetry than to real life’.16
Of course, Wordsworth’s conscious aims were usually Romantic, ar-
tistic and critical. He did not concede that the past was necessarily the
standard of excellence in human affairs. Indeed his Romantic creed
demanded that Man’s salvation should lie in ‘the living Now’, and
nowhere else.17 His Golden Age ideas, of course, are often coloured by
biblical, Greek and Latin allusions, but literary sources and traditions
are basically rejected in favour of the present dispensation:
. . . Paradise, and groves

Elysian, Fortunate Fields – like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main – why should they be

A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day . . .18
Thus he looked to ‘Man, Nature, and Human Life’, as found in the

Lake District, for his poetic content and inspiration.19 In particular, he
worshipped the power of ‘the simple primary affections and duties’, as
Matthew Arnold so aptly called them.20 Ironically, perhaps, Wordsworth’s
focus upon the present was often dependent upon his Golden Age ideals
of Childhood, Nature and the Natural Man. This raises two problems
for the social historian: first, he must distinguish these Romantic ideals
from Golden Age theories which were not consciously constructed by
the poet. (Compare the next paragraph.) And second, he must explain
these Romantic notions in social terms: for example, Wordsworth’s formal
education exposed him to some important artistic-cum-political tradi-
tions which contained more or less Golden Age elements, including
pastoral idylls, picturesque landscapes and Rousseau’s Natural Man.21
Nonetheless, his formal studies at Hawkshead Grammar School and
Cambridge University conflict with his frequent declarations of factual
truth and frank description of Lakeland life and manners. A closer in-
spection of the topic reveals that other causes were at work, including
(1) his mystical experience of Nature, (2) his family life and relation-
ships, and (3) his early contacts with the ‘statesmen’ farmers in the
region. These informal sources are studied, in Chapters 3, 4 and 5,
with the help of social historians of childhood and the family like
Philippe Aries, M. D. George, Ivy Pinchbeck and R. A. Houlbrooke. My
original argument suggests that Wordsworth’s social identity as a child
and youth was somewhat ill-defined, and so responsible for his con-
fused social standards and expectations. The structural conditions and
relationships which led to Wordsworth’s lack of a coherent role or status
in the old landed order are discussed in the following pages. It is suffi-
cient here to state that he grew up sharing the social and economic
standards of the small independent producers rather than those of the
rural professions into which he had been born. At least, his Romantic
notions of natural innocence and equality were often drawn from facts
and traditions about the ‘statesmen’ of the North. Thus his pictures of
the Natural Man – such as ‘Michael’ (1800), or Walter Ewbank in ‘The
Brothers’ (1800) – can be checked to his credit against the historical
record. Wordsworth’s views of childhood, nevertheless, were also de-
pendent upon his professional background. At least, his close family
Introduction 7
ties, formal education, and ‘connections’ in the old landed order were
important in leading him towards the modern, ‘middle-class’ and Ro-
mantic conception of childhood as a particular state of mind and body
which requires special treatment for its full potential to be realised.
This new social study, however, does not reduce the poet’s visionary
experience to social causes or effects, but merely locates the elements
in his childhood and youth which admit of social rather than psycho-
logical explanation. Finally, it questions the poet’s late adoption of
Edmund Burke’s conservative views of social and political life. No one,
to my knowledge, has yet noted that Wordsworth’s idea of natural in-
nocence and virtue was strictly incompatible with Burke’s belief in human
fallibility. Thus his Romantic search for any Golden Age ideal – of Child-
hood, the Natural Man or the Lake District community – was com-
promised, in theory, by his changing religious and political beliefs. It
might be objected here that historians and critics have no moral or
professional right to set up a canon of consistency in this regard and
then to judge Wordsworth against it. The poet, however, was convinced
that his Romantic views of ‘Man, Nature, and Society’ were quite com-
patible with his tory beliefs and behaviour. In consequence, a detailed
review of Wordsworth’s Romantic ideas of human innocence and virtue
and Burke’s scholastic beliefs about human fallibility and evil gives new
evidence for and against his successful adoption of a consistent world
view in the period 1814–32. Furthermore, the study of Wordsworth
‘consistency’, in this matter, will provide clear evidence that Wordsworth’s
social and economic assumptions about rural life and society were not
only Romantic, but also ‘populist’, in scope and character. In other
words, his Romantic creed was used, consciously, as a critical frame-
work in which to deal with the outward facts of rural life and society,
on the one hand, and the inward facts of childhood memories, mystical
states and imagination, on the other, but it was never the sum total of
his Golden Age ideas during the Industrial Revolution in England.
In this regard, Wordsworth’s Golden Age theories represent, in some
important respects, anti-modernist elements in the so-called ‘Old Regime’
in England (1688–1832). This historical conclusion derives its logic and
strength from the sociology of the Old Regime. By the word ‘sociology’
I do not mean the modern ‘objective’ study of the Old Regime in England
by social and political historians; though the works of Harold Perkin, J.
C. D. Clark, A. J. Mayer, and W. D. Rubinstein will prove invaluable to
the credibility of my case.22 I refer instead to the structure of the old
landed order as understood and defined by the members of its several
ranks at the time. This idea is strengthened by a detailed comparison
of Wordsworth’s beliefs about Old England with those of Edmund Burke
(1727–97) and William Cobbett (1763–1835). On the one hand, like
Burke, he objected to the rise of abstract reason in the affairs of men at
the expense of the traditions and customs of the past. On the other
hand, like Cobbett, he tended to look back to the world of his child-
hood and youth as the best available standard of comparison for judging
the new industrial society. A number of writers have contrasted Burke
and Cobbett as stalwart defenders of the pre-industrial order.23 Both
worked for the same ends of social stability and order based upon old
landed relationships and political institutions, but their methods were
politically poles apart: Burke upheld the state as a divinely ordained
result of England’s collective wisdom and experience; Cobbett looked
back to a Golden Age of ‘mixed political government’ and ‘pudding
time’ for all the dependent ranks of rural society.24 Curiously enough,
it would seem that no one has yet noted the many similarities be-
tween Wordsworth and Cobbett. Above all else, they shared certain
social values, or standards, which were derived from living among the
small independent farmers, artisans and shopkeepers, who formed the
lower-middle ranks of rural society in the late eighteenth century. At
the same time, comparing the conservative views of Edmund Burke
and William Wordsworth has been commonplace in Wordsworth scholar-
ship. In consequence no one to date has noted, or defined, the
contradictions and tensions between Burke’s belief in ‘human fallibility’
and Wordsworth’s wavering faith in ‘human innocence’, on the one
hand, and his backward-looking ideals of social life and moral relations,
on the other. Both men, however, were resisting the vast changes of
the ‘material revolution’ to the social, economic and political life of
the old landed order.
Chapter 4, in this respect, confirms my main social assumption that
Wordsworth’s social status, or identity, as a child and youth in the
Lake District, was somewhat ill-defined and so primarily responsible
for his beliefs about the ‘statesmen’ farmers and their families. Here
the comparison between Wordsworth and Cobbett is especially useful.
Both men had been geographically isolated, in their formative years,
within the narrow confines of old agrarian communities in the Lake
District and the south-east of the country. In consequence, they had
imbibed the social and economic values and moral standards of those
rural classes about and beneath them in the absence of any major alterna-
tive view of life – as found, for instance, in the different ranks and
employments of the comparatively large commercial, administrative and
port cities of the period. In particular, Wordsworth adopted the view-
point of people who were, socially and economically speaking, his
inferiors. That is to say, he shared more in common with the Lake
District yeomen and their sons than with the rural professions into
which he had been born. (His father had been law-agent to the greatest
landowner in Cumberland.) The efficient cause of Wordsworth’s
attachment to the lower-middle ranks of rural society was his remarkable
Introduction 9
freedom and undisciplined lifestyle whilst a student at Hawkshead

Grammar School in Furness, where he lived for ten years with a local
joiner and his wife, named Hugh and Ann Tyson. In this period he
was in daily contact with local artisans, shopkeepers and ‘statesmen’.
This part of my thesis owes a practical debt to the older generation of
liberal historians who were ‘half-conscious’ of a connection between
Wordsworth’s rural upbringing and education at Hawskshead as general
social and economic causes of his adult ideas and attitudes on a range
of social and political topics. G. M. Trevelyan, for example, remarked
upon the poet’s attendance at the old endowed grammar school, with
its ‘yeomen’ scholars, as a major social reason for his perfection as a
poet in the modern age; his emotional wholeness being fostered by the
old-fashioned studies and ‘boyish pursuits’ among the mountains and
lakes.25 Likewise, A. V. Dicey believed that Wordsworth’s rural upbringing
was responsible for putting him outside the traditional rigour of party
politics for much of his life. He traced this freedom to the poet’s strong
regard for the ranks of freeholders in the Lake District, whose lives,
characters and customs were models of independence and courage for
the nation in its war-time distress.26 These writers, however, did not
detail their astute remarks to the satisfaction of other historians. At
least, no recent writer has referred to their work.27 Moreover, neither
Dicey nor Trevelyan related his view to Wordsworth’s social position
in the old landed order. In consequence, they did not see the anti-
modernist elements in Wordsworth’s adult views of ‘Man, Nature, and
Society’, nor the structural implications of their own ideas. My com-
parison of Wordsworth with Cobbett, therefore, has three aims. The first
is to prove the validity of their respective theses by a detailed investiga-
tion of Wordsworth’s rural education and upbringing; secondly, to expand
upon their views by showing that a broad account of Wordsworth’s ru-
ral education and experience is compatible with the academic and literary
studies of the poet’s formal schooling, but also explains the appearance
of ‘populist’ ideas in the poet’s Golden Age writings and changing pol-
itical commitments; and thirdly to prove the validity of my own thesis
that Wordsworth’s ill-defined status, or identity, in the old landed order
was socially responsible for his pre-disposition towards a Golden Age view
of life. In other words, I will argue that Wordsworth’s Golden Age ideal
and its anti-modernist elements were rooted in the social structure of
the Old Regime as much as the poet’s actual experience of Old Lakeland.
The latter certainly formed the historical content of his particular ideal
but its general social cause was the widespread resistance of Old English
farming classes to industrial and agrarian changes during the period
1750–1850. Because Wordsworth had imbibed so many of their Old
English habits and beliefs, he too needed a Golden Age ideal during
the new conditions and crises in the present.
Indeed, the study of Wordsworth’s rural education and social up-

bringing is not sufficient in itself to explain his adoption of a Golden
Age view of Lake District life. The poet’s ill-defined status was, socially
speaking, inherent in the structure of the old landed order. He was
born into the ranks of the old rural professions but by force of circum-
stance he shared the social and economic standards of the small
independent producers of the Lake Counties. His confusion of social
standards and expectations, however, was compounded by his life-long
dependence upon others for his social and economic welfare. Wordsworth
was one of those chosen beings who know who they are – ‘For they
are Powers’; but the reading ‘public’ did not recognise the Prophet of
Nature in their midst for many years to come.28 In consequence, he
never found full independence, happiness or security outside the old
system of patronage and protection into which he had been born. Bi-
ographers have not readily acknowledged Wordsworth’s life-long
dependence upon patronage as partly responsible for his confused role
and social character as a poet in the old landed order. This original
argument therefore corrects any bias in the comparison made elsewhere
between Wordsworth and Cobbett. At least, it shows that Wordsworth’s
lack of a coherent identity or status was often compounded by his
failure to escape the forces of the middle and upper ranks of the old
landed order who were trying to forge a traditional role for the would-
be poet in the period 1770–1814.
It is therefore necessary, from the outset, to define Wordsworth’s family
in social and economic terms, if we wish to follow the poet’s Romantic
revolt against their system of patronage and connection in the period
1787–1813. For the most part, his family was well connected with the
old rural professions and commercial employments of the ‘pre-industrial’
order. His relatives were involved, on the one hand, with the Church,
the Law and the Land, and, on the other, with the Navy, the East
India Company and the Civil Service.29 His mother, Ann, was born
into the family of the Crackanthorpes ‘who from the times of Edward
the Third had lived in Newbiggen Hall, [in] Westmoreland’.30 By the
will of James Crackanthorpe, who died without issue, the inheritance
was eventually devised upon her mother, Dorothy Cookson, née
Crackanthorpe, and her heirs male. Dorothy’s eldest son, Christopher,
became ‘squire’ in 1792. The manor included both customary tenants
and freeholders within its bounds.31 He therefore gained political influ-
ence in local elections and often sided with the Duke of Norfolk’s interest
in opposing the power of the Lowthers.32 His brother, William, held
one of the two fellowships at St John’s College, Cambridge, reserved
for men from Cumberland, which he vacated on his marriage to Dorothy
Cowper in 1788. A close friend of William Wilberforce, he was helped
through the latter’s interest to the living at Forncett and eventually a
Introduction 11
canon’s stall at Windsor, where he worked for the royal family.33 If the
poet’s maternal relations were well connected with the squiralty and
the clergy, his paternal ones were firmly placed in the civil service, the
law and navigation.34 His grandfather Richard (d.1762) had come into
Westmorland during the early eighteenth century. He was descended
from a family who had been settled at Peniston, in Yorkshire, probably
since late Saxon times.35 The family’s connection with the Blands of
Kappax and the Lowthers of Swillington, in Yorkshire, was probably
the reason for his employment as the ‘general superintendant of the
[large] estates of the Lowthers, of Lowther’ in Westmorland. Shortly
after his marriage to Mary Robinson, he purchased the yeoman-estate
of Sockbridge, near Cockermouth, in Cumberland, where he raised three
children. (‘At the time of the Rebellion of 1745 he was receiver-general
of the county.’36) Likewise, his eldest son, Richard, was eventually favoured
with the office of Controller of Customs at the important coastal town
of Whitehaven in Cumberland. This lucrative position revolved around
the tobacco trade with Virginia and gave him the wherewithal to raise
a large family of nine children in reasonable comfort and security.37 In
fact uncle Richard’s children, in turn, entered the East India Compa-
ny’s Marine (in which John was a captain); the civil service (in whose
charge James went to Bengal and Favell to Madras); whilst Robinson
Wordsworth eventually became Collector of Customs at Harwich to which
post he was, probably, helped by his distant relation and benefactor
John Robinson MP for Harwich.38 John Wordsworth (the poet’s father)
was also a well-to-do lawyer, who, in 1766 succeeded John Robinson
to the job of land agent and man of business to Sir James Lowther, the
greatest landowner in Cumberland and said to be the richest Com-
moner in England.39 His work for Sir James was both legal and political
in nature. For instance, he was personally responsible for keeping the
freeholders in the Lowther camp at election time. Although he inherited
the small paternal estate at Sockbridge, in Barton, John Wordsworth
and his wife, Ann, raised their five young children in the great house
in Cockermouth which belonged to Sir James.40 The four boys followed
the pattern already implicit in the previous examples. Richard was first
articled as a clerk to his cousin Richard in 1785 but was indentured a
second time, with his cousin’s consent, in 1789, to the law office of
Parkin and Lambert, in Holborn Court, Grey’s Inn, London, where he
finally qualified as a lawyer. After many years of hard work, he found
himself both economically comfortable and socially important in the
family’s affairs.41 William failed to find full economic independence in
the writing of poetry and prose in the period 1791–1813 and therefore
became Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland between 1813 and 1842,
which brought him the handsome income of four hundred pounds a
year in commission fees.42 His adventurous brother John, under the
patronage of William Wilberforce and John Robinson, eventually became

Commander of the East India Company’s main sailing ship, The Earl of
Abergavenny, which went to the most valuable ports in Bengal and China.
(Unfortunately, the most beloved of William Wordsworth’s brothers went
down with his ship off the Bill of Portland in February, 1805.) Christopher
Wordsworth, the youngest of the brood, rose quickly under the con-
siderable patronage of Charles Manners Sutton (the Archbishop of
Canterbury) and of his son (the Speaker of the House of Commons) to
become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He also married Priscilla,
the daughter of Charles Lloyd, one of the famous bankers of that name
in Birmingham.43 Last, but not least, John Wordsworth’s only sister,
Ann, married the Reverend Thomas Myers LLB and their two sons followed
their cousins’ footsteps: Thomas became Accountant General of Bengal
and married a daughter of the Second Earl of Abergavenny; John Myers,
like so many of his cousins became a barrister at law.44 Likewise, the
grandchildren of Richard, John and Ann Wordsworth continued to climb
the long ladder of social and economic fortune and respectability in
nineteenth-century England.45
What does this brief survey of Wordsworth’s immediate family reveal
about ‘the social class his relatives moved in’?46 It is evident that the
family was deeply involved in the old system of patronage and con-
nection which worked to keep the middle ranks of the landed order in
their mixed roles of social and economic affluence and mobility. Both
Wordsworth’s brothers and cousins, moreover, received good educations
at free or endowed grammar schools in the Lake Counties, at such
places as Hawkshead and Sedburgh, which fitted them for life in Old
Lakeland and elsewhere. In other words, they were ‘educated for clergy-
men, excisemen, clerks in counting houses, & c.’.47 More generally they
were educated for the mixed role of country ‘squire and gentleman’.
(Wordsworth, for example, was not known to the readers of Parson’s
and White’s Lake District Directory of 1829 as the ‘Lake Poet’ of
Westmorland but, rather, as the Distributor of Stamps for the county
and as ‘Esquire’ of Rydal Mount.48) Of course, a fair sum of money was
needed by the Wordsworth and Myers families to educate their sons
for the learned or respectable professions just described. We will discuss
the cost of education in the Lake Counties in Chapter 3. Nevertheless,
it was quite typical of the north-west of England.49 The expense too of
keeping a student at Cambridge was considerable, but not exorbitant –
especially when supplemented by scholarships and exhibitions. The
immediate cost could also be borne by patrons or benefactors. Thus
Richard Wordsworth of Whitehaven helped his nephew (William) fi-
nancially when he was at Cambridge by loaning him four hundred
pounds or so for the purpose. It was, however, a debt ‘which Wordsworth
strove vainly for many years to get repaid’ by his brother Richard, to
Introduction 13
the Whitehaven branch of the family. ‘It was not settled until 1813’.50
Nevertheless, the most important point to note here is the role played
by patronage, connection and marriage in making the money and talents
of children bring the greatest possible reward for the family’s time and
trouble. This is best seen in the connection between the Wordsworths
and the Lowthers in Yorkshire, which was exploited by four genera-
tions of Wordsworths in Westmorland: Richard worked first for Henry
Lowther (Viscount Lonsdale) and secondly for Sir James Lowther who
succeeded to his great-uncle’s estates in 1751; John for Sir James; William
for Sir James’s successor William, Lord Lonsdale (2nd creation); and
‘Willy’ worked for both Lord Lonsdale and his natural heir.51 The same
relationship of patronage and protection was found in the social bonds
between the Robinson family and the Wordsworths in Whitehaven and
Cockermouth; and notably between the Wilberforce family of Hull, in
Yorkshire, and the Cookson family of Penrith, in Cumberland, and later,
Newbiggin Hall, in Westmorland. The human cost of patronage, however,
was also heavy. It involved personal dependence, gratitude and obligation
to benefactors and family alike. Consider, for instance, the insupportable
problems faced by John Robinson when his employer, Sir James Lowther,
changed his political opinions over the nation’s involvement in the
American War. In brief, this biographical survey of the poet’s social
and economic background provides a valuable standard by which to
judge the enormity of his bohemian life and Romantic revolt in the
period 1788–1813.
In fact, the poet’s Romantic revolt in art and politics readily admits
of social rather than ‘economic’ or ‘emotional’ explanation. At least, I
will show that Wordsworth’s chronic dependence upon others was the
social link between his changing political commitments in the period
1789–1814. This point must be stressed. It stands in stark contrast to
recent studies of this topic. In particular, it does not rely upon the
principles of dialectical materialism or psychoanalysis to explain the
poet’s social relationships and emotional response to the old landed
order. Students of Marx and Freud often relate the poet’s early radical-
ism to his personal conflict with Sir James Lowther.52 This rich and
powerful landowner refused to pay moneys and fees owed to John
Wordsworth’s estate, and so, it seems, failed to fulfil his social and
economic obligations towards his law-agent’s family. Likewise the poet’s
mystical experience and love of Nature is reduced to medical concepts
of emotional disorder and a mental failure to distinguish between subject
and object. Whether or not such notions are truly compatible, from a
logical point of view, we cannot overlook the materialistic implications
of their use by Wordsworth’s left-wing critics. Class theory reduces
everything in the agent’s life and experience to the level of class rela-
tions, interests and conflicts; psychoanalysis often confuses the mental
origins of the agent’s ideas with its truth or falsity. One is guilty of
teleology; the other of the ‘genetic fallacy’.53 Neither result is at all
satisfactory to the student of Wordsworth’s Golden Age ideas and Ro-
mantic Creed. Of course, honourable exceptions to the crude Marxist
orthodoxy exist. E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, E. J. Hobsbawm
and George Rudé, for example, have each tried to discuss agrarian life
in the late eighteenth century with a subtle regard for the different
social and economic values and behaviour obtaining between the so-
called ‘Old Regime’ in England and the liberal order which followed
the Great Reform Act of 1832. In particular, Thompson’s work on the
‘moral economy’ of pre-industrial England, and the political problems
arising from ‘patrician’ and ‘plebeian’ cultures, are excellent tools for
understanding Wordsworth’s life and work in the old landed order. In
other words, not all Marxist historians assume that the old landed or-
der can be adequately discussed in terms of class relations and structure,
when evidence exists that it was still ‘a “one-class society” . . . in the
sense that one status system was universally recognised throughout society
with the exception, perhaps, of the urban dissenters’.54 What I pro-
pose, however, is a social explanation of Wordsworth’s Romantic revolt
against landed authority, and aristocratic government, which contains
the seeds of his later conservative views of social and political life,
whilst still respecting the spiritual quality of his childhood experience
of Nature. On the one hand, I will discuss Wordsworth’s dependence
upon patronage and the old landed order as social reasons for his early
dislike of the upper ranks of society, no less than his slow march towards
political and religious orthodoxy in the period 1807–14. We will see
much evidence of Wordsworth’s life-long belief in paternal relation-
ships between the ranks of rural society; especially the ancient ties among
the lower-middle ranks of the Lake District community. Consider, for
example, his moving tribute to the dignity and value of local charity
and forbearance in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ (1800):
. . . While from door to door,

This old Man creeps, the villagers in him
Behold a record which together binds
Past deeds and offices of charity,
Else unremembered, and so keeps alive
The kindly mood in hearts which lapse of years,
And that half-wisdom half-experience gives,
Make slow to feel, and by sure steps resign
To selfishness and cold oblivious cares.
Among the farms and solitary huts,
Hamlets and thinly-scattered villages,
Where’er the aged Beggar takes his rounds,
Introduction 15
The mild necessity of use compels

To acts of love; and habit does the work
Of reason; yet prepares that after-joy
Which reason cherishes. And thus the soul,
By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursued,
Doth find herself insensibly disposed
To virtue and true goodness55
This traditional ideal of social rights and duties was compounded by

his own family’s dependence upon the patronage of Sir James Lowther.
In short, Wordsworth’s views of the old landed order were rooted in
the Old English ideal of noble obligation between the ranks, in gen-
eral, and the treatment of the old rural professions in particular. But
this model of the old landed order was not always shared by the upper
ranks. This interpretation is given strong support from two important
models of ‘pre-industrial’ England. The first is Harold Perkin’s descrip-
tion of ‘the abdication on the part of the governors’ of protection for
their dependants, and the rapid transition in the period from the ver-
tical society of old vested interests to the horizontal society of class
interests and loyalties.56 The second is J. C. D. Clark’s idea that the
Old Regime’s social and political hegemony was never based upon any
belief in noble obligation between the ranks, but only the notions of
natural authority and hierarchy, which demanded obedience for the
good of all. This ‘patriarchal’ creed was compounded by the upper rank’s
‘aristocratic code’, which called for fair play only between equals.57
Wordsworth’s early resentment of the aristocracy was understandable
by the standards of the much abused dependent ranks but primarily
based upon his ignorance of the Old Regime’s ideology.58 He viewed
the actions of his social superiors from the viewpoint of a personal
dependant, on the one hand, and a poetic outsider, on the other. In
consequence, his early condemnation of the upper classes could be aroused
by his maltreatment by Sir James Lowther, but just as easily tempered
or allayed by actions which fitted his ‘paternal’ code of behaviour – for
example, the personal help and generosity of Lowther’s successor, Sir
William. He rarely acknowledged, however, the basic difference between
his paternal definition of social relationships and the patriarchal tenets
of those above him. This precarious social position in the old landed
order is the structural clue to Wordsworth’s changing politics in the
period 1789–1832.
On the other hand, I will show that Weber’s concept of ‘charisma’ is
all that is needed to explain the social origins and significance of
Wordsworth’s ‘Romantic revolt’ in art and culture.59 Weber defined ‘cha-
risma’ as a form of social authority which stands outside the normal
routine of everyday life. In other words, the ‘natural’ leaders in times
of ‘distress’ have been holders of specific gifts of the mind or body or

both which have been regarded as ‘supernatural’ and not available to
everybody else. The crisis facing the bearer of ‘charisma’ might be ‘psy-
chic, physical, economic, ethical, religious, [or] political’, but for our
purposes the content is irrelevant.60 The charismatic personality has a
self-appointed ‘mission’ to change the nature of his chosen field of
action and the means to achieve it.61 The ‘holders of charisma’, more-
over, ‘stand outside the ties of this world, outside of routine occupations,
as well as outside the routine obligations of family life’.62 This theory
fits neatly into the social framework of my thesis. Wordsworth’s char-
ismatic personality was remarked upon by friend and foe alike and
caused lasting interest among a small but loyal band of artists, patrons
and readers. The self-appointed prophet of Nature hoped to ‘arouse the
sensual from their sleep/ Of Death’, and to change the nature of art
and culture in the modern age.63 And whilst his unorthodox lifestyle
and ‘retirement’ has been justly described as bohemian, his life-long
dependence upon patronage was no object in the early years to his
Romantic ambition to be a great poet whose works ‘might live’ in the
hearts and minds of future generations.64 In fact, Weber’s concept of
charismatic behaviour is quite compatible with Wordsworth’s Roman-
tic creed of Nature, Individualism, Creativity and Genius, but it does
not pre-judge the truth or falsity of the poet’s visionary art and expe-
rience. The latter can therefore be studied under the appropriate terms
of aesthetics and religion rather than the foregone conclusions of Freudian
psychoanalysis or Marxist notions of ‘false consciousness’. At least, this
social argument regards psychological causes as extraneous to the task
of explaining the origins, growth and demise of Wordsworth’s artistic
‘mission’. Here Weber’s idea is ‘value neutral’.65 It does not entail moral
judgements on the poet’s need to break with tradition and authority
in the pursuit of his artistic ‘mission’, nor his eventual peace with the
High Culture of the Old Regime – in part, because Weber’s sociology
assumes that charismatic authority is inherently unstable and becomes
‘routinized’ in due course.66 It therefore provides a healthy corrective
to several Marxist accounts of Wordsworth’s artistic and political com-
mitments which focus more upon the left-wing implications of the poet’s
changing role in the Old Regime than its various social causes.
Finally, my social study of Wordsworth’s Golden Age theories offers
a new explanation of Wordsworth’s supposed ‘decline’ as a poet in the
period 1815–50. Several scholars, from V. G. Kiernan in the 1950s to
J. Lucas in the 1990s, have argued that this event was largely the result
of Wordsworth’s conservative views of social life and political order.67
This tempting idea is given weight by recent arguments that Wordsworth’s
views of social life and government were grounded in eighteenth-century
traditions of rural paternalism and political deference which were only
Introduction 17
fitfully escaped, or partly reworked, in the wonderful decade of Ro-

mantic creativity and individualism, beginning in 1797. This cause and
effect relationship, however, is extremely crude and requires three main
qualifications. First, the poet’s artistic decline cannot be attributed to
any particular cause. His life and work were beset with many emo-
tional and intellectual difficulties which lessened his resolve to be a
guide unto himself, and so hastened his movement towards social and
religious orthodoxy.68 They included the poet’s rapid loss of visionary
power and experience in the fourth decade of his life; the spontaneous
nature of his poetic moods, and his frequent failure to write anything
of note that did not come as naturally as leaves to a tree; the physical
and mental discomfort of writing which contrasted with his oral com-
position in the presence of Nature – when ‘the fit’ was upon him; the
attempt to write long ‘philosophical’ works like The Recluse, to which
his genius was not suited; the slow acceptance of his poetry by the
reading ‘public’, in general, and by the body of critical opinion, in
particular – headed by The Edinburgh Review; the heavy responsibilities
of civil office as the Collector of Stamps for Westmorland between 1813
and 1842; the tragedy of several deaths in his close-knit family; and
the bitter estrangement from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, beginning in
1810. As Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling put it tersely: ‘He iced over’.69
Secondly, Wordsworth’s tory years were often spent in the grips of despair.
Modern life simply overwhelmed him:
Why is the Past belied with wicked art,

The Future made to play so false a part,
Among a people famed for strength of mind,
Foremost in freedom, noblest of mankind?
We act as if we joyed in the sad tune
Storms make in rising, valued in the moon
Naught but her changes.70
His pessimism has received little serious attention from Romantic scholars.
It is gently mocked by his most recent biographer as the ‘irresistibly
comic’ mutterings of a nervous and disgruntled old man; and, more
often than not, it is scorned as the tory placeman’s selfish fear of social
and political change. 71 Dr Francis Klingender is the only post-war
exception to this rule. His fine account of the poet’s spiritual plight, in
Art and the Industrial Revolution (1947), concluded that Wordsworth’s
distrust of the new industrial order was rooted in his disappointed hopes
for the future relationship between art and science.72 Instead of leading
the nation towards general truth and happiness, the laws of science
and ‘social Industry’ had been used by a few enterprising groups to
subject most of the people to the twin yokes of industrial and agrarian
capitalism. These economic and social systems of class exploitation were

supported by the specious principles of political economy, on the one
hand, and Malthusian notions of natural selection and competition,
on the other. Thus ‘arts, in themselves good, [were] turned into fearful
scourges of mankind, and science [was] turned [into] sophistry through
attempting to justify the evil’.73 Nevertheless, the poet added, in The
Excursion (1814), the ‘animating hope’ that, ultimately, humanism would
prevail and science would be reconciled to art.74 There is much truth
and good sense to Dr Klingender’s argument, but he too missed the
anti-modernist side of Wordsworth’s denunciation of ‘these disordered
times’.75 In spite of his hopes for science and art, his opposition to
‘sweeping change’ in the period 1815–50 increased ten-fold and was
firmly rooted in his Golden Age assumptions about rural life and agrarian
society.76 As the Old Regime was steadily destroyed in these years,
Wordsworth’s distrust of modern man’s ‘distempered Intellect’, dog-
matic individualism and the ‘iron age’ grew into a peculiarly modern,
and perhaps Christian, condition of ‘cultural despair’.77 The idea of
‘cultural despair’ has been studied a great deal in recent years with
regard to modern Germany. In this respect I owe a clear debt to Fritz
Stern’s remarkable book, The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961).78 This
work, of course, applies only to European countries, like Germany, where
rapid industrialisation, in the years after c.1850, was found side by side
with old forms of aristocratical and monarchical government and strong
anti-modern and anti-liberal traditions. England, however, was uniquely
‘modern’, in many ways, and quite lacking an anti-modernist tradition
of the kind just mentioned. Nor is this all. Britain’s elite culture was
never anti-capitalist or anti-business in its beliefs or behaviour, nor, in
any credible way, responsible for the nation’s relative decline as an
industrial power in the period 1870–1990. At least Professor W. D.
Rubinstein observes as much in his recent book on the subject:
On any comparative basis British culture has been markedly less strident
in its condemnation of capitalism than any other European culture
and, indeed, presents one of the rare cultural traditions where capi-
talism and business life have been advocated and defended by leading
intellectuals [from Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall]. There is
virtually nothing whatever in British culture, at any stage of its modern
evolution, to set beside the cosmic anti-bourgeois sarcasm and
distilled hatred and loathing emanating from Germany’s Brechts
and other Marxist writers on the left, or its right-wing proto-fascist
proponents of ‘cultural despair’ and radical nationalist authoritari-
anism, traditions which are also well represented in all other European
cultures.79
Introduction 19
Professor Rubinstein’s view of the ‘post-industrial’ elite cannot be gain-

said, but even he has shown, elsewhere, the sheer irrationality of the
unreformed government and the widespread inertia of many sections
of the Old Regime in England to social, economic and political change
in the period 1760–1860. For example, in describing the end of ‘Old
Corruption’, in pre-Victorian times, he observes that the use of places,
pensions, sinecures, pluralist livings, reversions, and other sources of
revenue for office-holders in the various branches of government and
bureaucracy, to say nothing of the widespread nepotism and patronage
among aristocratic families, and the existence of closed municipal cor-
porations and so on, were all ‘virtually coextensive with the pre-1832
British Establishment itself’. Moreover, they were based upon pre-modern
and non-rational modes of thought and behaviour, ‘which lacked at
least an element of the modern notions of merit, individual responsi-
bility, and organisational rationale and which, furthermore, must be
taken at least partly at face value. In a word, the world of Old Corruption
was irrational (in Weber’s sense of rationality); there is a dreamlike or
nightmarish quality [about its administrative, clerical, and legal life]
which pervaded the [whole] system, and which’, he claims, ‘must be
appreciated by its historians’.80 Of course ‘Old Corruption’ was centred
upon London, Dublin and Edinburgh, rather than rural England. Never-
theless, his review of the problem serves as a valuable lesson to readers
of Romantic poetry and prose from the period 1770–1850. To experi-
ence the rural life and values of ‘Cobbett’s England’, no less than the
‘urban non-dynamic’ world of ‘Dickens’ London’, requires a major leap
of thought and feeling on our part.81 Above all, we must not ignore or
underrate the strength of old agrarian values and behaviour amongst
rural workers and landowners in Old England during the Industrial
Revolution (1770–1850) – a point made, in their own ways, by Arno J.
Mayer, J. C. D. Clark, and Patrick Joyce in their respective works on
the High and Low cultures of nineteenth-century England. The Politics
of Cultural Despair therefore offers several reasons for conservative views
of life which might apply, with appropriate changes, to Wordsworth’s
emotional and spiritual plight in the period 1814–32; especially, the
German ideologues’ disgust at modern man’s rapid separation from
the land, with its more rigid social relationships, more primitive sense
of community, and distrust of pure reason and intellect. At least,
Wordsworth’s orthodox views of Anglican political theology arose, in
part, from a similar mistrust of reason and progress, compounded by
his bitter experiences of radical politics abroad and the disturbing effects
of consumer capitalism and urban growth at home. In short, it gives
several clues to the poet’s long-standing adoption of Edmund Burke’s
conservative views of social life and political order which we discussed
earlier as being incompatible with his purely Romantic idea of Natural
Innocence. The concept of ‘cultural despair’, if nothing else, takes us

further than simple platitudes about Wordsworth’s tory reaction and
self-interest, and into the heart of his spiritual darkness: especially, his
related fears that ‘straight-lined’, or secular, progress would replace ‘faith
in Providence’, and that the material values of industrial society would
dissolve the old-fashioned individualism and traditional life of the old
landed order which had produced the ‘statesmen’:
[Men] Who are their own upholders, to themselves

Encouragement, and energy and will,
Expressing liveliest thoughts in lively words
As native passion dictates.82
Herein lies the third reason for Wordsworth’s relative decline as a great
poet, namely, the emotional contradiction between Wordsworth’s tory
creed and his Golden Age ideal of Old Lakeland. He largely supported
the Old Regime as a religious and political bulwark against widespread
industrial changes which, as Mary Moorman said, were ‘destroying the
best things in English life’; but, as we saw above, ‘the best things’ were
generally found among the lower-middle ranks of the old landed order.83
His conservative creed was therefore rooted in old agrarian values – of
sturdy individualism and traditional social ties, on the one hand, and
a considered faith in the social benefits of pre-modern forms of thought,
feeling and emotion, on the other. His intellectual defence of the aris-
tocratic government and its Constitution in Church and State was no
doubt able and sincere, but its ‘patriarchal’ tenets, in Clark’s sense,
were largely outside his own rural experiences and assumptions, which
were always the emotional impetus and historical content of his best
work:
Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope,

And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;
Of blessed consolations in distress;
Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;
Of joy in widest commonalty spread . . .84
In short, his best Romantic poetry, from a social point of view, was
basically the creative expression of ‘emotions’ and agrarian values and
relationships arising from his ‘dear remembrances’ of Old Lakeland,
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.85 The ‘statesmen
system of farming’ had given him a Golden Age ideal of the ‘true Com-
munity’ which no patriarchal creed could replace in his life and work.
1
Old Lakeland: a Golden Age Ideal
J. D. Marshall has argued that Wordsworth erred egregiously in calling

the customary tenant a ‘statesman’.1 This term was rarely used in parish
registers in Cumbria, before the late eighteenth century, to describe
land occupiers who were generally regarded as ‘yeomen’ or ‘husbandmen’.
The holder of a customary estate of inheritance, in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, was quite content to call himself a ‘yeoman’.2
He even considered this ‘feudal’ name a mark of respect. Marshall has
argued that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writers,
like John Housman and William Wordsworth (the poet), were largely
responsible for the word’s vogue, in the early Victorian Age among
prosperous middle-class professionals, industrialists, and tenant farmers,
who were searching for their roots in a glorious past.3 His claims make
it necessary for the student of Golden Age ideas to consider carefully
the poet’s interpretation of rural ‘facts’, on the one hand, and the re-
lationship between reading, writing and reality, on the other. Marshall’s
argument, however, is weakened by his lack of evidence, and the sev-
eral concessions which he makes to alternative views of the topic. He
admits, for example, that etymologically and geographically regarded,
the origins and growth of the word ‘statesman’ are both obscure and
ambiguous. Nonetheless, he still maintains that the word was not found
in the Cumbrian dialect.4 His reasoning here is somewhat self-serving
and directed by his radical beliefs. At least, he seems intent on proving
that the word is a middle-class import – perhaps from the South.5
Moreover, he rejects the idea that the words ‘statesman’ and ‘estatesman’
were evolved from the use of the word ‘estate’. The latter does not
evince any ‘special legal or generally expressive force’ in official docu-
ments from the period. On the other hand, he allows that the words
statesman and estatesman ‘appear as parallel forms’ in documents from
the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, when the ‘e’ was slowly
elided from the longer and possibly older word, leaving the shorter
word more suitable for use in common speech.6 This evolution, however,
21
England, 1750–1850
leads Dr Marshall to conclude that the word statesman was probably

used ‘in a rather worldly, sophisticated sense by those [well-to-do yeomen]
who chose’ to employ it ‘in private intercourse, as a status word’ com-
parable to the term ‘Mister’.7 Here we might recall Wordsworth’s repeated
assertion, in poetry and prose, that the statesmen, as he knew them in
childhood and youth, were often ‘men of respectable education’, landed
property, and independent character. Perhaps this word (statesman) arose
locally as a description of such men before the Industrial Revolution
had impoverished some, and made others both wealthy and important
in the ‘new’ society?8 Marshall thinks otherwise. Because the word does
not appear in early travel and guide books, or those used in the pictur-
esque tradition, he concludes that ‘the word was not in currency in
polite or learned circles, in Cumbria at least’.9 But here we must make
four qualifications to his account.
First of all, the Lake District was not fully discovered, even geographi-
cally speaking, by outsiders until the early nineteenth century. This
conclusion was drawn by Canon Bouch in his remarkable book, Prelates
and People of the Lake Counties (1948).10 The Lakes were largely un-
known by Englishmen until about 1750. Between that date and 1769,
‘visitors to the easily accessible lakes – the Windermere group, Ullswater,
Thirlmere, and the Keswick lakes, probably also Coniston, were not
infrequent’.11 Moreover, most tourists and holiday makers at this time
came from within the Border counties. ‘But of the remainder of the
Lake District very little had been seen by the outside world. John Wesley
seems to have been the only person known to have passed through
it’.12 Even highly reputable books on Lake District history, travel and
topography, published between 1770 and 1813, still printed very poor
and misleading maps of the district and so perpetuated ‘the general
ignorance’ of the region and its people.13 This geographical ignorance
was partly imposed upon the tourists by the Old Lakelanders them-
selves. The latter were widely engaged in smuggling in the years before
Pitt reduced excise duties on foreign goods. Therefore, they did not
encourage tours and expeditions into the Lake District proper, and access
by road was confined to a few major attractions.14 Moreover, there is
overwhelming evidence that the taste for fell walking and mountain
scenery was much more slowly effected in the general population than
has been thought to date by Romantic scholars and social historians.15
Secondly, late eighteenth-century writers of travel guides, regional
history books and geographical surveys used the term ‘statesman’ as a
native word with social and economic connotations of freedom and
self-sufficiency. Consider, for instance, William Hutchinson’s frequent
description of the Cumberland yeomanry, in 1794, as ‘the owners of
small landed estates, from whence they are called statesmen’.16 Likewise,
Andrew Pringle, who wrote the Board of Agriculture Report for
Old Lakeland: a Golden Age Ideal 23
Westmorland, in the same year, also referred to the Lake District yeomen
as customary tenants and freeholders who occupied their own estates
and therefore merited the name ‘statesmen’.17 We shall see later that
there is circumstantial evidence that Wordsworth might have read both
Hutchinson and Pringle in the late 1790s and therefore found written
authority for his own description of the statesmen in his letter to Fox.
It is surely more than a coincidence that all three writers refer to the
statesmen of the north as a species of yeomen who were respectable in
character and education and distinguished by their strong attachment
to their small family farms. Indeed, it is possible that Pringle and
Hutchinson rather than Wordsworth and Housman were the first writers
of note to make popular the use of the term statesman outside the
Lake District. At least they both published important works on agricul-
ture and regional history over fifteen years before the first (anonymous)
version of Wordsworth’s guide book appeared in 1810.18 Furthermore,
the Lake District directories, histories and gazetteers of Parson and White
(1829), Mannix and Whellan (1847) and others rely almost solely upon
the Board of Agriculture Reports for their definitions of the statesmen
system of farming. In this regard, the poet’s definition is a welcome
alternative to the standard accounts of the word, which were written,
as Marshall says, by ‘men from outside the immediately Cumbrian scene’.19
Thirdly, historical evidence clearly indicates that the technical dis-
tinction between freeholders and customary tenants was often more
apparent than real. At least, Canon Bouch and G. P. Jones concluded
that seventeenth-century records of Kendale show that a rural middle
class of small landowners did exist, in the Lake District, standing below
the local gentry and above the rural cottagers and labourers: ‘It may be
regarded as including yeomen in the legal sense, having freehold land
worth at least forty shillings a year, but also the holders of [customary]
“estates of inheritance”, to whom the term yeoman might be loosely
applied’.20 This middle class included extremes of big and small land-
owners within its ranks, but the typical Lake District estate was
comparatively small. 21 Thus, for example, the average size of 42
yeomen freeholds, in the Barony of Kendale, between 1605 and 1638,
was about 24 acres, but this figure is subject to much qualification. For
their part, customary estates tended to be even smaller than yeomen
freeholds. Thus, for instance, in the seventeenth century, 90 per cent
of customary estates were 10 acres or less, and over 50 per cent were 5
acres or less. (On the other hand, a customary acre, in the Lake Coun-
ties, could be three times the size of a statute acre.22 Because existing
documents do not always indicate which of the two kinds of acre was
used to measure customary estates in a particular parish, or manor, we
must treat such statistics with due caution.23) Perhaps a safer guide to
the size of freehold and customary estates is the range of incomes given
by rural writers of the late eighteenth century. George Culley and John
Bailey, for example, in 1794, guessed that two-thirds of Cumberland
were held by customary tenure, ‘in tenements from 5L. to 50L. a-year’,
with the majority ranging from 15L to 30L.24 Likewise, Andrew Pringle
argued that small landowners in Westmorland held estates ranging ‘from
L.10, or L.20, to L.50 a-year’.25 Their general comments have been con-
firmed by the few local and regional studies made on the topic.26 Clearly,
the majority of Old Lakeland estates were small in size and income,
with customary estates being smaller on the average than freeholds.
Nevertheless, such economic and legal differences were by and large
irrelevant to the locals who used the terms yeoman and statesman as
synonyms in general conversation.
Fourthly, Dr Marshall’s negative argument might be used to support
Wordsworth’s own claim, made in the letter to Fox, that gentlemen
were often ignorant of the lower-middle ranks of society, in general,
and the farming classes, in particular. Consider, for instance, the following
anecdote told in the Wordsworth family, about the Reverend Robert
Greenwood, Wordsworth’s boyhood friend at Hawkshead Grammar School,
and, later, a Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was the
son of a customary tenant at Ingleton, in Yorkshire.27 ‘After his father’s
death’, writes T. W. Thompson, ‘he let the [paternal] farm, but [only]
on the understanding that the tenant reserved two rooms for his use
whenever he wanted to go there, which he did very frequently, espe-
cially during the long vacation’:
In his younger days he enjoyed helping a bit on the farm. And thereby
hangs a tale. . . . A Trinity don, whom Greenwood did not like very
much, being on a northern tour, decided to call on him at his Ingleton
retreat. ‘His reverance [sic] is out’, the farmer’s wife told him, ‘help-
ing my husband with the hay: they’re leading, and there’s no time
to lose as it’s blowing like rain. But maybe you’ll call again’, she
suggested, ‘a bit later on.’ The visitor said he would, and in the
early evening made a second call. This time he was luckier. ‘I’ll go
and tell his reverance you’re here, sir’, the farmer’s wife said. ‘They’re
finished in the fields and he’s in the cow ‘us now helping with the
milking astead o’ me’. ‘If I may, I’ll come with you’, said the visitor.
‘I’d like to see his reverance milking a cow.’ After greetings, he watched
for a few moments, and then exclaimed: ‘Why, Greenwood, you look
as if you’d been doing this all your life.’ ‘And, as you know, I haven’t’,
said Greenwood. ‘But, my father being a statesman, I was born and
bred to it.’ His fellow don was puzzled. ‘What exactly do you mean?’
he asked. ‘Exactly what I said’, Greenwood assured him, ‘no state-
ment could be plainer. But if you don’t understand we must leave it
at that.’ And he changed the subject by asking his caller if he would
care to stay to a farmhouse supper.28
The word ‘statesman’, of course, was perfectly suited for a pun on the
contemporary term for a politician, as well as a private joke at the
expense of a visiting clergyman, who had not yet heard the common
name for a customary tenant in the Lake District. Indeed, William
Hutchinson, writing in 1794, claimed that the word was once used by
a Cumberland MP in the House of Commons ‘much to the amusement
of the late Earl of Guildford’, who was then at the helm.29 Furthermore,
the story confirms the need for a detailed study of Wordsworth’s social
background, and especially his upbringing in the Lake District, as root
causes of his high respect for the lower-middle ranks of rural society,
in general, and the ‘statesmen’, in particular. Robert Greenwood’s lasting
regard for his ‘paternal fields’ is a case in point; suggesting, as it does,
the scholar’s desire to keep in touch with his family’s estate and a
time-honoured way of life. Likewise, Christopher Wordsworth (junior)
remarked that without the long college vacation, in summer, his uncle
William might have forgotten or lost much of his life among his native
mountains.30 The word’s currency among the farming classes, more-
over, might be a satisfactory explanation of Wordsworth’s frequent use
of it to connote Old Lakeland characteristics, values, actions and life-
styles. At least, statesman might have been used – even ‘erroneously’ –
in the daily talk of cottagers, small farmers, shopkeepers and artisans,
who spoke ‘the real language of men’, in the hills and dales of the
region, and among their children in the classroom.31
Indeed, we must reconsider the whole question of etymology, language
and the real world from the viewpoint of modern linguistics and an-
thropology. A. L. Becker, for instance, has distinguished between formal
and folk etymology, arguing that ‘since the meanings of words con-
stantly change, etymologies must be reformulated (like genealogies),
based upon what one now, in the present, sees as the “intrinsic” meaning
of the word’:
A brief example: [formal] etymology A of the word history traces it

to French histoire, then to Latin historia ‘a narrative of past events’
to Greek istoria ‘Learning by inquiry’ and back to istor ‘arbiter, judge’
and hence back in time to a possible Indo-European root. [Folk] Ety-
mology B of the same word divides it into ‘his’ and ‘story’, and
interprets the elements of the word in the present. ‘His-story’ is also
an account of past events, but an account relating primarily to men,
with women in a secondary role. Which etymology is correct? It is
impossible to answer, for the question is wrong in insisting that we
reject one or the other conceptual strategy, etymology A or etymology
B. Certainly etymology B tells us more that is relevant and true to
current thought than etymology A.32
In a similar way we might ease the tension between Dr Marshall’s scholarly

account of the word ‘statesman’ and the common or vulgar etymology,
which was current in Wordsworth’s time, and probably based upon the
root word ‘estate’, or ‘estatesman’, or both. Legal terms, such as ‘yeo-
man’ and ‘husbandman’ might have been regarded, on a local level, as
correct terms for wills, inventories and last testaments, or parish records
of births, deaths, and marriages, but singularly lacking in warmth of
feeling and social distinction for the ‘small independent proprietors’
who were conscious of their customary estates of inheritance, on the
one hand, and their economic standing in the Old Lakeland community,
on the other. Their possession of small estates entailed a high profile
for the ‘statesmen’ in local affairs. For example, they were required
to take turns as surveyors of roads, overseers of poor relief, church-
wardens, bailiffs and constables. No doubt these social rights and duties
were a burden to some of the poorer statesmen of the eighteenth century,
but it is probable that most of them experienced a measure of self-
esteem and social power which often compensated them for their added
expense and special efforts on behalf of the parish community.33 Still,
it is clear that the term ‘statesman’ was always a social designation,
and not a legal title. ‘A yeoman was essentially a freeholder who owned
the field on which he lived, and cultivated it himself. But’, as Paul
Mantoux observed, ‘the name also applied to copyholders, whose family
had tilled the same bit of land for several generations, and even in
certain districts to leaseholders for life’.34 The Lake District community
was not acting whimsically, it seems, in their use of the word ‘states-
man’ as a synonym for the Old English term ‘yeoman’. Nor was the
remote north lacking a large group of freeholders proper, and customary
tenants with some freehold.35 In fact, it is often difficult to know whether
a certain group of statesmen are freeholders, customary tenants, or mixed
farmers, but the evidence strongly suggests that the ranks of freeholders
were swelled, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth
centuries by enfranchised customary tenants.36 Moreover, we must not
overlook the conservative nature of municipal culture and civil service
language in Old England. Indeed, Raymond Williams has even written
about the historically absurd insistence of modern English bureaucrats
upon the outdated feudal languages of monarch and subjects, and other
legacies of England’s pre-industrial and pre-democratic past, which once
composed an ‘Absolute Order’. Perhaps the terms ‘yeoman’ and
‘husbandman’ were used in this official, or post-feudal, sense in state
documents, ecclesiastical records, and the like.37 There is some evidence,
at least, that the term ‘yeoman’, by the late eighteenth century, ‘had a
distinctly old-fashioned flavour’; and ‘when writers bewailed the “decline
of the yeomanry” their very use of so archaic and imprecise a term [for
various landowners] denoted a somewhat sentimental approach to the
changes which were occurring in the agrarian structure’.38 In conse-

quence, the poet’s use of the word ‘statesmen’ as a Golden Age term
for the region’s ‘yeomanry’ is even more understandable. This linguistic
approach to the topic is therefore quite compatible with Marshall’s claim
that the word ‘statesman’ was ‘one more readily adopted as some members
of the [Lakeland] yeomanry began to climb the social scale and become
increasingly status-conscious, and as others began to feel that that status
was threatened’.39 It even dovetails neatly with his main idea that the
nouveau riche of Victorian times wanted to trace their ancestry back to
a justly proud and reputable stock of small property holders.40 But the
questions surrounding the geographical and etymological origins of the
word must take second place to its contemporary meaning as a standard
of social and economic independence for the small landowner of the
remote north. What remained of the technical sense of the word ‘yeo-
man’ was usually lost on the northerners who used the provincial and
‘emphatical’ term ‘statesman’ as a traditional description of any small
farmer who occupied his own estate.41 Whether or not the word (states-
man) was an anachronism, as Marshall implies, remains unanswered,
but there can be no doubt that it was the ‘real language of men’ in
Wordsworth’s day, and its Golden Age significance is not reduced by
its fairly recent appearance in print. On the contrary, it had impressed
itself upon the folk memory as a word which evoked the personal freedom,
economic competence and independent character of small landowners
in the Lake District, at the height of their general prosperity during
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and, like the word yeoman
itself, had gained stronger emotional significance during the period of
their frequent economic decline in the Industrial Revolution.42
For his part, J. V. Beckett has taken Wordsworth to task for describing
the Cumbrian landowner as a ‘peasant’. His review of the word’s meaning
in English history suggests that ‘peasant’ was only employed with ref-
erence to foreign farmers. Thus he concluded that Wordsworth’s usage
was wrong, in principle, and cast the dalesman in a European mould
that disfigured his English traits and character.43 Beckett specifically objects
to Wordsworth’s beliefs that the statesmen were (1) self-sufficient farmers;
(2) characterised by social and economic equality; and (3) occupied the
same lands, or tenements, for several generations.44 We will deal with
each of these objections in a moment. What we must ask here is whether
or not Wordsworth erred in using the word ‘peasant’. I have found
very little evidence that he did. For example, a careful perusal of
Wordsworth’s collected poems in two volumes, as well as The Prelude
(1805), which together span the years 1787 to 1850, and comprehend
some 2000 pages, reveals that the word ‘peasant’ was used only 34
times, and never with regards to a statesman – who was usually defined
as a ‘dalesman’. 45 To avoid taxing the reader at this stage of my

argument, I have relegated the details to the Appendix at the end of
the present work. This literary evidence reveals that Wordsworth was
well aware of the old and new connotations of the word in English
and used it according to the changing social and historical contexts of
his writings. Thus he applied it, quite properly, to the country people
below the rank of gentlemen in ‘feudal’ England, ‘Old Regime’ France,
and tradition-bound Spain. Nor did he err in calling the Swiss pastoralists
by that name. Likewise, he was careful to use the word as a credible
label for uncouth characters and their behaviour among the rural la-
bourers; and occasionally, as a conceit for rustic life and dress. In short,
the poet’s use of the word ‘peasant’, in the period 1787–1850, was
neither confused nor disparaging to the different peoples and places
involved. The size of the sample, moreover, suggests that Dr Beckett
has overstated his case, at least, with respect to Wordsworth’s poetry.
He might reply that his strictures were only supposed to apply to
Wordworth’s best-selling guide book, which reached a vast Victorian
audience and so coloured their views of both the mountains and the
statesmen. But even here he has made too much of Wordsworth’s use
of the term ‘peasant’ which occurs only once, in the 1835 edition,
with reference to the ‘estatesmen’ as ‘the native peasantry’. He is usually
content to refer to the Old Lakeland yeomanry as ‘estatesmen’, cus-
tomary tenants, or ‘proprietors for the most part of the lands which
they occupied and cultivated’.46 Clearly, Wordsworth took some pains
to qualify his use of the term ‘peasantry’ in this popular work. Nor
should it be forgotten that by 1835 the word was common in middle-
class literature. William Cobbett who died in that year still objected
to it. For example, in 1830, he claimed that the word ‘peasantry’ was
‘a new name given to the country labourers by the insulting
boroughmongering and loan-mongering tribes’. But the radical writer
was not typical of the age. Oliver Goldsmith’s attempt ‘to free the term
“peasantry” from the condescension and dismissal which [had] charac-
terised Johnson’s definitions’ was taking effect six and a half decades
after the publication of his poem ‘The Deserted Village’, in 1770.47 At
least, the great Northumbrian engraver, Thomas Bewick, who was quite
as rustic as Cobbett, both by background and in habits, was happy to
use Goldsmith’s famous couplet about ‘a bold peasantry, their coun-
try’s pride’ (and so on) in a superb woodcut on the topic of rural life
and manners.48 Likewise, Robert Anderson, who published dialect poems
in Cumberland in 1798 and 1820, used the word without qualms
in his prose description of rural customs and traditions of Lancashire:
‘A Cumbrian peasant’, for example, paid ‘his addresses to his sweet-
heart during the silence and solemnity of midnight, when every bosom’
was ‘at rest, except those of love and sorrow’.49 The word’s unsavoury
associations with feudal vassalage and France were therefore weakened

by the time Wordsworth and Bewick were paying tribute to their own
‘native peasantry’ in the north of England.
Nevertheless, this small cleavage between Wordsworth’s poetry and
prose can be bridged by a careful study of Wordsworth’s views of the
statesmen system of farming which were not based upon a ‘peasant’
model of society at all. Both Beckett and Marshall abstract a ‘peasant’
or ‘subsistence’ economy from the poet’s description of the statesmen
of the period where he only intended to portray a broad domestic
economy and personal independence (in Cobbett’s sense, as we shall
see below). He always acknowledged their general need for extra earnings
from domestic industry, seasonal work, and the sale of surplus crops
and dairy produce. In particular, he applauded their spinning of wool
and flax, and their knitting of small goods, like stockings. Such dom-
estic industry was crucial to the economic competence of the more
isolated farmers of the Lake District proper:
During long winter nights & wet days, [he recalled,] the wheel upon
which wool was spun gave employment to a great part of a family.
The old man, however infirm, was able to card the wool, as he sate
in the corner by the fire-side; and often, when a boy, [in Furness,]
have I admired the cylinders of carded wool which were softly laid
upon each other by his side. Two wheels were often at work on the
same floor, and others of the family, chiefly the little children, were
occupied in teasing and cleaning the wool to fit it for the hand of
the carder. So that all except the smallest infants were contributing
to mutual support. Such was the employment that prevailed in the
pastoral vales. Where wool was not at hand, in the small rural towns,
the wheel for spinning flax was almost in as constant use, if knit-
ting was not preferred. . . .50
Textiles was the most important by-work to be found in the Border

counties. And even if ‘domestic spinning, still less weaving, was far
from being a universal one’, both J. V. Beckett and E. J. Evans have
concluded that it was especially common in South Westmorland and
Furness. Furthermore, if Wordsworth focused upon the pastoral type of
economy, he was aware of the by-employments in West Cumberland
and Furness which Dr Marshall found indispensable to the statesmen’s
‘subsistence’ in Old Lakeland.51 It is significant that Wordsworth was
born in the one place and raised in the other. He was well acquainted
in childhood and youth with the old-fashioned manufacturing and
commercial towns such as Keswick, Cockermouth and Penrith as well
as the new port town of Whitehaven in Cumberland; and Hawkshead
in Furness. All but Keswick were the site of his formal education or
family connections or both. In ‘An Evening Walk’ (1793), for instance,

which drew largely upon his schoolboy memories of Hawkshead, between
1777 and 1787, he referred to several occupations which provided seasonal
or part-time work for statesmen as well as full-time work to tradesmen
and labourers; in particular, he wrote, about ‘potters’ who carried goods
upon panniered horses or donkeys; peat-moss or turf gatherers, who
brought this useful fuel down from the mountain’s side by means of
sledges; timber wains who brought their heavy loads from the forests;
and the men who quarried, cut and transported the ‘pale-blue’ slate,
which was one of the most lucrative exports from the southern Lake
District.52 Elsewhere, he referred to charcoal burners, timber cutters,
miners, and the ‘distant forge’s swinging thump profound’.53 Indeed,
the remarkable variations between the numbers of ‘yeomen’, in the
broad sense, and ‘tenant-farmers’, in the narrow sense, which have been
observed in the Border counties, by Bouch and Jones, were sometimes
‘connected with [their] remoteness from towns and markets. In Aldingham,
Furness, for example, the percentage of yeomen was 52.2; in Torver,
52.6; and in Church Coniston 57 per cent: in Pennington and Egton
cum Newland, nearer to [the old market town of] Ulverston, it was
only 13.6 and 7.1 per cent’.54 The relationship between ‘urban’ and
‘rural’ Lakeland, however, is very difficult to unravel: some small holders
gained an advantage over others from their very nearness to a given
textile, iron, or mining region, which provided additional work for states-
men and their families but no great incentive to sell or to lease their
lands – consider the comments already made about the hills and dales
around Kendal; the same may be true of the fellside communities of
Furness and the many small freeholds in the mining region of Aspatria.
Other statesmen were encouraged by the general rise in rents and prices
for farm produce, not to speak of the higher wages for industrial work,
to lease their lands, sell up and use their capital to stock a large tenant-
farm, or to specialise more for the local market – which might therefore
require enclosure (following enfranchisement) to reap the full benefit
of the expanding market for goods.55 Others yet again would have been
even more content to keep their small family estates. We shall assess
the role of the Industrial Revolution as a cause of the statesmen’s demise
in the last section of this chapter; what we must do here is acknowledge
the general role of the ‘pre-industrial’ economy as a long-term cause of
the statesmen’s survival in the region. Its three main supports were
small family farms, by-employments, and physical isolation. If these
forces are arbitrarily defined as a ‘peasant’ economy, we miss Wordsworth’s
Old Lakeland ideal of domestic economy and family independence.
Material life for him was always a necessary but far from sufficient
condition for a satisfactory system of social life and moral relations.
Economic competence could lead men and women to personal inde-
pendence and domestic happiness, as seen in the two anecdotes, and

so perhaps to the ‘true Community’.56
Dr Beckett’s second charge against the Romantic poet is more cogent.
Wordsworth, perhaps too readily, portrayed the customary tenants and
freeholders of the Lake Country as ‘a perfect Republic of Shepherds
and Agriculturists’.57 The historian, of course, can question the accuracy
of Wordsworth’s description, but he should consider the picture of reality
as the product of two faculties, which, like a pair of eyes, unite two
views of life into one sight, namely, the Romantic imagination and the
historical sense.
For, born in a poor District, and which yet

Retaineth more of ancient homeliness,
Manners erect, and frank simplicity,
Than any other nook of English Land,
It was my fortune scarcely to have seen
Through the whole tenor of my School-day time
The face of one, who, whether Boy or Man,
Was vested with attention or respect
Through claims of wealth or blood . . .58
His fervour for the lives of the statesmen does not mean that his his-
torical reasoning was invalid or his experience was without some basis
in rural fact. For example, the Lake Country was always a curious mix
of esquires, customary tenants and freeholders rather than the ‘typical’
social pyramid of the period, which focused upon great landed estates
and tenant farms. In fact the proportion of each county that was occu-
pied by great, middling and small estates often differed significantly
from the national average. Thus, for instance, in 1873, it had less great
estates of 3000 to 10 000 acres than the national average (17 per cent);
Lancashire had more (14 per cent), and Westmorland less (9 per cent)
gentry estates of 1000 to 3000 acres than the national average (12.4
per cent) – which was roughly found in Cumberland (12 per cent);
and, most importantly, all three had more than the national average
of small estates of 1 to 100 acres.59 This wide diffusion of property was
arguably greater in the preceding century. We can therefore conclude
that the large numbers of small and middling estates were partly re-
sponsible for the greater degree of social cohesion and economic equality
that was found in the region than elsewhere – with the possible excep-
tions of Middlesex and Cambridge, which also had high ratios of yeomen
farmers to greater and lesser gentry.60 This pervasive social and econ-
omic ‘equality’ and personal independence might well be described,
within the permissible limits of poetic licence, as a ‘republic’ of sorts:
Where kindred independence of estate

Is prevalent, where he who tills the field,
He, happy Man! is Master of the field,
And treads the mountains which his Fathers trod.61
Moreover, this broad ‘Republican Equality’ had several advantages for

the inhabitants. For example, at Grasmere, in Westmorland, it was sup-
posed to be ‘a condition favourable to the growth of kindly feelings
among them & in a striking degree exclusive to temptations to gross
vice & scandalous behaviour’.62 His conclusions have been confirmed
by the historical record. The absence of serious crime and base immo-
rality was observed by most writers of the period 1777–1847 in the
Border counties. John Housman, for example, was most impressed by
the honesty and sincerity of the statesmen of Westmorland: ‘Injustice
and fraud are almost utterly unknown; and if a person is found guilty
of a mean or dishonest action, he is marked with that universal con-
tempt among his neighbours which, in more refined districts, only attaches
to the worst of crimes. They who compose this class generally possess
a small property; and, notwithstanding their poverty, which is some-
times conspicuous, they have minds free and independent: hospitable,
and unaffectedly kind to strangers. . . . Oppression is little known among
them; but whenever it rears its head, no people in the world are more
impatient under its control’.63 Likewise, William Hutchinson wrote in
a similar fashion about the inhabitants of Orton, in Cumberland:
With respect to the morals of the people, it may be observed, that

no native of the parish was ever convicted and banished for theft. –
No contention has at any time happened which rendered it necessary
to call in the authority of the magistrate; nor ever any litigation
relating to property, except one suit with the lord of the manor
about fifty years ago, – at which time their right was fully confirmed:
in short, the inhabitants may be said to be as one family, friendly
and unanimous amongst themselves, and hospitable to strangers.64
More recently, J. D. Marshall has concluded, on the statistical evidence

of early Victorian times, that ‘the Cumbrian countryman was not markedly
less prone to poach, quarrel or commit small misdemeanours than . . .
[his counterpart] elsewhere’ – which supports Wordsworth’s views of
the statesmen and labourers given above, in lines 347 to 357 of the
poem about Grasmere; but he adds that Cumberland and Westmorland
had the lowest committal rates for serious crimes against persons and
property in England and Wales.65 ‘Westmorland headed the list of counties
with low ratios in the year 1841, with a committal to every 1711 of
the county population. Cumberland followed not far behind with 1 in
1178, and the record of the Cumbrian counties can be compared with
that of Gloucester (1 in 348), Warwick (1 in 384), and Monmouth
(1 in 369). These largely agricultural counties’, argues Marshall, ‘out-
stripped even industrial Lancashire’s 1 in 418’, and therefore concludes
‘that towns and industries were not alone responsible for crime’ in
the period. 66 Both Wordsworth and Marshall, moreover, ascribed
this comparative peace and safety, in the Border counties, to their in-
habitants’ ‘respectable education’ and high levels of reading and writing;
‘the widespread diffusion of property’; the high wages and regular work
found in the Lake District; the close relationship between masters and
servants on the tenant-farms of the region; the need for constant vigi-
lance against vagrants, who travelled the great roads which connected
England and Scotland; and even the censorious eye of the small
hamlet and village.67 In other words, Dr Marshall’s statistical study largely
confirms the poet’s Golden Age defence of Old Lakeland as a ‘true
Community’, whose general economic equality and social harmony went
hand in hand.
Furthermore, members of the farming community who were too old,
sick or infirm to work, or otherwise forced upon the parish for relief,
were, as Wordsworth said, ‘not too great a weight /For those who . . .
[could] relieve’. Of course, from a statistical point of view, Parson and
White concluded that ‘the pressure of the poor-rates’ appeared, in 1829,
‘to be as heavy’ in Cumbria ‘as in most other parts of the kingdom’.68
(The average yearly expense of poor relief for the period 1819–29 was
roughly L.90 000, ‘of which about two-thirds’ were collected in
Cumberland.69) But here geography helps to account for the poet’s beliefs,
since the burden of the poor rates fell hardest upon the urban and
industrial areas of Cumberland and, perhaps, Furness rather than their
pastoral neighbour, Westmorland, where Wordsworth lived between 1799
and 1850. In other words, we must qualify the poet’s statements on
poor relief to the extent that he was unmindful of the difficulties faced
by the out-lying areas but his Golden Age belief that ‘cold and hunger’s
abject wretchedness’ were largely ‘unknown’ in the region was clearly
rooted in the general social and economic conditions of the North,
and the specific facts of the statesmen system of farming which helped
to keep many people self-sufficient in the Lake District proper. For
example, the Poor Law Act of 1601 ‘laid the obligation on the parishes,
provided for the appointment of a parochial authority for the purpose,
[called] the overseers of the poor, defined their powers and enabled
them, with the assent of the justices, to levy a compulsory rate’. As
rate-payers, the statesmen were obliged to serve every few years as overseers
of the poor. A century later, the Act of 1722 revoked the pauper’s legal
right of receiving poor relief at home.70 This statute, however, was not
readily observed in the Lake Counties, which relied, for the sake of
economy and the pauper’s self-respect, upon the traditional methods

of ‘outdoor’ relief. When a boy at Hawkshead, for example, Wordsworth
might have seen the local practice of ‘owning’ a poor neighbour. When-
ever, ‘the head of a family, or his wife, or maybe some other key member
of it, was laid low by illness or injury, neighbours would each take a
small present as an indication of their readiness to help if needed. This
taking of a token present was called “owning” the family, . . . and was
expected of “aw i’ t’ nebber-raa”, all in the neighbour-row, including
those, if any, who had been having “differences” with the afflicted family.
As no complaint is registered in the Vestry Minutes of the extremely
high cost of relieving the poor [in the 1790s], it may be that this . . .
[behaviour] was regarded as an obligation to unfortunate neighbours
which must be fulfilled’.71 Such practices were socially important for
many statesmen families, who still adhered to the old rural ideals of
domestic economy and independence. The Act of 1782, moreover, re-
stored the said right to receive, at home, small payments of cash, or
kind, or both, while still ‘allowing [the] parishes to combine [in order]
to build workhouses’. Finally, the Act of 1795 gave to most ‘migrants’
in the parish the social and economic protection which had been for-
merly enjoyed only by people with certificates of residence.72 (Until
this date, the pauper’s right of poor relief was normally limited to the
parish of his birth.) Although figures are few and far between, historians
agree that the system of outdoor relief was widespread in the Border
counties. Only a minority of paupers in the region were ever exposed
to the miserable conditions of the 36 (?) poor houses which had been
established by the year 1832.73 Even comparatively well-endowed work
houses were avoided by the local paupers themselves. Eden, for example,
remarked that the Carlisle work house, in 1795, offered better condi-
tions to its members than might be found in their own homes, but
supposed that the building was largely shunned by the local people:
‘[M]any distressed families prefer[red] the chance of starving among
friends and neighbours, in their own native village, to the mortifying
alternative of being well fed, well lodged, and well clothed in a Poor-
house, [which they regarded as] the motley receptacle of idiots, and
vagrants’.74 This aversion to the work house was partly a long-term
social and economic effect of old agrarian values and habits of sturdy
individualism and self-sufficiency, even in the face of growing poverty
and debt. Whereas some statesmen were willing to give or to receive
material help from friends and neighbours, others were doggedly inde-
pendent of public and private relief. This helps to explain Wordsworth’s
use of poor statesmen as models of ‘personal and family indepen-
dence’.75 Consider, for instance, the case of the Greens of Blentaru Ghyll,
in Grasmere, who lived near the poet and his sister, in the period 1799–
1808. Old George Green and his second wife, Sarah, were killed in a
freak snow fall within earshot of their small family estate, in March of
the latter year. The tragedy, in Wordsworth’s eyes, shed ‘much light
upon the state of moral feelings’ among the farming community of
Westmorland.76 It had ‘excited much compassion’, which was the ‘more
deeply felt in their own neighbourhood because the Deceased were much
respected for their good morals and decent manners, for their frugality
and industry, and for the constant cheerfulness and independence of
mind, with which, without any assistance from the parish, they [had]
supported their Family under the burthen of extreme poverty’.77 Moreover,
they had been ‘loth to sell’ their small estate, for though heavily mort-
gaged, their farm had been in the family’s possession for several
generations.78 In this regard, George Green bore a striking resemblance
to old Walter Ewbank, in ‘The Brothers’, which had been published
about eight years before the mishap:
He had as white a head and fresh a cheek

As ever were produced by youth and age
Engendering in the blood of hale four-score.
Through five long generations had the heart
Of Walter’s forefathers o’erflowed the bounds
Of their inheritance, that single cottage –
You see it yonder! and those few green fields.
They toiled and wrought, and still, from sire to son,
Each struggled, and each yielded as before
A little – yet a little, – and old Walter,
They left to him the family heart, and land
With other burdens than the crop it bore.
Year after year the old man still kept up
A cheerful mind, – and buffeted with bond,
Interest, and mortgages; at last he sank,
And went into his grave before his time.
Poor Walter! whether it was care that spurred him
God only knows, but to the very last
He had the lightest foot in Ennerdale:
His pace was never that of an old man:
I almost see him tripping down the path
With his two grandsons after him . . .79
Wordsworth argued that the customary tenants’ attachments to their

families and lands were important social compensations for their long-
term demise. Economic hardship and comparative poverty were not
necessarily attended with moral degradation and vice. Nor were the
Green children left to the tender mercies of their father’s creditors.
Rather, the old rural and legal codes of paternal relief and charity took
control of the unfortunate situation. The overseers of the poor pro-

vided each of the five (unemployed) children with two shillings a week,
whilst local rate-payers found temporary homes and foster parents for
them. (The Wordsworths kept little Sally Green in their service for several
months, even though they had already engaged an older girl to take
care of their own children.) Like James Ewbank, they found ready help
and support among the statesmen families and parish officers: ‘Three
months with one,’ claimed the Priest in the poem, ‘and six months
with another; /And wanted neither food, nor clothes, nor love’.80 The
Grasmere community, with the Wordsworths at the helm, even organ-
ised a private subscription of L500 for placing the children with one or
more respectable families, for their schooling, and, if possible, for ‘setting
them forward [in life] as [domestic] Servants or Apprentices’.81 Clearly,
the relief effort was proof for him that the poor of Grasmere Vale were
‘not too great a weight /For those who . . . [could] relieve’. Poor relief
was always a specific social reality for the parish community, within
the general legal framework of Old England. It was no different for the
Lake District. The statesmen system of farming actively encouraged ‘per-
sonal and family independence’, rather than easy reliance upon public
institutions, but it also affirmed the old religious and social values of
private charity and collective responsibility for solving the problem of
poverty – and so provided the wherewithal for meeting this inevitable
burden of a rural economy.82 In short, it offered a two-fold vision to
the poet of sturdy individualism and strong social ties.
What about Beckett’s third objection to Wordsworth’s Golden Age
ideal of the statesmen system of farming?83 Did the customary tenants
reside for several generations upon their respective estates? This ques-
tion goes to the root of Wordsworth’s claim that each nation has ‘its
inheritance in past ages’. He wrote for instance, in A Guide Through the
District of the Lakes (1835), that ‘many of these humble sons of the
hills had a consciousness that the land which they walked over and
tilled, had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of
their name and blood’. So compelling was this belief to Wordsworth’s
contemporaries that Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted it as a classic example
of English Traits (1856): ‘A[n] hereditary tenure’, he added, ‘is natural
to them. Offices, farms, trades and traditions descend so. Their leases
run for a hundred and a thousand years. . . . Antiquity of usage is sanction
enough’.84 His Golden Age account, however, received its best expression
in the pastoral poems, ‘The Brothers’ (1800) and ‘Michael’ (1800). Both
were supposed to convey the strength of domestic feelings among the
‘small independent proprietors’ of the north, whose estates had ‘de-
scended to them from their ancestors’.85 Even old Michael’s very failure
to keep his ‘patrimonial fields’ served as a valuable lesson ‘of a man, of
strong mind and lively sensibility, agitated by two of the most power-
ful affections of the human heart; the parental affection, and the love
of property, landed property, including the feelings of inheritance, home,
and personal and family independence’.86 Speaking to his only son,
Luke, who must quit the land for a commercial career in a distant
town, old Michael declares:
– Even to the utmost I have been to thee

A kind and a good Father: and herein
I but repay a gift which I myself
Received at others’ hands; for, though now old
Beyond the common life of man, I still
Remember them who loved me in my youth.
Both of them sleep together: here they lived,
As all their Forefathers had done; and when
At length their time was come, they were not loth
To give their bodies to the family mould.
I wished that thou should’st live the life they
lived . . . 87
Historians, however, have certainly questioned such ideas as general truths.

Alan Macfarlane, for instance, has argued cogently that Gothic England
did not have a ‘peasantry’ at all. In fact, comparatively speaking, Old
English yeomen differed markedly from peasants by virtue of their strong
sense of individualism, private property rights, legal freedoms, and de-
tachment from the soil. His argument, moreover, was based, for the most
part, upon a detailed study of land records for the parish of Kirkby Lonsdale,
in Westmorland.88 J. V. Beckett has used Macfarlane’s research to cast
considerable doubt upon the statesmen’s supposed attachment to their
‘paternal fields’. Likewise Canon Bouch and G. P. Jones concluded that
‘the location of the same family on the same holding, generation after
generation, was by no means universal and perhaps, in some parts, not
even normal, at any rate in the period’ 1730–1830:
This appears, for example, by a comparison of the names of [cus-

tomary] tenants recorded in the 1578 Survey of Percy Lands with
those of people farming in the same district in 1829. At the former
date there were 28 surnames borne by tenants in Aspatria; five of
these appear in the 1829 Directory, three of them borne by farmers.
Similarly in 1578 the tenants in Nether Wasdale and Wasdale Head
had between them 20 surnames; of these, five occur among the farmers
in 1829, and another three, though not occurring in Wasdale, are
recorded in Kinniside; but of the numerous Gunsons, occuping at
least 12 homesteads in 1578, there was in 1829 no trace in either
‘Nether Wasdale or Wasdale Head.89
Nevertheless, Wordsworth was largely wrong on statistical and legal

grounds to argue that the yeomanry of Old England were once attached
to their family farms, or that the statesmen of Old Lakeland were often
distinguished by their ‘paternal lands’, though in Chapter 4 we shall
see that the statesmen were often bound by strong social, economic
and emotional ties to their families, which is a separate issue.
On the other hand, such sources can be misleading to the social
historian. Consider, for instance, the not uncommon case of the Park
family, who were well known to the Wordsworths. Old Willy Park (1741–
1825) held the ancient customary estate of the Nab, at Rydal, in
Westmorland. His stepfather, John Park, used to add small purchases
of land to his ‘paternal fields’. Described by one local historian as both
prosperous and ambitious, in 1735, he even bought the large Rydal
farmhold – complete with dwelling house – called Hart Head. He later
willed that his eldest son, John, should inherit the Nab and its adjoin-
ing lands, and his youngest son, George, aged four years, was ‘left Hart
Head, and part of the tenement known as Hobsons or Causeway Foot,
but his widow Mary [who was his second wife] was to have possession
of them first, . . . for as long as she lived’. This latter gift was sold by
George when he came of age but only after his mother had died; whence
he moved to Hawkshead to work as a saddler – and where, inciden-
tally, he knew the young Wordsworth. In 1770, John Park (junior) died,
and according to T. W. Thompson, ‘the Nab was sold to provide for
his widow and infant daughter, who shortly afterwards moved to London.
The buyer was William Park, George’s elder brother [and the dead man’s
step-brother]; and he remained there until his death in 1825 at the age
of eighty-four. His only son being an idiot, he was succeeded by his
daughter Mary and her husband John Simpson, who had been living
with him ever since their marriage, and whose daughter Margaret had
become the wife of Thomas De Quincey in 1816’. The Simpsons, how-
ever, were quickly impoverished by a ‘spirited if unwise litigation with
the manor concerning wood-rights’. In spite of financial aid from the
Reverend George Park, the saddler’s eldest son, the family estate was
sold by auction, in 1833, to pay off the occupants’ debts.90 The fate of
the Park family is a very interesting example of several topics which
fall under the heading of Land Tenure in the Lake District. On the one
hand, it illustrates the attachment of statesmen to their families and
lands; their attempts to provide adequate portions for their wives, widows
and daughters; their independent spirit and character, and their resolve
to stand up for their supposed rights and privileges. On the other hand,
it reveals the precarious nature of farming life in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, especially the social and economic problems
attending the death of family members, and the heavy burden of legal
fees and court costs. It also illustrates Alan Macfarlane’s controversial
thesis that England never had a peasantry after the thirteenth or four-
teenth centuries, because family members could freely buy, sell or
bequeath land, chattels and other goods in accordance with Common
Law and the statutes of Old England; and displayed a marked individ-
ualism and spirit of enterprise, which often led them away from the
family fold to relatively distant places. (Compare the fate of the young
George Park for example.) Clearly, social feelings played a significant
part in this history of the Park family’s attachment to their customary
estate: like the Green family of Grasmere, and the Greenwoods of Ingleton,
already mentioned, the family’s desire to retain their old way of life
and landed property was complicated by economic considerations of
education, work and debt. (Thus George Park left farming at Causeway
Foot for the saddler’s trade, in Hawkshead, and his son left the sad-
dlery for the Church – just as Robert Greenwood left the ‘paternal estate’
for a Fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge; but both clergymen kept
close ties with their rural backgrounds and pursuits.) If the statesmen’s
domestic affections often competed at a loss with these economic forces,
that is no reason in itself to underrate their strength.91 The task of
composing case studies and local histories is no less important than
statistics and legal records for solving this problem of Golden Age theories.
After all, Robert Greenwood gave a lease on his father’s estate, but
thereby bought for himself a life-long tie with his ‘paternal fields’ and
a cherished way of life; George Green incurred heavy debts in order to
retain his small family farm and the sense of being ‘A Freeman . . .
sound and unimpaired’; and, whenever possible, the Park family sold
the Nab to family members rather than to strangers and so, one gathers,
kept their ‘inheritance in past ages’. Statistical studies and legal docu-
ments are no doubt necessary but clearly insufficient sources to account
for such social and economic feelings amongst the statesmen. We must
therefore look to personal and family histories, as well as literary sources
like Wordsworth’s poetry and prose if we are to understand the Golden
Age aspects of this regional system of farming.
What about the fate of the small landowners in Wordsworth’s lifetime.

Were they ‘rapidly disappearing’ as he maintained in the letter to Fox?
The decline of the small landowner in general has been studied in
great detail by social and economic historians. All of the writers listed
in the following footnote have concluded that this group fell markedly
in the period 1688–1871 – except for a brief rally in the years 1765–
1815.92 Nevertheless the historical record is inadequate for regional experts
to determine the exact rate and extent of the statesmen’s decline in
Old Lakeland: land tax assessments, for example, are completely lack-
ing for Westmorland in the years before 1832, and those existing for
Cumberland begin in 1790. In consequence, statistical evidence must
be supplemented by social observation to unravel this major event.

Some historians and critics, however, contend that the statesmen’s
demise, in the Industrial Revolution, was neither so dramatic nor
so consistent as Wordsworth believed.93 Marshall and Dyhouse, for
example, concluded upon the land tax assessments that the statesmen
were ‘still fairly numerous’, in the period 1832–60, comprising, in
Westmorland’s hill country, ‘as great a proportion as one-third of all
land-occupiers’.94 Their survival was also seen in the figures given by
F. W. Garnett for the years of England’s high agriculture: In 1829
Westmorland was home to 899 statesmen, and in 1885, to 439; though
here we have the vexed question of definition.95 What did Garnett mean
by statesmen? On the one hand, he argued that: ‘The holdings of the
statesmen were small and of the value of L.10 to L.20, and in some
cases up to L.50 a year.’ On the other hand, his figures probably
referred to greater and lesser yeomen: if we combine Garnett’s figures
with those of Bateman’s, for 1873 (Table 1.1), we can see the logic of
this argument.96
Clearly, the historical record for the years 1829 and 1885, as given
by Garnett, is misleading. It does show a decline of 48.8 per cent, but
could only be referring to the well-to-do yeomen rather than the vast
majority of small landowners in Westmorland.97 Likewise, confusion
reigns over the numbers of statesmen in the neighbouring county of
Cumberland. Parson and White were convinced that this class of land-
owner was rapidly disappearing, but was still very common, and perhaps
numbered 7000 in 1829.98 Unless this figure is a misprint for 2000, it
does not square with the careful study of their own Directory made by
Canon Bouch and G. P. Jones, who concluded that 4619 tenant-farmers
and yeomen were found in that county, of which 2872 were simply
proprietors of the soil, and 1747 were ‘owner occupiers’ or ‘statesmen’.99
It would seem that the compilers of the Directory confused a part with
the whole. Or did they? Parson and White always distinguished between
tenant-farmers proper and owner-occupiers, whom they called states-
men or yeomen. Their lists have been checked against the poll books
for Westmorland and have been found to be quite accurate.100 Never-
theless, a comparison of their Directory with the New Domesday of 1873
reveals the old problem of definition. Bateman found that there were
5682 small landowners in Cumberland, who comprised, in the latter
year, 242 greater yeomen, 943 lesser ones, and 4497 small proprietors.101
This surprisingly large figure of 5682 suggests that Parson and White’s
estimate of 7000 statesmen was not far-fetched if the word ‘statesmen’
is used in the widest sense of the term (‘small landowner’). It also
confirms the assessment made by a contributor to the Gentleman’s
Magazine, in 1766, which claimed, quite plausibly, that Cumberland
had about 10 000 small landowners with estates ranging from L10 to
Table 1.1 Relative decline of the ‘statesmen’ in Westmorland 1829–85

Year No. of yeomen No. of small proprietors Total Westmorland*
1829 899 – –
1873 4611 2055 2516
1885 439 – –
* Total number of statesmen.
1
Comprising 352 lesser yeomen and 109 greater yeomen.
L100 a year.102 In other words, the fact that there were 1185 ‘yeomen’
of the greater and lesser sorts, in John Bateman’s time, suggests strongly
that Bouch and Jones were referring only to the better freeholders rather
than all kinds of statesmen when they concluded that there were still
1747 ‘owner occupiers’ in the year 1829. From these few facts we can
reason that the total number of small landowners, in Cumberland,
between 1766 and 1829, declined markedly by 30 per cent, but there-
after, between 1829 and 1873, by only 18.8 per cent; whereas the yeomen
proper during the latter years disappeared at the alarming rate of 32.2
per cent. There was clearly a swift decline of all small landowners during
the Industrial Revolution in Cumberland at least; whereas elsewhere in
England the decline was greater before and after these years, but only
the greater and lesser yeomen in the Lake Counties seem to have suf-
fered a considerable drop in ranks during the nineteenth century. This
time-frame confirms Wordsworth’s fears that the statesmen were ‘rap-
idly disappearing’ during his lifetime and so – to a point – justifies his
Golden Age ideal of the statesmen system of farming as a vanishing
way of life. It was, however, a general conclusion which was subject to
much local qualification and cannot be taken as representative of all
‘owner-occupiers’ in the Border counties.
Several critics, however, have wrongly argued that the statesmen were
victims of General Enclosure of wastes and commons. In so doing they
have condemned Wordsworth’s ‘neglect [of] the part the landlords and
improvers had in creating distress in the country’ during the Industrial
Revolution.103 Indeed, this silence is construed as evidence of Wordsworth’s
awkward social and economic position in the old landed order. He is
variously depicted by his most recent critics as a ‘bourgeois’ poet who
could not wholly affirm any social role. His dependence upon great
landlords such as Lord Lonsdale and Sir George Beaumont is seen as a
strong social and economic check to his moral and imaginative sympa-
thy with the ‘statesmen’ farmers.104 The connection between Wordsworth’s
life-long dependence upon patronage, as a long-term cause of his chang-
ing political commitments, is discussed in Chapter 5 of this book; here
we must content ourselves with severing the connection between
Parliamentary Enclosure of wastes and commons, in the Lake Counties,

and the statesmen’s widespread decline in the period 1770–1850. The
said critics rely for the most part upon the out-dated idea that enclo-
sure spelt the death knell for the small landholder. Nothing could be
further from the truth: ‘Detailed investigation has shown that in many
cases Parliamentary enclosure had little effect on either the number of
freeholders or the size of farms, and in many instances the number of
small freeholders actually increased’.105 Much, of course, depended upon
local conditions. Wordsworth’s critics, moreover, subscribe in various
ways to the views of the Hammonds, in The Village Labourer, 1st edn
(1911), and E. P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class,
1st edn (1963). Both books assume that enclosure was basically the
tool of class interests. Thompson argued that agrarian capital and ruling-
class repression went hand-in-hand during the long French War
(1793–1815): the tide was turning against the small landowner and rural
worker in favour of laissez-faire economics, the craze for ‘innovation’
and social control. ‘Ideology was [therefore] added to self-interest. It
became a matter of public-spirited policy for the gentleman to remove
cottagers from the commons, reduce his labourers to dependence, pare
away at supplementary earnings, [and to] drive out the smallholder’;
and this at ‘a time when Wordsworth was extolling the virtues of old
Michael and his wife, in their struggle to maintain their “patrimonial
fields”’.106 Superficially, of course, this argument fits the geographical
facts of Old Lakeland. The Board of Agriculture Reporters, for example,
bewailed the poor usage of wastes and commons in the region. In
Cumberland, with 150 000 acres of ‘improveable common’, Culley and
Bailey were troubled ‘to see such extensive tracts of good corn land laying
[sic] waste, of no value to its owners, and of no benefit to the community’:
Instead of the present scarcity of grain, large quantities might be

yearly exported; and instead of the ill formed, poor, starved, meagre
animals that depasture the commons at present, an abundant sup-
ply of good fat mutton, would be had, to grace the markets of the
county, and also to send off large supplies to Newcastle, Liverpool,
Manchester, and other populous manufacturing places.107
Likewise, Richard Watson (the Bishop of Llandaff) gladly wrote a foreword

to Andrew Pringle’s Report for Westmorland. He was convinced that
the county contained so much ‘uncultivated land’ that ‘its improve-
ment [was] a matter not only of individual concern, but of national
importance’.108 (Between 1782 and 1816, for example, Watson planted
thousands of larches on his Calgarth estate, and, to Wordsworth’s dis-
may, sponsored the practice elsewhere.) Pringle confirmed that a mere
one-fourth of Westmorland’s 540 760 statute acres were tilled in 1794.109
Of the 135 000 acres of cultivated lands, moreover, only 20 000 or so,
in any one year, were sown with corn, whilst the rest was cut for hay,
or consumed by ‘fattening beasts, rising stock’, or dairy cows.110 The
commons, on the other hand, were always ‘numerous, extensive, and
valuable’ in both counties, being used to support large numbers of sheep
and cattle. But they too were so badly used, in some mountainous
districts of Westmorland, ‘that the liberty of keeping ten sheep on them
might be hired for six-pence a year’; even the rule governing the right
to pasture sheep on the common was so widely ignored that commons
were usually over-stocked, and the statesmen did not always ‘think it
worth while to avail themselves of their right of commonage’.111 Both
counties, it seems, were ready targets for enclosure during the rapid
economic growth of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The
price of corn, from 1765 to 1815, ‘rose almost continuously. Between
1760 and 1790 the average price was 45s. 7d. [a bushel] and 55s. 11d.
in the following decade. From 1805 to 1813 it varied between 73s. and
122s. 8d.’ This was owing to several bad seasons, rapid population growth,
and the war against Napoleonic France, ‘which hindered the imports
now necessary’ to feed the nation.112 Such short- and long-term causes
were reflected in the rate and scale of enclosure across the country.
Consider, for instance, the figures in Table 1.2.
Table 1.2 Percentage of land enclosed in a range of counties by Act of Parlia-

ment, 1760–1870
County 1760 1761–70 1771–80 1781–90 1791–1800 1801–10 1811–20 1821–70 Total
1
Cumb. C – – 0.2 – – – * * 0.2
T1 – 2.4 1.7 – 1.0 9.2 5.2 4.4 23.9
Hunt. C 1.6 6.4 9.9 0.8 11.4 15.8 5.4 4.5 55.8
T 1.6 6.4 9.9 0.8 11.4 15.8 5.4 4.5 55.8
North. C 0.3 – 0.4 0.1 – 0.7 0.2 0.1 1.8
T 2.0 0.7 1.5 0.4 1.2 2.4 0.7 3.6 12.5
Oxf. C 1.5 5.8 7.8 1.7 7.7 4.8 3.3 8.2 40.8
T 1.5 5.8 7.9 1.7 7.7 5.0 4.4 9.8 43.8
Som. C 0.2 – – – 0.1 0.5 0.7 0.3 1.8
T 0.3 * 1.0 1.1 5.1 1.5 1.5 2.2 12.7
Staf. C 0.4 0.1 0.3 0.4 1.3 3.2 0.6 0.3 6.6
T 0.9 1.1 1.3 0.7 1.7 3.5 1.3 1.9 12.4
Sur. C – – * – 0.3 2.4 1.4 0.9 6.0
T – * * – 1.7 3.4 1.5 3.5 10.1
West. C – – – – – 0.1 0.2 – 0.3
T – 0.1 0.3 * – 2.3 5.0 8.6 16.3
Wilt. C 0.8 0.2 3.7 3.3 4.0 5.3 4.4 1.2 22.9
T 0.9 0.2 3.7 3.7 4.6 5.8 5.0 2.3 26.2
York C 1.7 8.6 9.4 0.8 2.9 6.8 1.8 1.4 33.4
East T 2.5 9.7 10.2 1.0 3.3 7.2 2.1 2.3 38.3
1
The abbreviations C and T, respectively, stand for ‘common field’ and ‘total’ land en-
closed, both common field and commons. An asterisk [*] refers to a small amount.113
Table 1.3 Acreage enclosed by Parliamentary Act in England115

County Total acreage Percentage of Acreage enclosed Acreage with
enclosed county area by Acts for some arable
(000) common/waste enclosures
only (000) by Private
Acts (000)
Cumb. 270 27.7 220 7
West. 106 20.9 76 –
Lincoln. 667 38.7 149 494
Wilts. 255 29.4 16 220
England 6794 20.9 1880 4248
The spate of enclosures in Cumberland, between 1801 and 1810, was

no doubt encouraged by the passing of the General Enclosure Act of
1801, ‘which simplified the parliamentary machinery for [the] enclo-
sure of commons and thus reduced its expense. The result was a burst
of expenditure relating to small acreages which had previously not been
worth enclosing’. Such acts, however, when ‘concerned merely with
the enclosure of common pasture and waste . . . often did no more than
extend the margin of cultivation to lands which had been worthless
when the price of corn was low’.114 This was certainly the case in the
Border counties of Cumberland and Westmorland (Table 1.3), where
the enclosure of waste and commons was the rule, and strip-fields the
exception.
The Enclosure Movement came comparatively late to the Lake Dis-
trict, was never extensive in Westmorland, and was only intensive in
Cumberland during the war years. In consequence, it did not compete
too much with the statesmen either for land or for markets. Why should
it? The latter county already boasted 470 000 acres of Old Enclosures,116
and the former was always well suited to the small sheep run, cattle
station, and dairy farm. In fact, J. H. Clapham concluded that there
was no general decline in the ranks of freeholding yeomen, copyholders,
or other lifeholder proprietors; though he hastened to add that ‘a con-
siderable decline in the latter group may be assumed. Tenures for lives
were becoming old-fashioned and when they ran out or [were] for-
feited they might not be renewed’. For their part, the other groups
were often hit hard by the post-war depression, but Clapham believed
that yeomen and customary tenants were often to blame for their own
end: for example, many of them burdened their lands with portions
for big families which the fallen prices could not carry.117 Canon Bouch
gave a striking twist to this argument by noting that the decline of
cottage industry in the region, during the nineteenth century, meant
that the statesman’s widow, or unmarried daughters, or both could no
longer contribute to their support and so ‘had to be provided for out

of the estate’.118 Whilst it is unlikely that more children were born to
couples in this period, it is possible that more of them survived; and
even more probable that the wartime prosperity had widened their parents’
views of a suitable standard of living.119 The problem of patrimonies,
however, is solved, to a point, by a long-term perspective. J. D. Marshall’s
review of statesmen’s inventories and wills, for the years 1660–1749,
revealed that many yeomen had mortgaged their properties in order to
provide patrimonies for their children, and to increase the size of their
family farms, and not, as previously supposed, to stave off creditors:
‘The problem, then, was the burden of interest, which the inheriting
son had to pay, and the principal’, which had to be paid off during
the best part of his working life.120 This social fact was used by Wordsworth
to describe the long-term economic decline of fictional characters such
as Walter Ewbank, who was ‘buffeted with bond,/ Interest, and mort-
gages’, and old Michael, whose ‘fields were burdened when they came
to’ him, and remained so for most of his life:
Till I was forty years of age, not more

Than half of my inheritance was mine.
I toiled and toiled; God blessed me in my work,
And till these three weeks past the land was free.
– It looks as if it never could endure
Another Master.121
The Romantic poet did not, as his critics claim, ‘displace’ responsibility
from improving landlords and semi-feudal tenures to the statesmen
themselves. Their economic burdens, in fact, were quite typical of their
class. We know, for example, that the statesmen were often involved
in money-lending in the region, and served as sureties for relatives and
friends. Indeed, old Michael’s final blow – a debt incurred by his ‘in-
dustrious’ nephew – was not uncommon in the eighteenth century.122
Both poems were therefore credible accounts of the statesmen in the
pre-industrial period. Clearly, Wordsworth’s critics have overstated the
case for enclosure as a major economic cause of the statesmen’s decline.
In consequence, their social and political explanation of the poet’s ‘silence’
on this topic is, economically speaking, irrelevant. He might have acted
from self-interest, but historians cannot use the Enclosure Movement
as evidence of their (negative?) argument. His views of enclosure are
best studied from a Golden Age, rather than a ‘class’, perspective. He
saw enclosure as part of the region’s long-term evolution of a viable
system of farming: in so far as the new enclosures were not competing
with the old, Wordsworth saw them as signs of economic growth and
social gain:
Chatsworth! thy stately mansion, and the pride

Of thy domain, strange contrast do present
To house and home in many a craggy rent
Of the wild Peak; where new-born waters glide
Through fields whose thrifty occupants abide
As in a dear and chosen banishment,
With every semblance of entire content;
So kind is simple Nature, fairly tried!
Yet He whose heart in childhood gave her troth
To pastoral dales, thin-set with modest farms,
May learn, if judgement strengthen with his growth,
That, not for Fancy only, pomp hath charms;
And, strenuous to protect from lawless harms
The extremes of favoured life, may honour both.123
By the 1830s, the poet was clearly convinced that the Industrial Rev-
olution, rather than the Enclosure Movement, was responsible for the
rapid demise of the statesmen in Old Lakeland:
The family of each man, whether estatesman or farmer, formerly had

a twofold support; first, the produce of his lands and flocks; and,
secondly, the profit drawn from the employment of the women and
children, as manufacturers; spinning their own wool in their own
houses (work chiefly done in the winter season), and carrying it to
market for sale. Hence, however numerous the children, the income
of the family kept pace with its increase. But, by the invention and
universal application of machinery, this second resource has been
cut off; the gains being so far reduced, as not to be sought after but
by a few aged persons disabled from other employment. . . . The
consequence, then, is – that proprietors and farmers being no longer
able to maintain themselves upon small farms, several are united in
one, and the buildings go to decay, or are destroyed; and that the
lands of the estatesmen being mortgaged, and the owners constrained
to part with them, they fall into the hands of wealthy purchasers,
who in like manner unite and consolidate . . . and it is probable,
that in a few years the country on the margin of the Lakes will fall
almost entirely into the possession of gentry, either strangers or
natives.124
A number of regional historians agree that the decline of cottage in-

dustry was a major cause of the statesmen’s distress in the early nineteenth
century. The ‘ousting of home-spun by factory yarn’, as Bouch and
Jones concluded, was indeed a calamity for the Old Lakeland yeomen
who ‘had eked out their farming with domestic industry’.125 As Canon
Bouch observed elsewhere: ‘Statesmen both in the low country and the
fells . . . suffered by the invention of the “spinning jenny”. By concen-
trating spinning in factories[,] it deprived them of a [valuable] means
by which their wives and children had for generations contributed to
the family income’.126 Much economic activity was visible in the Border
counties between 1750 and 1850, but most of the new manufactories
which concerned the Lake District proper were set up between 1790
and 1830. This squares with Wordsworth’s experience of the facts in
South Lakeland. By late 1806, he was already writing sonnets on the
demise of domestic spinning among his Grasmere neighbours.127 In-
deed, geography might well be the clue to his sweeping conclusion
that these events were catastrophic for all statesmen in the area. We
must recall that woollen mills and cotton factories were focusing their
efforts upon the fast-flowing streams and rivers of this remote inland
region: for example, new cotton mills were erected, by 1794, at Cross
Canonby and Keswick, and a large woollen mill (for the making of
linsey and coarse woollen goods) was built about 1797 at Ambleside,
just a few miles from Grasmere.128 By 1806, Wordsworth was telling
his Leicestershire patron, Sir George Beaumont, that he would always
keep his presentation of a small estate at Applethwaite, near Keswick,
‘unless the character of the place be entirely changed’ by ‘a cotton-mill
being already planted, or to be planted, in the glen’.129 His evident
alarm at factory production, in the Lake District, cannnot be divorced
from its early physical threat to the beauty and simplicity of the old
pastoral economy. The statesmen of the hinterland, moreover, were
dependent upon Keswick, Cockermouth and Kendal markets for the
sale of their homespun yarn and small manufactures. William Hutchinson,
for example, wrote in 1794 that statesmen in the parish of Uldale were
suffering from the war economy: ‘At those markets, yarn has sold these
late years from 11s. to 15s. 6d. per stone; but at present scarcely any
exceeds 12s. and even some of it will hardly sell owing to the [low]
price’ which resulted from the war against Jacobin France.130 How wide-
spread such problems were during the long campaign is anyone’s guess.131
We might suppose, for example, that the nearby parish of Grasmere
suffered the same economic woes as Uldale; but low prices for yarn
were probably offset by high prices for foodstuffs, especially Cumberland
and Westmorland dairy.132 Elsewhere, the parishes of Ravenstonedale,
Sedbergh, Dent and Orton were the victims of new military codes of
dress: in 1801, the said parishes produced about 2400 pairs of hand-
knit worsted stockings every week for the Kendal market, where, for
many years, large numbers were bought by army contractors; but the
British command suddenly replaced the troops’ long stockings and knee-
breeches with short socks and trousers. In consequence, both ‘the
Westmorland dales and the Kendal trade in stockings were ruined’.133
Nor was this a rare occurrence. Changing fashions in society and in-
creased competition from West Riding cloths were both responsible for
the old Kendal cottons ‘being used [only] for horse cloths and the like’.134
But even here, Wordsworth also lamented the fate of the statesmen in
the remote Pennine hills, mentioned above, who could no longer compete
with ‘the increase of mechanic power’ in the period.135 It is therefore
at least possible that Wordsworth’s subjective views of the rapid decline
of cottage industry in the southern Lake District were rooted in the
objective but highly selective facts of the Industrial Revolution in the
remote hills and dales of Cumberland, Westmorland and Furness, and
even the West Riding of Yorkshire.
This geographic view of the statesmen’s decline, moreover, gives new
meaning to some classic comments made by William and Dorothy
Wordsworth about the vale of Grasmere and its inhabitants. Dorothy’s
Journal for 18 May 1800 recorded that John Fisher, a local statesman,
‘talked much about the alteration in the times, & observed that in a
short time there would be only two ranks of people, the very rich &
the very poor, for those who have small estates says he are forced to
sell, & all the land goes into one hand’.136 It is commonly assumed
that this statement refers to enclosure as the cause of the statesmen’s
economic troubles and the subsequent consolidation of estates by old
and new gentry. But does it? The only economic problems facing large
numbers of statesmen during the war years were (1) the decline of
domestic industry and (2) the provision of patrimonies for children.
Wordsworth made a similar point in the passage, quoted above, from
A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, where he argues that the new
gentry’s engrossment and consolidation of small estates followed the
demise of customary tenants. The desire to buy out the statesmen was
certainly new in the Lake District. J. V. Beckett, for instance, has shown
that the old Westmorland gentry were usually content to wait for ten-
ements to fall into abeyance, or for families to be extinguished by natural
means; but this new eagerness for customary estates was mainly the
result of a middle-class craving for Lakeside retreats at Rydal, Winder-
mere, Grasmere and Derwentwater.137 Still, it cannot be gainsaid that
the decline of cottage industry rather than enclosure was the main
cause of the statemen’s need to sell their tenements to the new men.
Nor is this all. According to some historians ‘Wordsworth held that
between 1770 and 1820 the number of “statesmen” with freehold land
was halved while the size of such holdings doubled’.138 Moreover they
believe that this remark is evidence of Wordsworth’s confused definition
of the word ‘statesmen’. Did he use the term only for mixed farmers?
And others have used it as evidence of Wordsworth’s aversion to en-
closure.139 No one to my knowledge has studied the statement’s authority.
Critics have usually given Bouch and Jones as their source; they, in
turn, go back to Canon Bouch’s book, Prelates and People (1948); and
he culled it from G. M. Trevelyan’s famous social history of England,
first published in 1942.140 But where did he get it from? I have not yet
answered that pressing question. No reference is given by Trevelyan in
the said edition. A similar view, however, was described by Wordsworth
in the guide book already mentioned, but no ratios or percentages were
given. It is possible that Trevelyan used one of the earlier editions of
the guide book from 1820, 1822, or 1823, which would agree with the
fifty-year time frame: 1770–1820. For the moment the remark must be
treated with some caution. If Wordsworth was the actual source, it would
suggest that he was aware of the long-term, secular forces which were
making large farms more profitable than small ones. But here the plot
thickens! We have already seen that Canon Bouch believed that the
‘spinning jenny’, rather than enclosure, was the major economic cause
of the statesmen’s decline. His authority, however, was again G. M.
Trevelyan, who likewise attributed the idea to Wordsworth, but again
gave no source. In consequence, we can only surmise that he was re-
ferring to Wordsworth’s guide to the Lakes.141 If so, it is possible that
three generations of historians and critics have been using Wordsworth’s
guide book as evidence of industrial and agricultural changes without
knowing that they were using Wordsworth to prove or to disprove the
poet’s views on these topics! That is to say, they have been begging
the question of the truth or falsity of the poet’s views of land tenure,
the Enclosure Movement, and the Industrial Revolution. And even my
argument – in so far as it rests upon their use of his work – is guilty of
this logical contradiction. If not, it is clear from the evidence given
above that Wordsworth was quite aware of the decline of domestic
industry, the rise of factory competition, and the provision of patrimo-
nies as the decisive blows to the viability of this regional system of
farming, based upon Old Enclosures and customary tenures. Neverthe-
less, his Golden Age ideal of the ‘statesmen system of farming’ was
drawn from his life-long contact with the fell-side communities of the
Lake District proper and the West Riding of Yorkshire, whose pastoral-
ism offered a clear contrast to the agriculture and commerce of the
coastal plains. In consequence, his ideal was only typical of the Lake
District hinterland and its people.
2
Land Tenure: a Lake District Survey
This chapter will define more precisely than before the extent to which
Wordsworth’s views of land tenure were rooted in his study of history
and not just his personal observation and experience of a vanishing
way of life. It will involve the review of Wordsworth’s life and work
within the context of contemporary scholarship on the Lake Counties
and pre-industrial society: in particular, (i) the contemporary usage
of the term statesmen to signify yeomen-farmers and customary ten-
ants in the region; (ii) the original meaning of Border tenure, in feudal
times, as ‘tenant right’, and its later reduction to ‘customary estate
of inheritance’, on the one hand, and ‘copyhold’, on the other; and
(iii) the historical connection between this ancient system of farming
and the growth of social and economic equality in Old Lakeland. In
so doing, we shall discuss the poet’s Golden Age ideal of Old Lakeland
as the product, in part, of social, economic, and political traditions in
the area.1
Wordsworth’s favourable views of the lives and characters of the ‘states-

men’ and their families were shared, to a surprising degree, by several
writers whose economic and social interests were quite different to his
own; especially agricultural writers and reporters – which is a point
worth stressing. The reader will recall Dr J. D. Marshall’s thesis that
William Wordsworth and John Housman, in their different ways, were
mainly responsible for the ‘myth’ of the statesmen system of farming
among a mid-Victorian readership of prosperous tenant-farmers, yeo-
men and industrialists. He even claimed that these Romantic writers
distorted the lives and values of the statesmen. His argument, how-
ever, ignores the fact that many of Wordsworth’s views of the Lakeland
yeomen were already current among Lake District writers; especially
his views of their small farms, proudly independent characters, and
supposed attachment to the land. For example, Dr Marshall relies heavily
upon the Board of Agriculture Reports of the period to prove that the
50
England, 1750–1850
Land Tenure: a Lake District Survey 51
statesmen were often wretched, hidebound farmers whose days were

numbered:
‘They live poorly and labour hard,’ wrote [Andrew] Pringle [for
Westmorland] in 1794; they ‘seem to inherit with the estates of their
ancestors, their notions of cultivating them,’ wrote [John] Bailey and
[George] Culley [for Cumberland].2
Indeed, all the writers mentioned in this study, as Wordsworth’s con-

temporaries, were convinced that the old systems of land tenure like
copyholds, tenant right estates, leases for lives and so on were obsolete
and must be removed before serious agricultural change and innova-
tion could be effected in the region. But Dr Marshall’s choice of economic
evidence is highly selective. All of these writers bore witness to the
social, moral and cultural achievement of the statesmen-farmers in terms
which were very similar to Wordsworth’s letter to C. J. Fox.3 Let us, for
example, restitute Andrew Pringle’s economic statement to its original
context:
It might be useful[, he writes,] to know what proportion of the lands

in the county is possessed by that numerous and respectable Yeo-
manry already mentioned as occupying small estates of their own
from L.10, L.20, to L.50 a-year. These men, in contradistinction to
farmers or those who hire the land they occupy are usually denomi-
nated statesmen. They live poorly, and labour hard, and some of
them, particularly in the vicinity of Kendall [sic], in the intervals of
labour from agricultural avocations, busy themelves in weaving stuffs
for the manufacturers of that town. The consciousness of their inde-
pendence renders them impatient of oppression or insult, but they
are gentle and obliging when treated by their superiors with kindness
and respect. This class of men is daily decreasing. The turn-pike roads
have brought the manners of the capital to this extremity of the
kingdom. The simplicity of ancient times is gone. Finer clothes, better
dwellings, and more expensive viands are now sought after by all.
This change of manners, combined with other circumstances which
have taken place within the last forty years, has compelled many a
statesman to sell his property, and reduced him to the necessity of
working as a labourer in those fields which perhaps he and his ancestors
had for many generations cultivated as their own. It is difficult to
contemplate this change without regret, but considering the matter
on the scale of national utility, it may be questioned whether the
agriculture of the county will not be improved as the landed property
of it becomes less divided.4
Apart from his hopes for the nation’s economic future, what does Pringle
reveal about the statesmen’s lives and character, considered as ‘fact’,
which is not found later in Wordsworth’s letter to Fox? We find in
both writers a distinct concern for: (1) the fate of the ‘numerous and
respectable Yeomanry’, called ‘statesmen’ in Cumbria; (2) the supposed
disappearance of this class of ‘small independent proprietors’; (3) their
desperate attempts to stay afloat in a sea of economic change by means
of cottage industry, mortgages and so forth; (4) the supposed attach-
ment of these men to their small family farms and patrimonial lands;
(5) the moral and social degradation of those statesmen who had already
fallen from the ranks of smallholders to the status of wage labourers;
(6) the old agrarian habits of frugality, hard work and plain living which
were competing at a loss with the new material values and economic
interests of consumer capitalism as epitomised in fashionable clothes,
expensive foods and better buildings; and (7) the increasing contact
between the once isolated rural community of Westmorland and the
new urban centres – with their commerce, industry and modern ideas.
Pringle might be wrong about some of his ‘facts’; for example, the
statesman of the late eighteenth century was not normally resident on
lands which ‘he and his ancestors had for many generations cultivated
as their own’. Nor is the statesmen’s demise easily explained. What
does Pringle mean by ‘other circumstances’ were combining with the
‘change of manners’ to force many of them to sell their family farms?
His forty-year time-frame fits the slow rise of cotton mills and woollen
manufactories around Kendal and the hinterland. It also includes the
increasing cost of living, taxation and poor relief, and perhaps too the
burden of patrimonies for sons and daughters. We have already seen
the extent to which each of these events was an important cause of
the statesmen’s rapid decline in the Industrial Revolution. It is there-
fore sufficent to review his comments as supposed facts of the recent
past. They rest upon Golden Age ideas and assumptions about the states-
men system of farming which might have been true for an earlier age.
Both Pringle and Wordsworth, it seems, were preoccupied with ‘what
is past, or passing, or to come’. In fact the similarity between the two
pieces is so strong that Pringle’s report might have served the poet as
a basis for his letter to Fox. How is this possible? On the one hand,
Duncan Wu has shown recently that S. T. Coleridge had a wide knowl-
edge of agricultural affairs and often obtained books and articles on
the subject from lending libraries in Bristol, Stowey, and the farm-house
of Thomas Poole, Esq., of Nether Stowey. Thus he read, for example,
the Letters of the Bath and West of England Society for the Encouragement
of Agriculture, Etc., Vols 6 (1792) and 7 (1795). When in Germany, during
1798, he received, from Poole, copies of the ‘agricultural queries . . .
proposed by the Board [of Agriculture?] to the Surveyors of the differ-
ent committees’. Likewise, Wordsworth, who was in constant associa-

tion with Poole and Coleridge in the period might have read, or heard
of, the contents of agricultural works, in general, and the Board of
Agriculture Report for Westmorland, in particular; which latter work
would have been of considerable interest to him.5 After all, he was
looking for a place to call home, and Westmorland was a distinct
possibility. He had spent much of his boyhood and youth exploring
its hills and dales, and had even singled out Grasmere as hallowed
ground. Moreover, his views of the place were confirmed by a six-week
stay at Windy Brow, on the slopes of Keswick, in 1794.6 Secondly,
Coleridge was responsible for writing all but one of the letters, which
accompanied the presentation copies of Lyrical Ballads, to nine (?) dis-
tinguished persons; the exception being the letter to Fox, which
Wordsworth himself penned. Perhaps Coleridge suggested to him the
use of the said report, or some of its ideas, as a factual basis for a letter
to a famous statesman, who was familiar with agricultural reform in
the south but not necessarily acquainted with the old ‘statesmen’ system
of land-holding in the north.7 This circumstantial account of the simi-
larity between the two pieces cannot claim the power of proof, but it
is plausible. It means that Wordsworth’s views of the statesmen’s life-
style and character must be vigorously compared with contemporary
accounts if we are to come closer to the truth of pre-industrial life in
Old Lakeland and its Golden Age significance for the student of social
change in the period.
Wordsworth’s contemporaries, despising old land tenures as obstacles
to agricultural progress, readily confused the statesman’s customary tenure
with copyhold. ‘A large proportion of the county of Westmoreland’,
wrote Pringle, ‘is possessed by a yeomanry who occupy small estates of
their own . . . either freehold or held of the lord of the manor by cus-
tomary tenure, which differs but little, if at all, from that by copyhold, or
copy of court roll’.8 His account was duly echoed by Parson and White,
in 1829, and by Mannix and Whellan, in 1847.9 Other writers, con-
demned it as ‘a species of vassalage’, resting upon ‘feudal’ rents, fines,
heriots, boon-days, ‘and a number of other ridiculous and disagreeable
burdens’.10 Such views, however, rested, in part, upon two questionable
assumptions: first, that northern tenures were no different to southern
ones; and second, that semi-feudal exactions by a demographically scarce
peerage and gentry, in the region, were somehow incompatible with
the statesmen’s personal independence and domestic competence.11 Let
us examine the first of these assumptions in some detail.12 Agricultural
experts were no doubt led by legal fictions to confuse tenant right,
customary estate of inheritance, and copyhold tenures. Even Lord
Ellenborough, a native of Cumberland, believed that they were the same:
These customary estates known by the denomination of tenant-right

are peculiar to the northern parts of England, in which border services
against the Scots were anciently performed; these estates seem to
have many qualities and incidents which do not properly belong to
villenage tenure, either pure or privileged, and to have even some
qualities which savour of military tenure, viz., the being holden at
the will of the lord, and the title being usually evidenced by copy of
court roll; also they are alienable differently to copyholds, viz., by
deed and admittance thereon; yet notwithstanding all these anoma-
lous circumstances, it seems to be now settled in courts of law, that
these customary tenant-right estates are not freeholds, but that they
fall in effect within the same consideration as copyholders, and the
quality of their tenure cannot properly any longer be drawn in
question.13
His general conclusion was wrong. At least, historians have traced the
origins, growth and significance of tenant right estate in a very differ-
ent manner to eighteenth-century lawyers and judges. The statesmen
system of farming was always ‘anomalous’ to the legal mind because
its social rights and duties did not jell easily with legal fictions of feu-
dal life.14 Border tenants, in the thirteenth century, were bound by two
obligations: first, to pay noutgeld or cornage rent which ‘was a distinct
burden on the land’.15 And second, to defend the Border, or ‘frontier’,
between England and Scotland, on behalf of the Crown; but this obli-
gation to fight was deemed to be ‘the equivalent of foreign service in
other counties’.16
It was found in 1247[, for instance,] that Johanna de Morvill held

Burgh by Sands by paying cornage, and if the king passed through
Cumberland, her obligation lay in prima warda of his army in going
and in the rear-guard in returning, her sub-feudatories[, be it noted,]
holding of her by the same tenure as she held of the king.17
These feudal obligations were changed by time and circumstance into

the semi-feudal obligations of tenant right. It was not a species of
copyhold. In the south, tenants held their lands, in law, ‘by copy of
court roll at the will of the lord, according to the custom of the manor’.18
Their estates were therefore conveyed by a formal surrender of title to
the lord of the manor, who then admitted ‘the nominee of the tenant
upon the court roll as the new tenant’. (Although the lord’s power of
veto had vanished by Wordsworth’s day, it was still active until com-
paratively recent times.) By custom, moreover, the method of descent
used in such cases was freehold. It was therefore a tenure in pure vil-
leinage.19 Copyholders, as Judge Blackstone observed, were no more than
‘villeins, who, by a long series of immemorial encroachments’ had, ‘at

length, established a customary right to those estates, which before,
were held absolutely at the lord’s will’.20 In Cumberland and Westmorland,
however, customary tenants were usually descended from comparatively
‘free’ Viking, Saxon and Danish communities, which had never been
wholly subjugated by the Normans, either in body or in law.21 As Canon
Bouch observed:
The introduction of the ordinary Norman manorial system into these

parts, except in the more ‘civilized’ areas around Carlisle and the
upper Eden Valley, was probably a tedious process. In fact, it may
be doubted that it was ever introduced in all its severity. Before the
Conquest our Viking forbears had spread along the coasts, probably
enslaving what remained of the native population, and had settled,
each with his small clearing, in the forest. Within each group or
district there would be some kind of leader, the heirs of the men
who owned the ships that brought the invaders. But it is difficult to
believe that they were often either desirous or able to reduce their
followers to the level of ordinary bondmen or villeins.22
It is therefore likely that customary tenants, in the Lake District, owed

their status as privileged villeins to this Viking legacy of freedom and
independence. At least the standard account of tenant right as a direct
result of Border defence against the Scots is not sufficient as a long-
term cause of this regional system of farming. After all, Border service
in the Welsh Marches brought no comparable benefits or privileges to
the soldier-farmers who were thereby established.23 Whatever the pre-
cise origins of landholding in the north-west of England, it is arguable,
in spite of Lord Ellenborough’s objections, that customary tenants in
the Lake District were indeed privileged villeins. (The exception to this
rule were the feudal drengs, whose base usage is dealt with below.) Their
estates ‘passed by common deed and admittance’, called in lawyers’
jargon, ‘grant and livery’. The purchaser was thus admitted upon the
court roll as tenant, ‘not to complete the conveyance’, but only to
register the change of tenant for the lord’s benefit.24 In fact, the cus-
tomary tenants in the north had a distinctive ‘tenant right’ in their
estates which was once called ‘the Border Tenant-Right’:
They paid small fixed rents for their estates, but held them, it was
generally considered, on condition of providing a certain number of
horsemen, bowmen, or javelin men for services against the Scots
whenever it was required, this service, however, being limited to
forty days in the year. Certain fixed payments were made by them
on the death of the lord. [They paid general fines on the death of
the lord, and specific fines on the death of the tenant. The widow,
in most manors, paid a heriot to support the border army – though
this purpose has been questioned – and she enjoyed a half or two-
thirds of her husband’s lands for life, during her chaste widowhood.]
These customary estates . . . [by the late nineteeth century were]
considered equal to freehold.25
The basic distinction between tenant right and copyhold tenures is made
even more complicated by Canon Bouch’s conclusion that copyhold in
the Border counties was also different to its counterpart in the south!
‘It is generally assumed that copyhold tenancies, which in their origin
were pure villeinage, did not confer Border Tenant Right. But the ab-
bey tenants [of Holm Cultram in Cumberland], whose lands were
copyhold, had the right of succession and the liability to “serve the
prince on these Borders” – that is [to say] Border Tenant Right and
duty. It seems then as if this tenure was not limited . . . to customary
estates of inheritance, but extended to copyhold.’26 Indeed, tenant right
could be described as a class of customary tenures, in the Border counties,
which arose from (1) the pre-feudal pattern of landholding in the
region, but (2) was later broadened by the obligation of Border duty
into a military tenure which included both kinds of customary estates
in the north.
The Border system was abolished, in June 1625, by a famous deci-
sion of the Star Chamber, which had been badgered by King James I,
and his son Charles, the Prince of Wales, to rid the Crown lands of
their Border tenants.27 The king had proclaimed, in 1620, that Border
service, in the legal sense, had ceased to be with the (symbolic?) union
of the two kingdoms in 1603; the lands in the new ‘middle shires’
were said, by right, to revert back to their traditional lords. Non-royal
tenants in the Barony of Kendal, however, had baulked at this royal
decree, and were thereupon charged, on the second of November, 1622,
with ‘unlawful assemblies, and publishing a libellous book . . . to op-
pose his Majesty’s proclamation for abolishing of the tenure and name
of border service in the county of Westmorland’.28 Their plea of ‘not
guilty’, however, was well received by Justice Hobart and the Star Chamber
who looked favourably upon their claim that they held their lands by
virtue of fixed fines, rents and other services, according to the customs
of their respective manors, and not by Border service. This ruse on the
tenants’ part was given a legal gloss by the Star Chamber who later
decreed that: ‘the border service was no special part of their services
reserved, or in respect of the tenure of their lands, but a duty and
readiness required of them to tend those occasions, as the lords them-
selves and all other freeholders, great and small, of the whole country,
did and ought to do, by virtue of their allegiance and subjection; not
by order and direction of their lords, but of the lord warden of those
parts’.29 The Star Chamber, it seems, did not confirm the status of tenant
right as it had once existed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.30 They
were helped, of course, by the Kendal tenants themselves, who, fearing
reprisals for their bold stand against the king’s flagrant usurpation of
their traditional rights and lands, had made no ‘mention of their border
service in their admittances [to the Star Chamber] or other entries touching
the said estates’.31 The seventeenth-century judges, as S. J. Watts ob-
served, ‘viewed tenant-right as a customary tenure divorced from the
obligations of border service which had formerly been assumed to be
the basis of this tenure’.32 This modern belief stood in stark contrast to
the social and legal conventions of feudal society as found in the Lake
District. The basis of tenant right, as we saw above, was not just manorial
custom, but a specific obligation to serve the king, or his realm, at
home or abroad. When Cumbrians fought for the king’s benefit in other
counties, or on foreign soil, they were entitled to the pay and condi-
tions of normal soldiers. Nevertheless, the disputes of the seventeenth
century were primarily responsible for the sudden end of Border service
and tenures as such. Both tenant right estate and customary estate of
inheritance were still used to describe the statesmen of the north, but
many outsiders confused such possession with copyhold as found in
the south.33
By ignoring the rich social and legal heritage of the Border counties,
the Board of Agriculture Reporters were at a loss to explain the remark-
able blend of personal freedom and communal obligations, which they
observed among the statesmen. John Housman, however, saw that the
Border tenants, ‘though quite civilised’, still retained ‘that resolution,
that sort of savage courage in enterprise or any dangerous undertaking
which distinguished their ancestors’. They were ‘a hardy race of men’
who bore ‘the greatest fatigue with patience, live[d] contented on homely,
though wholesome fare; seem[ed] fond of independence’ and avoided
serious crimes like theft and murder.34 Likewise, William Hutchinson
found the origins of the statesmen’s lifestyle and character in the con-
ditions and demands of Border tenure itself. Their forebears had been
given ‘a degree of [social and economic] equality though [remaining]
under a strong military subordination’.35 It was responsible for their
remarkable patriotism, which underlay their high morale and, perhaps,
their military prowess. Their courage and skill at Flodden Field, for
example, in 1513, had given King Henry VIII’s army its great victory
over James IV of Scotland; at Solway Moss, in 1542, they routed the
flower of the Scotch nobility; and they stood many a long and bitter
seige at Carlisle against William the Lion, in 1174; William Wallace in
1297; and Robert the Bruce in 1315.36 And though Border Tenant Right
was abolished between 1603 and 1625, the customary tenants were still
obliged to defend the Border lands from brigands and fugitives, called
‘Moss-troopers’, who preyed upon lonely estates and hamlets: stealing
food, livestock and other goods, but sometimes threatening the lives
and buildings of the inhabitants. They even supported the nation’s
professional armies in the Scottish Uprisings of 1715 and 1745. But
their limited military service died quietly in 1757.37 Above all else, perhaps,
the ‘battles [of] long ago’ were still remembered in Wordsworth’s day
by old village dames and veterans who were the bridge between liter-
ate and oral cultures. Who but old Ann Tyson used to tell the schoolboys
at Hawkshead a number of ‘tales half as long as an ancient romance’?
For instance, she told William Wordsworth about the ‘history’ of the
Jacobite rebel and the Whig protector of the Constitution in Church
and State. (The poet explored this theme over thirty years later, in The
Excursion (1814), Bk 6, showing how their ‘opposite principles’ were
admirably tempered by mutual sympathy and personal respect.)38 Clearly,
the poet’s contemporaries suspected a causal connection between large
numbers of small family farms, in the Border counties, and the inde-
pendent characters of their owner-occupiers, but only a few writers like
Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn, William Hutchinson and John
Housman grasped the full historical complexity of the problem: so too
did William Wordsworth.
Wordsworth’s contemporaries, like the landscape itself, provided the

poet with a wealth of historical fact and fiction about Border life and
tenures. Recent studies suggest that his Golden Age views of the states-
men system of farming were confirmed by his reading of regional history
books and travel guides in the period 1777–1805. In particular, he read
the works of Thomas West, Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn, William
Hutchinson and John Housman.39 (His related interests in England’s
national history, genealogy and antiquities are discussed elsewhere.40)
All of these writers showed a current interest in the ‘picturesque tradi-
tion’. Even agricultural writers and improvers like William Hutchinson,
Thomas West and John Housman evince a stylistic debt, at least, to
the great writers of the genre, such as William Gilpin, Dr John Brown
and Thomas Gray; hence their inclusion, one gathers, in West’s
famous book, A Guide to the Lakes (1779). Likewise Wordsworth’s own
work, A Guide Through the District of the Lakes (1820; 1835) was similar
in style to his sources. J. R. Nabholtz concluded that ‘Wordsworth’s
purpose and method . . . as distinctive as they are in the Guide, did
not involve a departure from the picturesque tradition, as most critics
have maintained’. 41 The book’s aesthetic principles of composition,
however, must not be viewed at the expense of its Golden Age ideas
and assumptions. Nabholtz, for example, focuses too narrowly on the
‘pictorial effects’ of Wordsworth’s writing and so misses its Golden Age
significance: Section Two, he claims, ‘shows how the characteristic pic-

torial effects achieved by natural process in the Lakes had been seconded
by the economy of the inhabitants from earliest times’.42 But there is a
side to Wordsworth’s writings on Old Lakeland which reminds one of
Marc Bloch’s position, last century, on the method and aims of the Annales
school of history:
There have been histories of the countryside whose heroes, as Lucien

Febvre puts it, seem to do their ploughing with charters; administrative
histories full of the grand doings of a ‘central power’ which rules
the provinces, seemingly regardless of such mundane realities as
the condition of roads, the availability of animals for transport, the
supply of fodder for horses, and travelling time. . . . Their errors are
inexcusable. Ever since Annales has been in existence, its editors
have never ceased to demand that learning shall be kept in touch
with reality.43
To understand French social history, Marc Bloch stood among the ‘mun-
dane realities’ of farming life and the rural landscape, with its different
field systems, and then related their diverse features to his vast knowledge
of feudal life and tenures as gleaned from archival sources.44 Wordsworth
too was preoccupied with the ‘mundane realities’ of the statesmen’s
domestic economy, as found in the remote hills and dales of the Lake
District, and then related these social and economic facts to his expe-
rience of the land itself – with its strip fields, wastes, old enclosures,
commons and moors and so on – and the ancient cloth industry of
Kendal and Keswick.45 Of course, his liking for the past might have
coloured his views of the efficiency of the old system of farming –
where it still existed – and the reader should contrast this section with
the comments made in Chapter 1. The poet, moreover, relied upon
Thomas West’s remarkable book, The Antiquities of Furness, 2nd edn
(1805), for his own account of Border life, military service, and ‘feudal’
tenures in Tudor and Stuart times. The key passage used by Wordsworth
to show the origins of the statesmen system of farming was drawn
from West’s antiquarian study:
Every whole tenement, besides the customary annual rent, was charged
with the obligation of having in readiness a man completely armed
for the king’s service, on the border or elsewhere. Of these, there
were sixty in Plain Furness. When the abbot of Furness franchised
his villains, and raised them to the dignity of customary tenants,
the lands they had cultivated for their lord were divided into whole
tenements, which were again subdivided into four equal parts: each
villain had one, and the party tenant contributed his share in
supporting the man at arms and other burthens. These divisions were
not properly distinguished; the land remained mixed: each tenant
had a share through all the arable and meadow land, [and] the common
of pasture over all the wastes; was deemed a principal tenant, and
paid a fine upon his admittance. These subtenements were judged
sufficient for the support of so many families, and no farther division
was permitted.46
This description of late feudal society, in the seignory of Furness, was

fairly representative of the farming life and Border service in Cumbria.
There was, of course, a striking difference between the original status
accorded to the Abbot’s tenants and those of other Lake Country lords.
Most of the customary tenants in Furness were regarded, at first, as
tenants in pure villeinage, who for reasons unknown were at last eman-
cipated to the status of copyholders.47 Some manors and parishes in
the neighbouring counties were based upon the ancient feudal system
of drengage, wherein the tenants were wholly subject to the will of the
lord; but most tenants in Cumbria were always accorded the greater
dignity of privileged villeins.48 Nevertheless, this evolution of Border service
and land tenure was basically the same in Cumberland and Westmorland.
Wordsworth admits as much in his comments on the said text. Indeed,
he might have used the examples of Brampton Parish, on the one hand,
and the Manor of Kentmere, on the other:
The whole number of tenements originally in this manor was sixty;

that is, the lands were apportioned and set out for the sustentation
of sixty soldiers: and the vestiges of this establishment yet remain
[in the 1770s]. The manor is divided into four quarters; each quarter
into fifteen tenements; each tenement consists of a proportionable
quantity of inclosed ground, with pasture for ten cattle in a common
pasture lying within each quarter respectively, and privilege for 80
sheep in another pasture common to the whole manor; and for each
tenement a man serves the office of constable, pays 2s. a year to the
curate of the chapel, and 13s. 4d. rent to the lord of the manor
[Thomas Fenwick, Esq.].49
Wordsworth’s reading of regional history, and his own observations

since boyhood, led him to conclude that this system of land tenure
was unique. Its evolution involved a measure of social and economic
equality among customary tenants who were still constrained – to a
point – by the semi-feudal bonds of obligation to the lord and to each
other. Its remarkable blend of communal life and personal indepen-
dence was the result of geographic isolation, on the one hand, and the
problems of Border life, on the other. Indeed, Wordsworth saw the
present system of township fields, old fellside enclosures, traditional

access to wastes and commons, domestic economy and ‘sturdy indi-
vidualism’ of the statesmen as evidence of a single evolution of land
settlement within regional geography and Border history. His general
perspective, as revealed in his life and work, was rooted in a ‘total
context’, not in a particular concern with the secondary ‘Aspects of
the Country as Affected by its Inhabitants’.50 Like Marc Bloch a century
later, he was concerned about the ‘mundane realities’ of farming life
and rural society, in a given region, as contrasted with ‘the grand doings
of a central power’, whose prime concern, one gathers, was national
unity and State authority at the expense of regional diversity and inde-
pendence.51 As a Golden Age writer, however, Wordsworth looked back
to Border history as responsible for creating ‘a perfect Republic of Shep-
herds and Agriculturists’, whose ‘pure Commonwealth . . . existed in
the midst of a powerful empire, like an ideal society or an organised
community, whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by
the mountains which protected it’.52
Wordsworth’s contemporaries were also aware of the social and econ-
omic equality of the statesmen in the eighteenth century. They shared
a similar interest in the causes and consequences of this equality for
the people of Old Lakeland. On the other hand, their definition of
social equality is difficult to grasp without resort to long quotations. I
shall therefore relate all my points to a single paragraph taken from
Wordsworth’s book, A Guide Through the District of the Lakes (1835), in
which he sets out clearly the social and economic causes of the states-
men’s equality:
From the time of the erection of these [statesmen’s] houses, till within
the last sixty years, the state of society, though no doubt slowly and
gradually improving, underwent no material change. Corn was grown
in these vales (through which no carriage-road had yet been made)
sufficient upon each estate to furnish bread for each family, and no
more: notwithstanding the union of several tenements [since the
end of Border service in 1603], the possessions of each inhabitant
still being small, in the same field was seen an intermixture of different
crops; and the plough was interrupted by little rocks, mostly over-
grown with wood, or by spongy places, which the tillers of the soil
had neither leisure nor capital to convert into firm land. The storms
and moisture of the climate induced them to sprinkle their upland
property with outhouses of native stone, as places of shelter for their
sheep, where, in tempestuous weather, food was distributed to them.
Every family spun from its own flock the wool with which it was
clothed; a weaver was here and there found among them; and the
rest of their wants was supplied by the produce of the yarn, which
they carded and spun in their own houses, and carried to market,
either under their arms, or more frequently on pack-horses, a small
train taking their way weekly down the valley or over the mountains
to the most commodious town[, such as Kendal, Keswick, or
Cockermouth]. They had . . . their rural chapel, and of course their
minister, in clothing or in manner of life, in no respect differing
from themselves, except on the Sabbath-day; this was the sole dis-
tinguished individual among them; every thing else, person and
possession, exhibited a perfect equality, a community of shepherds
and agriculturists, proprietors, for the most part, of the lands which
they occupied and cultivated.53
All of the writers mentioned in the text as Wordsworth’s ‘contempo-

raries’, held similar views of Old Lakeland life and society. They shared,
in their several ways, the same ‘facts’ as given by Wordsworth about (i)
the wide diffusion of private property in the region; (ii) the states-
men’s dependence upon subsistence agriculture and domestic economy;
(iii) the geographic isolation and harsh climate of the Lake District;
(iv) the need for by-employments in many households; (v) the import-
ance of the local markets and old textile industries in the Lake Counties’
economy; (vi) the limited road and water transport in the pre-industrial
period; (vii) the honoured roles of the priest and schoolmaster in the
moral and intellectual life and improvement of the statesmen and their
families; (viii) the fundamental equality of the church congregation;
and (ix) the common status and economic condition of the farming
classes, who therefore made a ‘commonwealth’ of sorts in their remote
hills and dales. The said writers gave detailed examples of manors and
parishes in the Lake District which could have been easily substituted
for Wordsworth’s ideal, and some of which will be studied in the fol-
lowing pages. The best of these examples are, probably, William
Hutchinson’s account of Orton Parish, in Cumberland; Thomas West’s
description of Ulverston in Furness; and Joseph Nicolson’s and Richard
Burn’s record of Ravenstonedale in Westmorland.54 Wordsworth’s views
of Old Lakeland life and society were never universally true of all
three counties, but they were obviously rooted in specific facts and
traditions about the statesmen system of farming that were widely shared
at the time.55
Wordsworth’s intellectual debt to Thomas West has already been noted.
His use of other historical sources calls alike for serious study. In the
extract from A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, for example, he
seems to rely upon the following passage from Nicolson and Burn for
proof of his Golden Age ideal of social and economic equality in the
decades before his birth in 1770:
By reason of the aforesaid provision for keeping the tenements intire,

the ancient military estate continues in many places in a great measure
still unaltered. And by this means, there was a sufficiency kept up
for the maintenance and support of the soldier; and the children,
except the eldest, migrated into other places. And so late as the
time of bishop Nicolson’s parochial visitation in 1703, [a hundred
years after the official end of Border service,] he was informed at
Ravenstondale by the church wardens, that they had not [had] a
beggar in the parish within the memory of man; and at the same
time, they added, that they had never [had] a gentleman among
them, except only the curate and [the] schoolmaster. And this happy
equality in a great measure still continues [in the 1770s].56
Wordsworth knew this work well. He had read Nicolson and Burn as a
schoolboy at Hawkshead, and later used its contents as a prop for some
minor poems.57 Surely, then, it was uppermost in his mind when he
was composing the epitome of Old Lakeland’s social and economic life
as found ‘till within the last sixty years’. His discussion of the rural
chapel and the priest points forward to Macaulay’s famous description
of the typical country parson, on the one hand, and his own beautiful
memoir of the Reverend Robert Walker, on the other. ‘Hardly one living
in fifty,’ observed Macaulay, ‘enabled the incumbent to bring up a family
comfortably’.
Often it was only by toiling on his glebe, by feeding swine, and by

loading dungcarts, that he could obtain daily bread; nor did his utmost
exertions always prevent the bailiffs from taking his concordance
and his inkstand in execution. It was a white day on which he was
admitted into the kitchen of a great house, and regaled by the serv-
ants with cold meat and ale. His children were brought up like the
children of the neighbouring peasantry. His boys followed the plough;
and his girls went out to service. Study he found impossible: for the
advowson of his living would hardly have sold for a sum sufficient
to purchase a good theological library; and he might be considered
as unusually lucky if he had ten or twelve dog-eared volumes among
the pots and pans of his shelves. Even a keen and strong intellect
might be expected to rust in so unfavourable a situation.58
Macaulay was writing after the commutation of the tithes and other
church reforms had dramatically changed the incomes and character
of the English clergy; and yet his vignette is still valuable for the in-
sight which it gives into the social and economic inferiority of the poor
rural clergy, whose lives were often – though not invariably – a mixed
blessing of small farmer, notary, public registrar, schoolmaster and
minister! More importantly, for our purposes, the poverty and ignor-
ance condemned by Macaulay were seldom mentioned with regret by
Wordsworth and his Lake District contemporaries. Why? Clearly dis-
tinctions of wealth and social status were rare among the Lake District
community, especially in the hinterland: of 93 benefices which belonged
to the diocese of Chester (before 1851) ‘no fewer than 80 were worth
L.50 a year or less, and 56 were worth only L.10 a year or less. That is
[to say], 60 per cent of the clergy concerned had incomes no higher
than that of a chief hind [or labourer], ploughman or shepherd in the
region about [the year] 1760’.59 Wordsworth’s Golden Age ideal of the
poor clergy, however, was the Reverend Robert Walker of Seathwaite,
already adverted to, ‘That lowly, great, good Man’, whose life was pre-
served in Wordsworth’s poetry and prose.60 Walker was born, in 1709,
the youngest child of a statesman at Under-Cragg (Seathwaite) in the
valley of the Duddon. When 17 years of age, he was employed as a
schoolmaster at Gosforth. He later accepted the positions of school-
master and minister at Buttermere in return for a small salary and
‘whittle-gate’.61 ‘Moving thence to Torver, he was ordained and, later,
crossed the fell to [his beloved] Seathwaite in the Duddon valley, where
he was curate for 67 years.’62 His life was the ecclesiastical counterpart
of the statesman of the old landed order:
[‘]In this one Man is shown a temperance – proof

Against all trials; industry severe
And constant as the motion of the day;
Stern self-denial round him spread, with shade
That might be deemed forbidding, did not there
All generous feelings flourish and rejoice;
Forbearance, charity in deed and thought,
And resolution competent to take
Out of the bosom of simplicity
All that her holy customs recommend,
And the best ages of the world prescribe.
– Preaching, administering, in every work
Of his sublime vocation, in the walks
Of worldly intercourse between man and man,
And in his humble dwelling, he appears
A labourer, with moral virtue girt,
With spiritual graces, like a glory, crowned.’63
Indeed, whilst mindful of his flock and church duties, Walker con-
trived by domestic weaving, small scale farming, and ‘legal’ activities
to raise twelve children and leave them a family fortune of L2000.64 A
surgeon, named Alexander Craig Gibson, believed that Walker was
unworthy of his (posthumously given?) epithet of ‘the WONDERFUL’.

‘After all,’ he argued, ‘these are but every day wonders and amount to
no more than the bare fact of a resolute, conscientious and very indi-
gent man, carrying with him into the Church the stern habits of frugality,
industry, temperance, and self-denial in which he was reared, and which
he doubtless had seen practised in his father’s family from his earliest
childhood.’65 His account, however, hardly differs from the poet’s. Both
men saw Walker’s social character and economic condition within the
context of the statesmen system of farming. Each man regarded the
said clergyman as typical of Old Lakeland life and manners – of thrift,
hard work and self-sacrifice. In spite of comparative poverty, moreover,
the Lake District clergy were not often mean or ignorant men. On the
contrary, Wordsworth and his contemporaries were well aware of the
old and honourable connection between the Church, small landholding
and education in the area. The former often referred to this rural con-
nection as a social reason for the widespread satisfaction of the
lower-middle ranks of landed society with their lot in life: the small
landowners, for example, saw that social mobility was a distinct possi-
bility for their children through the possession of modest farms, the
patronage of the Anglican Church, and the high standard of education
in town and country alike.66 As John Housman wrote in 1800: ‘Whatever
patrimonial estates they inherit, they are generally transmitted to the
eldest son without much in addition, or any considerable diminution.
From the laudable establishment of a school in almost every village,
where the children of the villagers may be taught at a trifling expence,
many of the younger sons are educated for clergymen, excisemen, clerks
in counting houses, & c.’.67 Nor were Wordsworth and his contempo-
raries naive Romantics; they saw vanity, pride and weakness in their
fellow men, including the Lake District clergy, who were not always
temperate in speech, manners or alcohol. Edward Rowlandson, for
example, was curate of Grasmere for more than forty years. He died in
1811, aged 77. (The rector, John Craik, was both absent and insane.)
Wordsworth observed that ‘Two vices used to struggle in him for mastery,
avarice & the love of strong drink: but avarice as is common in like
cases always got the better of its opponent, for though he was often
intoxicated it was never I believe at his own expence’. His behaviour,
moreover, provides some evidence in support of Macaulay’s proverbial
poor curate, already mentioned: meaness, adds Wordsworth, ‘strength-
ened upon him as his body grew feebler with age. He had purchased
property & kept some land in his own hands but he could not find [it]
in his heart to lay out the necessary hire for labourers at the proper
season & consequently he has often been seen in [his] half dotage working
his hay in the month of November . . . which I myself have witnessed’.68
Nevertheless, ‘this man on account of his talents and superior Education,
was looked up to by his parishioners who without a single exception

lived at that time (& most of them upon their own small inheritances)
in a state of Republican Equality, a condition favourable to the growth
of kindly feelings among them &[, as we have already seen,] in a striking
degree exclusive to temptations to gross vice & scandalous behaviour’.69
Wordsworth, at least, could weigh such faults in the scales of charity
and still look to other men in his neighbourhood to justify his ideal of
the rural priest: for example, Joseph Simpson and his family, who were
described in The Excursion (1814) Bk.7, and were accounted the poet’s
closest friends in his early years at Grasmere. Many examples of this
weekday equality, so to speak, can be found in the works of Wordsworth’s
contemporaries. The list in note 70 provides several examples of rural
ministers, curates, and schoolmasters, whose lives and characters ap-
proximate to the poet’s ideal.70 Such ‘happy equality’ was not a product
of ‘primitive simplicity’, where ‘human relations [were] untrammelled
by [private] property’; let alone ‘a poor and primitive family’, where
‘humanity [was] reduced to the ancient, indestructible core of its material’;
nor even a kind of ‘primitive Christianity’, though the gospel was spread
by a lowly ‘reader’ or curate who shared fully the lifestyle and sufferings
of his flock.71 No. It was caused by rural isolation, subsistence agriculture,
cottage economy, and (ironically) the constraints of a post-feudal but
pre-industrial system of land tenure, which tempered the statesmen’s
sturdy individualism with a healthy measure of communal obligation
and activity. Of course, such equality could be construed by romantic
minds as satisfaction with one’s lot in life and upheld before the gentle-
man and the statesman in office as a model of Old English harmony
and deference in the countryside.72 Hence Thomas Gray’s famous de-
scription of the Parish of Grasmere in 1769: ‘Not a single red tile, no
gentleman’s flowing house, or garden walls, break in upon the repose
of this little unsuspecting paradise; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy
poverty, in its neatest, most becoming attire’.73 His remarks, however,
reveal something more than pastoral politics. There were few gentry
families in the region. The Flemings had been settled at Rydal for several
generations, but no other family of note lived near Grasmere. Gray’s
statement is therefore partly prophetic of the influx of well-to-do
merchants, lawyers and industrialists from Liverpool and Halifax who,
in the next sixty years, would ‘change’ Grasmere, Rydal, Ambleside,
Keswick and Windermere. In Old Lakeland ‘they never [had] a gentle-
man among them’, except only the minister and schoolmaster. Such,
at least, was the Golden Age ideal by Wordsworth’s day. Between Bishop
Nicolson’s parochial visitation in 1703 and Thomas Gray’s pre-Romantic
wanderings in 1769, large numbers of yeomen-farmers and customary
tenants in England had lost their family farms; and yet contemporaries
record many remote parishes where the statesmen doggedly held their
ground, kept their dignity, or both. (Even William Cobbett, who toured
the Lake District in 1832, was convinced that Cumberland landowners
were still ‘very numerous’, and though their farms were ‘generally small’,
the inhabitants looked ‘very neat and clean’.74 Needless to add, he avoided
the cant of ‘happy poverty’!) Such observers saw Protestant virtues and
Old English habits as partly responsible for the Cumbrian’s pure and
simple manners; his honest and upright bearing. Wordsworth was more
familiar than most writers with the daily life and manners of the lower-
middle ranks of yeomen-farmers, customary tenants, artisans and
shopkeepers. His basic idea about the inhabitants of Grasmere, for
example, was stated abruptly in a letter to Coleridge, dated 27 December
1799: ‘The manners of the neighbouring cottagers have far exceeded
our expectations; They seem little adulterated; indeed as far as we have
seen not at all. The people we have uniformly found kindhearted frank
and manly, prompt to serve without servility. This [is] but an experience
of four days, but we have had dealings with persons of various
occupations, and have had no reason whatever to complain’.75 No doubt
the neat and becoming people of Grasmere were a welcome contrast to
the often degraded rural labourers, vagrants and smugglers of the south-
west of England who had vexed Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy,
for three years (1795–8). This short passage is also significant for the
social historian because it was written before the poet, at Dove Cottage,
had read Ben Jonson’s beautiful idyll, ‘To Penshurst’ (1616), or had
begun to write his own Golden Age ideal, called ‘Home at Grasmere’.76
Indeed it was a return to ‘something’ found in Wordsworth’s earliest
memories of Old Lakeland: a ‘kindred independence of estate’, on the
one hand, and a ‘kind-hearted frank and manly character’, on the other.77
Nor was this ideal of social and economic equality, this ‘happy’ condition,
a democratic idea imported by the poet from revolutionary France. It
was the growth of old-fashioned English individualism and communal
life in a remote region: ‘In general’, wrote John Housman in 1800, ‘the
Cumbrians disdain to fawn on the rich, or cringe to the powerful; they
are accustomed to consider all mankind as equal, and the different gra-
dations among the human species are lost in their ideas’.78 Among the
hills and dales of the Lake District tourists saw something of the old
agrarian order, whose egalitarian spirit stretched back to the Protestant
Reformation, and beyond – to the ancient Border system, where troops
displayed ‘a degree of equality, though under a military subordination’.79
By the late eighteenth century this remarkable amalgam of post-feudal
land tenure and Old English individualism was faced with material changes
which threatened its very existence.
3
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a
Comparison
This chapter compares the Golden Age ideals of William Wordsworth

and William Cobbett during the Industrial Revolution in England. The
common elements of their moral critiques can be gauged from the
several heads below. The main concern here is the social perspective
involved. Wordsworth and Cobbett are compared as members of the
dependent ranks of the old landed order, in general, and the lower-
middle ranks of small independent producers, in particular. Or, better
still, their similar social and economic beliefs are explained by direct
reference to their rural educations and upbringings in Old England.
Both men are viewed as representatives of an anti-modernist tradition,
in Old England, which was resisting the growth of modern, urban so-
ciety, on the one hand, and the rise of industrial and commercial
capitalism, on the other. Their rural assumptions and experience pro-
vide a social and economic framework for understanding the origin
and significance of their Golden Age ideals of small-scale farming com-
munities in the Lake Counties and in the south-east of England. They
explain the writers’ specific commitment to old standards of rural edu-
cation, domestic economy, cottage industry, and the cult of the ‘whole
man’. Likewise, they explain the writers’ general support of paternal
relationships between the ranks of the old landed order, as well as the
appearance of populist ideas in their radical, whig and tory creeds: for
example, their vehement opposition to the development of class re-
lationships and collective action in the new factory towns, enclosed
fields, and commercial centres of the day. Finally, they qualify the writers’
different views of reform questions such as Catholic emancipation, Irish
nationalism, and the extension of the elective franchise. Such a com-
parison might be deemed ambitious but far-fetched. It is, however, justified
by its historical method and detail. Above all, it confirms that Wordsworth
and Cobbett shared similar assumptions about the nature of rural life
and order and so arrived at similar conclusions about the dangers of
urban and industrial life and society. Of course, qualifications must be
68
England, 1750–1850
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 69
made to this statement. The two writers, for example, often laid different
emphases upon the social and economic issues involved. Wordsworth,
for instance, looked with particular dismay upon the rise of the factory
system and consumer capitalism, whilst Cobbett was obsessed with the
enclosure movement and agrarian capitalism. Nevertheless, their Golden
Age critiques of the Industrial Revolution were not different in kind.
Both men wanted to preserve the sturdy individualism of the lower-
middle ranks of society. On the other hand, they chose different methods
to achieve their common goal. Cobbett believed that the aristocratic
government was wholly corrupt, and part of the complex of commercial
and financial capitalism against which he was fighting. He therefore
favoured radical reform. Wordsworth was convinced that the Old Re-
gime’s Constitution in Church and State was the best guarantee of social
stability and political order in the period. He therefore opposed all ‘sweep-
ing change’.1 Such divergences, however, are the best reason for pursuing
the said comparison, for beneath them lurk similar views of the origin,
growth and significance of rural society, and the need to preserve its
‘best’ features from the forces of change both within and without the
old landed order.
Geographical isolation and Old England
Any comparison between William Cobbett (1763–1835) and William

Wordsworth (1770–1850) must start with geography. Both writers were
born into ‘Old England’ amid rural isolation.2 In other words, they
grew up in the old landed order, with its rural economy and relation-
ships, but the effect of these social and economic constraints upon
their characters and life-experience was compounded by their geographical
remoteness from widespread change in the years before the long French
wars. Cobbett was brought up in the valley of Farnham, in Surrey,
Wordsworth in the Border counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and
Furness. Although the latter was the site of old industries, such as min-
ing, iron and textiles, it was not easily drawn into the revolution in
consumer manufacturing that was changing the face of Lancashire and
the ‘Black Country’ of Sheffield. The hinterland, where Wordsworth spent
most of his boyhood and youth, had changed little since the early
seventeenth century. Physical isolation meant that ‘hills and dales’ around
the several lakes were largely used for cattle and sheep farming and
cottage industry. Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn wrote, in 1777,
that: ‘Every man [still] lives upon his own small tenement, and the
practice of accumulating farms hath not yet here made any consider-
able progress’.3 The statesmen system of farming, as defined above, was
not only viable in such surroundings but also evidence of social and
economic continuity in the years before the French wars brought
agricultural and industrial changes more extensively to such remote

inland regions. After 1750, moreover, cotton mills and woollen
manufactories were confined, for the most part, to the major sources
of water and steam power, such as the upper Eden valley and the mineral
rich plains of the west coast of Cumberland, between Whitehaven and
Carlisle; the old manufacturing towns of Kendal and Kirkby Lonsdale
in Westmorland; and Ulverston in Furness. Even the successful iron
works which survived in the well-wooded valleys between Ulverston
and Coniston were ‘only . . . [of] secondary importance in the history
of the industry and its progress’.4 We might therefore agree with the
conclusion drawn by J. V. Beckett and E. J. Evans that ‘Cumbria in the
middle of the eighteenth century showed at once a rapid industrial
development and antique agricultural practice’.5 Not until the revolu-
tion in transport and trading systems overcame ‘the tyranny of distance’,
in this remote district, did the fell country feel the social and econ-
omic forces of the modern world at odds with their old way of life. It
is therefore no exaggeration to say that Wordsworth’s homeland, during
the late eighteenth century, was still largely trapped in its rural past by
its beautiful but rugged terrain. Far to the south-east, moreover, lay
the remarkably mixed farming region of Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Between
1600 and 1750 these neighbouring counties changed slowly from a
subsistence economy to a modern system of agriculture and grazing
based upon large farms, engrossments, enclosures and lease-hold tenure.6
Surrey, however, was not always in the vanguard of agrarian change.
Like Cumberland, Westmorland and Furness, it had many open fields
and commons, in the eighteenth century, which needed traditional
methods of crop rotation, ploughing and communal action. Copyhold
tenures were also widespread and deeply rooted in this county. Even
its large number of freeholders and cottagers, practising primogeniture
and self-sufficient farming, turned a deaf ear to the calls of improving
landlords, wealthy tenants, and writers for enterprise, capital, ‘innova-
tion’ and new markets.7 They were similar, in this respect, to the
customary tenants and freeholders of the north, whose old-fashioned
methods and expectations were discussed in Chapter 1. Both groups,
in the main, were too poor, too hidebound, or too complacent to improve
their holdings. Moreover, Surrey’s extensive tracts of wild-green sands,
wastes, and heath-clad moors were largely untouched by the demand
for new enclosures and engrossments before the French wars (1793–1815)
bumped up farm prices and made ‘improvements’ profitable in the area.
Consider, for example, the figures in Tables 3.1 and 3.2.8
The comparatively ‘open’ counties of Surrey and Sussex underwent
widespread enclosure in the twenty-two years of economic prosperity
which attended the war. These events, however, were not limited to
the rural south; the move to enclose marginal corn lands was evident
Table 3.1 Acreage enclosed by Parliamentary Act in England for Kent, Surrey
and Sussex
County Total acreage Percentage of Acreage enclosed Acreage with
enclosed county area by Acts for some arable
(000) common/waste enclosures
only (000) by Private
Acts (000)
Kent 8 0.8 6 –
Surrey 69 14.4 20 33
Sussex 41 4.4 9 20
England 6794 20.9 1880 4248
Table 3.2 Percentage of all Parliamentary Enclosure which was for open-field
arable land for Kent, Surrey and Sussex
County Pre-1793 1793–1815 1816–29 Post-1829
Kent – – – –
Surrey – 45.2 1.9 4.4
Sussex – 31.1 8.1 13.3
England 27.3 29.2 3.5 6.0
across the country. As J. H. Plumb observed: ‘Over two million acres of

land which had been neglected since the middle ages, if it had ever
been cultivated at all, were enclosed and brought into cultivation be-
tween 1790 and 1810’.9 Even Cumberland and Westmorland, as we saw
above, were drawn into the mania. But whereas rapid enclosure was
not a major cause of the small landholders’ decline in the years of
‘boom and bust’ (1793–1820), its overall effect on the farming classes
of the south-east was complicated by the high numbers of rural labourers
and cottagers, who relied heavily upon the wastes and commons for
their domestic survival or competence. For example, many families
gathered peat-moss and turf, rushes, and fire-wood from the furze-clad
heaths, swamps, and sand-hills of the region, and frequently acquired
traditional rights to graze a few sheep, pigs, cows or geese upon the
wastes and commons. On the other hand, because legal rights to turbary,
estover and commons were only guaranteed by formal land-tenures,
and not by convention, squatters and rural labourers were often treated
coldly by the courts and enclosure commissioners.10 Be this as it may,
Cobbett’s birth-place, between 1763 and 1793, was a backwater of old-
fashioned farming methods and self-reliant families, surrounded by barren
hills and moors. The county’s general prosperity as a sheep and corn
producer, of course, was dependent upon its nearness to London, whose
population between 1700 and 1820 almost doubled from 647 000 to
1 274 000 people. Huge amounts of cheap meat and corn were carried
from all across the country to the Metropolis, and her ‘markets and
stalls were . . . increasingly well supplied with fruit and vegetables from
the neighbouring market gardens’.11 When touring the English country-
side, in the early 1830s, the old Cobbett was far more conscious of this
economic connection between the Home Counties and the ‘increase of
London’. The ‘swelling of the immortal Wen’, he argued, ‘assisted to
heap wealth upon these counties’.12 Nonetheless, the appearance of
economic independence and local consumption, in the years of his
boyhood and youth, was far more important, for our purposes, than
the reality. Both he and Wordsworth, it seems, saw continuity rather
than change in their native environments.
Country and city
This isolation of time and space was partly responsible for the two
writers’ mixed feelings over town and city life. They had acquired at
first hand the social ideal of the small community from the small market
towns and villages of their local regions. Wordsworth was born in the
old borough town of Cockermouth, where he spent much of his boy-
hood and youth with his maternal grandparents, and sometimes with
his paternal uncle, Richard, at Whitehaven. He also spent about ten
years as a student in the old market town of Hawkshead. In other words,
his early life was often shaped by his experience of old market towns
and municipal centres in the Border counties. His family moved about
a great deal when he was a boy, and his holidays were often had with
different friends and relations in Cumberland. In consequence, he fre-
quently travelled on foot, or on horseback, to old manufacturing and
market towns like Cockermouth, Penrith and Keswick. All but Whitehaven,
which was a comparatively new port-town for the export of Cumbria’s
coal, were marked by small scale farming, manufacturing and commerce.13
Their old-fashioned appearance and provincial character is confirmed
by many of Wordsworth’s contemporaries. A fairly typical case is given
by John Housman in 1800:
KESWICK is a small but neat and pleasant market town, and, in

general, well built; with some good inns for the accommodation of
travellers; and a weekly market on Saturdays, chiefly for woollen
yarn (spun in the adjacent dales), a variety of fish from the lakes,
and the finest mutton in the kingdom. – A cotton factory has lately
been established here; and course woollen goods, kerseys, and some
linen, are also manufactured.14
Different market towns might have laid more or less emphasis upon
the sale of farm produce like mutton, fish, dairy or corn; or the role of
domestic manufactures and the erection of modern textile mills; but

the picture gleaned from most sources is clear: regular buying and selling
of surplus goods and farm produce by small independent farmers and
artisans (such as weavers) according to age-old customs and municipal
regulations.15 Carlisle and Kendal were cases in point. The rise of political
economy and the forces of social and economic change were discussed
in Chapter 2, with respect to the old farming systems, but a similar
division existed in the most important manufacturing towns. According
to The Boke of Recorde of the Burgh of Kirkby Kendal, published in 1575,
trades or craft guilds were numerous and important in the economic
and municipal life of the place. But tensions were mounting in the
period under study:
These guilds fell to pieces in the last half of the . . . [eighteenth]

century; they had not, as at Carlisle, the possession of the munici-
pal franchise to ensure their coherence, or, rather, to ensure ambitious
politicians finding the money necessary for that coherence; their
trade regulations and restrictions were out of date, and behind the times;
the last to survive was the Cordyners’, or Shoemakers’, and it
died fighting for its mediaeval rights in an attempt to impose a fine
upon persons, not being free of the company, setting up business
within the borough; the Hampden who resisted them was one Robert
Moses, and his refusal broke up the last of the Kendal guilds.16
[Emphasis added.]
If Kendal is considered as the most progressive and important of

Westmorland’s industrial towns, the passage gives strong evidence of
the Border counties’ resistance to rapid and widespread changes in town
life and administration.17 By 1829 there were still only ten market towns
in Westmorland, and seventeen in Cumberland: the emphasis upon
permanent manufactories, however, was fully established in many of
these and the remaining ones often relied upon permanent shops and
offices for the sale of goods and the provision of professional services.18
Thus, for example, Orton’s market, situated between Kendal and Appleby,
was ‘becoming obsolete’.19 On the other hand, the rise of factory towns
and suburbs contributed to the growth of the ‘ancient but respectable
and well-built Market-town’ of Penrith. According to Parson’s and White’s
Directory the town’s many markets, fairs and festivals were ‘numerously
attended’ and were ‘the principal support of the town, which . . . [had]
lost all its former participation in the cotton trade, except about 100
weavers, who were . . . [now] employed by the Carlisle manufacturers’.20
In short, the evidence confirms the view set forth in previous chapters
that Wordsworth’s vision of Old Lakeland was very much the result of
his personal experience of a slowly vanishing way of life in the hinterland,
which was not always representative of the pace and scale of changes
elsewhere in the region. In this respect he was like William Cobbett,
who had been born and raised amid the small towns and hamlets of
south-east England. Farnham, for instance, had been a very important
corn market in Arthur Young’s time but its economic role had rapidly
declined in the late eighteenth century. The rural south, moreover, had
long before lost its importance as a producer of iron and textile goods.
In consequence, Cobbett was probably a stranger to small-scale dom-
estic manufacture of iron and woollen goods, including yarn, as well
as the need for new middle-sized cotton and woollen manufactories in
the modern period. The south-east’s economy, however, was rich in
agriculture and husbandry, including hops and market-gardening, and
so provided a variety of cottage industries and side-lines for the ‘labouring
classes’, whom Cobbett defined as all tradesmen, farmers and wage
workers, who laboured in their several ways.21 He absorbed the ideal of
the market town as a place in which the small producers bought and
sold their domestic manufactures and farm produce and offered the
rural professions and services a venue for their activities; it was not a
‘commercial’ centre, or entrepot, for middle-men in the modern sense
of warehousemen, merchants, bankers or brokers. His economic model
was based upon the easy movement of surplus foods, materials and
manufactured goods from one group of labourers to another.
The fair and the market, [he wrote,] those wise institutions of our
forefathers, and with regard to the management of which they were
so scrupulously careful; the fair and the market bring the producer
and the consumer in contact with each other. Whatever is gained, is
at any rate, gained by one or the other of these. The fair and the
market bring them together, and enable them to act for their mutual
interest and convenience. The shop and the trafficker keeps them apart;
the shop hides from both producer and consumer the real state of
matters.22
He clearly made no allowances or excuses for the growth of modern

shops and commercial methods in the period 1688–1831. In this re-
gard he stands somewhat to the right both of Daniel Defoe, the famous
journalist (1660?–1731), and William Wordsworth, the Romantic poet
(1770–1850). Whereas Defoe had ridiculed the new practice of ‘shop-
ping’ for pleasure and amusement in Greater London, Wordsworth had
reproached all consumers and spendthrifts in his memorable sonnet:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.23
Nevertheless, even Defoe was aghast at the ‘modern custom’ whereby

‘tradesmen . . . [laid] out two-thirds of their fortune in fitting up their
shops’, especially in London. His indictment, as M. D. George argues,
is representative of the times; ‘then capital was sunk in stock, and used
for wages, and to a large extent for giving credit to customers, but very
little was used for buildings and what are now called overhead ex-
penses’.24 But neither Wordsworth nor Defoe would have denied that
shops had a legitimate place in English trading life. Cobbett, however,
was adamant, in 1826, that ‘When fairs were very frequent, shops were
not needed.’
A manufacturer of shoes, of stockings, of hats; of almost any thing

that man wants, could manufacture at home in an obscure hamlet,
with cheap house-rent, good air, and plenty of room. He need pay
no heavy rent for [a] shop; and no disadvantages from confined situ-
ation; and, then, by attending three or four or five or six fairs in a
year, he sold the work of his hands, unloaded with heavy expense
attending the keeping of a shop. . . . Of course he could [also] afford
to sell the work of his hands for less; and thus a greater portion of
their earnings remained with those who raised the food and the
clothing from the land.25
He therefore concluded that the old Tudor and Stuart codes were very
just and very wise: ‘They were laws to prevent the producer and the
consumer from being cheated by the trafficker’.26 This old belief was
the standard by which he judged the different effects of social and
economic changes in town life and administration. Hence his high
regard, one gathers, for the old ‘royal city’ of Carlisle, which he visited
in 1830. It was a rare example of the ‘moral economy’ of pre-industrial
times, with its rules and regulations against forestalling and regrating
and so on, as well as its ‘feudal’ heritage of public life and pageantry
for its free merchant and craft guilds. 27 Above all, he noticed its
‘very fine market for all sorts of produce’.28 In spite of the widespread
adoption of industrial plant to the west of the town, he could still
sense its historical importance as a major outlet for the surplus
produce of the plains and the hinterland.29 Wordsworth’s experience
of the ‘moral economy’ was not as extreme as Cobbett’s, being
tempered by his family’s commercial and legal background, on the
one hand, and the reliance of the statesmen upon factors to buy their
yarn and hand-made goods, on the other. But even he was convinced
that the basic principle of the Lakeland economy of his boyhood and
youth had been self-sufficient farming and old-fashioned methods of
buying and selling. Together they grew up believing that commercial
and industrial life, in Old England, were largely dependent upon the
comparatively small domestic needs of farmers, artisans and rural

labourers, rather than the big demands of modern merchants, bankers
and factory owners. When they went to London they took this pre-
industrial ideal with them.
Their views of city-life, however, were not simply a revulsion of rural
feeling and emotion at the unknown. Their literary and political careers
were often involved with the metropolis of London – the ‘mighty heart’
of the nation.30 When a young man, Wordsworth often stayed with his
elder brother, Richard, a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn, where he met eccentric
legal figures like Basil Montagu; and wandered around Old London with
his circle of radical friends such as the publisher, Joseph Johnson; or
listened to Joseph Fawcett, the dissenting minister, at Old Jewry, preach
against the war with France. Likewise, in his later years, he dined with
whig friends like Lord and Lady Holland, as well as Thomas Clarkson
and his wife; or stayed with tory patrons, such as the Lowthers and
the Beaumonts, who all had town houses in Westminster.31 This in-
volvement, however, served only to compound his distrust of the
Metropolis and its endless round of social and political engagements:
in 1807 he asked Lady Beaumont: ‘The things which I have taken [as
subjects for my verse], whether from within or from without, – what
have they to do with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to
door, from street to street, on foot or in Carriage; with Mr. Pitt or Mr.
Fox, Mr. Paul [sic] or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster Election or
the Borough of Honiton; in a word, for I cannot stop to make my way
through the hurry of images that present themselves to me, what have
they to do with endless talking about things nobody cares anything
for except as far as their own vanity or selfishness is concerned . . .?’32
At first sight one might think that Wordsworth shared little in common
with Cobbett, who was working with James Paull and Sir Francis Burdett
for a radical reform of Parliament and writing with vigour about the
Westminster election, and the struggle for Honiton.33 But Cobbett was
also disturbed by his surroundings. Despite many years spent as a journal-
ist in Fleet Street, and as a radical candidate in Westminster, Cobbett
was a stranger to Dr Johnson’s world of coffee shops and polite society,
and a sworn enemy of its commercial classes who now supported the
unreformed Parliament and its system of pensions, places and sinecures.
Both he and Wordsworth were appalled by the dirt, smoke, noise and
crime of the Metropolis and its suppression of natural instincts for wildlife
and rural landscapes: when a scrivener for Mr Holland of Gray’s Inn,
the young Cobbett’s ‘only’ delight was to walk, every Sunday, ‘to St.
James’s Park, to feast’ his ‘eyes with the sight of the trees, the grass,
and the water’. Except for this weekly respite, his days were spent in
the confines of the lawyer’s chambers, where he lived like Melville’s
Bartleby in darkness and solitude. And though he stayed at the job for
only eight or nine months, he henceforward always avoided writing in

the city, whenever possible. Even in the year of his death he could
hardly face going to ‘the Wen’:
Hating the smoke of London as I do; my ears, violated as they are

by the rattle of the infernal hackney coaches; my eyes, blasted as
they are by the sight of the seventy-five-thousand-pounds gateway,
and by the hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pounds picture gallery, the
expenses of which are extracted from the sweat of the working people,
whom the aristocracy wish to reduce to a coarser sort of food . . .
abandoning the sweet air, the singing of the birds, and the coming-
forth leaves, I really sigh for the 12th of May, as much as any
maiden-bride ever sighed for her wedding day.34
He seems to express, in these passages, the same emotional and physi-

cal yearning of Wordsworth’s ‘Poor Susan’ for her old country life which
is suddenly aroused, in the mercantile district of London, by the sound
of a thrush at dawn:
’Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees

A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,

Down which she so often has tripped with her pale;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.35
But the servant’s ‘reverie’ does not last. She is divorced by time and
space from the hills and dales of Lancashire, Cumberland and
Westmorland. Wordsworth was one of the first writers to express such
feelings of loss and estrangement from nature in the towns and cities
of modern England. Later, as the Hammonds argued only too well, the
country folk who migrated to the commercial and industrial towns did
not readily lose ‘their instincts and longings or their sense for beauty
and peace’, but had them stifled by the ugliness of ‘Coketown’ and the
slums of London’s East End.36 Wordsworth and Cobbett expressed, at
an early stage, this agrarian need for emotional and physical well-being
in the companionship of nature and farm life.
Wordsworth’s Romantic critique of urban life, moreover, also gives
the reader a pre-Marxian insight into ‘alienation’ and rootlessness; and
seeks to explain these social and economic facts by direct reference to
the individual’s imaginative life and social affections; but even these
modern ideas were drawn from populist assumptions of petty-produc-

tion and traditional independence. In The Prelude (1805) and ‘Home at
Grasmere’ (1806), for example, the poet pays great attention to the
estrangement of man from man in the Metropolis:
Where pity shrinks from unremitting calls,

Where numbers overwhelm humanity,
And nearness of neighbourhood serves rather to divide
Than to unite.37
The isolation and indifference of people in the city of London was

always a problem for Wordsworth. Even when a boy, at Hawkshead, he
had been baffled by the news that men and women lived ‘Even [as]
next-door neighbours . . . yet still/ Strangers, and knowing not each other’s
names’.38 This anonymity was most often sensed ‘in the overflowing
Streets’, where ‘the face of every one . . . [was] a mystery’.39 Wordsworth,
moreover, observed a ‘new kind of urban crowd’, in the demographic
mayhem of commercial London, who were ‘physically very close but
still absolute strangers’; beings who ‘had lost any common and settled
idea of man and so needed representations . . . to stimulate if not [to]
affirm a human identity’. Hence their need for ‘the hoardings, the new
kinds of sign’, to define the Londoner’s life.40 But what sort of image
did the hoardings, public roads, and buildings yield to the inhabit-
ants? ‘Oh, blank confusion!’ Or, if that be too dramatic: dead ballads
and ‘Advertisements’ – symbols of the past and the future set side by
side.41 The poet, of course, often captured the spirit of Old London in
a manner worthy of Charles Lamb and Washington Irving, who wrote
more favourably of its people and pastimes; but nothing could dissolve
the poet’s fundamental objections to the growth of large towns and
cities.42 Why? The answer is given in the ‘Preface to’ Lyrical Ballads
(1800/1802):
[A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting

with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the
mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a
state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are
the great national events which are daily taking place, and the in-
creasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their
occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the
rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this ten-
dency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions
of the country have conformed themselves.43
This round condemnation of modern culture and town-life is impor-

tant for two reasons: first, as a Romantic critique of art and society, it
points towards R. G. Collingwood’s famous distinction between real,
magical and amusement art. The first is, basically, the true expression
of emotions by the imagination into a given medium; the second is
the evocation of different emotions for useful social purposes, or the
business of daily life; and the third is the crude stimulation and dis-
charge of emotion within the framework of the amusement itself, which
has no further benefit for the amused or his fellows. Whilst Collingwood
argued that only the first is, philosophically speaking, true art, he ac-
knowledged that the second form often contains a large measure of
true artistic expression in the service of social and communal ends. (It
manifests itself most clearly in religious and secular rites, which direct
emotions like love and patriotism into the service of the Church and
State.) He did not, however, limit the development of ‘amusement art’
to modern times, or to recent inventions like the radio or cinema, but
traced its effects upon Graeco-Roman societies. The moral decay of society
is the philosophical source of ‘amusement art’, especially the sense that
life is really not worth living without endless diversions and ‘pleasures’
– whether in the form of Hellenic poetry, Roman spectacles or modern
cinema. Nevertheless, he argued that its growth in the nineteenth century
was largely the result of the new commercial and industrial civilisa-
tion, in England, which had divorced the vast majority of people from
their traditional lifestyle in town and country. Prior to this upheaval,
the rural poor had developed a rich legacy of native art – which was
often ‘patronized by the name of folk-art’. This rural tradition con-
sisted mainly of songs, dances, stories and dramas, which gave emotional
meaning to their seasonal lifestyles and employments. ‘It was’, in fact,
‘the magical art of an agricultural people’.44 The modern labourer, however,
in factory or field, was often reduced, like the Roman plebeian, to ‘a
state of almost savage torpor’, which required a range of ‘gross and
violent stimulants’ to give short-term relief from his general malaise.
But, according to R. G. Collingwood, this blunting of sensibility was
just as common, if not so strong, among the middle classes as their
social and economic inferiors. They were merely philistines. Wordsworth
would have agreed. Hence his moral and artistic revulsion against the
reading public’s taste for ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German
Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ no less
than their ‘craving for extraordinary incident, [from the battle-field,]
which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly’ gratified. Even
Old London herself was a fearful instance of this phenomenon. In
his account of London’s everyday life, in Book 7 of The Prelude, he
objects to those ‘times, when half the City shall break out/ Full of one
passion, vengence, rage, or fear,/ To executions, to a Street on fire,/
Mobs, riots, or rejoicings ‘.45 The same observation was made by William
Cobbett in 1802. Before his conversion to the radical cause, he could

hardly ignore the violent language and behaviour of the London crowds.
Consider, for instance, his description of the electoral victory of Sir
Francis Burdett in Middlesex:
The road from Piccadilly to the hustings at Brentford is a scene of

confusion and sedition, such as never was beheld, except in the en-
virons of Paris, during the most dreadful times of the revolution . . .
The road . . . is lined with ragged wretches from St. Giles’s bawling
out ‘Sir Francis Burdett and No Bastille’ and at the hustings there
are daily some half a dozen convicts who have served out their time
in the house of correction, employed in amusing the rabble with
execrations on the head of Mr. Mainwaring [the sitting member for
the borough].46
Cobbett observed elsewhere that Burdett’s victory was more than a sig-
nal for illuminations in the streets and shop-fronts: ‘It will have this
most dreadful effect’, he mourned. ‘It will embolden and increase the
disorderly and dishonest part of this monstrously overgrown and profligate
metropolis’.47 The two writers, it seems, were not just repelled by their
bloody memories of revolutionary France when they saw, at first hand,
the power of the mob. They were obsessed by the plebeian’s love of
‘spectacle’ and ‘amusement’ in all its forms. The Metropolis offered
opportunities for vice and immorality, on the one hand, and frivolous
pleasures and distraction, on the other, which were simply awesome
compared to the old market towns and fairs of the countryside.48 Of
course, social historians like E. P. Thompson and Peter Linebaugh might
well disagree with Wordsworth and Cobbett on this point. They have
shown that ‘plebeian culture and society’, in the late eighteenth cen-
tury, was often characterised by a coherent, if traditional, response to
forces acting against their social, economic and political concerns. At
least, they have given valuable accounts of such diverse events as the
execution of convicts at Tyburn, and the role of the ‘crowd’ in keeping
together the ‘moral economy’ and ‘self-regulating communities’ of Old
London and elsewhere.49 Thus, for example, the attempts by a con-
vict’s family and friends to save his body from medical dissection and
disfigurement were based upon semi-pagan beliefs in ‘magic’, including
the Christian tradition of physical resurrection, and the free-born Eng-
lishman’s rejection of Parliamentary interference in the treatment of
the criminal’s corpse – if his family were willing to bury it.50 Indeed,
Peter Linebaugh warns ‘against those glib explanations of urban crime
of the eighteenth-century London poor which refer so easily to the
anonymity of city life’ or the breaking up of old social groups and
bonds under the ‘Process of Urbanization’. Body-snatching, for instance,
reinforced strong communal bonds between family members, friends,

neighbours and workmates in the old maritime and industrial districts
of London.51 Nor was this all. E. P. Thompson has emphasised the need
for historians to study old social formations such as ‘Church-and-King
mobs’, electoral riots, and crowds as key social and political elements
in the structural relationship between the lower ranks of eighteenth-
century London and their ‘Whig’ rulers. In this regard, the disorderly
crowd, who damned Mr Mainwaring, might have been vying with the
government’s candidate for ‘symbolic authority’ – offering a public ‘chal-
lenge to the gentry’s hegemonic assurance’ – and seeing Burdett’s victory
as a valuable gain in the struggle for symbolic control over public affairs.52
We need not concern ourselves, here, with Thompson’s detailed dis-
cussion of patrician and plebeian relations, except to say that it reveals
different ‘codes’ of behaviour which Wordsworth and Cobbett, as country-
men, might easily have missed – especially the poet, whose views of
urban life were based partly upon Romantic notions of inwardness and
solitude, which left little room for ‘the masses’ or their ways.53 Such
stimulation, however, was most apparent to Wordsworth in Saint
Bartholomew’s Fair which laid ‘The whole creative powers of man asleep!’54
This circus-like ‘spectacle’ fully illustrates Collingwood’s idea of amuse-
ment art and culture and Wordsworth’s rural dislike of city-life which
made all and sundry ‘slaves . . . of low pursuits’:
Living amid the same perpetual flow

Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end . . .55
Wordsworth’s negative vision of everyday life in London was the result

of his personal observation of rootlessness and anonymity among its
inhabitants; but it was also the result of his populist perspective – which
often gave shape and meaning to his varied experience. It is interesting
to note, in this regard, that Wordsworth follows his account of Saint
Bartholomew’s Fair and Old London with a description of Helvellyn
Fair in Old Lakeland. The dalesmen used such country fairs as a seasonal
outlet for their farm produce and domestic manufactures. Moreover,
they and they wives could buy ‘books, pictures, combs and pins’ for
their families’ use and benefit.56 Above all, they enjoyed a welcome
relief from working, in the plough-field and the meadow, in the form
of country sports and pastimes such as running, wrestling, singing and
dancing. Wordsworth even mused on the unattended maypole as a vivid
symbol of the countryman’s life and yearly festivals: observing, in The
Excursion, how it ‘shines’:
as if the rays
Of morning, aided by exhaling dew,
With gladsome influence could re-animate
The faded garlands dangling from its sides.
But the ‘annual Wake’ was in fact only a temporary respite from Nature
and her permanent appeal to their social affections, communal re-
lationships, and material interests.57 The statesmen, it seems, were spared
‘temptations to gross vice & scandalous behaviour’ because they lived
‘in a country not crowded with population’ and were ‘placed above
poverty’.58 The poet’s Romantic critique of contemporary art and cul-
ture always points us back to his beliefs about rural life and society:
‘Trade, commerce, & manufactures,’ he declared, along with ‘physical
science & mechanic arts, out of which so much wealth has arisen, have
made our country men infinitely less sensible to movements of imagin-
ation & Fancy than were our forefathers in their simple state of society’.
Materialism was at war with imagination: ‘Refinement, for the most
part false,’ he argued, ‘increases the desire to accumulate wealth; &
while theories of political economy are boastfully pleading for the practise,
inhumanity pervades all our dealings in buying & selling. This selfish-
ness wars against disinterested imagination in all directions, &, evils
coming round in a circle, barbarism spreads in every quarter of our
Island’.59 Imagination is ‘disinterested’ to the point that it carries ‘re-
lationship and love’ into the world of ‘Man, Nature, and Society’.60
Townsmen were quite unlike either the poet of genius, by ‘sensible
impressions not enthrall’d’, or the statesmen of Cumbria, living amidst
the beautiful and permanent forms of nature, ‘Diffusing health and
sober cheerfulness’:
And giving to the moments as they pass

Their little boons of animating thought
That sweeten labour, make it seen and felt
To be no arbitrary weight imposed,
But a glad function natural to Man.61
Moreover, their hereditary farms, frugality, and hard work guaranteed

to them a glimpse of ‘disinterested imagination’ no less than social
and economic independence:
Joy spreads and sorrow spreads; and this whole Vale,

Home of untutored Shepherds as it is,
Swarms with sensation, as with gleams of sunshine,
Shadows or breezes, scents or sounds. Nor deem
These feelings, though subservient more than ours
To every day’s demand for daily bread

And borrowing more their spirit, and their shape
From self-respecting interests, deem them not
Unworthy therefore, and unhallowed – no,
They lift the animal being, do themselves
By Nature’s kind and ever-present aid
Refine the selfishness from which they spring,
Redeem by love the individual sense
Of anxiousness with which they are combined.
And thus it is that fitly they become
Associates in the joy of purest minds
They blend therewith congenially: meanwhile
Calmly they breathe their own undying life
Through this their mountain sanctuary; long,
Oh long may it remain inviolate . . .62
The romantic belief in the power of nature to endow everyday life

with human and spiritual meaning, however, was based upon
Wordsworth’s vision of self-sufficient farming and rural life as found in
the Lake District:
Where kindred independence of estate

Is prevalent, where he who tills the field,
He, happy Man! is Master of the field,
And treads the mountains which his Fathers trod.63
Their small farms and domestic labour, moreover, were viewed as the
social and economic preconditions of their close family relationships
and communal emotions. As he told Charles James Fox:
Their little tract of land serves as a kind of permanent rallying point

for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written
which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances when
they would otherwise be forgotten. It is a fountain fitted to the nature
of social man from which supplies of affection, as pure as his heart
was intended for, are daily drawn.64
Social affections and folk memories were both fostered by ‘paternal fields’
and domestic interests.65 Was it any wonder, then, that Wordsworth
defined life in Old London in negative terms of rootlessness and
anonymity or railed against the twin yokes of industrial and commer-
cial capitalism which were premised in England upon the aggressive
individualism and self-interest of political economy? Only Old Lakeland,
as defined in section one of this chapter, offered Wordsworth a satisfactory
ideal of social life and moral relations which reconciled the competing
claims of community and individuation in the period 1770–1850. The
ideal’s great strength, however, was also its great weakness. It gave
Wordsworth a populist perspective by which to judge both urban life
and laissez-faire individualism, but it could never be used to embody
new material values, crowd dynamics, or class relationships in a positive
way. It remained rooted in the old landed order of pre-industrial times.
Nor did the statesmen ‘remain inviolate’ from the spread of manufactured
goods during the Industrial Revolution: 1770–1850. It was a vanishing
ideal, vitiated by new material values and modern ideas. Nevertheless,
some statesmen and writers were resisting the social and economic changes
to their old way of life. Wordsworth’s Romantic criticism was clearly a
case in point. Indeed, it was anti-modernist.
Wordsworth’s views of rural life and society also fit well into C. J.
Calhoun’s survey of the concept of community from the late eight-
eenth century to the present: ‘In England, [during the Industrial
Revolution,] writers from Cobbett to Coleridge recognised and bemoaned
the loss of older self-regulatory mechanisms of community’.66 That is
to say, they often defined ‘community’ as a set of close social relation-
ships, customary controls and traditional authority that stood opposed
to the new powers and importance of the political state, which sought
to direct people’s lives and values without regard to their local or re-
gional concerns. Calhoun strongly argues that this definition was a step
towards a dynamic rather than a static idea of community. But it did
not go far enough: ‘A community, in this usage, . . . [was] able to pursue
only implicit and/or traditional ends, or to respond to external threats
to its ability to follow its traditional way of life’.67 In this context we
can more readily understand the efforts of William Wordsworth and
William Cobbett to defend their old ways of life which were threat-
ened by the new industrial and commercial order of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. In particular, it points us towards their
mistrust of London as the centre of state authority and power and its
widespread corruption in the period. Both men were opposed to the
same urban and political corruption which centred upon the nation’s
capital. Wordsworth portrayed Pitt’s England as ‘a fen/ Of stagnant waters’.
When a radical, he had collaborated with Francis Wrangham on a satire
of the ruling classes which contained many of the elements of Cobbett’s
radical critique of ‘Old Corruption’. He despised the system of parlia-
mentary representation which kept power in the hands of a small group
of tory and whig landowners; in particular, he singled out boroughmongers
like Sir James Lowther, whose seat of Appleby in Westmorland was
held by Pitt himself. Like Cobbett, he believed that the Pitt govern-
ment had declared war on revolutionary France in order to preserve its
own aristocratic privileges. Moreover, both men were convinced that it
was not until ‘war was begun against the French People, that those
bloody scenes ensued which . . . [were], by the Aristocrats, ascribed to
the revolution’. (Wordsworth might even have shared Cobbett’s belief
‘that if the People of France had been suffered to remain at peace,
that, as far as the circumstances of the two nations were, previous to
the French Revolution, alike, so far the People of England would have
followed their example’; to wit: Parliamentary reform.68) Both men sub-
scribed to the ‘Norman yoke’ theory of ‘lost rights’ and looked to a
reform of parliamentary representation to rectify past abuses and to
preserve the people’s traditional rights and liberties.
When the Peace of Amiens (April 1802 to May 1803) collapsed under
the threat of Napoleonic expansion, Wordsworth’s opposition to the
French war waned.69 He now saw England as the only hope for Europe’s
safety.70 Nevertheless, he continued to condemn the English govern-
ment. Why? Because London was a world where political corruption
went hand-in-hand with the social and economic interests of the new
moneyed men of merchants, bankers, stock-jobbers and money-lenders
who reckoned the cost of war with France according to their profits:
Wordsworth was worried that the ‘trade war’ would undermine the moral
and political principles of national liberty and independence which alone
could justify England’s leadership in Europe. He feared for the worse
‘when men change[ed] swords for ledgers, and desert[ed]/ The student’s
bower for gold’.71 The nation’s leaders, he argued, were too often guilty
of ‘selfishness’. Thus in a letter to Sir George Beaumont upon the death
of Pitt, in 1806, he had written candidly, in opposition to his tory
patron’s beliefs, that Pitt’s ‘first wish (though probably unknown to
himself ) was that his Country should prosper under his administra-
tion; his next, that it should prosper’.72 Pitt’s connections with the
commercial, financial and manufacturing classes was depicted as partly
responsible for the nation’s loss of virtue in the revolutionary period.
‘The wealthiest man among us is the best’, he mourned in 1802:
No grandeur now in nature or in book

Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,
This is idolatry; and these we adore . . . 73
Wordsworth’s Republican and Real Whig beliefs in national liberty and

virtue were being stifled by ‘the vanity and parade’ of Englishmen, ‘es-
pecially in great towns and cities’, who were corrupted by the possession
of ‘undisturbed wealth’. 74 There was a large measure of truth to
Wordsworth’s assertion of general indifference to the war as a means
of national regeneration: first, the long wars with France were not total
wars and so remained distant to many men and women. As G. M.
Trevelyan wrote: ‘the war was in the newspapers, but it scarcely entered
the lives of the enjoying classes’.75 Secondly, the nation’s economy grew
well during the period under study, in spite of some problems caused
by the enforcement of the Orders in Council, between 1806 and 1812.
Merchant shipping, the manufacture of cotton and woollen textiles,
iron production, and agriculture all expanded markedly under the
security of England’s naval supremacy and ‘the productive powers
of a newly developing industrial society’.76 Grand political and moral
principles, it seems, were competing at a loss with government corruption
and the profits of war.
Cobbett came to a similar conclusion. ‘Old Corruption’, he argued,
had sold the birth-rights of the English people for its own profit and
power. He claimed that the aristocrats and greater gentry had used the
nation’s resources to fight a long war against revolutionary France and
therefore to stop the spread of Jacobin ideas. Now they were lumped
with the yearly interest repayment of forty million pounds sterling to
the fundholders, who had financed their war effort, but were unable to
honour their public debt without burdening the ‘labouring classes’ with
high excise duties and other indirect taxes on necessary goods.77 Nor
could they keep their estates without the sinecures, places and pen-
sions of the unreformed Parliament.78 The land tax was eating too much
into their rent-rolls. Thus he thought that the great landlords faced a
war of ‘extermination’ with the fundholders, who were often able to
buy out the former and to set up home in the countryside.79 Historians
have since qualified, or rejected, this ‘conspiracy’ theory. E. P. Thompson
and W. D. Rubinstein have looked intelligently at the social origins
and political significance of Cobbett’s beliefs.80 What we find is a radi-
cal critique of the existing structures of power in society that lacks a
consistent world-view. His position was closer, it seems, to the nineteenth-
century populism of Midwest America and post-colonial Australia than
to any accepted political tradition today.81 On the other hand, his
conspiracy theory – or ‘the Thing’ which devours the small independ-
ent producer – was indeed an ideology: railing now against the ‘Old
Corruption’ of the aristocratic government and its dependent ranks of
middle-class professionals, civil servants and businessmen; despising now
the new type of public servant (who subscribed to the liberal views of
Jeremy Bentham and Henry Brougham); and, finally, condemning the
new financial and commercial elites, who, as Professor Rubinstein ob-
serves, were the ‘bearers of radical modernity and modernising values
in Weber’s sense’.82 Cobbett, however, never arrived at a lasting cri-
tique of contemporary society and property-rights.83 His mental and
moral framework was simply too small. On the one hand, he never
questioned the ‘Norman Yoke’ theory of ‘lost rights’ to which he ad-
hered. And, on the other, he never moved beyond the rural values and
assumptions of his early life at Farnham to find a clear alternative to
the (conflicting?) forces of laissez-faire capitalism and aristocratic govern-

ment against which he was fighting. His position was, for the most
part, anti-modernist in nature.
Indeed, it focused his attention upon the relationship between con-
spicuous consumption and economic background. Consider, for example,
his remarks on Cheltenham, in 1821, which he described as ‘a nasty,
ill-looking place, half clown and half cockney’:
The town is one street about a mile long; but then, at some distance
from this street, there are rows of white tenements, with green bal-
conies, like those inhabited by the tax-eaters round London. Indeed,
this place appears to be the residence of an assemblage of tax-eaters.
These vermin shift about between London, Cheltenham, Bath, Bognor,
Brighton, Tunbridge, Ramsgate, Margate, Worthing, and other spots
in England, while some of them get over to France and Italy . . . 84
Cobbett’s remarks on ‘the tax-eaters’ of London, and the ‘watering places’

of Bath, Brighton and Margate, suggest Wordsworth’s image of ‘stag-
nant waters’ and waste. There is the same concern with moral corruption
from excessive wealth and luxury, and unproductive living in the sub-
urbs and holiday places. Even Lewis Mumford, in the twentieth century,
who described Bath as ‘a superior example of town planning’ knew
that the ‘baths, purgatives, and curative waters were an excellent pre-
text for another kind of life. Here all the typical baroque pleasures
were available: gambling, dress, flirtation, liaisons, dances, music, [and]
sometimes the theatre’. 85 Cobbett could never accept such private
‘pleasures’, nor the commercial and financial investments and Civil List
payments which supported many of them: Cheltenham, for example,
in his eyes, was ‘a place to which East India plunderers, West India
floggers, English tax-gorgers, together with gluttons, drunkards, and
debauchees of all descriptions, female as well as male, resort, at the
suggestion of silently laughing quacks, in the hope of getting rid of
the bodily consequences of their manifold sins and iniquities’.86 The
young Wordsworth, too, reproached the upper and middle ranks for
their frequent debauchery and vice, but, above all, for their gluttony,
drinking bouts and gambling; observing that their vulgar behaviour
was responsible for their visits to bath houses and quacks to restore
their health:
Erroneously we measure life by breath;

They do not truly live who merit death.
Though Riot for their daily feast unite
Thy turtles [Wilston?] and thy Venison, Wright,
For them though all the portals open stand

Of Health’s own temple at her Graham’s command
And the great high-priest baffling Death and Sin
T’ earth each immortal idiot to the chin,
Ask of these wretched beings worse than dead
If on the couch celestial gold can shed
The coarser blessings of a Peasant’s bed.87
These mediocre lines are drawn from the poet’s imitation of Juvenal’s
eighth Satire, which makes the point that blue blood is not enough to
guarantee virtue in a provincial ruler or an aristocrat.88 (No doubt he
was thinking of Sir James Lowther.) But their meaning is not so much
political as moral: the aristocracy and gentry are not using their wealth
in a way which is conducive to their moral and physical health, and
therefore betray their noble background and breeding as the nation’s
natural leaders.89 Both he and Cobbett were convinced that old and
new wealth alike were often morally corrupt, and attributed this decay,
in part, to their adoption of a ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle of physical indul-
gence and social idleness.
In clear contrast, however, to Wordsworth’s moderate views of
the topic, Cobbett’s hatred of ‘the infernal funding and taxing system’
was often darkened by the spectre of racism and religious bigotry; es-
pecially in his comments on the contrast between city-dwellers and
the ‘labouring classes’ of the countryside.90 Near Swindon, in Wiltshire,
for example, he observed the movement of oxen – the ‘primest of hu-
man food’ – to the Wen of London, where it was said to be devoured,
for the most part, ‘by the Jews, loan-jobbers, tax-eaters, and their base
and prostituted followers, dependents, purveyors, parasites and pimps,
literary as well as other wretches, who, if suffered to live at all ought to
partake of nothing but the offal’.91 More typical, perhaps, in style, though
not in sentiment, was his remark that a pasture-field ‘close to SWIN-
DON’ was ‘full of riches; and, as fast as skill and care and industry’
could ‘extract these riches from the land, the unseen grasp of taxation,
loan-jobbing and monopolizing’ took them away, ‘leaving the labourers
not half a belly-full, compelling the farmer to pinch them or to be
ruined himself, and making even the landowner little better than a
steward, or bailiff, for the tax-eaters, Jews and jobbers!’92 By 1823 his
obvious dislike of the Jews had become obsessive and virulent. Hence
his description of London as the ‘Jewish wen’. Clearly, his hatred of
the Jews in England was always more than ‘a mode of expression, [or]
a rhetorical style’ in Hofstadter’s sense.93 He was always consciously
offensive in his common stereotypes of the Jews. Consider, for example,
his description of Cheltenham in 1826:
The whole town . . . looked delightfully dull. I did not see more than
four or five carriages and, perhaps, twenty people on horseback; and
these seemed, by their hook-noses and round eyes, and by the long
and sooty necks of the women, to be, for the greater part, Jews and
Jewesses.94
It was the full expression of a fading political prejudice and religious

bigotry against the ‘infidel’ in a Christian country, which was often
reinforced, if not wholly supplanted, by a strong social and economic
animosity against the new wealth and social mobility of the commer-
cial and financial classes.95 This two-pronged argument allowed Cobbett
to pitch his hatreds against other foreigners and religious groups who
had adopted modern ideas and rational behaviour (in Weber’s sense):
in particular, Dutch bankers and money-lenders, Quaker corn merchants,
and last, but not least, the many Scottish intellectuals and business-
men, who, in his eyes, embodied the ‘march of intellect’ and commercial
capitalism to the detriment of the old landed order. Indeed, Cobbett’s
views of ‘Old Corruption’ were finally translated into a complete dis-
like of London as the focal point of political power, foreign policy,
mercantile banking, finance capitalism, ‘political economy’, and social
mobility in the period.96 Hence his round condemnation of London’s
late Georgian architecture and aristocratic culture for example: Her ‘new
and fine houses’ and her ‘new streets and squares’ were constructed as
the concrete ‘effects of paper money’. The speculative spirit of her financial
and commerical classes were deemed the visible signs of ‘a roguish dis-
position’ and ‘the off-spring of greediness’. Even ‘the swelling out of
London’, he believed, was ‘naturally produced by the funding system’
– which forced men and materials to follow ‘money’ into ‘crime and
misery’!97 London was ‘the great whore that sitteth upon many waters’
and Cobbett passed judgement upon her:
The dispersion of the [great] wen is the only real difficulty that I see
in settling the affairs of the nation and restoring it to a happy state.
But dispersed it must be; and if there be half a million, or more, of
people to suffer, the consolation is, that the suffering will be divided
into half a million of parts.98
Cobbett’s agrarian ideology was clearly uncompromising with the forces

of social and economic change and political stability in the period.
London had to be removed and the people returned to their rural lives
and values. Both he and Wordsworth, in their respective ways, took
the ‘world-view’, or ‘values’, of the small rural community as their starting
point for attacking the growing importance of factory towns, commer-
cial centres, and suburban sprawls in the period under study.
A rural education
Indeed, the concern of Cobbett and Wordsworth for the lower-middle

ranks of the old rural order was basic to their views of social life. Was
their preoccupation with the ‘man on the land’, as the standard of
social life and character, the result of common features in their rural
education and upbringing? At first sight this might seem unlikely. Cobbett
was largely self-taught. Moreover, he dismissed formal education as useless
‘folly’, turning gentlemen’s sons into nancy boys and ‘dunces’ – whether
at public schools like Winchester and Westminster, or at the two uni-
versities and colleges. One-half of the fellows who were called ‘educated’
at Oxford, he declared, in 1821, were ‘unfit to be clerks in a grocer’s or
[a] mercer’s shop’.99 Ironically, it has been argued with great acumen
that Cobbett’s humble background and limited education meant that
he always lived ‘outside the [prevalent] hegemonic knowledge/value
system’, in England, and so railed against ruling groups, whose ‘educa-
tional experiences and assumptions’ he did not share or understand.100
Wordsworth, however, received the ‘elite’ education of the country
grammar school and the ancient university. Recalling his family con-
nections with ‘Old Corruption’, there is a prima-facie case for thinking
that Wordsworth shared little in common with the plough-boy from
Farnham. Agreed. But we must not overlook the remarkable similarities
in their ‘educational experiences and assumptions’. Here we might
remember the conclusions of liberal historians like A. V. Dicey, G. M.
Trevelyan and Alfred Cobban, who believed that Wordsworth’s educa-
tion in Old Lakeland was very important to his development as a man,
poet and political observer. Dicey, for example, was adamant that
Wordsworth’s upbringing, in the remote north, put him outside the
traditional party politics for much of his adult life. He traced this
position of freedom and independence to the poet’s strong regard for
the ranks of small freeholders, called statesmen, in the Lake District,
whose lives, characters and traditions were a model for the nation in
its war-time distress.101 (Dicey’s book appeared in 1917.) Likewise, Alfred
Cobban was convinced that Wordsworth’s highly unorthodox ideas on
nationalism were the product of his early contacts with the same group
of smallholders, who were supposed to be strongly attached to their
hereditary farms.102 Finally, G. M. Trevelyan argued that Wordsworth’s
school life in the countryside was so old-fashioned that ‘the poet in
the child survived into the man’.103 Unfortunately, neither Dicey, Cobban
nor Trevelyan detailed his idea to the satisfaction of later historians
and critics. What follows is Golden Age comparison of Wordsworth
and Cobbett which gives support to each of them, but, above all,
reveals the social origins of Wordsworth’s populist views of ‘Man,
Nature, and Society’.
Both writers, it seems, shared a striking degree of freedom and ir-

regularity in their rural educations and upbringings. Wordsworth’s studies
were neither so dignified nor so rigid as the foregoing account might
suggest. They were quite common, old-fashioned and even desultory
for the first nine years of his life, consisting of some family lessons
from his mother and father; attendance at Cockermouth’s rather poor
and inefficient grammar school under the Reverend Joseph Gillbanks,
and old Ann Birkett’s ‘Dame School’, at Penrith, where moral and reli-
gious instruction, ‘letters’, and rural customs were the lot of all students
– including Mary Hutchinson, the poet’s future wife. 104 When at
Hawkshead Grammar School his study of mathematics and Latin was
much advanced by sound teaching.105 On the other hand, the school’s
methods were quite ‘liberal’ for the time (1779–87) and included much
free reading of English literature, history and biography. Even at Cam-
bridge University, the young undergraduate spent much of his time
reading for personal pleasure and profit and ignoring his guardians’
pleas that he compete for academic honours and awards; sometimes he
missed exams altogether (see Chapter 5 below). Moreover, as G. M.
Trevelyan argued long ago, Wordsworth’s actual school life at Hawkshead
was spent ‘amid the healthy companionship of north-country yeomen’s
sons’.106 The social and economic equality of Old Lakeland, which was
discussed in section one, was epitomised in the old system of endowed
grammar schools as much as the statesmen system of farming itself.
No major distinctions were made between the boys in the classroom,
or between them and their community. Most importantly, perhaps, the
young poet was ‘boarded-out’ at Hawkshead for almost a decade. He
stayed with old Ann Tyson, a small-grocer and haberdasher, and her
husband Hugh, a master-joiner. In 1783 they moved to Colthouse, a
hamlet, about a half-mile east of the town proper. At Hawkshead and
Colthouse, Wordsworth’s knowledge of ‘old England’ in Cobbett’s sense
was ingrained for life. When at ‘home’, for so it was to the orphaned
boy, he played country games and sports, read Old English tales and
ballads, and listened to Ann Tyson’s stories and anecdotes. (Some of
Wordsworth’s best poems were based upon such ‘incidents and situa-
tions from common life’. Thus she told him the tale of the shepherd
and his son, which was used in Book Eight of The Prelude; and the
story of ‘Benoni, or the child of sorrow’, in ‘Peter Bell’ (1819).) In short,
she was a wealth of local history and folklore, and a model of dom-
estic economy and religious virtue.107 Her ledger book, moreover, confirms
A. V. Dicey’s view that Wordsworth ‘knew what it was to have an empty
purse as well as ever did Cobbett or Burns’.108 Wordsworth, at least,
did not exaggerate the frugal living of his boyhood and youth – spend-
ing most of the time in ‘pennyless poverty’ and pinched by the hunger
of ‘Sabine fare’, which included Ann Tyson’s home-made bread, cakes
and pasties.109 Furthermore, she placed few restrictions upon her young
guest; even keeping his old clothes for his many rambles among the
hills and dales – getting the kind of ‘sand-hill’ education and rural
experience which one finds in Cobbett’s boyhood. Moreover, as Trevelyan
observed, the ‘diversions’ of the grammar school boys at Hawkshead
were the same as those of the other children of the town and parish,
and ranged from Old Lakeland traditions of boating, skating, fishing
and riding, on the one hand, to cliff-climbing, egg-stealing and nut-
ting, on the other.110 Wordsworth, moreover, was a very talkative and
curious child. He often asked questions and got to know local figures
of all ranks and degrees. For example, he sometimes spoke with the
old men who sat around the church on summer evenings and some-
times invited him to share their seat.111 According to T. W. Thompson,
the local historian, the poet probably knew well the old school teacher,
John Harrison, who treated all men the same whatever their rank or
station in life – thereby fitting Wordsworth’s later ideal of Old Lakeland
life and equality already discussed in section one. Also present was a
Hawkshead ironmonger and writer of local verse, named Thomas
Cowperthwaite. It is interesting to add, in this regard, that the artisans
in Hawkshead had dealings with those in Kendal and were largely sturdy
individualists:
Hawkshead and Kendal are bound up together

Firstly by Wool and Lastly by Leather.
Both Live by their Trade in fair or foul Weather,
And pay scanty heed to Mighty Folks Blether.112
The ‘Mighty Folks’ were possibly the leading whig and tory statesmen
of the day, ‘for whose utterances a certain contempt may have been
felt in both Hawkshead and Kendal’.113 And if not, the reference to
‘blether’, or empty talk, in connection with the ruling classes of the
Lake District, and elsewhere, is a clue to the independent character
and attitude of the rural artisans and statesmen – who made Hawkshead
and Kendal important commercial and manufacturing towns in the second
half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, it is crucial to our study of
Wordsworth’s rural education and upbringing to recall the character of
the old market town in which he lived for almost ten years. John Hodgson,
a shoemaker, was also ‘one of the old men who sat on Church-end on
summer evenings’. Between March 1744 and January 1785, he was Parish
Clerk of Hawkshead and kept a very good, even genealogical, register
at the town.
His registrations show that during his term of office charcoal-burning,

which had brought Irishmen to the district, was on the decline, and
slate-quarrying on the increase; that there was still a good many

weavers in the parish, and a fair number of tanners and curriers;
that shoe-making and hat-making were important minor industries;
that with the exception of the landlord of the Red Lion all the inn-
keepers followed trades as well; and that several of the shop-keepers
had second strings to their bows, one of the grocers being a farrier
as well, and one of the mercers a glazier, whilst the only bookseller
was also a hatter.114
We have already studied the egalitarian ideas and independent character

of tradesmen and professionals in the area.115 The local economy was
still not clearly defined into distinct trades and services; men and women
were not yet reduced to ‘wage slavery’, the ‘shopkeeper’ mentality of
early Victorian times, nor the aggressive individualism of the early In-
dustrial Revolution. People moved easily in the company of different
ranks without fear or favour. Almost everything was run along pre-
industrial lines. Husbands and wives were often partners in a family
business or two, which might employ a few friends and relations as
well. (Ann Tyson, for example, and her husband, Hugh, employed a
couple of servants and journeymen to help them run the family shop,
perform common errands, and complete the woodwork.) Wordsworth,
it seems, was witness to a slowly vanishing way of life in Furness, which
encouraged both self-reliance and strong communal ties. Nor was this
all. Wordsworth made friends with Scotch pedlars and ‘packmen’ like
Thomas Wishert and David Moore, who extended his knowledge of
‘human nature’ by their memories and stories about the people of the
Perthshire Hills and elsewhere on the Border.116 In his own walks, and
wanderings, whether alone or with the sons of neighbouring farmers
and labourers, he observed the different ranks of country people, and
valued their pursuits, speech and manners. (He later claimed, for in-
stance, that his early liking for, and understanding of, Robert Burns’s
dialect poems was partly the result of his own Cumberland burr and
wide knowledge of language amongst the lower ranks of society.117) In
particular, he imbibed the local beliefs about the ‘statesmen’, whose
supposed attachment to the land, domestic competence, patriotism and
personal independence have caused so much controversy among re-
gional and local historians. Indeed, it seems that he drew his standard of
life from the lower-middle ranks of Old Lakeland and not primarily from
literary and artistic traditions and travel guides as many critics maintain.
In this regard he was like William Cobbett, the son of a largely self-
taught inn-keeper, surveyor and small landholder. Cobbett’s childhood
in the south was basically that of a plough-boy and farm labourer. He
had a ‘faint recollection of going to school to an old woman’ who
nevertheless failed to teach him his ‘letters’. His father, however, taught
him to read and write, including some short-hand, and gave him ‘a
pretty tolerable knowledge of arithmetic’.118 The young Cobbett, moreover,
had to work very hard to earn his keep:
I do not remember the time when I did not earn my living. My first
occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip seed, and
the rooks from the peas. When I first trudged a-field, with my wooden
bottle and my satchel swung over my shoulders, I was hardly able
to climb the gates and stiles; and, at the close of the day, to reach
home was a task of infinite difficulty. My next employment was
weeding wheat, and leading a single horse at harrowing barley. Hoeing
peas followed, and hence I arrived at the honour of joining the reapers
in harvest, driving the team and holding [the] plough.119
This rural upbringing, however, was not without its advantages: he enjoyed
many adventures and traditional sports – especially cricket, bird-nesting
and hare-hunting. Readers of Wordsworth’s poetry, of course, will re-
call his classic descriptions of the latter two sports in Old Lakeland; for
his part, Cobbett remembered ‘many and many a day’ when he ‘left
the rooks to dig up the wheat and the peas’ while he ‘followed the
hounds’ and did not heed the threats of punishment from his
father (whom he admired), nor forgot the feelings of physical freedom
and pleasure it produced.120 Sometimes his rambles took him far into
the heaths, sand-hills and woods of the county. It was there that he
received his best education: his favourite pastime was rolling down a
sand-hill!
This was the spot where I was receiving my education; and this was
the sort of education; . . . It is impossible to say how much I owe to
that sand-hill; and I went [there in 1821] to return it my thanks for
the ability which it probably gave me to be one of the greatest
terrors, to one of the greatest and most powerful bodies of knaves
and fools [bred in the public schools and universities], that were
ever permitted to afflict this or any other country [ – to wit: the
British Parliament].121
Whether or not rural life and sports, in Farnham, were primarily re-
sponsible for Cobbett’s down-to-earth character and independent habits
is hard to say, but he certainly thought so. Wordsworth was always
more religious and philosophical about the country-boy’s relationship
with Nature but even he remarked firmly, in a letter to a school’s in-
spector in 1845, that the school authorities should not use economic
arguments as reasons for farmers sending their children to school:
How much of what is precious comes into our minds, in all ranks of
society, not as Knowledge entering formally in the shape of Knowl-
edge, but as infused thro’ the constitution of things and by the grace
of God. There is no condition of life, however unpromising, that
does not daily exhibit something of this truth. I do not relish the
words of one of the Reporters . . . in which he would reconcile the
Parents to the expence of having their Children educated in school
by remarking that the wear and tear of clothes will be less; and an
equivalent thus saved in shoe-leather. – Excuse this disagreement in
opinion, as coming from one who spent half of his boyhood in running
wild among the Mountains.122
Cobbett’s ‘condition of life’ was, perhaps, a case in point. It was fairly

‘unpromising’, but by stroke of fate, or quirk of character, if not the
offices of a sand-hill in Farnham!, he chose to see the world and never
returned to the same ‘Old England’ of ‘roast beef and plum pudding’.123
His remarkable career from the fields of Farnham to a seat in Parlia-
ment cannot be told here. But the observation must be made that he
avoided most contacts with the outside world until he was twenty or
so years of age. Thus his social isolation was acute. His trips were largely
confined to places like Wey-hill fair, or holidays with his grandmother,
who was a model of cottage economy and Old English virtues: she
lived alone in a ‘little thatched cottage, with a garden before the door . . .
Her fire was made of turf, cut from the neighbouring heath, and her
evening light was a rush dipped in grease’.124 When he did escape the
confines of Farnham’s ‘labouring classes’ for any length of time it was
usually attended with similar work and relationships. Consider, for in-
stance, his sojourn at Steeple Langford, a small village in Wiltshire,
near Salisbury.125 In fact, G. D. H. Cole even accounted for Cobbett’s
great change from supporter of aristocratic government to radical ac-
tivist in the early nineteenth century by direct reference to his early
life in the country and later exile in Canada, France and the USA. He
concluded that ‘almost from a boy, he had seen little of England’, and
what he saw was not necessarily true of the whole.126 His model of the
typical Englishman was a compound of small landowner, tenant-farmer,
rural artisan, inn-keeper and cottage labourer. The common sense, hard
work, domestic economy and independent spirit of these groups in Surrey
were the elements of his Golden Age ideal of the ‘Free-born English-
man’. Moreover, it has been argued with some truth that Cobbett was
the last representative of a long tradition of ‘peasant radicalism’ in the
south-eastern counties, which had revealed itself with violence over
several centuries. Furthermore, this sort of rural ‘radicalism . . . was seldom
or [n]ever concerned with philosophical or political theories’. On the
contrary, it ‘was wholly concerned with the ancient rights and the bellies
of the poor’.127 His compound, of course, was highly misleading as

a guide to the different ranks of the rural south. For example, the
labourers and the domestic servants were not as thrifty as the farmers.
Nor did they often have any incentive to thrift. One might recall the
life of ‘Simon Lee’ (1798) who was ‘A running huntsman merry’.
Although the poem is set in ‘the sweet shire of Cardigan’, in Wales,
the man in question ‘had been huntsman to the Squires of Alfoxden’
in Somersetshire. ‘The old man’s cottage stood upon the common, a
little way from the entrance to Alfoxden Park’.
In those proud days, he little cared

For husbandry or tillage;
To blither tasks did Simon rouse
The sleepers of the village.
Thirty-five years later, however, the huntsman is without service, he

must live, with his wife, in ‘liveried poverty’ upon the ‘village Com-
mon’. Even though he is not a burden upon the parish, he is no use to
himself or his wife.
Beside their moss-grown hut of clay,

Not twenty paces from the door,
A scrap of land they have, but they
Are poorest of the poor.
This scrap of land he from the heath
Enclosed when he was stronger;
But what to them avails the land
Which he can till no longer?128
Nevertheless, the hope of taking a small farm was a strong incentive

to some village labourers to save their money and goods in the years
before widespread enclosure reduced them to a rural proletariat.129 In
this regard, the social and economic success of Cobbett’s father, George,
and his own genial farm life in Surrey were both exceptional and
exemplary of the possibilities for the labourers and their families in
‘old England’. (His grandfather, too, it should be added, was a day
labourer, and a road wagoner, ‘for one farmer from the day of his marriage
to that of his death, upwards of forty years’.130 Yet we have already
seen how well he provided for his widow.) Indeed his standard of the
good life and English character gradually changed over the years towards
the lowest common denominator of rural society – namely, the village
labourer. He showed a blatant regard for bread, beer, bacon, cheese
and fire-wood, which allowed a man a measure of self-respect, inde-
pendence, and national pride: in ‘spite of all refinements of sickly minds’,
he argued in Cottage Economy (1822), ‘it is abundant living amongst the

people at large, which is the great test of good government, and the
surest basis of national greatness and security’.131 Wordsworth was also
aware of the need for a decent standard of living to promote social
peace and happiness, but he was never a simple ‘patriot of the belly’.132
His measure of the good life was the ‘statesman’ of Cumberland,
Westmorland and Furness, treading ‘the mountains which his Fathers
trod’. Cobbett wanted to lead the rural labourers of the early nine-
teenth-century from the brink of ‘wage slavery’ and ‘class war’ to the
Golden Age of his youth.133 Wordsworth wanted to keep alive the old
rural values and relationships of the Lake District as a clear example to
the new class society of a ‘true Community’. He thus dismissed ‘all
Arcadian dreams’ –
All golden fancies of the golden Age,

The bright array of shadowy thoughts from times
That were before all time, or are to be
Ere time expire, the pageantry that stirs
And will be stirring when our eyes are fixed
On lovely objects and we wish to part
With all remembrance of a jarring world [–]
and looked instead to the ‘simple produce of the common day’.134 But
his social ideal was always based upon his happy memories of Ann
Tyson’s cottage and the small independent producers of Hawkshead in
Furness. Like Cobbett, he believed that Old England was the social and
economic source of his life’s best work.
Education is not Tuition
Before proceeding further with a comparison of the writers’ social, econ-

omic, and political views, it is important to ask whether or not the
similarities in their upbringing were reflected in their ideas on educa-
tion in general, and the ‘labouring classes’, in particular. The short
answer to this question is ‘Yes’. They both shared a strong liking for
the traditional education of the lower-middle ranks of society. More-
over, they often equated education with ‘life-experience’ rather than
with formal lessons. Wordsworth, at least, tried to distinguish between
education and school instruction. The former was the more valuable
social and moral development that came to children from experience
of life; the latter was the necessary instruction – or ‘tuition’ – in read-
ing, writing, arithmetic and cottage industry which fitted the average
boy or girl for life in the country.135 What Wordsworth called ‘the edu-
cation of circumstances’ fitted parents in the pre-industrial world to be
‘the most important tutors of their children, without appearing, or

positively meaning, to be so’.136 The very nature of farm life and do-
mestic industry, in Old Lakeland, was founded upon family labour and
the practical division of tasks according to age, strength and experi-
ence. Hence the parents were always closely connected with their
children’s moral, emotional and manual instruction. No clear demarca-
tion existed, in the Border counties, between formal schooling and
traditional training. Women in the ‘labouring Classes’, for example,
often taught their children to read on Sunday afternoons and so con-
tributed greatly to their wider education.137 Wordsworth was conscious
of this close web of rural relationships and wanted to preserve it. Although
he had been involved, for several years, with Andrew Bell’s ‘monitorial
system’ of teaching, whereby older students took responsibility for teaching
younger ones, and thus reduced time and expense to the local authori-
ties, he never felt comfortable with the content and aims of ‘modern’
schools.138 He objected, above all, to the views of ‘liberal’ reformers of
education, like Henry Brougham, who thought ‘that sharpening of in-
tellect and attainment of knowledge are things good in themselves,
without reference to the [social and economic] circumstances under
which the intellect is sharpened or to the quality of the knowledge
acquired’.139 This social and economic context reconciles his several
statements over the years with regards to the value of education in the
Lake District. Wordsworth, for instance, claimed that the levels of school
attainment should be related either to the parents’ ‘possession of cer-
tain property’ or the parents’ sacrifices towards their children’s instruction.
Such a view was wholly compatible with his tory conservatism, in the
period 1814–50. It would help to maintain the status quo among the
ranks of the old landed order and to promote ‘the prosperity and secu-
rity of the state’.140 Thus, for example, the conservative poet believed
that it was not good for an infant to ‘learn much which its parents do
not know’ – lest it suffer from intellectual pride and disobedience.141 He
was convinced that the ‘education of man, and above all of a Chris-
tian’ was ‘the education of duty’ but even this social virtue was ‘most
forcibly taught by the business and concerns of life’ – books playing
only a small part.142 This view, however, was not merely the result of
his long-term conversion to the ideology of Church–State hegemony
during the war against France. It was the natural growth of his Golden
Age ideal of a vanishing way of life in Old Lakeland, in which the
‘labouring Classes’ were regarded as dignified and intelligent beings who
did not need the added stimulus of formal knowledge to gratify their
lives or to improve their given lot. His view was made clear in the
following letter to Francis Wrangham:
The labouring man in agriculture generally carries on his work either

in solitude, or with his own Family, persons whose minds he is
thoroughly acquainted with, and with whom he is under no temp-
tation to enter into discussions, or to compare opinions. He goes
home from the field, or the Barn, and within and about his own
house, he finds a hundred little jobs which furnish him with a change
of employment, which is grateful and profitable; then comes supper,
and to bed.143
The same held true for many of the old yeomen-farmers and their families.
At least, the poet’s prose description of the labourer’s weekday employ-
ments was almost identical to his poetic depiction of the statesman’s
way of life. Consider, for instance, the following passage from ‘Michael’
(1800):
. . . When day was gone,

And from their occupations out of doors
The Son and Father were come home, even then,
Their labour did not cease; unless when all
Turned to the cleanly supper-board, and there,
Each with a mess of pottage and skimmed milk,
Sat round the basket piled with oaten cakes,
And their plain home-made cheese. Yet when the meal
Was ended, Luke (for so the Son was named)
And his old Father both betook themselves
To such convenient work as might employ
Their hands by the fire-side; perhaps to card
Wool for the Housewife’s spindle, or repair
Some injury done to sickle, flail, or scythe,
Or other implement of house or field.
Down from the ceiling, by the chimney’s edge,

That in our ancient uncouth country style
With huge and black projection overbrowed
Large space beneath, as duly as the light
Of day grew dim the Housewife hung a lamp;
An aged utensil, which had performed
Service beyond all others of its kind.
Early at evening did it burn – and late,
Surviving comrade of uncounted hours,
Which, going by from year to year, had found,
And left the couple neither gay perhaps
Nor cheerful, yet with objects and with hopes,
Living a life of eager industry.144
The same story was true for Cumberland and Furness. Thus John Housman
observed that the villagers of Cumberland spent ‘their winter evenings
generally in small parties over homely fires’, the ‘men (except manu-
facturers and some mechanics) . . . [did] nothing after night . . . [set-in];
but women of every description, from eight years old and upwards, . . .
[were] employed till bed-time (about ten o’clock) in spinning, knitting,
sewing, & c.’.145 Taken together, these passages suggest that formal edu-
cation was of little immediate use to the ‘labouring Classes’ of the
hinterland, with their modest ambitions and seasonal routines. Farmers,
labourers and rural artisans, of course, were often given a compara-
tively good education in Old Lakeland at the village and town level,
but they invariably learnt their trades, handicrafts and farming meth-
ods in the workshop, the kitchen and the field. 146 According to
Wordsworth, the said classes derived only incidental benefit from the
‘half-penny Ballads’, and abundant chapbooks and almanacs sold in
the Border counties by poor pedlars.147 One might well agree, on this
score, with E. P. Thompson that ‘where oral tradition . . . [was] supple-
mented by growing literacy, the most widely circulated printed products
([like] chapbooks, alamanacs, broadsides, “last dying speeches” and
anecdotal accounts of crime) tend[ed] to be subdued to the expecta-
tions of the oral culture rather than challenging it with alternatives’.
At least, ‘in those regions [of Britain] where dialect’ was strongest –
such as Cumbria? – ‘basic elementary education’ coexisted, ‘through-
out the nineteenth century, with the language – and perhaps the sensibility
– of what . . . [was] then becoming “the old culture”’.148 Wordsworth
certainly wanted to preserve the best in the vanishing culture and was
convinced that domestic education was part of the answer wherein
knowledge was still mostly informal and directly relevant to the labourer’s
given lot in life. In this respect, he was like William Cobbett, who
favoured country life and traditional domestic skills above all others.
This was owing, in part, to the weaker role of school life, in the rural
south, amongst both the day labourers and the small landholders, but
also a direct result of his self-instruction.149 He was adamant, for in-
stance, that normal parents could teach their children at home the
basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic with more success and
less expense than the local schools. This belief followed, in part, from
his Rousseauistic idea that education ought to be a ‘pleasant pursuit’
and not be undertaken until the child was ‘capable of reasoning’.150 It
was also confirmed by his own success in teaching the seven Cobbett
children. In consequence, parents were depicted as the best, even natu-
ral, tutors of their children.151 Cobbett, of course, knew well that many
labourers, perhaps most, were unwilling or unable to read for personal
pleasure or profit after a long day’s work in the field, let alone for their
children’s further benefit, and yet such men and women, in his eyes,
were well and truly educated. Indeed, he wrote vehemently against moral
and evangelical reformers like Samuel Whitbread and William Wilberforce
who were wholly convinced that religious education and book learning
would solve the contemporary problems of vice, immorality and ignor-
ance. Cobbett believed that neither Church schools nor religious tracts
were relevant to the everyday lives and traditional character of the
lower ranks. Widespread poverty and desperation amongst the ‘labour-
ing classes’ were caused, in his view, by heavy taxation, poor wages
and the mismanagement of the nation’s affairs during the long French
wars.152
It is the lot of man, [he wrote,] and most wisely has it so been
ordained, that he shall live by the sweat of his brow. In one way or
another every man must labour, or he must suffer for the failure in
health or in estate. Some are to labour with the mind, others with
the limbs; and, to suppose what is, by Mr.Whitbread, called educa-
tion, necessary to those who labour with their limbs, is, in my opinion,
as absurd as it would be, to suppose that the being able to mow and
to reap are necessary to a minister of state or an astronomer. The
word ignorance is as much abused by some persons as the word learning;
but, those who regard the latter as consisting solely in the acquire-
ment of a knowledge of the meaning of words in various languages,
which knowledge is to be derived only from books, will naturally
regard the former as consisting solely of a want of the capacity to
derive any knowledge at all from books. If the farmer understands
well how to conduct the business of his farm, and if, from observa-
tion of the seasons and the soil, he knows how to draw from the
latter as much profit as therefrom can be drawn; if the labourer be
expert at ploughing, sowing, reaping, mowing, making of ricks and
of fences, loading the waggon, threshing and winnowing the corn,
and bestowing upon the cattle the various necessary cares: if this be
the case, though neither of them can write or read, I call neither an
ignorant man. The education of these men is a finished one, though
neither may ever have looked into a book; and, I believe, Mr.Whitbread
would be greatly puzzled to suggest even the most trifling probable
benefit that either could derive from an acquaintance with the use
of letters.153
The reader will forgive the length of this quotation for the consider-
able light it sheds on Cobbett’s practical approach to the questions of
learning and education in ‘old England’. His basic idea that the rural
labourers and farmers have no necessary use for the ‘learning’ of polite
literature and foreign languages and other marks of the ‘educated’ classes
is populist rather than ‘radical’, or ‘liberal’, in the modern sense: at
least, it pre-empts Silas’s position in Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Death

of the Hired Man’ (1914). Silas was a farm hand who could not understand
why Harold Wilson ‘a likely lad’ – should be so ‘daft /On education’.
Although Wilson had done casual work, ‘haying four years since’, he
was now ‘finished school, and teaching in his college’. Clearly his ‘edu-
cational experiences and assumptions’, in Rubinstein’s sense, were quite
different to those of Silas the labourer. Indeed, the latter could not
fathom why a boy learnt ‘Latin like the violin /Because he liked it –
that an argument!’ Above all, he wanted to teach Wilson ‘how to build
a load of hay’ because he hated ‘to see a boy the fool of books’.154 In
this regard, Silas still lived ‘outside the [prevalent] hegemonic knowl-
edge/ value system’ of twentieth-century New England and, one gathers,
held different views to Wilson over what constituted real work, knowl-
edge and leisure in everyday life. Cobbett himself was a keen reader
and prodigious writer of prose but he too saw clearly that knowledge
was neither wholly nor essentially a concern of books and formal in-
struction. A man’s character and independence were defined by his
material ability to make his way in the world by hard work and the
acquisition of the ideas and methods of his trade or profession – which
may or may not be gotten from books. The ‘basis of good to the labourer’
consisted in ‘steady and skilful labour’. Therefore the best books, in
Cobbett’s eyes, were those like his own Cottage Economy (1822) which
assisted the labourer ‘in the pursuit of this labour, and in turning it to
the best account’.155 Cobbett’s country-books, of course, had a clear
political bias, but they were also highly practical and popular accounts
of cottage economy, gardening and husbandry, which aimed to make
the labouring classes ‘free’ of the ‘taxing-funding system’ which, he
thought, was degrading them. In short, he believed that the self-taught
man or woman was both intelligent and self-sufficient. Thus he con-
demned the calls of the middle classes for a system of state education
as no less than a form of religious and political oppression. He also
argued, in later years, that the need for state education was a tacit
admission by the nation’s ‘corrupt’ ruling classes that they could no
longer control the ‘labouring classes’ who were seeking Parliamentary
and economic reforms for their own good.156 By 1814, Wordsworth, on
the other hand, thought that a system of state schools was necessary
for the Old Regime’s survival. It would teach the Church of England’s
creed and drill the students in the catechism, but even he believed
that religious instruction was ‘too often given with reference less to
the affections, to the imagination, and to the practical duties, than to
subtle distinctions in points of doctrine, and to facts in scripture his-
tory, of which a knowledge may be brought out by a catechetical
process’.157 He shared too Cobbett’s dislike of the ‘comfort system’ of
religion and piety, which often fell into religious fanaticism and re-
nunciation of the ills of this world.158 (Cobbett even turned the cant of
‘happy poverty’, used by the evangelical reformers and methodist preachers,
into a devastating term of moral and economic abuse.159) Wordsworth
was more generous in his feelings towards the evangelical leader, William
Wilberforce, who was closely connected with his maternal uncle, the
Reverend William Cookson. Moreover, he was keen to promote public
devotion and building works, at the local level, but his conservative
views of religion in English life were staunchly High Church, never
‘evangelical’, and, ironically, tempered by his own early experience of
the statesmen-farmers as models of the ‘Free-born Englishmen’: for
example, he told the Reverend Francis Wrangham that the old system
of endowed grammar schools in the Lake District, which had once been
a seed-bed for the nation’s clergymen, did not make the statesmen and
their children ‘habitually religious in the common sense of the word,
much less godly’. It encouraged them to behave with ‘independence
and self-respect’.160 Nor was he happy about the spate of religious and
moral tracts produced by Hannah More and other evangelicals; like
Cobbett, he belittled their sentiments and banal style, and much pre-
ferred old English ballads, stories and fables like ‘Jack the Giant Killer’,
‘Robin Hood’, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe; and, of course, the Bible
itself.161 Cobbett used such works to instruct his own children in the
rudiments of reading and writing, but was not convinced that the Bible
itself was better read by labourers than heard by the congregation at
church. Wordsworth, on the other hand, had been raised in the Quaker
and Baptist strongholds of the Lake District where Bible reading was
celebrated as the best way to free a man’s soul.162 In consequence, he
was more ready to admit religious pamphlets and books into the homes
of the labouring classes; but he was unable to find ‘much disposition
to read’ among them, nor ‘much occasion for it’.163 Nonetheless, he
was sure that religion and piety were more likely to bear fruit if the
school teacher took ‘the most comprehensive view of the human mind’
and not a narrow concern for doctrinal accuracy and salvation. It was
a vague gesture towards the cult of the ‘whole man’ which he had
always evinced in his writings on the statesmen of the hills and dales.
Likewise, Cobbett’s country books, leading articles, English Grammars,
lay sermons, and moral guides such as Advice to Young Men (1829),
strongly suggest that his conception of the ‘practical lesson’, whether
technical or religious, was also aimed at the whole man and not just
his stomach. He and Wordsworth, it seems, turned to the small inde-
pendent producers and day labourers for a standard of education that
was good enough for the rural majority of Old England. It was a legacy
of pre-industrial times that attained a great vogue among some Victo-
rian artists and thinkers like William Morris and John Ruskin. Nevertheless,
it was largely ignored by the urban majority in the decades before the
passing of the Education Act; and especially by the civil servants of the
School Board, who wanted a docile if semi-literate and rational workforce
for the new industrial economy rather than a self-sufficient way of life.164
It might be objected here that Wordsworth held the old system of
endowed grammar schools in high regard, and therefore affirmed the
need for formal education to a much greater extent than Cobbett.165
Agreed. But a closer inspection of his views of both labour and educa-
tion reveals more clearly his ‘populist’ assumptions about the common
man and his needs. He expanded upon this point in a long letter to
the Reverend Francis Wrangham, in 1808, who wanted to establish lending
libraries and Sunday Schools in the north of England:
The influence of our schools in this neigbourhood can never be under-

stood if . . . their connection with the state of landed property be
overlooked. . . . The effect of their schooling is chiefly seen in the
activity with which the young Persons emigrate, and the success
attending it; and at home, by a general orderliness and gravity, with
habits of independence and self-respect; nothing obsequious or fawning
is ever to be seen amongst them.166
The poet’s views of education were clearly rooted in his Golden Age
ideal of the statesmen system of farming. Above all, he believed that
the high levels of literacy in the Lake District were the result of high
expectations and wide diffusion of ‘landed property’ amongst the sev-
eral classes of yeomen. Almost ‘every one’, in the district, ‘can read’,
he told the Reverend Mr Wrangham, ‘but not because we have free or
endowed schools, but because our land is far more than elsewhere tilled
by Men who are the Owners of it; and as the population is not over-
crowded and the vices which are quickened and cherished in a crowded
population do not therefore prevail, Parents have more ability and
inclination to send their Children to School; much more than in Manu-
facturing districts, and also, though in a less degree, more than in
Agricultural ones, where the Tillers are not [also] proprietors’.167 Whilst
his contemporaries were impressed with the widespread provision of
formal education in almost every town and village of the area, none –
to my knowledge – gave such weight to the comparatively high expec-
tations and means of the small landholders themselves.168 Perhaps the
poet’s upbringing amongst the farming classes at Hawkshead, in Furness,
and Penrith, in Cumberland, exposed him to the well-to-do ‘statesmen’,
whom he always claimed were ‘men of respectable education’.169 His
statements on education, moreover, emphasise the ‘feedback’ of old-
fashioned schooling in the district: the parents’ self-respect and inde-
pendence were confirmed by the close connection of landed property
and the ability to pay for a sound education in the countryside. Their
sons – and daughters – in turn were ‘endowed’, so to speak, with the

character and technical skills to make their way in life, but were not
forced to adopt a wholly new or different attitude to the world. In this
regard we might recall that Cobbett’s main objection to the public schools
of southern England was based upon their peculiar speech, dress and
modes of thought. Consider the following passage:
It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his

life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any
real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered friv-
olous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to
words instead of things; to sound instead of sense . . . Is it not fortu-
nate if half a life restore the energies of mind thus enfeebled at the
outset? Must it not be a sort of miracle, if a bold thought, an orig-
inal idea, ever come from such a mind? . . . However, the general
effect is, to accustom the mind, by slow degrees, to those trammels,
in which, at last, it is not only content to remain, but for which it
acquires a taste, at the same time, that it acquires a conceit, that
superiority consists chiefly in the having been at a college.170
We are here brought back, full circle, to the question of Wordsworth’s

own rural education and upbringing which left him, for many years,
largely outside the ‘Establishment’. Wordsworth’s life at Hawkshead
Grammar School encouraged his sympathy for the common man and
kept his mind open to ‘the infinite variety of natural appearances’,
which he observed, during childhood and youth, amongst the several
hills and dales.171 Indeed, his own perception of the landscape and
rural life confirmed his mystical belief that modern man too readily
mistook words for things. Both he and Cobbett had too much power
of precise observation to be guilty of confusing the real world of nature
with language and social fictions. Above all, the poet made explicit
what was implicit in the journalist’s critique of the public school and
university set, namely, that they, and their supporters, were not repre-
sentative of human nature and could not, by any objective mind, be
used as the best, or only, standard of social life and moral behaviour.
Thus, in a letter to John Wilson, he believed that the Lyrical Ballads
would not readily appeal to readers in the middle and upper classes of
society because they had a very narrow view of human nature:
People in our rank in life are perpetually falling into one sad mis-
take, namely, that of supposing that human nature and the persons
they associate with are one and the same thing. Whom do we gen-
erally associate with? Gentlemen, persons of fortune, professional
men, ladies[;] persons who can afford to buy or can easily procure
books of half a guinea price, hot-pressed, and printed upon superfine

paper. These persons are, it is true, a part of human nature, but we
err lamentably if we suppose them to be fair representatives of the
vast mass of human existence. And yet few ever consider books but
with reference to their power of pleasing these persons and men of
a higher rank[:] few descend lower among cottages and fields and
among children.172
Here is revealed the main reason for Wordsworth’s lifelong aversion to

modern education: the ‘vast mass of human existence’, in the old agrarian
order, were not gentlemen or their families, but rather the small inde-
pendent producers and cottage labourers, whose whole way of life was
bound up with the natural world. Statistically speaking, his position
could not be gainsaid during his lifetime. In 1831, for instance, the
‘man of the crowded countryside was still the typical Englishman’. The
Census returns for that year ‘showed that 961,100 families were em-
ployed in agriculture, or 28 per cent. of all the families in Great Britain’.
Indeed, ‘some 50 per cent. of the families of Great Britain lived under
conditions which may properly be classed as rural’.173 Even twenty years
later, only ‘one Englishman out of every five lived in a large town’.
About 16 per cent of the population was then found in towns and
cities of 5000 or more inhabitants, but most of them still lived in London.
Liverpool and Birmingham, on the other hand, ‘had joined Norwich
and Bristol among the towns of over 25,000’ whilst ‘Manchester was
rapidly growing towards this kind of size’.174 Nevertheless, the demo-
graphic ‘facts’ favoured Golden Age writers such as Wordsworth and
Cobbett as much as rationalists, and ‘march of intellect’ critics like
Henry Brougham and Thomas Macaulay. Indeed, Wordsworth, like
Cobbett, believed that ‘most men must end their temporal course pretty
much as they began it’, but they were largely compensated for it by
the blessings of rural life and work.175 Both small farmers and labour-
ers, it seems, were able to find religious and imaginative meaning in
the natural world. Their emotional and intellectual needs were more
easily, or ‘naturally’, satisfied by the basic connection of social and
economic life around the family unit of production. Like Cobbett, he
used the ‘labouring Classes’ as a broad test of human nature, but found
the best qualities of social life and moral relations in the ‘statesmen’ of
the North. In so far as the ‘free’ system of schooling, in the Border
counties, was responsible for reinforcing the statesmen’s traditional lifestyle
and independence it recommended itself to the poet as a major social
and economic achievement in the post-feudal period; but even he sensed
that it could not be readily applied to the various factory towns, com-
mercial centres and entrepots of modern England:
Heaven and Hell[, he wrote,] are scarcely more different from each
other than Sheffield and Manchester, etc. differ from the plains and
Vallies of Surrey, Essex, Cumberland, or Westmorland. We have mighty
Cities and Towns of all sizes, with Villages and Cottages scattered
everywhere. We are Mariners, Miners, Manufacturers in tens of thou-
sands: Traders, Husbandmen, everything. What form of discipline;
what Books or doctrines, I will not say would equally suit all these;
but which, if happily fitted for one, would not perhaps be an absol-
ute nuisance in another?176
The connection between ‘Surrey, Essex, Cumberland, . . . [and] West-

morland’ is striking in the light of what was said above about each
writer’s rural isolation and upbringing. Ironically, the poet’s rural ex-
perience and assumptions made it almost impossible for him, in the
years before he became a tory, to propose a practical course of reli-
gious and manual instruction for the urban and industrial populations.
It acknowledged instead the important facts of regional diversity and
county history, which have recently aroused new interest among geog-
raphers and historians like John Langton and Patrick Joyce as major
reasons for the growth of populist sentiments and cultures in the in-
dustrial north and midlands.177 Patrick Joyce, moreover, has even argued
that Wordsworth himself was heir to the ‘small-town, small-propertied
tradition in the late eighteenth century’. Agreed. But the poet could
never reconcile the anti-modernist elements of this tradition to the new
urban life and ‘rational’ economy of the nineteenth century.178 His Golden
Age ideal of education and farming life in the Border counties was the
basis of his Romantic critique of schooling and domestic relations in
the industrial towns, but they were not able to stop ‘the march of
intellect’, or as he put it ‘barbarism’ in the period 1770–1850.
Industrial progress versus moral regression
Here we might ask if Wordsworth’s views on the Industrial Revolution

were so different from Cobbett’s as to render void any credible com-
parison. At first sight their critiques of social and economic change
were certainly different in direction: Wordsworth looked with particu-
lar dismay upon the rise of the factory system in the north of the
country, whereas Cobbett was mainly obsessed with the enclosure of
the land in the south and the supposed transfer of real estate from the
old order to the new men. But a closer study of their moral critiques of
the factory system and industrial relations, as such, confirms the need
for a comparison of their populist ideas and assumptions on this im-
portant topic. Both he and Wordsworth, above all, observed new methods
of production turning men, women and children into factory slaves,
who had no value to their masters beyond their capacity for labour;
and a new system of relations which was replacing the old ranks and
gradations of society with two classes called the rich and the poor.
Both writers, to a point, came to accept the economic benefits of the
new methods of production. Wordsworth always admired the massive,
if piecemeal, changes to the mining, iron and textile industries in the
period 1770–1850. Modern science and engineering were applauded as
signs of England’s ‘social Industry’, in general, and the source of her
increasing commercial and industrial wealth, in particular.179 Yet he
was definitely alarmed by ‘the darker side / Of this great change’.180
Workers were being wasted by the new mills and manufactories of the
Lake District hinterland and the rapidly growing towns of the West
Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Midlands. In the former, where
water power was plentiful, the poet saw cotton mills and woollen
manufactories raised above the rivers and streams. Such fabrications
symbolised, for him, the new industrial system. In The Excursion (1814),
he wrote about the night shift at a typical factory in the region:
Disgorged are now the ministers of day;

And, as they issue from the illumined pile,
A fresh band meets them, at the crowded door –
And in the courts – and where the rumbling stream,
That turns the multitude of dizzy wheels,
Glares, like a troubled spirit, in its bed
Among the rocks below. Men, maidens, youths,
Mother and little children, boys and girls,
Enter, and each the wonted task resumes
Within this temple, where is offered up
To Gain, the master idol of the realm,
Perpetual sacrifice.181
Written in 1814, these lines reveal Wordsworth’s early fears about the
factory operatives’ physical and mental welfare. They were clearly fa-
tigued by long and ‘unnatural’ hours of work with the spinning jenny.
Factories built upon the banks of fast-flowing streams and rivers were
subject to some variation in power and so in demand for labour.182
The difference between water- and steam-powered machines, however,
was negligible in terms of their long-term effects upon the factory op-
eratives themselves. Historians have sinced studied the social and moral
impact of the factory system of work and discipline which rested, in
part, upon the assumption that time is money, and so denied the old
notion that jobs must be done according to the ‘natural’ rhythms of
daily life and seasonal change.183 Wordsworth was well aware of this
inversion of temporal and material values. He saw the ‘unnatural light’
of the factory windows reveal ungodly labour in the night, when cot-
tage labourers were resting in bed or working with comparative ease
and variety by their own firesides. Moreover, he heard the terrible bell
which summoned the cotton workers ‘to unceasing toil’. The work bell
was even worse, to his mind, than the Conqueror’s ‘curfew-knoll’ which
had once kept the ‘Free-born Englishman’ indoors, and so ensured his
subjection to ‘the Norman yoke’. Cobbett too noted the high degree of
regimentation and order of the factory system. In 1823, for example,
he described the factory operative working intolerably long hours for
very low wages; the victim of arbitrary and extortionate fines which
ate away his earnings; and the base wretch of a rigid and despotic
discipline, which gave him no right ‘to leave his employer without due
notice, but liable himself to be turned off at a moment’s warning, and
trodden down, besides, by monstrous legal inequalities, such as the
Combination Acts’, which were used by factory owners and govern-
ment ministers alike to stop the spread of radical trades unions in the
period 1799–1824.184 Cobbett and Wordsworth, it seems, witnessed with
horror the cumulative immiseration of the ‘working classes’ in the In-
dustrial Revolution.185 (Their observations about the evils of the factory
system were confirmed, for example, by testimonials given in 1833 to
the Commission for Inquiry into the Employment of Children in Fac-
tories.) Both men believed that the Englishman’s broad domestic economy
and traditional independence were being undermined by the ideology
of self-interest and greed which gained legal status in the first four
decades of the nineteenth century. The Englishman’s ‘birthrights’ to a
degree of self-sufficiency and self-respect, moreover, were being lost at
the same time that middle-class reformers were boasting of the aboli-
tion of the slave trade. Cobbett therefore vilified William Wilberforce,
who was both the leading abolitionist of the day and the main instiga-
tor of the Combination Acts already mentioned. What ‘an unfeeling,
what a cold-blooded hypocrite must he be’, declared Cobbett, ‘that can . . .
call upon people under the name of free British labourers: to appeal to
them on behalf of black slaves, when these’ same ‘labourers; these poor,
mocked, degraded wretches, would be happy to lick the dishes and
bowls, out of which the black slaves have breakfasted, dined, or supped. . . .
Talk, indeed, of transmuting the wretched Africans into this condition! . . .
Will not the care, will not the anxiety of a really humane Englishman
be directed towards the Whites, instead of towards the Blacks, until, at
any rate, the situation of the former be made to be as good as that of
the latter?’186 His moral anger and frustration, if not his personal an-
tipathies, were shared to a point by Wordsworth who wrote that:
‘Slaves cannot breathe in England’ – yet that boast

Is but a mockery! when from coast to coast,
Though fettered slave be none, her floors and soil

Groan underneath a weight of slavish toil,
For the poor Many, measured out by rules
Fetched with cupidity from heartless schools,
That to an Idol, falsely called ‘the Wealth
Of Nations’, sacrifice a People’s health,
Body and mind and soul; a thirst so keen
Is ever urging on the vast machine
Of sleepless Labour, ’mid whose dizzy wheels
The Power least prized is that which thinks and feels.187
Wordsworth mocked Adam Smith’s book, The Wealth of Nations (1776),

because it was the philosophical basis of political economy.188 Basi-
cally, Smith maintained that social progress, wealth and welfare were
guaranteed by the struggle between individuals for private profit in the
marketplace. In short, each against all.189 He therefore supported the
de-regulation of the market place from government control and en-
couraged free-trade as against protection. In consequence, he was later
worshipped by some economic writers as a prophet of laissez-faire. Fur-
thermore, his theory demanded that capital be husbanded with great
care to pay for the division of labour ‘which in turn is the engine of
economic progress’.190 Although he lived in a commercial age, his views
of labour were applied to modern manufactories in the works of Andrew
Ure, who unwittingly summed up the case against the factory owners
in a passage from his book, The Philosophy of Manufacture, published in
1835:
The principle of the factory system . . . is, to substitute mechanical

science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essen-
tial constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among
artisans. On the handicraft plan, labour more or less skilled, was
usually the most expensive element of production – Materiam superabat
opus [or, ‘the work exceeded the material’]; but on the automatic
plan, skilled labour gets progressively superseded, and will, eventu-
ally, be replaced by mere overlookers of machines . . . 191
Wordsworth obviously believed that operatives, in the cotton mills and

woollen manufactories, had already been reduced to the level of ‘mere
overlookers of machines’. Moreover, like Cobbett, he condemned the
related views of the Reverend Thomas Malthus who asserted that food
supply could never keep pace with population growth and so concluded
that a surplus population had no moral or legal claim upon the rest of
the community.192 Cobbett was all but exasperated by the sheer hypoc-
risy of a parson, who – living upon tithes and church emoluments
drawn from the people of England – argued that the poor ought not to
have children lest they become a charge upon the parish. This was a
‘diabolical assertion’.193 Such writers, nevertheless, gave greedy factory
owners a philosophical cover for their aggressive individualism, in gen-
eral, and their indifference to their workers’ poverty, in particular. Both
Cobbett and Wordsworth, however, in their different ways, saw this
new philosophy as a conspiracy to defraud Englishmen of their histori-
cal rights and legal dues. ‘The THING’, argued Cobbett, had grown under
the encouragement of several views in favour of social change, mate-
rial progress, population growth, personal wealth and ‘cheap government’.
Indeed, ‘“land-clearing” and poor-rate abolishing “feelosophers”’ had
given rational grounds for destroying the old agrarian order and re-
placing it with a new industrial one. He singled out, in this regard,
‘both Adam Smith and Sir James Steuart’, but also returned again and
again to the radical, whig and tory writings of ‘Doctor’ John Black (of
the Morning Chronicle), Henry Brougham (of the Edinburgh Review), and
William Huskisson (of the Board of Trade). They were the ideologues
of the new commercial and industrial wealth, whom he despised as ‘an
aristocracy in trade’ and a ‘mushroom gentry’, who having drawn ‘wealth
into great masses’ also drew ‘English people into crowds’ and made ‘them
slaves . . . of the lowest and most degraded cast’; and then retired to
their country seats ‘with all the keen habits of their former lives’. Thus
he reasoned that ‘the vassalage of our [feudal] forefathers’ still existed
in the industrial north, where ‘enlightened slaves who toil[ed] in the
factories for the Lords of the Loom’, ate porridge, whilst the rural workers
in the south still retained their independent character and spirit and
so demanded ‘a lump of household bread and a not very small piece of
bacon’.194 Time, however, proved him wrong. At least his famous tours
of four northern counties, in the early 1830s, led him to qualify his ill-
founded views of the comparative condition of rural and industrial
workers. The former were, in fact, better paid and better fed than the
latter, even though they were not always receiving a fair return for
their labour or working in safe and wholesome conditions.195 His pre-
industrial view of society, however, gave little scope to consumer
capitalism to play a major role in the nation’s economy. He always
saw the small workshop and the artisan as the mainstays of the manu-
facturing sector; in consequence, his critique of new factory owners
and their practices was social and moral rather than economic and
technical in nature. The whole system, he thought, was unnecessary
and ‘unnatural’.196 Wordsworth’s ‘romantic critique’ of factory life was,
likewise, rooted in agrarian ideals of small independent production,
‘natural economy’, and the close-knit community. He therefore judged
the effects of the Industrial Revolution according to normative values
of sturdy individualism and domestic competence, rather than intellectual
theories of economic rationalism and national prosperity. He had long

lamented, for example, the demise of cottage industries in the remote
north as a result of ‘the increase of mechanic power’ and factory com-
petition. He even pre-empted Karl Marx’s observation in Das Kapital
(1867), that ‘Large-Scale Industry’, ‘at a certain stage of its develop-
ment’, had become ‘technologically incompatible with the basis furnished
for it by [the old domestic system of] handicraft and Manufacture’.197
But he would have vehemently denied the materialist’s dialectical as-
sumption that changes of production necessarily meant changes of
relations in manufacturing, farming or transport systems.198 The degra-
dation of rural and urban workers, he argued, was not inevitable. As
Dr Klingender observed long ago: ‘arts, in themselves good, [were] turned
into fearful scourges of mankind, and science [was] turned [into] soph-
istry through attempting to justify the evil’.199 Both he and Cobbett
believed that the new social and economic relations of modern produc-
tion were worse than the old system of ranks and gradations in rural
England. Instead of the widespread diffusion of wealth, and the ben-
efits of ‘natural mobility’, between the ranks, which they had observed
in their native counties, the new economic order was based upon the
concentration of wealth and capital into a few hands at the expense of
the majority who must henceforth work for low wages.200 Some eco-
nomic historians, however, have argued that most commercial and
industrial magnates were not in a position to improve their workers’
lot in life whilst still being themselves in the process of capital forma-
tion and frequent re-investment in plant and materials.201 Nevertheless,
Wordsworth believed that the old landed order would be dissolved by
‘a social war . . . between the poor and the rich, the danger of which . . .
[was being] aggravated by the vast extension of the manufacturing sys-
tem’; Cobbett believed that the community would be reduced ‘to two
classes: Masters and Slaves’.202 Above all, both writers rested their moral
critiques of the factory system and industrial relations upon their simi-
lar views of small farming life and domestic industry in the period
under study, and looked for political solutions to social and economic
problems.
Paternalism
The ‘Free-born Englishman’ and the paternal society, however, were

always found together in their writings. Both Wordsworth and Cobbett
made significant contributions to the debate on living standards and
the need for society to retain old laws and regulations for the protec-
tion and profit of all its dependent ranks. For example, both writers
upheld the principle and practice of the Old Poor Law, which had been
passed by Elizabeth I as a way of controlling the rural poor. Its provi-

sions were far from ideal, but they were sanctioned by time and tradition
and varied with local circumstances and conditions.203 Both writers were
opposed to the coldly rational and impersonal views of the political
economists, the Malthusians, and the utilitarians, who wanted to re-
place the custom of ‘out-door relief’ with a punitive system of work
houses for all the unemployed and their families.204 Both men, more-
over, defended the Old Poor Law on normative rather than abstract
grounds. Indeed, no one to my knowledge has yet revealed the striking
similarity in their respective views: Wordsworth wrote ‘that all persons
who cannot find employment, or procure wages sufficient to support
the body in health and strength, are entitled to a maintenance by law’.205
Cobbett agreed. He told the rural labourers, whom he affectionately
called ‘Chopsticks’, that they had both a traditional claim and a legal
right, in the advent of ‘distress, to have . . . [their] wants sufficiently
relieved out of the produce of the land, whether that distress arise
from sickness, from decrepitude, from old age, or from the inability to
find employment’.206 Both writers, moreover, used historical arguments
to support their moral and legal views. Wordsworth shrewdly set the
natural justice of the old principle against the aggressive individualism
of laissez-faire philosophy and the sophisticated ‘doctrines of political
economy’ which were then prevalent:
If self-preservation be the first law of our nature, would not every

one in a state of nature be morally justified in taking to himself
that which is indispensable to such preservation, where, by so do-
ing, he would not rob another of that which might be equally
indispensable to his preservation? And if the value of life be regarded
in a right point of view, may it not be questioned whether this
right of preserving life, at any expense short of endangering the life
of another, does not survive man’s entering into the social state;
whether this right can be surrendered or forfeited, except when it
opposes the divine law, upon any supposition of a social compact,
or of any convention for the protection of mere rights of property?207
Clearly the question is rhetorical. Wordsworth, like Cobbett, believed

that every man had ‘an indefeasible right to live’.208 He therefore gave a
twist to Locke’s famous idea of a social contract, which supplanted the
state of nature – in which each man was a law unto himself. Like
Cobbett he held that the state could be dissolved by its members if it
failed to satisfy their basic needs. (Such a view, however, was always
implicit in Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1689).209) Cobbett even
went so far as to posit a pre-feudal social contract which had been
modified by Norman and Tudor dynasties, but never fully repealed. It

provided him with a cogent historical account of the origins and evolution
of poor relief in England.
For a thousand years . . . necessity . . . [was] relieved out of the pro-

duce of the TITHES. . . . When the tithes were taken away by the
aristocracy [in the Reformation period], and by them kept to them-
selves, or given wholly to the parsons, . . . provision . . . [was] made . . .
out of the land, as compensation for that which had been taken
away by the aristocracy and the parsons. That compensation was
given . . . in the rates as settled by the poor-law. To take away those
rates would, therefore, be to violate the agreement, which gave . . .
[the poor] as much right to receive, in the case of need, relief out of
the land, as it left the land-owner a right to his rent.210
Both William Cobbett and William Wordsworth shifted the focus of

the Poor Law debate from abstract rights of property to historical claims
for social justice and communal values. If the aristocracy and gentry
asserted an ‘ABSOLUTE RIGHT to exclusive proprietorship of [the] land’,
Cobbett and Wordsworth upheld the people’s ‘common right in the
land’.211 (Wordsworth even declared, in 1817, that the right of the poor
to relief from the parish rates constituted an ‘actual possession of full
one-fifth of the real estate of the Country’; by which he meant that
they had an ‘admitted right’ to possession.212) Their views of poor relief
were therefore part of their respective visions of the old landed order.
Wordsworth, for example, as a tory declared that it was ‘the duty of a
christian government standing in loco parentis towards all its subjects,
to make such effectual provision, that no one shall be in danger of
perishing either through the neglect or harshness of its legislation’.213
His statement is remarkable for three reasons: first, it confirms Jonathan
Clark’s thesis that the Old Regime’s political hegemony lay in natural
authority and hierarchy and not in noblesse oblige. Secondly, it recalls
the nation’s aristocratic leaders to consider their Christian duty to pro-
tect their dependants as parents naturally protect their children. And,
thirdly, it reminds the state’s leaders that the proposed Poor Law Amend-
ment Bill must be tempered by traditional principles of justice – or
natural right – in the sense already defined. The poet’s position is in-
teresting in the light of recent accounts of the origins and execution
of the New Poor Law Act of 1834. According to Anthony Brundage, for
example, the major amendments were largely the result of the ruling
classes’ concern with social order in the countryside rather than the
bureaucratic experiments with ‘rational’ and ‘impersonal’ methods of
poor relief. The ‘harshness’ of the new legal code, however, was a clear
sign of the ruling classes’ long-term neglect of their social obligations
and their widespread ignorance of the traditional values favoured by

old-fashioned paternalists like Wordsworth and Cobbett.214
Both writers believed that hospitality and protection had once been
common among all ranks of rural society, but had been weakened by
the sudden and widespread growth of commercial and industrial econ-
omies in the eighteenth century. Cobbett even argued that a massive
transfer of real estate had followed the success of commercial and in-
dustrial ventures in the countryside since 1688. The ‘new men’, he
argued, had been able to buy great- and middle-sized estates from their
erstwhile lords and masters, and so introduced different standards of
farm management and social life to the manor. Although Cobbett gave
clear examples of land transfers in the recent past, it is doubtful if
they were ever really typical of the majority of manors in the counties
involved.215 (At least, he tended to single out ‘foreign’ families, like the
Barings, whose forebears came from Bremen, in the early eighteenth
century, and derived most of their wealth from banking, trade and
government service. Thus he observed, in 1822, that Sir Thomas Baring
had supplanted the Duke of Bedford at Stratton Park, in Hampshire;
and his grandson, the Rt Hon. Alexander Baring, had supplanted Lord
Northington at the Grange, in Alresford, in the said county.216) Never-
theless, he readily distinguished ‘between a resident native gentry, attached
to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from their childhood,
frequently mixing with them in those pursuits [like fox-hunting] where
all artificial distinctions are lost, practising hospitality without ceremony,
from habit and not on calculation; and a gentry only now-and-then
residing at all, having no relish for country-delights, foreign in their
manners, distant and haughty in their behaviour, looking to the soil
only for its rents, viewing it as a mere object of speculation, unac-
quainted with its cultivators, despising them and their pursuits, and
relying, for influence, not upon the good will of the vicinage, but upon
the dread of their power’.217 It is difficult to accept Cobbett’s remarks
at face value. By the eighteenth century, at least, most gentlemen (in
the sense of independent landlords) spent a great deal of time in Lon-
don on important business and family matters; and, especially, for the
round of seasonal engagements in politics, social intercourse and amuse-
ments which constituted their High Culture. On the other hand, his
distinction points to a long-term decay of loyalty and deference towards
the landlords by their dependent ranks in the rural south between 1760
and 1832. Where found, a ‘resident native gentry’ could still expect to
find widespread support among the farming and professional classes –
in the form of social deference, feelings of personal obligation and grati-
tude, and, of course, political loyalty – because of its very involvement
in everyday matters around the manor, village or parish. William
Wordsworth agreed. The ‘Resident Gentry’, in Westmorland, were not
proprietors of the soil in general, and had ‘little influence or interest

in the state of the neighbourhood’.218 Nor were their ranks readily sup-
plied by the new wealth of Westmorland’s manufacturing towns. J. D.
Marshall and C. A. Dyhouse, in a social study of Kendal, concluded
that only the Wakefields, who were ex-Quakers and ex-bankers, were a
major accession to the rural gentry of the area. The middle classes in
Cumbria, it seems, preferred to establish new estates on the edges of
the existing towns or, by 1835, ‘to build [new] villas around Winder-
mere, to Wordsworth’s disgust. Not that there were many “gentlemen”
to advance up the social ladder; in the 1851 census only 29 persons
were so classed in 118 townships or parishes in Westmorland’.219 The
poet therefore held them partly to blame for the growth of violence
and drunkenness amongst the landless labourers, especially in the vicin-
age of Ambleside, Rydal and Kendal.220 They exerted no widespread
paternal influence upon the labouring classes in the period of social
and economic flux. Likewise, in 1817, he wrote about the changing
‘feudal’ relations in the face of the commercial and industrial creed of
self-interest. The ‘principal ties which kept the different classes of soci-
ety in a vital and harmonious dependence upon each other’ had
‘within . . . [the last] 30 years either been greatly impaired or wholly
dissolved’:
Everything has been put up to market and sold for the highest price
it would bring. Farmers used formerly to be attached to their Land-
lords, and labourers to their Farmers who employed them. All that
kind of feeling has vanished – in like manner, the connexion between
the trading and landed interests of country towns undergoes no modi-
fication whatsoever from personal feeling, whereas within my memory
it was almost wholly governed by it. A country squire, or substantial
yeoman, used formerly to resort to the same shops which his father
had frequented before him, and nothing but a serious injury real or
supposed would have appeared to him a justification for breaking
up a connexion which was attended with substantial amity and in-
terchanges of hospitality from generation to generation.221
Wordsworth was a true paternalist; like William Cobbett he believed

that ‘quickened self-interest’ had begun to dissolve the ‘moral cement’
between patrons and their clients no less than that between masters
and their servants. Of course, he knew that the new society gave coun-
try people ‘more extensive views . . . and wider dependencies’ than ever
before, but they were visibly ‘more lax in proportion as they . . . [were]
wider’.222 Cobbett, too, could remember the time when the typical farmer
was famous for his fair wages, good terms of employment and old-
fashioned hospitality. He used ‘to sit at the head of the oak table along
with his men, say grace to them, and cut up the meat and the pud-
ding. He might take a cup of strong beer to himself, when they had
none; but that was pretty nearly all the difference in their manner of
living’.223 His farmhouse was the home of ‘Merry Old England’ with its
roast beef and small beer; a cheerful and happy place where the live-in
labourer ‘used to sit around the fire with the master and mistress, and
to pull and tickle the laughing maids’.224 By the end of the French war,
however, he and Wordsworth had noticed a change in manners. Cobbett,
in particular, despised the new breed of agricultural capitalist who re-
garded the labourer as a mere source of gain and not as a human being;
but his scorn was even greater for the wealthy farmers who now vied
with each other to emulate the ways of their betters:
A fox-hunting horse; polished boots; a spanking trot to market; a

‘get out the way, or by G_d I’ll ride over you’ to every poor devil
upon the road; wine at his dinner; a carpet on his floor; a bell in his
parlour; a servant (and sometimes in livery) to wait at his table; a
painted lady for a wife; novel-reading daughters; sons aping the young
’squires and lords; a house crammed up with sofa’s, piano’s, and all
sorts of fooleries.225
The emotional bonds between the modern tenant-farmers and their live-
in labourers were being dissolved, in his view, by the higher expectations
and living standards of the former. Cobbett always looked back to a
‘pre-industrial’ world of stringent domestic economy and old-fashioned
hospitality. In a similar way, he believed that the moral economy had
been oiled from above. Wealth, at the level of manor, parish or county,
had always flowed in a varied measure from the great landlords down
to the smallest employers of a few journeymen or labourers. Moreover,
all of these groups, in his view, spent their money on essential items
rather than luxuries. Of course, he did not deny that luxury existed
amongst the lords and gentry, but so too did largesse, and the many
needs of the country houses and mansions of the rich made work for
local artisans, domestic servants and rural labourers.226 Both he and
Wordsworth condemned the wealthier classes for their indifference and
lack of leadership. It is easy to dismiss their critique as a mere yearn-
ing for a mythical past, which ignores the tensions and conflicts between
the ranks of Old England. At least, a group of left-wing historians has
found that the Old Regime was based as much upon sheer force as,
say, social deference. Douglas Hay, for example, has argued that the
aristocratic government was guilty of organised terror and biased treat-
ment of the dependent ranks of society. (This was most visible in the
‘lottery’ of criminal justice which relied upon three variables for its
overall success, namely, ‘majesty’, ‘justice’, and ‘mercy’.) Moreover, he
attributes their harsh penal code and its enforcement to their prevail-
ing ‘ideology of property-rights’. This was most evident in the regular
battles between gentlemen and cottage labourers over the right to take
game from the park-lands, commons and forests of the several man-
ors.227 His views were shared by E. P. Thompson, who studied the social
and economic meaning of nameless, threatening letters, which were
sent, in the eighteenth century, from members of the ‘labouring classes’,
in Cobbett’s sense, to their traditional rulers over issues of ancient rights
and duties. The letters were often, unofficially, a safety valve for the
release of social and economic discontent. At least, Thompson some-
times found that letter writing was ‘an effective signal to the [legal]
authorities to attempt to restrain prices, to regulate the markets, to
institute subsidies, or [to] activate charities in anticipation of riot’.228
Sources for the ‘lower orders’ remain scarce, and therefore it is difficult
to say just how typical such behaviour was during the eighteenth cen-
tury. Several letters clearly suggest that the poor – by threat or by the
use of violence – were ‘recalling the rich to certain notional duties’.
Such letters, however, do not show the absence of deference in the old
landed order, ‘but something of its character and limitations’: it had
‘no inwardness’, declares Thompson; these writers did ‘not love their
masters’. Nevertheless, they were reconciled, in the end, to their mas-
ters’ everyday expectations and power by the sheer weight of England’s
post-feudal history and piecemeal changes in the pre-industrial period.229
In this regard, Wordsworth and Cobbett provide a valuable middle ground
between Douglas Hay and E. P. Thompson, on the one hand, and J. C.
D. Clark, on the other. Both writers agreed that deference, in the old
landed order, was both reasonable and necessary for the good offices of
society, but were adamant that it was a highly moral relationship; one
that bound its ranks together by feelings of mutual warmth and regard,
not just legal rights and duties sanctioned by force. Neither man was wholly
right or wrong in his view of the origin and significance of social and
economic life in the old landed order, but each looked back to a van-
ishing world as a basis for argument.
Radical and tory politics
Both writers, it seems, experienced long-term changes in the nature of

English society as a catastrophic decline in the old and familiar. Neither
man’s response to the outward facts of history was impartial. Each man
made a political commitment. Whereas Wordsworth chose to defend
the ‘Constitution in Church and State’ of the old landed order, Cobbett
worked for a radical reform of Parliament. The difference, however, was
always one of degree rather than kind. Hating egalitarian doctrines no
less than the ‘abdication on the part of the governors’ to rule, Cobbett
did not wish to establish a democratic republic but a backward-looking

constitutional monarchy which had all the real – and imaginary! – bless-
ings of Alfred’s ‘Free Constitution’ and exemplary rule by King and
Parliament.230 Of course, his statement of the political problem came
very close, on occasion, to being a demand for a complete subversion
of the ruling classes and the making of a genuine – Jeffersonian? –
democracy; but this was not the Golden Age ideal.231 At heart, Cobbett
always believed in the virtues of a landed order and hierarchy. Hence
his repeated calls to the ‘native gentry’ to assert themselves and their
traditional values against the forces of social and economic change in
modern England. The resident gentry, as we saw above, was visibly
marked by paternalism on the land and noblesse oblige in Parliament.
In consequence, Cobbett could affirm their right to rule the country as
long as their character remained untouched by the manners, interests
and concerns of the new ‘mushroom gentry’, who, in his eyes, were
‘created by the [French] war and its boundless expenditure’:
In men of this [noble] description, so well known in their several

counties and neighbourhoods; men whose interests were so closely
interwoven with those of the people at large; men who had not
become rich by the receipt of taxes [but who ‘held their estates from
their ancestors’]. In this sort of natural magistracy of the country,
the people had in spite of the partial distribution of the elective
rights, a tolerable security for their liberties and properties. The char-
acter of the members [in the Commons] supplied in a great degree
the place of a fair mode of election.232
In practice, it seems, virtual representation was not incompatible with

the birth-rights and liberties of Englishmen. But faced with the wide-
spread abuse of Parliamentary privileges and power, Cobbett was more
than willing to sacrifice the aristocratic ‘few’ for the sake of the labour-
ing ‘many’, as long as the latter remained on the land. Wordsworth,
on the other hand, discarded his radical and whig ideals for the tradi-
tional values of England’s Constitution in Church and State as developed
since 1688. He was an able defender of the Old Regime and did not
spare himself at election times to help the Lowther camp.233 His main
position on the reform question is often quoted but not fully under-
stood. It appeared in a letter to Lord Lonsdale, in 1818, during the first
serious challenge, from the whig statesman, Lord Brougham, to the
regular tory candidates:
What else but the stability and weight of a large estate [like the
Lowther’s] with proportionate influence in the House of Commons
can counter-balance the democratic activity of the wealthy commercial
and manufacturing Districts? It appears to a superficial Observer, warm

from contemplating the theory of the Constitution, that the politi-
cal power of the great Landholders ought by every true lover of his
Country to be strenuously resisted, but I would ask a well-intentioned
native of Westmorland or Cumberland who had fallen into this mistake
if he could point out any arrangement by which Jacobinism can be
frustrated, except by the existence of large Estates continued from
generation to generation in particular families, with parliamentary
power in proportion.234
This statement has more in common with Coleridge’s essay On the

Constitution of Church and State (1830) than Cobbett’s support of ‘mixed
political government’; of course, it lacks the one’s philosophical spirit
and acumen, and the other’s shrewd, if intemperate, account of the
great landowners’ failure to fulfil their ‘noble obligations’ to society.
Coleridge argued that there had always been three estates in England,
the first was made up of the ‘possessors of fixed property’, or ‘land-
owners’, who corresponded to the Lords and Gentry of Old England.235
The second estate comprised ‘the merchants, the manufacturers, free
artisans, and the distributive class’, whilst the third was the National
Church or ‘Nationality’. Of these groups the first two had a permanent
interest in the land and therefore gave overall stability to England’s
government and religious institutions. The second group was represented
by wealth in goods rather than land. In consequence, their true value
to society lay in their provision of goods and services and their pro-
gressive spirit and enterprise. Together these groups formed the
‘Proprietage’ of Old England and ensured that material civilisation was
given the two-fold advantages of continuity and change. The third es-
tate was the spiritual depository of England’s national learning and
scholarship. Its members were not merely clergymen, but ‘clerks in the
mediaeval sense in which any educated man was a clerk’. Nevertheless,
the social function of the Clerisy was to educate the people in the
moral and religious values of the National Church. The self-interest of
the ‘Proprietage’ was therefore balanced by the self-sacrifice of the ‘Clerisy’
to national virtue and integrity, on the one hand, and to High Culture
and scholastic learning, on the other. Coleridge, however, was con-
vinced that, since the ‘Glorious Revolution of 1688’, the trading groups
had been gaining power and prestige at the expense of the two other
estates, and so diverting the national constitution from its formal goal
of moral virtue and regeneration, to a selfish instrument of the com-
mercial and industrial classes. His solution to the political problem of
reform lay in restoring the proper balance and harmony between these
estates and bringing the people into a proper position of obedience vis-
à-vis their landed and clerical leaders. This would be achieved by bringing
the corrupt ‘Proprietage’ to a just sense of its traditional role in the

constitution, and by legislating against the trading groups, in a medi-
eval fashion, for the benefit of all consumers. Hierarchy and authority
would replace the laissez-faire philosophy and dogmatic individualism
of the modern world. Wordsworth admired Coleridge’s essay when it
was published in 1830. Both agreed that the Old Regime was more
than a balance of economic and social interests. It was clearly a ‘Church–
State’ unity. But it is doubtful that his own political views owed much
to his old friend.236 They stemmed from rural rather than philosophical
assumptions about the best relationship between the ranks. His defence
of the old landed order has often been dismissed as shallow, self-serving
and unworkable: for example, he was made Distributor of Stamps for
Westmorland, in 1813, and owed the Lowther family a debt of ‘endless
gratitude’ for their public and private patronage of his own family and
friends. His argument is therefore ignored, for the most part, as the
propaganda of the tory placeman. Such a view, however, is largely
irrelevant to his conservative vision of life and his involvement in tory
politics. His position on reform was more ‘realistic’ than Coleridge’s
famous attempt to reify the future order from its definition or idea;
and far more credible than Cobbett’s belief that a thorough reform of
Parliament would allow the working people of England to return to
their ‘pre-industrial’ past. The poet heard the murmurings of discontent
among the middle and working classes of England’s new factory towns
and commercial centres, but he knew that their calls for the franchise
had to be judged by the fundamental interests of the Old Regime. He,
like Cobbett, was wary of the ‘wealthy commercial and manufacturing
Districts’ getting a greater say in government, and their economic power
could only be counter-balanced by the comparatively ‘old’ landed es-
tates; as for the revolutionary mob, they were to be feared and ‘frustrated’
by an alliance of the old ruling families.237 (The poet, like Cobbett, was
always haunted by the spectre of revolutionary France, which he had
seen when still a youth.) One would like to think that Wordsworth
was distinguishing between the legitimate demands of the middle classes
for ‘democratic’ reform and the dangerous ‘Jacobinism’ of the urban
workers, but nothing could be further from the truth. His tory creed
could only admit, more or less, degrees of ‘influence’ and ‘connection’
with the ruling classes; not a new measure of middle-class control.238
At most he wanted to improve the relative position of the ‘new wealth’
without upsetting the Old Regime. Ironically, Cobbett looked upon re-
form as the best way to resist the forces of change in Old England;
Wordsworth resisted reform for the same reason. Each man drew upon
his old rural ‘experiences and assumptions’ to arrive at a satisfactory
solution to the twin problems of industrial capitalism and urban life.
Cobbett became a radical, and Wordsworth a conservative.
The Catholic and Irish questions
Both writers, moreover, took strong stands on the ‘Irish Question’, which
was inseparable from the ‘Catholic Question’. Cobbett was for the pro-
posed constitutional reforms, Wordsworth against. Neither man’s position,
however, was a stock response to his political creed. There was often as
much dissent in the radical and liberal ranks over the second question
as there was in the tory camp. Many Dissenters, for example, who were
technically excluded from holding government office, on account of
their religious convictions, were just as fervent as Evangelical and High
Churchmen in their cry of ‘No Popery!’ in England.239 The problem
facing all groups was three-fold: Irish nationalism and Catholic eman-
cipation were subordinate in the period to the needs of the British
Constitution in Church and State as established since the Glorious
Revolution of 1688. Many statesmen were willing to grant the small
number of English Catholics a greater measure of religious and politi-
cal freedom in return for reasonable guarantees of security for the nation’s
institutions, but the emancipation of Irish Catholics was a very differ-
ent matter. The Irish clergy pledged political and religious allegiance
to the Pope and his representatives in the Vatican. Whilst the majority
of Irishmen, in the early nineteenth century, were not interested in
religious questions as much as economic ones – such as the redistribu-
tion of property – it was clear to the English government that the
Catholic Church was ‘a State within a State’ in so far as its national
organisation and ideology were concerned. The foundation of the Irish
Association in 1823 under the inspired leadership of Daniel O’Connell
produced the same result. Indeed, the Association even levied a rate or
tax upon the people and developed new policies for the future govern-
ment of Ireland. Cobbett spent several years working with O’Connell
for the religious and political reforms. Why? On the one hand, he thought
that the Roman Catholic Church, in England, during the ‘dark ages’,
had been a good and faithful steward of the land, caring for its tenant-
farmers and cottage labourers in a paternal fashion:
The monastery was a proprietor that never died; its tenantry had to
do with a deathless landlord; its lands and houses never changed
owners; its tenants were liable to none of the many uncertainties
that other tenants were; its oaks had never to tremble at the axe of
the squandering heir; its manors had not to dread a change of lords,
its villagers had all been born and bred up under its eye and care;
their character was of necessity a thing of great value, and, as such,
would naturally be an object of great attention. A monastery as the
centre of a circle in the country, naturally drawing to it all that
were in need of relief, advice, and protection, and containing a body
of men, or of women, having no cares of their own, and having wis-

dom to guide the inexperienced, and wealth to relieve the distressed.240
Indeed, he thought ‘that before the [Protestant] “Reformation” England

was greater, more wealthy, more moral and more happy than she has
ever been since’.241 His Golden Age ideal of Catholic England therefore
explains his revulsion against the new industrial order, and the ‘com-
petitive’ view of society, which attended it.242 He was convinced that
greedy and selfish ruling classes, since the days of Henry VIII, had aban-
doned the better world of Old England for the tangible benefits and
illiberal demands of big land grants, tithes, ‘Norman titles’, sinecures
and tax-eating, as well as agrarian ‘innovations’, industrial developments
and commercial investments.243 Monasteries were the earliest social
institutions which he found in England’s long and chequered history
to embody his Golden Age beliefs in a ‘communal society’, but also
confirmed his account of ‘the THING’ – the system of corruption and
privilege against which he was fighting.244 Wordsworth agreed with the
social and moral elements of this radical critique but not its political
and religious implications. Hence his mixed feelings towards the Ro-
man Catholic Church in England’s medieval history and the growth of
Irish nationalism in the present. On the one hand, his poetry often
presents a favourable view of the corporate life and paternalism of the
Catholic Church, whilst, on the other hand, his prose often refers to
the threat of a patriotic priesthood in Ireland to the political Union of
1801.245 Consider, for instance, his description of the Monastery at St
Bees, which had flourished during the Middle Ages on the west coast
of Cumberland.
Who with the ploughshare clove the barren moors,

And to green meadows changed the swampy shores?
Thinned the rank woods; and for the cheerful grange
Made room where wolf and boar were used to range?
Who taught, and showed by deeds, that gentler chains
Should bind the vassal to his lord’s domains?
The thoughtful Monks, intent their God to please,
For Christ’s dear sake, by human sympathies
Poured from the bosom of thy Church, St Bees! 246
For hundreds of years the monks had reconciled feuding Chiefs, raised
the status of lowly tenants, introduced new methods of farming and
industry (such as iron making), and built Churches.
Yet more; around those Churches, gathered Towns

Safe from the feudal Castle’s haughty frowns;
Peaceful abodes, where Justice might uphold

Her scales with even hand, and culture mould
The heart to pity, train the mind in care
For rules of life, sound as the Time could bear.
But all availed not; by a mandate given

Through lawless will the Brotherhood was driven
Forth from their cells; their ancient House laid low
In Reformation’s sweeping overthrow.247
The Roman Catholic Church had been a major social, economic and
political influence in feudal times; a bearer of European civilisation.248
Wordsworth could not be insensible to its destruction at the hands of
Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I. Like Cobbett, he was a member
of the Protestant Church, in part, because it was the national church,
and he was an Englishman. Unlike Cobbett, he had a theological bent
and believed that the Protestant Church was, doctrinally speaking, a
better one than the Roman Catholic kind it had replaced in England.249
Moreover, he looked to the Anglican Church–State as a bulwark against
religious intolerance and fanaticism. Nevertheless, he agreed with Cobbett
that the Reformation itself was often clouded by the wilfulness and
greed of the aristocratic classes.250 In The Excursion (1814), for instance,
he wanders around the hills and dales of Cumberland, Westmorland
and Furness, and contrasts ‘the hell of the modern factory system’ with
‘the peace of the ancient cathedral, admires and describes Gothic ruins,
and is indignant at the thought of the disorders which accompanied
the Reformation, of the altars destroyed, [and] the religious [orders]
scattered’.251 Indeed, like Cobbett, he beheld a two-fold vision of scien-
tific and industrial power, on the one hand, and ‘a catastrophic upheaval
of deeply rooted custom’, on the other.252 Its size and intensity were
unknown since the Reformation and called for direct comparisons and
contrasts. Experts, of course, have since qualified the poet’s account of
the Reformation in the remote north of England, but even they have
concluded that ‘its achievement meant a moral shock to many ordi-
nary folk’.253 Here, however, lies the greatest danger for the student of
Wordsworth’s Golden Age theories. Although I will argue in the fol-
lowing chapter that the poet, in some ways, saw the old landed order
of the late eighteenth century as a ‘Golden Age’, we must not confuse
‘fact’ and ‘imagination’ with regards to earlier periods such as the Middle
Ages. His writings often reveal a striking amalgam of the two. It is
easy, therefore, to mistake a given image – for example, a Gothic mon-
astery at St Bees’ Heads in Cumberland – for a fully fledged Golden
Age reality.254 It was never wholly real in the physical sense; at least
until the eighteenth century. Indeed, he did not believe that the past
was necessarily better than the present. It was a historical judgement

made with hindsight. Nor was it a complete answer to the problems of
modern life. History offered him the elements of a Golden Age ideal
that could be realised by imagination and art. This social ideal is often
called the ‘organic society’, which historians attribute to the writings
of the Romantic conservatives such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott
and Southey. Cobbett’s vision of feudal England, however, is also seen
as part of the wider revival of England’s Gothic history.255 Together
these men argued that society was essentially a whole that was greater
than its parts; whose social relationships and material interests were
mutually related to one another and not directed by the needs of any
particular group, but existed for the benefit of all. This social ideal of
feudal England therefore had political implications for Cobbett and
Wordsworth; both men drew upon the communal life and relation-
ships of the remote past to confute the laissez-faire theory and practice
of the present; thus the poet concluded the poem on St Bees with the
following contrast between Gothic and Industrial England:
Alas! the Genius of our age, from Schools

Less humble, draws her lessons, aims, and rules.
To Prowess guided by her insight keen
Matter and Spirit are as one Machine;
Boastful Idolatress of formal skill
She in her own would merge the eternal will:
Better, if Reason’s triumphs match with these,
Her flight before the bold credulities
That furthered the first teaching of St Bees.256
Wordsworth’s mixed feelings about the ‘mechanic power’ of the mod-

ern age have already been noted. Here we find the specific contrast
between scientific Reason and faith in Providence; for Wordsworth mean-
ing in life and moral growth were not the same things as material
progress and formal knowledge. Science was not yet a surrogate reli-
gion. The Gothic Church had been founded upon ‘the bold credulities’
of the Christian faith but it had nurtured both art and science beneath
its general aim of public morality. The Catholics, for all their ‘supersti-
tion’, knew better than the modern schools of science and economics
the proper relationship between Man and God. Cobbett agreed: ‘Noth-
ing has ever yet come to supply the place of what was then destroyed’.257
Nonetheless, only Wordsworth’s social ideal of the old landed order
could be used to justify the Old Regime in its entirety. This is the
second point to note. Both writers used Golden Age arguments to sup-
port their respective claims for and against Parliamentary Reform, Repeal
of the Test and Corporation Acts, and Catholic Emancipation. Cobbett,
in 1827, published Part II of the History of the Protestant Reformation;

containing A List of the Abbeys, Priories, Nunneries, Hospitals, and other
Religious Foundations in England and Wales, and in Ireland, confiscated,
seized on, or alienated, by the Protestant ‘Reformation’ Sovereigns and Par-
liaments. Cobbett prefixed a longish introduction to this catalogue of
state plunder and pillage, in which he reckoned the extent of the spo-
liation and drew the political meaning of the ‘Reformation’ in the most
forthright terms – concluding that any Church property which still
remained in public hands ought to be used to pay off the National
Debt, and the whole position of the Church vis-à-vis the State ought to
be reviewed in light of the ‘facts’ which he had revealed. Indeed, he
‘wanted the Church to be non-political and independent of the State’,
and even ‘supported by the voluntary zeal of the believers and dis-
pensing, like the Quakers, . . . with “paid preachers and tithe-eating
parsons”, who did not even preach. The questions between Catholics
and Protestants’ had therefore ‘sunk more into the background: the
social effects of the Reformation and the present perversion of the
Church . . . [had] become his principal concerns’.258 And this squares
with Cobbett’s preoccupation with fiscal and administrative reforms to
rid the people of ‘parasitical classes’ and excessive taxation. Wordsworth
took the opposite view. He supported ‘well-considered change in the
distribution of some parts of the property’ then ‘possessed by the church’,
but stopped short of commuting the tithes.259 His vigorous defence of
the ‘Constitution in Church and State’, moreover, was, politically speaking,
quite feasible. Both Jonathan Clark and A. J. Mayer, for instance, have
given strong evidence of the aristocratic government’s survival in En-
gland as well as Europe for much of the nineteenth century.260 Indeed,
Tory stalwarts like Lords Eldon and Newcastle, the old Lake Poets
(Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge), and leading theologians like Van
Mildert and Phillpotts saw the Catholic Question ‘as a classic issue of
political theology’.261 Elie Halevy was therefore wide of the mark, in
this regard, when he said that theological arguments against admitting
Catholics to Parliament were largely irrelevant to the national debate,
which focused upon the Irish Question. ‘The English [certainly] did
not wish to see the House of Commons invaded by the Irish agita-
tors’.262 But, as Jonathan Clark has observed:
Seen in an English perspective, a Roman Catholic claim of superior

spiritual allegiance [to the Pope] could seem a natural concomitant
of a claim to a right of rebellion. The events of 1798[, when Wolfe
Tone led the Ulster revolutionaries to join the French invaders,] seemed
practical confirmation. The same principle could be held to be em-
bodied in what Protestants claimed was the Roman maxim that ‘No
faith is to be kept with heretics’: a standard complaint of Anglican
apologists for centuries, kept alive now both in the Orthodox and
Evangelical camps, and by Methodists referring to John Wesley’s Letter
Concerning the Civil Principles of Roman Catholics (1780). A society
bound by Christian oaths could not, Anglicans maintained, accept
those – whether atheists or Papists – who could not give guarantees
of their behaviour; and the Roman doctrine of ‘exclusive salvation’
could be expected to make Catholics unreliable fellow citizens of,
let alone legislators for, a Protestant society. The ‘Alliance between
Church and State’ could thus be defended on the plausible grounds
of the superiority of Anglican to Roman doctrine, rather than with
dubious arguments about how the contract of alliance was to be
understood. The claim of Catholic Emancipation was [therefore] fought
on ground most advantageous to the defenders.263
Indeed, their doctrinal ‘defence of the Church–State, and their ulti-

mate defeat’, in the period 1828–32, ‘provided the definition and marked
the dissolution of the ancien regime in England’.264 Unlike Cobbett’s
writings, which did not amount to a mainstream ideology, but arose
on the populist fringe of English political life, the poet’s defence of
Old England was a consistent world-view, in the sense already defined.
It must not be dismissed by his left-wing critics as a crude orthodoxy
or, worse, a mere reaction. He always struggled with himself and the
world to find a satisfactory religious and political creed that gave scope
to the conflicting claims of ‘Man, Nature, and Society’ during the In-
dustrial Revolution in England.
4
Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast
What do Wordsworth’s life and work reveal about the nature and ex-
tent of his conservatism? Was it merely political? – a retreat for a
disenchanted radical of the French Revolution? Or was it something
‘deeper, purer & higher’? – a yearning for a Golden Age vision of Old
England?1 No quick and ready answer can be given to that question. It
requires close study in the context of his own times as well as the
whole history of English conservative thought from Hooker to Burke.
Nevertheless, we have a starting point for our argument in Alfred Cobban’s
book, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century (1929),
which was the first historical study to trace the different political and
cultural effects of Burke’s life and work upon the ‘Lake Poets’.2 He was
adamant that these Romantic writers owed their greatest intellectual
debt to Edmund Burke and no other. The three Romantics started life
as ardent followers of the French Revolution and scorned Burke’s rhe-
torical defence of the English Constitution in Church and State;
Wordsworth declaring that it was ridiculous to believe ‘that we and
our posterity to the end of time were riveted to a constitution by the
indissoluble compact of a dead parchment’.3 They subscribed instead
to the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who argued that ‘Man
is born free but is everywhere in chains’. In other words, Rousseau
believed that the individual, in a state of Nature, is both free and vir-
tuous but is inevitably corrupted by the development of private
property-rights, material values, and artificial behaviour in civilised society.
Therefore, in so far as men move back to Nature, and its supposed
equality of rank and station, so far do they restore their moral, emo-
tional and mental health. Rousseau’s idea of the Natural Man found
expression in Wordsworth’s poetry for many years. Thus he wrote of
the free peasantry of the Swiss Republic, in 1793, that:
Once Man entirely free, alone and wild,

Was blessed as free – for he was Nature’s child.
128
England, 1750–1850
Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast 129
He, all superior but his God disdained,

Walked none restraining, and by none restrained,
Confessed no law but what his reason taught,
Did all he wished, and wished but what he ought.
As Man in his primaeval dower arrayed
The image of his glorious sire displayed,
Even so, by vestal Nature guarded, here
The traces of primaeval Man appear.4
Nevertheless, the verses reveal grave differences between the two writers.
Wordsworth likened the state of Nature to the innocence of Adam before
the Fall, and argued elsewhere that radical, democratic reforms were
able to remove the modern evils of social conflict, inequality and moral
decay. His views were shaped – to a point – by Thomas Paine’s master-
piece, Rights of Man, which was published in two volumes between
1791 and 1792. Paine saw revolution as ‘a renovation of the natural
order of things’ and Wordsworth probably agreed with his prophecy
that ‘the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of
the new world’.5 Such religious and political ideas, however, were foreign
to the eclectic and inconsistent philosophy of Rousseau himself. As
N. K. O’Sullivan observed:
In place of Adam he offered society as the source of human misery.

Reform society, he argued, and evil and suffering will eventually dis-
appear from the world . . . [But the] idea that a corrupt social
organisation is the chief cause of evil did not, however, lead Rousseau
himself to draw the conclusion that man could perfect his nature by
using political methods to change his social environment. That was
something which would require . . . the work of a supra-human
Legislator. 6
In other words, the ‘general will’ of the community rather than the
particular programme of a political faction or group was the source of
moral authority and perfection in a State. According to Rousseau’s Social
Contract (1762), individuals surrender their natural freedom to govern
themselves and their families for the collective security of the State.
The ‘social contract’ consists in the ‘total alienation of each associate,
together with all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first
place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for
all; and this being so, no one has any interest in making them burden-
some to others’. This alienation moreover is made without reserve: ‘If
individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common su-
perior to decide between them and the public, each, being on the one
point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature
would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become

inoperative or tyrannical’. Nevertheless, the people are the best law-
givers. Their ‘general will’ is revealed in the State when passive, and in
the Sovereign when active, but it is not the same thing as the Govern-
ment which might take any form. In fact, Rousseau was convinced
that equality was more important than liberty. Thus his theory could
be used to justify totalitarian regimes. Because the ‘general will’ is always
right, it is able, on moral and metaphysical grounds, to force wayward
members to conform to its legitimate authority – meaning, in practice,
that any conscientious objector could ‘be forced to be free’.7 Wordsworth
agreed with Rousseau that the ‘people’ were ‘the proper judges of their
own welfare’, but could not accept his autocratic conclusions.8 Rousseau’s
doctrine denied the rights of man for which the poet was fighting.
Wordsworth wanted to preserve both universal suffrage and individual
liberty. In this regard he stood closer to Paine than to Rousseau.9 In his
unpublished pamphlet, addressed to Bishop Watson, he argued that liberty
could not exist without equality, and used the notion of the ‘general
will’ to justify the end of the Bourbon monarchy in the heady days of
the French Revolution. Violence was a necessary evil for the immediate
overthrow of the ancien régime, but it was not a substitute for demo-
cratic government in the new Republic.10 Hence his utter rejection of
the Jacobin and Bonapartist regimes which took control of the people’s
interest in the French Revolution. Both Robespierre’s second Committee
of Public Safety (1793–4) and Bonaparte’s consulship (1799–1804) could
be justified by Rousseau’s theory. Robespierre (1758–94) was well read
in the Social Contract and used bloody methods to defend Rousseau’s
basic notion of equality.11 Napoleon, for his part, could claim to be the
political embodiment of the people’s moral will.12 Wordsworth remained
confident, at the start, that the ‘Reign of Terror’ against nominal en-
emies of the Revolution would consume itself without weakening the
people’s widespread desire for democracy under peaceful and represen-
tative government.13 His hopes, however, were only half-fulfilled. When
Robespierre was executed, by the National Convention in 1794, the
way was cleared for the rapid rise of Napoleon (1769–1821) as the leading
figure in French warfare and politics. The Corsican general, however,
never gained the poet’s respect: his heroic deeds and chicanery were
condemned as shallow and impious ambition, unworthy of the ‘one
paramount mind’ whom the poet had called upon in the period to
clear ‘a passage for just government’ and leave ‘a solid birthright to
the State’.14 Wordsworth finally abandoned the French people in the
period of Napoleonic conquest and imperialism. The decisive event, in
his eyes, was ‘the invasion of Switzerland and the subversion of its
republican institutions by French armies in the autumn of 1798’. Only
then, he concluded, in the Convention of Cintra (1809), did the war
against France begin ‘to be regarded by the body of the people as in-
deed both just and necessary’. This bold statement distorted the facts.
The English campaign only became popular in its second phase:
1803–15.15 Still, the poet was right to see the event as symbolic of the
Republic’s perversion of values and a true record of his own revulsion
of feeling at the time. As Cobban observed, the ‘invasion of Switzer-
land was by no means the worst crime of the young republic; but the
internal conditions of Switzerland were unknown to the outside world,
and whereas other invasions might be represented as defensive mea-
sures undertaken against the league of [European] despots for the sake
of freeing enslaved populations, the invasion of Switzerland was a patent
interference with the internal affairs of a sister republic and the tradi-
tional home of liberty’.16 Indeed, Wordsworth had given his heart ‘to
the People’,
But now, become oppressors in their turn,

Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence
For one of conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for. 17
Wordsworth had found the Republic wanting. He therefore turned slowly

but surely towards Burke’s original arguments against the theory of natural
rights which he had once espoused. 18 Alfred Cobban’s account of
Wordsworth’s disenchantment has much to recommend it as psychol-
ogy: it dovetails neatly with similar studies of the Lake Poet given by
Crane Brinton, F. M. Todd, and, most recently, Nicholas Roe, who con-
cluded that ‘Wordsworth’s consciousness of human weakness and
fallibility . . . was the hardest lesson of revolution’.19 Wordsworth, how-
ever, was henceforth hurled upon the horns of a dilemma. Having turned
to the ‘genius of Burke’ for a conservative solution to the problem of
political order and stability, in a time of momentous social and econ-
omic change, the great Romantic poet could not accept the statesman’s
‘psychology’ of Man.20
Burke’s belief in human fallibility left no room for Rousseau’s ‘Natu-
ral Man’ – whether in abstract form like the noble savage of the Social
Contract, or in flesh and blood like the inhabitants of Rousseau’s native
Switzerland. His creed was a flat contradiction of all Romantic notions
of natural innocence, goodness and freedom. In the Vindication of Natural
Society Burke offered a burlesque both of rationalism and of the unsub-
stantiated idea ‘of a free, happy, lawless, and propertyless state of nature’.
His critique of Rousseau’s Natural Man was, in some respects, a proto-
type of modern anthropology as well as a practical argument against
natural rights. He had a high regard for ancient myths and legends,
believing that they embodied in primitive form the basic religious and
communal values which underpinned social and political life in what-

ever guise. Likewise, he was eager to defend the benefits of orthodox
religions and moral codes in different societies. Nevertheless, his cul-
tural relativism was qualified by his conviction that Britain’s Constitution
in Church and State was the best available framework for guaranteeing
both personal liberty and public security. Above all, he revealed the
great role of custom in keeping society together. Neither history nor
tradition could sustain the ‘idea of a primeval condition in which man,
unfettered by mundane convention, lived contentedly according to the
easy impulses of natural right’.21 Even Herman Melville, a great be-
liever in Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’, reviewed life among the cannibals
of the Marquesas Islands with a mixture of profound fear and admira-
tion. Beyond their native innocence and hospitality to strangers lay
the terrible secrets of the tribal Taboo and the ‘frightful genius of pagan
worship’. Above all, he observed the ‘scene of many a prolonged feast’
and ‘of many a horrid rite’.22 Reason played little part in their religion
or their daily life; magic and superstition much. He was closer, in this
regard, to ‘cultural conservatives’ like Burke and Coleridge who weighed
the benefits and drawbacks of abstract reason and virtue against the
dark side of man’s instinctual nature.23 Indeed, Burke’s view of Man
was grounded in the medieval tradition of Original Sin. The ‘levellers’
of the French Revolution believed that society was rendered bad by its
given institutions and structure; remove them, and Man’s natural goodness
and reason would prevail. Burke, however, believed that Man’s suffer-
ing was caused by innate weakness, if not total depravity: ‘You would
not cure the evil’, he warned, ‘by resolving that there should be no
more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpret-
ers of law; no general officers; no public councils. . . . Wise men will
apply their remedies to vices, not to names’.24 He even glimpsed the
terrible figure of ‘the gallows’ lurking behind the philosophic groves
and democratic vistas of the French revolutionaries. The Republic’s ‘laws’,
he argued, could only ‘be supported . . . by their own terrors’, or ‘by
the [casual] concern which each individual may find in them from his
own private speculations, or . . . private interests’. This vision was soon
realised in France, if only for a short time.25 Moreover, his direful con-
clusion followed from his argument that Government was ‘a contrivance
of human wisdom to provide for human wants’, among which were
numbered ‘the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon
their passions’.26 Wordsworth, of course, had seen the Revolution fall
victim to the vices of vanity, ‘pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust,
sedition, hypocrisy, [and] ungoverned zeal’.27 They had revealed them-
selves with equal force during the Reign of Terror, the Directorate and
Napoleon’s virtual dictatorship. He was devastated. It forced him to
clarify his former views of radical politics, on the one hand, and the
nature of man, on the other. The next chapter will deal with each of
these events in further detail. It is sufficient here to give his main con-
clusions: first, he was convinced that radical ideas and activities were
both shallow and unworkable. By 1805, for instance, he was ‘prepared
to find’:
Ambition, folly, [and] madness in the men

Who thrust themselves upon this passive world
As Rulers of the world, to see in these,
Even when the public welfare is their aim,
Plans without thought, or bottom’d on false thought
And false philosophy. 28
Like Burke, he rejected the view that ‘reason’ was able by itself to jus-
tify either revolution or major reform. It was fallible. ‘Politics’, wrote
Burke, ‘ought to be adjusted, not to reasonings, but to human nature;
of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part’.29
Over the next thirty years the poet moved closer to the statesman’s
conservative position. In a letter to a famous prelate, for example, sent
on the eve of Catholic Emancipation, he declared that ‘human nature,
be it what it may, must by legislators be looked at as it is’.30 But did he
subscribe to Burke’s views of Original Sin? In a word, ‘No’. Wordsworth’s
emotional crisis in the years 1794–8 was resolved in favour of his ear-
lier Romantic creed. As Nicholas Roe observed, ‘it was [revolutionary]
failure that made Wordsworth a poet’.31 It forced him to look afresh at
his vivid memories of childhood, nature and rural life, and to re-work
his knowledge of Rousseau’s Natural Man into a modern theory of
language, poetry and imagination. Rousseau’s preference for Nature was
‘sentimental’. It stemmed from a religious need for inner personal truth.
‘Ah, Madame!’, he confessed to a correspondent, ‘sometimes in the privacy
of my study, with my hands pressed tight over my eyes or in the dark-
ness of the night, I am of [the] opinion that there is no God. But look
yonder: the rising of the sun, as it scatters the mists that cover the
earth, and lays bare the wondrous glittering scene of nature, disperses
at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I find my faith again, and
my God, and my belief in Him. I admire and adore Him, and I pros-
trate myself in His presence’.32 By no stretch of the imagination could
this sentiment be called ‘mystical’ in scope or character. Wordsworth’s
contact with Nature, however, was truly visionary; its starting point
was the pantheistic experience of ‘God and Nature’s single sovereignty’.33
Whence, then, did evil arise? Was Nature, or social life, the cause of
human weakness? Wordsworth wavered between individual and collec-
tive causes of human misery and vice. His Romantic critique of urban
and industrial life was based, in part, upon backward-looking ideals of
rural life and society. Likewise, his own visionary experience of Nature’s
‘awful Power’, and her role in shaping his own poetic imagination,
were enough to convince him ‘that Nature never did betray/ The heart
that loved her’.34 Nevertheless, he still believed that human weakness
and vice were visible both in urban and in rural environments. The
difference between them was partly one of scale: rural life offered ‘fewer
temptations to gross vice & scandalous behaviour’, and more compen-
sations for the sufferer than did urban life and society.35 But it was also
a difference in kind: his memories of the lower-middle ranks of statesmen-
farmers, rural artisans, village labourers and travellers confirmed his
Romantic belief that men and women in low stations were not insen-
sible to life’s mystery and truth. Nor were they incapable of furnishing
the highest moral and emotional subjects for art and poetry:
There are who think that strong affections, love

Known by whatever name, is falsely deem’d
A gift, to use a term which they would use,
Of vulgar Nature, that its growth requires
Retirement, leisure, language purified
By manners thoughtful and elaborate,
That whoso feels such passion in excess
Must live within the very light and air
Of elegances that are made by man.36
Burke, for one, had argued that ‘art is man’s nature’. It resides in the
highest conditions and activities of civilisation: ‘Never, no never, did
Nature say one thing and Wisdom another’. ‘Nor are sentiments of
elevation in themselves turgid or unnatural. Nature is never more truly
herself than in her grandest forms. . . . The Apollo of Belvedere . . . is as
much in nature as any figure from the pencil of Rembrandt, or any
clown in the rustic revels of Teniers.’ 37 Always an aristocrat, in culture,
he believed that real and symbolic differences between ranks were de-
veloped over the centuries for the good offices of society. Hence his
revulsion at the revolutionary effects of social and political equality, in
France, which he felt to be an affront to the very notion of civilisation
itself:
All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience
liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which,
by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments
which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this
new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery
of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished
from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns,
and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of

our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own
estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquarian
fashion.38
The chivalry and formality of France’s ancien régime had been defiled
by the Jacobins and ‘levellers’ of the Revolution. Burke’s comment on
‘the decent drapery of life’, however, was also a rhetorical defence of
England’s own aristocratic government and landed elite. It suggested
that government and authority were necessarily a fabric of artificial
ranks, distinctions, educations, traditions and mores. Symbolism was
part of the function of the State and its different classes. Wordsworth’s
dependence upon landed patrons, and his involvement in whig and
tory politics, were partly responsible for his final acceptance of the
practical need for social, economic and political distinctions in the period
1814–32. Nevertheless, he bent ‘in reverence’:
To Nature, and the power of human minds,

To men, as they are men within themselves.39
Indeed, he believed that high society and culture were based, in part,
upon false assumptions about the relationship between men in gen-
eral, and between readers and writers, in particular. In lines reminiscent
of his letters to John Wilson and C. J. Fox, he deplored how men ‘mis-
lead each other’ for the sake of their vanity and pride; ‘above all/ How
Books mislead’ the public, ‘looking for their fame’:
To judgments of the wealthy Few, who see

By artificial lights, how they debase
The Many for the pleasure of those few
Effeminately level down the truth
To certain general notions for the sake
Of being understood at once, or else
Through want of better knowledge in the men
Who frame them, flattering thus our self-conceit
With pictures that ambitiously set forth
The differences, the outside marks by which
Society has parted man from man,
Neglectful of the universal heart.40
If Burke had lived to read Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude or

The Excursion he would have been shocked by the poet’s candid attri-
bution of the ‘highest bliss’ and the profoundest feelings and emotions
to characters ‘of low and rustic life’. By addressing different kinds of
people, in the Lyrical Ballads, from yeoman-farmers and shepherds to

homeless children and beggars, Wordsworth brought English literature
into the ambit of the social and political revolution in France. He gave
independent voices and characters to the very classes whom Burke had
likened, at best, to cattle under the English oaks, who were oblivious
to the noise of Jacobin innovation, and, at worst, to the ‘swinish mul-
titude’ who would overthrow the old landed order.41 Wordsworth thereby
compelled the polite reader to consider the highly individual lives and
attributes of his subjects from whom he was largely estranged by
‘language . . . manners . . . laws and customs’.42 In short, he rejected radical
activity in favour of Romantic individualism and the affirmation of
universal values and behaviour which revealed themselves in all levels
of society, however humble. By this means he re-worked Rousseau’s
version of the Natural Man to fit the historical context of Old England’s
lower-middle ranks, in general, and his own experience of rural life, in
particular. Be this as it may, he could not square either version of life
with Burke’s view of Original Sin, nor the prescriptive basis of social
and political life in Old England.
If Man’s nature was for ever ‘fallen’, as Burke believed, then his social
and political life must always suffer to some extent. He would have
agreed with Robert Frost’s adage that: ‘All ages of the world are bad –
a great deal worse anyway than Heaven’.43 Nevertheless, his view of
history allowed for a measure of social progress, or ‘perfection’, under
the guidance of Heaven.44 Society was described as a great contract
between its members. It was a partnership, or corporation, whose terms
were binding upon the past, present and future generations. But its
organisation and goals were more like those of a universal Church than,
say, a chartered company45:
Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be

dissolved at pleasure – but the state ought not to be considered as
nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper
and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be
taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the
fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; be-
cause it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross
animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a part-
nership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every
virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership can-
not be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not
only between those who are living, but between those who are liv-
ing, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.46
Burke’s sliding from the contractual basis of society to that of the state
is curious but consistent47: elsewhere, for example, he contrasts the
social being, or the ‘state’, with the ‘government’ of the nation. The
former is made by God, the latter by men. But the basis of government
is ‘laid, not in imaginary rights of men, (which at best is a confusion
of judicial with civil principles,) but in political convenience, and in
human nature; either as that nature is universal, or as it is modified by
local habits and social aptitudes’.48 Hence his preference for prescrip-
tive rights over natural ones. Here, however, the whig statesman was
tossed upon the horns of a dilemma. He was far ‘from denying in
theory . . . the real rights of men’, only ‘their false claims of right’.49
But what were these ‘real rights’ if not ‘natural’? Burke was forced to
agree: God had ordained the state for certain benefits to man; among
which he reckoned equality of justice before the law, security of prop-
erty and labour, the refinements of civilised life and institutions, and
the advantages of orderly society. 50 Nevertheless, he was convinced that
the British Constitution in Church and State was the best available
guarantee of such ‘natural’ rights. In consequence, he wavered between
abstract and prescriptive rights: the one being universal claims, made a
priori, upon all civilised constitutions; the other being the results of a
people’s given social and political history. On some occasions, he de-
clared that natural rights preceded the Constitution and gave it ‘latent
wisdom’. But when revolutionaries and rationalists in France used the
same idea to defend their secular and democratic constitution, he called
instead for the concrete facts of historical experience and proven rights:
‘Our Constitution’, he wrote, ‘is . . . prescriptive’. Its ‘sole authority is
that it has existed time out of mind . . . without any reference what-
ever to any other more general or prior right’. Experts agree that Burke
never resolved the logical contradiction in his view of legal rights.51
Nevertheless, the normative notion of prescriptive rights could be used
to justify both the Bourbon regime of pre-revolutionary France and the
Hanoverian regime of unreformed England: in fact, the greatest evil of
the French Revolution, in Burke’s eyes, was its faith in human reason
and social science. Burke could not believe that any generation of men
had yet discovered the best form of government or social organisation.
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or

reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught
a priori. . . . The science of government being . . . so practical in it-
self, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires
experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in
his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is
with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling
down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages
the common purposes of society . . .52
Even his high regard for England’s Old Regime was tempered by a knowl-
edge of its specific imperfections.53
I think our happy situation owing to our constitution; but owing to

the whole of it, and not to any part singly; owing in a great measure
to what we have left standing in our several reviews and reforma-
tions, as well as to what we have altered or superadded.54
In consequence, what was handed down from one generation to the

next was to be treated with the utmost respect as the collective wis-
dom and experience of the race. Hence his conservative case against
reason and innovation. A careful adjustment of the state’s given form
depended upon ‘the known march of the ordinary providence of God’.55
Radical changes were therefore rejected as unwise attempts to circum-
vent the proven record of social progress in each country. Human pride
and reason were regarded as kindred powers which threatened to de-
stroy the present dispensation. Reform was a last resort; a safety valve
for widespread discontent, or persistent complaints, which could not
be settled within the given body of laws and institutions.
I should be led to my remedy by a great grievance. In what I did, I

should follow the example of our ancestors. I would make the rep-
aration as nearly as possible in the style of the building. . . . Not
being illuminated with the light of which the gentlemen of France
tell us they have got so abundant a share, they acted under a strong
impression of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind. . . . Let us
add, if we please; but let us preserve what they left; and standing on
the firm ground of the British constitution, let us be satisfied to
admire, rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights, the
aeronauts of France.56
For many years after 1803, Wordsworth continued to defend the ideals
of the early revolutionaries and those men and women who had
sympathised with them – whether at home or abroad.57 Nevertheless,
his conservative defence of the British Constitution in Church and State
was based, for the most part, upon Burke’s essays and speeches.58 Thus
he told the distinguished mathematician, Sir William Rowan Hamilton,
in 1831, that:
The Constitution of England which seems about to be destroyed [by

the Great Reform Bill], offers to my mind the sublimest contempla-
tion which the History of Society and Govern[men]t have ever pre-
sented to it; and for this cause especially, that its principles have
the character of pre-conceived ideas, [or] archetypes of the pure
intellect, while they are in fact the results of a humble-minded
experience.59
Here Wordsworth’s standing as a ‘cultural conservative’ is evident in

his use of Coleridgean language like ‘pre-conceived ideas’ and ‘arche-
types of the pure intellect’. But the difference is still instructive: Coleridge
gave first place to the unchanging idea of the State as it was philo-
sophically conceived rather than the events of English history from
which it was factually derived. Wordsworth, for his part, gave prece-
dence to the people’s gradual perception of universal values of justice,
liberty and order in everyday life and society and their progressive
embodiment in a system of formal laws and institutions. The influence
of Burke is evident in the views of both men. Coleridge, like Burke,
made the unfounded assumption ‘that English history and the English
constitution have an archetypal significance’, but the critic’s essay on
The Constitution of Church and State (1830) has more in common with
Plato’s classic work, The Republic, than the statesman’s scattered speeches
and essays on social and political life.60 For his part, Wordsworth was
drawn towards Burke’s view of the British Constitution as the natural
accretion of time and circumstance: It ‘was not preconceived and planned
beforehand – it grew under the protection of Providence – as a skin
grows to, with, and for the human body’.61 Hence his anger at the
advocates of the Great Reform Bill of 1832: ‘Our Ministers would flay
this body [of laws and institutions], and present us, instead of its natu-
ral Skin, with a garment made to order, which, if it be not rejected,
will prove such a Shirt as, in the Fable, drove Hercules to madness and
self-destruction’.62 But where does this leave the poet? Was he hope-
lessly torn between his Romantic ideals of ‘Man, Nature, and Society’
and his tory politics? In a word, ‘Yes’. He had never been ‘born’ or
bred a conservative like Sir Walter Scott, nor able to break boldly his
‘squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition’ like Coleridge or Robert Southey.63
His emotional attachments to persons, places and things gave his ideas
a greater hold on his imagination and affections. His final rejection of
radical politics was therefore caused by his belief that reason was not
sufficient for the growth of social sympathy and the guarantee of pol-
itical order and stability. Here the works of Noel O’Sullivan and Anthony
Quinton provide a valuable context in which to judge Wordsworth’s
conservative views. Both writers focus upon the idea of ‘imperfection’
in Man’s moral and intellectual natures.64 Thus O’Sullivan believes that
conservative ideology is ‘committed to the idea of limits’, on the one
hand, and ‘directed towards the defence of a limited style of politics’,
on the other. By limits he means two things: first, that social reality is
not readily understood nor handled by men; and, secondly, ‘that pain,
evil and suffering’ are permanent features of individual and collective
life.65 Quinton, however, narrows the field even further than O’Sullivan
with his view that political conservatism in English history from Hooker
to Oakeshott is primarily concerned with man’s intellectual limits in a
world of manifold experience:
It is opposed to totalitarian conceptions of the scope of government

and to the according of absolute power to any person or institution.
Although, like all other positive theories of government, it draws on
the notion of man’s moral imperfection, its distinctive emphasis is
on the intellectual imperfection of mankind. From that fact, together
with an acknowledgement of the extreme complexity of the social
order, it infers that the theoretical constructions of the individual
intellect are inadequate guides to political practice. Direct experi-
ence can equip men to manage institutions that they cannot
individually construct, but in whose natural growth an accumulated
collective wisdom is progressively embodied.66
His view, perhaps, is better suited to Wordsworth’s Romantic conserva-

tism than to Burke’s scholastic variety. He does not, for example, give
a convincing argument for his conclusion that Burke’s understanding
of political life was really ‘utilitarian’ rather than moral and religious.67
We have already seen strong evidence, for example, that Burke’s con-
servative views were based firmly upon the notion of Man’s universal
weakness and vice. It was the efficient cause rather than the observable
effect of Man’s bad behaviour. Be this as it may, Quinton’s basically
secular view of conservative thought helps to ease the tension between
Wordsworth’s life-long belief in human goodness and his growing fears
about the direction and meaning of modern secular society. Wordsworth
wanted to limit the scope of reason and intellect to effect radical changes
in social, economic and political life.68 For example, he opposed the
Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 because it conflicted with traditional
notions of outdoor relief and social independence. Likewise, he sup-
ported petty production in the workshop and field at the expense of
economic rationalism. He even rejected the Great Reform Bill because
it gave too much weight to those commercial and industrial classes
who were responsible for the spread of reductive materialism and the
liberal politics of laissez-faire individualism. Above all, as Crane Brinton
and Francis Klingender argued, in their respective studies of the French
and Industrial Revolutions, Wordsworth became a conservative because
sweeping social, economic and political reforms had failed, in his eyes,
to improve the happiness of the common man.69 Henceforth his stan-
dard of the good life and moral progress was based upon emotion rather
than reason; experience rather than theory; and tradition rather than
abstract ideas. Clearly, the poet arrived at a middle ground between
Burke’s view of social and political life and his own Romantic ideal of
Nature and the common man. In the next chapter we will discuss the
several tensions in his conservative position: for example, he some-
times wavered between the Romantic love of Nature and the orthodox
views of the Anglican Church regarding sin and redemption. Thus, in
1834, he meditated upon the timeless question of ‘who is innocent’ in
the world?
By grace divine,
Not otherwise, O Nature! we are thine,
Through good and evil thine, in just degree
Of rational and manly sympathy.
To all that Earth from pensive hearts is stealing,
And Heaven is now to gladdened eyes revealing,
Add every charm the Universe can show
Through every change its aspects undergo –
Care may be respited, but not repealed;
No perfect cure grows on that bounded field.
Vain is the pleasure, a false calm the peace,
If He, through Whom alone our conflicts cease,
Our virtuous hopes without relapse advance,
Come not to speed the Soul’s deliverance;
To the distempered Intellect refuse
His gracious help, or give what we abuse.70
Wordsworth, at such times, was never closer to Burke’s conservative

views of human nature. But even here he stopped short of saying that
Man was inherently evil or corrupt. Moreover, God might save men by
His grace, but Nature did not lead them into crime and wrongdoing;
the diseased ‘intellect’ and abuse of free will did that. Clearly, he re-
mained loyal to his grand idea of the Natural Man and the power of
rural life to influence Man’s behaviour for the better. The evident con-
tradiction between his vision of natural innocence and virtue and Burke’s
views of human fallibility and ignorance remains unresolved to the
detriment of his Golden Age theories of Childhood, the Family, and
the Old Landed Order – to which we must now turn.
The notion of human fallibility affects Wordsworth’s inward notion of

childhood as a unique state of mind, and the outward facts of the old
landed order as ‘best’ suited to the child’s growth and happiness. The
most celebrated statement of the poet’s mental position is the following
stanza from the Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early

Childhood (1807):
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He
Beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.71
Wordsworth told his nephew, Christopher, that the Ode did ‘not pro-
fess to give a literal representation of the state of the affections and of
the moral being, in childhood’. He referred instead only to his ‘own
feeling at that time’.72 On the other hand, The Prelude, and the Lyrical
Ballads, both confirm his Romantic belief in the innocence and bless-
edness of childhood for all mankind. His own childhood, moreover,
was not only memorable for its mystical union with Nature. It was
also a special pleading for life in Old Lakeland. Thus he reflected upon
the privilege of living at Grasmere, which he had first seen whilst ‘a
roving schoolboy’ at Hawkshead:
Nowhere (or is it fancy?) can be found,

The one sensation that is here; ’tis here,
Here as it found its way into my heart
In childhood, here as it abides by day,
By night, here only; or in chosen minds
That take it with them hence, where’er they go.
’Tis, but I cannot name it, ’tis the sense
Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,
A blended holiness of earth and sky,

Something that makes this individual Spot,
This small Abiding-place of many Men,
A termination, and a last retreat,
A Centre, come from wheresoe’er you will,
A Whole without dependence or defect,
Made for itself, and happy in itself,
Perfect Contentment, Unity entire. 73
No one, to my knowledge, has noted the logical tension between Burke’s

notion of Man’s ‘fallibility’ and Wordsworth’s Golden Age ideals of
childhood and the old landed order. (It has been completely overlooked,
for example, by Michael Friedman, who has studied the poet’s ‘tory
humanism’ in great detail and subtlety.74) But here we might go fur-
ther and ask what historians and psychologists think about the origins
and significance of childhood in history. Do they agree with Burke or
Wordsworth? No simple answer can be given to that question. The study
of childhood and the family is still in its infancy and few conclusions
have been reached. Nonetheless, the attempt to bring Wordsworth’s
ideas on the family and childhood into the modern debate is itself a
valuable contribution to it.
Consider, for example, the ideas of Philippe Aries, in Centuries of
Childhood (1962). Aries studied the concept of childhood in Europe,
from the Middle Ages to the present, as the product of new family
relationships and class needs. It first appeared, in its modern form, in
France among the middle classes during the seventeenth century, and
only later filtered down to the peasants and urban workers.75 The child
was henceforth depicted, in art and literature, ‘by himself and for him-
self’.76 Therefore the reality of the child’s world and his own identity
were largely defined by adults in social terms rather than the bonds
between parents and offspring. Thus he argued that the importance of
‘the child’s personality was linked with the growing influence of Chris-
tianity on life and manners’.77 This meant that the traditional ‘fondness’
felt by middle-class parents for their children was replaced, in France,
from the seventeenth century onwards, by a pervasive concern for the
child’s ‘innocence’ and moral welfare.78 Above all the child was regarded
as fallible by pedagogic writers like Balthazar Gratien, who wrote, for
example, in a popular treatise on education, that only ‘time can cure a
person of childhood and youth, which are truly ages of imperfection
in every respect’.79 By the eighteenth century, concludes Aries, not ‘only
the child’s future but his presence and his very existence’ were of moral
and religious concern to middle class parents and school authorities:
the child had ‘taken a central place in the family’.80 Of course, Aries’s
methods and conclusions have been questioned by several experts. The

best summary of the case against him is found in Ralph Houlbrooke,
The English Family 1450–1700 (1984):
Aries took up an already current but somewhat nebulous idea that

older children were treated like ‘little adults’ in early modern times
and expressed it with a new vigour. He used what at first looked like
a wealth of convincing evidence from literature and art and related
his central theme to developments in education and the nuclear family.
Yet Aries ignored, or dismissed as irrelevant, much mediaeval evi-
dence of solicitude for children and awareness of their distinctive
characteristics. The portrayal of children was only one of the areas
affected by the development in art of naturalism and a secular spirit;
the late Middle Ages saw not only adults and small children, but
also men and women, increasingly differentiated by their dress. Yet
Aries failed to take full account of these facts. He repeatedly ripped
evidence from its proper context, failed to consider how typical it
was, and confused prescription with practice.81
Clearly, Aries overstated his case. Above all, perhaps, he tried too hard
to depict the ‘typical’ childhood in middle-class Europe: most recent
scholarship pointing to a great diversity of parental expectations and
practices in the period. Both his ‘class’ thesis, however, and the quali-
fications made to it, are relevant to any detailed discussion of the social
origins and significance of Wordsworth’s Romantic ideas in the old landed
order.
Aries’s thesis, for example, supports my main social assumption that
Wordsworth’s status, or identity, was somewhat ill-defined in the period
1778–1814. We have already seen evidence that the poet’s ‘populist
sentiments’ were the result of his contacts with men and women at
Hawkshead who were, socially and economically, beneath him. Here
we can qualify more carefully than before the bias in that plebeian
view. For example, the poet observed, in a letter to an unknown corre-
spondent, in 1808, that: ‘Formerly, indeed till within these few years,
Children were very carelessly brought up; at present they too early and
too habitually feel their own importance, from the solicitude and un-
remitting attendance which is bestowed upon them’.82 Clearly he believed
that children in general and not just plebeian boys and girls were once
given a free rein by their parents. His mother, Ann Wordsworth, was a
case in point. She was solicitous for all her children, especially Will-
iam, who was often proud and defiant; but she was ‘not puff’d up by
false, or unnatural hopes’ for them, nor did she restrict their move-
ments. 83 Indeed, as Hunter Davies observed: ‘For a conventional,
middle-class family of the times, which employed a nurse to look after
the children and at least one maid servant, William was allowed a re-
markable amount of freedom’.84 Hence the poet’s earliest memories of
Cockermouth were often images of rambling amongst the ruins of the
town’s castle, playing by the river Derwent, or running about the
neighbouring fields and woods. His adventurous spirit was sown at
Cockermouth and Penrith rather than Hawkshead. The poet, in fact,
never forgot his mother’s great ‘faith’ in her children’s ‘innocent in-
stincts’ and the natural course of their physical and mental growth.
Some biographers have even ascribed his own love of Nature to her. 85
If her ideas of childhood were old-fashioned, however, they were also a
protection against the newfangled ‘systems’ of education which flour-
ished in Europe after the publication of Rousseau’s Emile in 1762.86
Wordsworth even attributed his mother’s broad-minded views of edu-
cation and child-rearing ‘to the times, . . . / And [to the] spot in which
she liv’d’.87 This statement is plausible but very difficult to prove. For
example, his grandmother, Dorothy Cookson, was born into the an-
cient country family of the Crackanthorpes, who owned Newbiggin Hall
in Westmorland. We have already seen evidence that the squires and
gentry of the Lake Counties were often little different from the well-to-
do yeomen, artisans and clergy of the area and often shared their old
fashioned lifestyles and values. On the other hand, she had married a
fairly prosperous mercer, in Penrith, named William Cookson. Together
they raised their youngest son, William, for the Church, and their
eldest son, Christopher, for the manor-house: he eventually inherited
the estate and assumed the name of Christopher Cookson Crackanthorpe.88
The grandparents and their male offspring had definite social preten-
sions; even Ann Wordsworth married a promising land-agent for Sir
James Lowther. Their view of life, however, was apparently very differ-
ent to that of their daughter (Ann). For example, when she died, in
1778, her children were often forced to spend many days with her
parents at the clothing shop in Penrith. Dorothy, in particular, was
raised by her grandparents for several years. They judged her ‘untractable
and wild spirit’ as a classic example of ‘original sin’ and set about tam-
ing her. Thus in a letter to her friend Jane Pollard, Dorothy lamented
that:
One would imagine a Grandmother would feel for her grandchild

all the tenderness of a mother when that Grandchild had no other
parent, but there is no such tenderness in her manner, nor anything
affectionate. While I am in her house, I cannot consider myself as at
home – I feel like a stranger. You cannot think how gravely and
silently I sit with her and my Grandfather, you would hardly know
me. You are well acquainted that I was never remarkable for tacitur-
nity, but now I sit for whole hours without saying anything excepting
that I have a shirt to mend, then, my Grandmother and I have to

set our heads together and contrive the most notable way of doing
it, which I daresay in the end we always hit upon, but really the
contrivance takes up more time than the shirt is worth. Our conver-
sation is about work, work, or what kind of servant such a one’s is,
who her parents are, what places she lived in, why she left them,
etc. etc. What, my dear Jane, can be more uninteresting than such
conversation as this?89
Clearly, the emphasis upon decorum, ‘work’, and domestic service was
not merely the result of the age difference between Dorothy and her
maternal grandparents. It was a ‘middle-class’ concern for Dorothy’s
future respectability and marriage prospects. Indeed, the grandparents
were positively ‘bourgeois’ in their commercial lifestyle and values, on
the one hand, and their domestic behaviour both in and above the
shop, on the other. The main point to note here is that the poet was
not constrained to the same degree by the grandparents’ ‘middle-class’
ideas about ‘work’, religion and family connections.90 He was entrusted
for most of his boyhood and youth to the care of Ann Tyson and the
teachers of Hawkshead Grammar School. This is not to say that his
mother had ever neglected his formal education and communion within
the Established Church. On the contrary, she had encouraged her chil-
dren to learn the catechism and to respect the yearly rites of the Anglican
congregation.91 Indeed, one of the few memories which Wordsworth
had of his mother’s face was impressed upon him one day at church,
in the busy moments they had shared in waiting for the minister to
hear him recite the catechism. She therefore laid a foundation-stone
for her son’s final return to orthodoxy in the post-war period. In short,
his formative years were spent under the watchful but unobtrusive eye
of his ‘Beloved Mother’ who never burdened him with unnecessary
labour or schemes of moral improvement.92 We will deal later with
Michael Friedman’s Freudian study of Wordsworth’s Golden Age ideas,
but it might be noted here that his ‘Oedipal’ reading of the poet’s
relationship with his mother might amount to no more than a ‘middle-
class’ mother’s strong affection for her wayward but emotional son;
especially, in the long periods of absence from her husband, who worked
all over Cumberland.93 Indeed, John Wordsworth himself played a short
but important role in keeping the family together before and after his
wife’s death, and was responsible for the boys receiving a broad educa-
tion both at home and away. He was a well-read and intelligent man,
who encouraged his children to learn large portions of Milton, Shakespeare
and Spenser and allowed William to use his ‘golden store’ of books;
the budding poet reading at a young age ‘all [of ] Fielding’s works, Don
Quixote, Gil Blas, and any part of Swift that . . . [he] liked; Gulliver’s
Travels, and the Tale of the Tub, being both much to . . . [his] taste’. 94
We have already seen that Wordsworth’s views of good literature were
influenced by his love of highly imaginative works of high and low
culture alike. Thus Milton and ‘Jack the Giant Killer’ were both accept-
able food for the child’s emotions and feelings. If his mother, Dame
Birkett, and Ann Tyson were responsible for his knowledge of folklore
and ballads, his father was the guiding light of his early reading of the
nation’s ‘elder writers’.95 Ann Wordsworth, moreover, abhorred the fash-
ionable novels and moral tales of the late eighteenth century which
were written solely for children.96 Her views made a lasting impression
upon the poet. He told the famous American educationist, Elizabeth
Palmer Peabody, in 1827, that: ‘If I am to serve the very young by my
writings, it must be by benefitting at the same time, those who are old
enough to be their parents’.97 In other words, the poet was absolutely
convinced ‘that Children will derive most benefit from books which
are not unworthy the perusal of persons of any age’; and strongly pro-
tested ‘against those productions . . . in which the doings of children
are dwelt upon as if they were incapable of being interested in any-
thing else’.98 Both John and Ann Wordsworth, it seems, had encouraged
their son’s early imaginative life. Given their frequent separation, how-
ever, biographers like Stephen Gill have concluded that father and son
‘can hardly have been close’. Nevertheless, they have acknowledged
that Wordsworth was struck by his father’s death from a fever in December
of 1783. Indeed, Gill makes the interesting comment that some of
Wordsworth’s finest poetry ‘recalls . . . not the actual death of his father
but the intensity of his own longing to be home’ in the Christmas
holidays of that year. 99 Agreed. But we must make two further observa-
tions: the first is that John Wordsworth’s mental state was somewhat
suspect. The poet remarks that his father had not yet fully recovered
from his wife’s death (about five years before) when he too fell vio-
lently ill. His flagging spirits might well be evidence of a ‘death wish’
of sorts. Or, if that be too strong a term, say, ‘a recurrent depression’.100
Having caught a fever, himself, he never rallied. In this context of sad-
ness and depression, we might also infer, secondly, that the young couple
had been very close and had cast a benign influence over their children’s
lives. How else can we explain the following lines which were written
by Wordsworth when a boy of sixteen or seventeen years of age?
. . . what avails my tear?

To sorrow o’er a Father’s bier.
Flow on, in vain thou hast not flowed,
But eased me of a heavy load;
For much it gives my heart relief
To pay the mighty debt of grief,
With sighs repeated o’er and o’er,
* * *
Nor did my little heart foresee

She lost a home in losing thee.
Nor did it know of thee bereft
That little more than Heaven was left.101
Even without his mother, Wordsworth had found ‘a home’ in the com-
pany of his father and four siblings. It is therefore possible that both
parents were once firmly attached to each other and to their children
in the period 1768–78. If nothing else, they were certainly aware of
the many emotional, intellectual and physical needs of their children.
Likewise, when a student at Hawkshead, Wordsworth’s formal educa-
tion was directed by several people, who seem to have been quite ‘liberal’
in their views of education and childhood development. By contem-
porary standards, their courses and instruction were both progressive
and varied. Wordsworth was given a very good grounding in Latin gram-
mar, literature, and geometry; but the relevance both of words and
numbers to the intelligent understanding of the world was impressed
upon him. His schoolmasters, moreover, like William Taylor and Thomas
Bowman, employed their immense talents and broad interests in the
poetry of ‘sentiment’ and the ‘cult of melancholy’, to bring the school-
boy into the pre-Romantic world of modern literature and learning.102
Bowman’s son recorded his father’s belief ‘that he did more for Will-
iam Wordsworth by lending him books than by his teaching[;] . . . I
remember him telling [me] how he lent Wordsworth Cowper’s “Task”
when it first came out, and Burns’ “Poems”’. Wordsworth wrote to the
son adding that Bowman ‘also introduced him to Langhorne’s poems
and Beattie’s “Minstrel” & Percy’s “Reliques”, and that it was in books
or periodic works’ lent by the same ‘that he first became acquainted
with the poetry of Crabbe & Charlotte Smith & the two Wartons’.103
Such poetry was remarkably broad in its terms of reference: Cowper
praised the simplicity of the rural poor, and Langhorne ‘fairly brought
the Muse into the Company of common life, to which it . . . [came]
nearer than Goldsmith, and upon which it . . . [looked] with a tender
and enlightened humanity’.104 Likewise, the eighteenth-century tradi-
tion of humanitarianism was built upon by Charlotte Smith and Helen
Maria Williams (another of Wordsworth’s early favourites) who both
evinced a liberal concern for ‘the sufferings of the poor and the op-
pressed rather than with their virtues’.105 In other words, they helped
to develop Wordsworth’s own social and economic sympathies for the
common man and political reform.106 More importantly, for our pur-
poses, the teachers treated their students with a remarkable degree of

affection and foster care. They were probably quite firm with the boys
in class, but they showed a willingness to earn rather than to demand
their charges’ respect. Perhaps the rural isolation and the egalitarian
ethos of Hawkshead itself rubbed off on the staff. After all, three of the
headmasters during Wordsworth’s time at the school were local men:
Edward Christian was born and raised in Cockermouth(?), Cumberland;
William Taylor was a native of Outerthwaite, Lancashire, North of the
Sands; and Thomas Bowman was baptised in the parish of Askham,
Westmorland.107 Several of the teachers, moreover, were sons ‘of the
humble yeomanry’ who could not afford a university education and
therefore ‘became ushers in schools until such time as they were old
enough to receive ordination’.108 (Thomas Bowman, for instance, ushered
for two years under the headmastership of William Taylor.) We might
therefore expect a readiness on their part to accept, or to retain, those
local customs and mores which did not conflict with Edwin Sandys’s
foundation charter. The emotional bond between staff and students is
best seen in Wordsworth’s memories of William Taylor who died at the
early age of thirty-two years. Some of the senior boys, including
Wordsworth, were called to Taylor’s death bed for a final audience and
Wordsworth kissed him on the cheek.109 Eight years later the poet came
across the schoolmaster’s grave in Cartmel and cried at the vivid memories
of this man who had ‘loved the Poets’ and had given such particular
help to the schoolboy as he ‘Began to spin . . . [his] toilsome Songs’.110
Both parents and teachers, it seems, were lasting influences upon the
boy’s affective life and the education of his emotions no less than his
intellect. In consequence, his own views of childhood were shaped, in
part, by ‘middle-class’ ideas and relationships, in Aries’s sense of the
word, and not merely his mystical experience of Nature, or his adult
reading of Romantic poetry and prose. They confirmed in a striking
way the French historian’s idea of sentiment de l’enfance – or ‘an aware-
ness of the particular nature of childhood’.111
It might be objected, however, that Aries’s views of ‘class’ relationships
are not as relevant to the evolution of ‘modern’ English society as, say,
the French middle class since the seventeenth century. Agreed. But here
the great difficulty lies in defining terms like ‘class’ and ‘modern’. England,
in the late eighteenth century, was still ‘a “one-class society” . . . in the
sense that one status system was universally recognised throughout society
with the exception, perhaps, of the urban dissenters’.112 And yet, as Pro-
fessor Rubinstein observes, as ‘a system of achieving wealth and status’
England was pre-eminently ‘modern’ among Europe.113 Some historians
have therefore concluded that England was, in fact, a ‘post feudal or
preindustrial ancien regime’ that fitted obliquely into the pattern of aristo-
cratic and monarchical governments found on the continent.114 The
dependent ranks of society were still locked in a traditional way of life

which, nevertheless, included a large measure of economic individualism
and social movement.115 Even the Industrial Revolution itself is rendered
more intelligible against this long-term background: thus Alexis de
Tocqueville wrote of ‘liberal England’, during the nineteenth century, that:
At first blush it would appear that the old constitution is still in

force in England; but, on a closer view, this illusion is dispelled.
Forget old names, pass over old forms, and you will find the feudal
system substantially abolished there as early as the seventeenth cen-
tury: all classes freely intermingled, an eclipsed nobility, an aristocracy
open to all, wealth installed as the supreme power, all men equal
before the law, equal taxes, a free press, public debates – phenom-
ena which were all unknown to medieval society. It was the skilful
infusion of this young blood into the old feudal body which pre-
served its life, and imbued it with fresh vitality, without divesting it
of its ancient shape.116
This passage gives a striking view of England’s social, economic and

political ‘progress’ since the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. It brings to
the fore the visible differences between England and Europe in the eyes
of a gifted observer. Nevertheless, it is easy to confuse abolition of ‘the
feudal system’ by King Charles II, in 1660, with the end of the Old
Regime in England. We must not ignore the agrarian nature of English
society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; nor underrate the
cogency of the Old Regime’s conservative ideology and aristocratic code
in the years before 1829–32. Both social and economic practice and
political prescription were key elements in the pre-industrial order: for
example, the old patriarchal conception of family life was quite com-
patible with the aristocratic government’s belief in Church–State authority.
Both institutions ‘were regarded as divine’.117 Behind them lay notions
of natural authority and hierarchy, not emotional bonds between fam-
ily members, nor paternal obligations between the ranks of the old
landed order. As J. C. D. Clark explains:
The extended family has for centuries been no part of the English
experience: patriarchalism operated as metaphor. Yet we should re-
member that sentiment has been able to turn many sorts of social
reality into powerful and effective ideals in different eras – especially
where religion frequently, and common human decency briefly, in-
truded. But the hardest thing in dealing with patriarchalism is to
discard sentimental approval or censure as sources of analytical cat-
egories. It is particularly difficult since hierarchy and natural authority
were still found in families, and families were economically powerful.118
Indeed, the Old Regime’s ideology of Church–State hegemony had a

wide range of social and economic effects. For example, the notion of
family authority ‘was a matter of positive inculcation’, in Stuart and
Hanoverian times, by catechising priests, in parish schools and churches,
who used rote learning and the many examples of paternal authority
which were contained in the Bible to shape the minds of the nation’s
largely illiterate youth.119 Likewise, Dr George found that ‘child labour’,
in the eighteenth century, ‘was limited only by the possibilities of [dom-
estic] employment’. The lot of plebeian boys and girls was the result of
their families’ economic needs. Keeping them busy about the house,
the field or the workshop was good for the family budget and for the
children’s souls. They were coerced by God-fearing parents towards a
life of Christian piety and domestic economy. The ‘notion that chil-
dren should be treated with tenderness’, she concluded, still lay in the
future. Wordsworth might describe them as ‘trailing clouds of glory’,
but his forebears believed that they were often ‘limbs of Satan’ and
must be subdued.120 Here we might observe too the long-term signifi-
cance of this post-feudal ideology. The notion of childhood as a distinct
state of mind and body took longer to establish itself in England than
on the Continent. Not only Rousseau’s pre-Romantic ideas of educa-
tion and natural innocence, but Wordsworth’s Romantic depictions of
childhood and Nature were not readily accepted by the majority of the
middle class who formed the reading ‘public’. Such writers created the
taste by which they were read. By the early nineteenth century, how-
ever, the art and literature of the upper and middle classes were suffused
with references to children and their ways.121 Wordsworth’s close friends,
Charles and Mary Lamb, for instance, were publishing Poetry for Chil-
dren and the Tales from Shakespeare, whilst the Edgeworths, the Aikins
and the Taylors were all writing for children as a special audience.
Nonetheless, the middle classes were reluctant to extend the franchise
of childhood to the lower orders, who filled many of their factory floors
and coal pits in the period 1770–1832.122 In part, this was a conse-
quence of their own frequent rise from the lower-middle ranks of
tradesmen, artisans and farmers; but, in part, it was a result of their
specifically ‘Protestant’ beliefs and ‘Puritan’ traditions, which included
a cold rejection of secular humanism, on the one hand, and artistic
ideas and entertainments, on the other.123 Ironically, perhaps, many
poor parents were happy to exploit the labour of their own children in
the family business or on the farm no less than the big capitalist enterprise
and found it acceptable to their peers no less than their social superiors.
Both classes could benefit from this situation in the troublesome period
of early industrial capitalism (1770–1850). But it was the woeful legacy
of the Old Regime’s ideology of Church–State hegemony and the econ-
omic constraints of a rural economy.
What relevance does this short survey of the Old Regime have for
the study of Wordsworth’s Golden Age ideal of childhood and the fam-
ily? At first sight, the reader might think that Aries rather than Houlbrooke
has the stronger case. In other words, we might conclude that Wordsworth
merely projected his own ‘middle-class’ ideas about paternal relations
and domestic attachments on to his contemporaries in the Lake Dis-
trict. But the scope of my chapter does not warrant such a sweeping
conclusion. If anything, the poet’s study of family life in Old Lakeland
provides a valuable corrective to the views of Aries, Clark and George,
and a considerable amount of evidence in favour of Houlbrooke’s the-
sis that the emotional bonds and benefits of the simple household family
were well established by the mid-eighteenth century. 124 We have al-
ready discussed the poet’s vision of the Lake District yeomen as models
of sturdy individualism and strong communal ties. Above all, emotional
bonds and paternal relationships were quite common between family
members, farmers and their live-in servants. John Housman, for example,
observed, in 1800, the pleasing harmony of the statesmen, their families
and their rural labourers:
Property is very much divided in . . . [Cumberland], and most of the

little farmers cultivate their own small estates, which gives them an
air of independence, and constitutes a principal trait in their local
character. The farmer labours in the fields together with his family
and servants, and eats at the same table; his daughters and female
servants assist in carting, harrowing, and weeding, as also in hay-
making and harvesting . . . [and so on]. These healthy-looking maids
become alert, hardy, and industrious, and make excellent wives for
men in the same station.125
In fact, the Census returns for 1851 suggest that farmers’ daughters, in
general, married farmers’ sons.126 Moreover, most migration in Cumberland
and Westmorland stemmed from neighbouring parishes. In consequence,
it has been argued by analogy that the region’s marriage pattern was
similar. Communities of small farmers in such instances thereby devel-
oped strong kinship ties.127 Indeed, a number of regional and comparative
historians have remarked upon the ‘clan feeling’ and strong communal
ties of the remote Lakeland farmers in the period 1500 to the present.
‘The family’, writes Joan Thirsk, ‘was and still is the working unit’, in
the Lake Counties, ‘all joining in the running of the farm, all accept-
ing without question the fact that the family holding would provide
for them all or else that the family’s savings would go to buy a lease or
an interest in land nearby. The custom of partible inheritance . . . [fos-
tered] this attitude, and its survival’, in the 1960s, ‘among a small number
of families in Gosforth in Cumberland . . . suggests that it was once
more common in the northern fells’.128 Indeed, family bonds and identi-
ties could be cemented by rural isolation, the desire for self-sufficiency,
and the focus of economic efforts towards the social ends of future
independence, land-ownership, patrimonies for children, education and
other forms of individual advancement. Above all, the custom of pass-
ing the ‘paternal estate’, intact, to the eldest son or daughter, was
widespread in the Lake Counties. As the poet of ‘the simple primary
affections and duties’, Wordsworth was acutely aware of the statesmen’s
twin loves of family and landed property.129 What he valued most in
the pre-industrial order has already been remarked upon several times
in this essay. He was convinced that strong and healthy emotions were
generated by the ownership of land and the ability of the household
to make its own way in the world without dependence upon third
parties like employers, landlords or public charities. Wordsworth’s con-
temporaries were well aware of the same social and economic effects of
the old system of land tenure. Thus William Hutchinson was keen to
record the survival of old agrarian values and behaviour in his History
of the County of Cumberland (1794). For example, he observed, in
Cumberland Ward, that the father of the Reverend Josiah Relph, a dia-
lect poet and local curate, was a statesman whose small hereditary farm
did not reap more than thirty pounds a year; yet ‘with a kind of patri-
archal simplicity, he brought up a family of three sons and a daughter;
one of whom he set out for a learned profession’.130 Likewise Josiah
Relph’s student and editor, the Reverend Thomas Denton, was also the
son of a northern yeoman. Whereas Thomas was raised for the clergy,
his elder brother inherited ‘the paternal estate at Green-Foot’, which in
turn was passed on to his son, ‘the present Vicar of Bromfield’.131 Both
statesmen were models of economic frugality and paternal feeling. Many
freeholders and customary tenants, however, were not averse to using
family labour rather than hired hands. This was especially true of the
dalesmen in Westmorland who did ‘the work upon their own estates,
with their own hands and those of their families’ and seemed reluctant
‘to labour for other people’.132 Here context is crucial. Whereas some
rural groups like weavers and miners were known to ‘exploit’ their
children’s labour, the practice was less common among small farmers
whose income was based upon a range of goods and by-employments –
from crops and wool clips to homespun yarn and hand-made stockings
and so on.133 (It is worth reminding the reader that weavers who en-
gaged in farming were more properous and independent than those
who did not.) As times got worse for small holders, in the nineteenth
century, they might have become more dependent upon their children’s
labour to keep their estates viable. This might explain the curious com-
ment made by Sir John Clapham that lesser yeomen in the Lake District
were reluctant to send their children to the new state schools in the
1870s because they needed their labour. 134 On the other hand, we have
already discussed the close connection between the old endowed gram-
mar schools and the statesmen system of farming in the region. It is
therefore possible that the traditional relationship between schools and
farming families was partly successful because it was voluntary and did
not force parents to part with their children’s labour where this was
not workable. (Nor did the old system of village and dame schools
remove the children from the home for more than a few hours in the
day.) Hence the economic contribution of such children to their par-
ents’ income remained important. Indeed, some parishes in the Lake
Counties were all but proverbial for their various by-employments: thus,
in 1826, when ‘Harry’, Lord Brougham, was conducting the last of his
great political campaigns against the Lowthers in Westmorland, he ad-
dressed the people of Ravenstonedale from the gallery of the Black Swan
Inn, ‘and in the course of his speech, seeing several of the women and
lads knitting whilst listening to him, said [that] “this parish ought to
be called the knitting dale”’.135 Clearly, the division between everyday
life and work was not yet visible. This social and economic relation-
ship between parents and their children in the Lake Counties was, perhaps,
partly responsible for the harmony noted amongst the local communi-
ties of the period. The ‘young and old’ in Orton Parish, for example,
were ‘said to be as one family’ and ‘mix[ed] together’ in their ‘vacant
hours’.136 How representative such children and adults were is anyone’s
guess, but it is worthwhile recalling that Wordsworth, when a school-
boy at Hawkshead, made friends with several old men who sat around
the church on Sunday evenings, as well as local packmen, shepherds
and farmers. In consequence, we cannot dismiss the idea that age differ-
ences were less significant in old rural towns and hamlets than elsewhere.
If nothing else, the poet grew accustomed to ‘paternal’ rather than
‘patriarchal’ relationships in the region. This significant fact will oc-
cupy us for the fifth, and final, chapter.
5
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account
Wordsworth’s social ideal of Old England was partly the result of his
lifelong dependence upon others for financial and social support in
the Old Regime. Readers might be forgiven if they find this particular
conclusion unremarkable. Biographers have long known the outward
‘facts’ of Wordsworth’s life and career as the orphaned son of John
Wordsworth (land-agent and man of business for Sir James Lowther):
for example, they have dwelt upon his early days as a promising scholar
at Hawkshead Grammar School under the distant charge of his uncles;
his several years as a wayward and wilful youth at Cambridge Univer-
sity; his early involvement and late disaffection with the cause of the
French Revolution in the 1790s; his growing friendship with Sir George
Beaumont (Baronet); and his final years as a tory placeholder under
William, Lord Lonsdale. What more need be said? A great deal, I would
argue. No one, to my knowledge, has yet noted the nature and extent
of the poet’s dependence upon patronage as a major reason for his
support of the Old Regime, in general, and the old landed order, in
particular. What follows is a specific survey of Wordsworth’s private
society – that is to say, his family, friends and associates – who kept
him firmly within the web of patronage, connection and dependence
among the middle and upper ranks of the old landed order. I would
not, however, be misunderstood. Several articles and books have been
published since the mid-1950s which focus upon the effects of patron-
age upon the poet’s lifestyle and practice – especially his relationship
to the common people who formed the content of his best poetry. In
particular, the work of Victor Kiernan (1956 and 1973), E. P. Thomp-
son (1969 and 1994), Michael Friedman (1979), David Simpson (1987),
John Williams (1989), and John Lucas (1990) have renewed interest in
the topic of Wordsworth’s relationship to the old landed order as a
social reason for his tory politics in the period 1814–32. All of these
writers conclude that Wordsworth’s ‘independence’ as a poet was
155
England, 1750–1850
compromised by his mature relationships with patrons like Sir George

Beaumont and Lord Lonsdale. Kiernan and Thompson pay greatest at-
tention to the long-term forces of social and economic change as the
main reasons for Wordsworth’s disillusionment with radical ideas and
action, and his final adoption of tory politics in the post-war years. On
the one hand, they reveal private and public reasons for his growing
distrust of ‘men’s ability to control what they had created’ in revolu-
tionary France and industrial England; on the other hand, they condemn
his failure to understand the forces of class conflict and industrial capi-
talism as being necessary for the success of utopian schemes in both
countries.1 Their historical studies have not been rivalled for philo-
sophical subtlety and depth by subsequent Marxist and post-structuralist
critics who have also dealt with these topics. The works of the latter
have been, more or less, variations on a theme, but the views of David
Simpson and John Lucas may be taken as representative. Simpson, a
post-structuralist critic, claims that Wordsworth occupied ‘the classic
bourgeois site, an unstable and amorphous middle ground which’ dis-
abled ‘him from validating any orthodox social role in a wholehearted
manner’.2 In other words, the Romantic poet could not ‘be at one’
with the small independent producers whom he admired because he
was a professional writer whose work was dependent upon the com-
mercial and agrarian changes of the eighteenth century which were
slowly destroying the old landed order. 3 Likewise, John Lucas, a Marx-
ist critic, claims that Wordsworth, in the receipt of patronage from Sir
George Beaumont, turned ‘away from his “useful” ambition of being a
man speaking to men, out of guilt, or out of an awareness that he’ had
‘become committed to and identified with a social structuring that’ was
‘ultimately exploitative’. Indeed, he even concludes that Wordsworth’s
‘reactionary toryism develop[ed] as a mode of rationalising and justify-
ing his acquired position’.4 Such views might remind the reader of my
own assumption that Wordsworth’s ‘identity’ or ‘social status’ was some-
what ill-defined in the period of the French Wars, but their theoretical
bases are quite different to mine. For example, I have deliberately es-
chewed the use of post-structuralist jargon of hermeneutics and textual
analysis and the main Marxist ideas of dialectical materialism and ‘false
consciousness’ because they invariably obscure or stereotype the poet’s
private experience and public behaviour between the Scylla of linguistic-
and the Charybdis of economic determinism. I have offered instead a
social and economic argument for Wordsworth’s changing political com-
mitments, in the period 1789–1832, which looks at Wordsworth’s private
experience and social relationships within the old landed order as defined
and understood by non-Marxist historians. Its framework of vertical
ranks and dependence rather than horizontal classes and conflicts offers
a social and economic explanation of Wordsworth’s political commitments
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 157
and behaviour which still leaves room for theoretical speculation about
the poet’s ‘subjectivity’ and ‘class identity’ without system-building in
any given area. Above all, it gives several credible reasons for Wordsworth’s
abandonment of the reformers without invoking the traditional curse
of the ‘lost leader’.5 (This riddle of early revolt and late conformity to
the old landed order is also partly solved by the ideas of Max Weber.)
In brief, it sets down the social and economic connections between
Wordsworth’s life and work as a poet in the Old Regime without
treating the topic of patronage as the sole source of the poet’s ill-
defined status in the old landed order – which we have already ascribed,
for the most part, to his rural education and upbringing in Old Lake-
land.
Patronage, professional life and the Old Regime
Wordsworth’s first challenge to the patronage system was made at Cam-

bridge University (1787–91). Several writers have shown that Wordsworth’s
relations with private benefactors were pushed to the limit by his pre-
varication over the choice of a career, in general, and by his refusal to
compete for academic prizes and awards, in particular. When Wordsworth
left Hawkshead Grammar School for the University he was willing to
conform to the expectations of his family and friends. Thus, for example,
he reputedly told Captain Hugh Robinson, in (October) 1787, that he
would ‘be either Senior Wrangler or nothing’. 6 Likewise Dorothy
Wordsworth wrote to her friend Jane Pollard, in the same year, that
her brother wished ‘very much to be a Lawyer if his health’ permitted. 7
Nor did his father’s death and involved financial affairs leave him without
several economic advantages: for example, his uncle, Richard Wordsworth
of Whitehaven, advanced him the money for his university education;
his uncle William Cookson was expected to give up his fellowship at St
John’s College and thereby leave a place for him to fill – if his results
were good enough; and, finally, upon arrival at the University he soon
obtained a small scholarship through Edward Frewen, a friend of William
Cookson.8 By the close of first year, however, he was already out of
contention for Senior Wrangler, being placed in the Second Class of
undergraduates reading for honours; and by the end of December he
had evidently given up the prescribed course of study which might
have earned him a fellowship.9 What can explain his puzzling behaviour?
Ben Ross Schneider believed that Wordsworth’s peculiar experience of
Cambridge life was the main reason for his determination not to com-
pete for exams and prizes. The University in Wordsworth’s day was
still a web of ‘intrigue, favouritism, and injustice’.10 It was ‘the ten-
dency of influence and connections rather than merit to determine
worldly success’.11 Thus, for example, parents of noblemen and fellow-
commoners ‘often employed the younger Fellows of colleges as private

tutors and companions for their sons, and these often succeeded to
rich preferments in return for their services rendered’.12 (Wordsworth’s
younger brother Christopher, for instance, started his academic career
as private tutor to Charles Manners Sutton.) In consequence, rich or
powerful students could be fawned upon by poorer tutors and students
alike. Wordsworth was not oblivious to the venal behaviour of those
around him; but his views were basically short-lived and served to edify
him in the ways of artificial life and manners:
And, as for what pertains to human life,

The deeper passions working round me here,
Whether of envy, jealousy, pride, shame,
Ambition, emulation, fear, or hope,
Or those of dissolute pleasure, were by me
Unshar’d; and only now and then observ’d,
So little was their hold upon my being,
As outward things that might administer
To knowledge or instruction.13
Wordsworth, nevertheless, drew valuable lessons from his observations

of such diverse groups and individuals at the University. He even closed
the third book of The Prelude, called ‘Residence at Cambridge’, with a
parody both of himself as a ‘simple Rustic’, and of the people around
him as a model of ‘the great world’ of English society:
For all Degrees

And Shapes of spurious fame and short-liv’d praise
Here sate in state, and fed with daily alms
Retainers won away from solid good;
And here was Labour, his own Bond-slave, Hope
That never set the pains against the prize,
Idleness, halting with his weary clog,
And poor misguided Shame, and witless Fear,
And simple Pleasure, foraging for Death,
Honour misplaced, and Dignity astray;
Feuds, Factions, Flatteries, Enmity, and Guile,
Murmuring Submission, and bald Government;
The Idol weak as the Idolater;
And Decency and Custom starving Truth;
And blind Authority, beating with his Staff
The Child that might have led him; Emptiness
Followed, as of good omen; and meek Worth
Left to itself unheard of, and unknown.14
Here, of course, we face a difficult question. Why did Wordsworth re-

main aloof from ‘Feuds, Factions, Flatteries’ and so forth? Was it merely
the result of his natural aversion to violent emotions; his preference
for solitude and ‘lonesome places’; his satisfaction with the company of
‘more unthinking Natures’; or was it the effect of personal slights and
ill-treatment?15 Ben Ross Schneider, for instance, claims that Wordsworth
was the victim of social and economic prejudice and poverty whilst a
student at the University. Thus the poet resolved to keep himself apart
from the patronage and honours system. Of course, neither ‘his regional
origin nor his rank made any difference’ to his academic life, ‘but socially
[speaking] they did’.16 Schneider’s conclusion rests on two assumptions:
the first is that Wordsworth was somehow demeaned by being a sizar
or charity boy, and secondly, that Wordsworth’s Lake District background
and upbringing was likely to single him out for gossip and ridicule by
the noblemen and gentlemen commoners – who were often drawn from
the ranks of ‘public school boys’. 17 In brief, he claims that these
‘circumstances . . . placed him just one step above the college servants
in the eyes of those with whom such matters counted’.18 Schneider’s
claims have been rehearsed by several biographers and critics, but the
evidence is still weak and the argument itself misleading. His assump-
tions are supported with speculative evidence about the theoretical status
of ‘sizars’ and ‘north-countrymen’ but very little practical evidence of
their maltreatment. For example, he claims that north-countrymen ‘were
distinguished from the public school-boys – the social arbiters – by
their manners, their speech and their dress’.19 His examples, however,
tend to be drawn from the early and mid-eighteenth century, when
sizars were considerably poorer than those of Wordsworth’s day. Thus
he refers to famous students from Westmorland and Cumberland like
Richard Watson, William Paley and Edmund Law whose very success as
sizars gave lasting prestige to its standing among the several colleges.20
Furthermore, reading men who were forced by poverty to wear homely
dress might well have been ridiculed or jeered at by some of the well-
to-do commoners and noblemen, but Wordsworth’s clothing and
appearance were outwardly the mark of a gentleman: for instance, his
velvet coat and waistcoat were made by a tailor at Hawkshead, and his
shirts were hand-sewn by Dorothy Wordsworth, who worked as a seam-
stress in a respectable clothing shop in Penrith; he also wore silk stockings
and powdered his hair in the old way – ‘like rimy trees when frost is
keen’.21 It is therefore far-fetched, in my opinion, to compare his ap-
pearance with Richard Watson, who ‘had difficulty in living down his
blue stockings when he first came up to Cambridge’ in 1754.22 For his
part, Dr Schneider admits that changes had begun to take effect by
Wordsworth’s day with regards to the role and standing of the ‘sizars’
at the different colleges and clubs. Thus Clement Carlyon, an acquaintance
of Coleridge, recorded in 1836, that ‘whilst it was said that, at Oxford,

the candidate for a fellowship must be well-dressed, of gentle lineage,
and moderately learned, the humble sizar at Cambridge was invited to
enter the lists for academic honours and emoluments, without there
being any question asked as to the tailor who made his coat, or the
station in life of his parents’.23 Secondly, Dr Schneider agrees that sizars
in Wordsworth’s day sometimes met with great academic and social
success: William Cookson of Penrith, and Isaac Pennington of Foreness
Fell, for example.24 More generally, we must not exaggerate the import-
ance of language as a barrier to social mobility and acceptance in the
Old Regime. For example, Schneider claims that Wordsworth’s ‘burr’
and ‘broad vowel sounds were certain to single him out for ridicule
and to restrict his social sphere’. Yet Wordsworth’s uncle, William Cookson,
provides clear evidence to the contrary: he was a particular friend of
William Wilberforce, who is singled out by Dr Schneider as a famous
and influential gentleman-commoner. Furthermore their friendship was
probably helped by the fact that they were both north-countrymen
whose knowledge of the local landscape and regional languages was
important to their provincial culture and heritage: for example, the
young ‘gentleman-commoner’ was more than willing to visit Cookson
at Penrith and to tour the Lake District in his long vacation.25 Indeed,
Dr Schneider adopts too readily the ‘whig’ view of public school boys
and thereby obscures their interests as a ‘class’ – for want of a better
term. (For instance, he focuses upon their effeminacy and violence, which
social traits are stocks in trade of whig historians on this topic.26) No
doubt the ‘public schools’ like Eton and Winchester were more impor-
tant than the universities as creators of social and economic identity
amongst the aristocratic classes, but it is debatable whether their ‘aris-
tocratic code’ was based upon speech and pronunciation so much as
the social values of leadership and esprit de corps. Such students, no
doubt, became proficient at public speaking and studied classical ora-
tory, but the emphasis fell upon the political implications of ‘the patrician
ideals of classical civilisation’ rather than elocution in a narrow sense.
(Above all, they learnt to respect the equality of all gentlemen.27) The
niceties of everyday speech were a much later development. Indeed,
Raymond Williams, in The Long Revolution, has argued that the aristo-
cratic classes were slow to change their various dialects and earthy tones
for the excessive refinement and self-conscious snobbery of the new
middle classes:
Between about 1775 and 1850, what was later called ‘Received Stan-
dard’ pronunciation changed markedly. One of the crucial changes
was the lengthening of the vowel in such words as past and path:
now a mode of class speech, but until this period a regional and
rustic habit. . . . These and similar changes were spread by improved

communications, but the main agency, undoubtedly, in fixing them
as class speech was the new cult of uniformity in the public schools.28
Nevertheless, the ‘public schools’ of the nineteenth century were both

more numerous than and very different to those of the previous one.29
We ought not, therefore, to assume – without stronger evidence – that
Wordsworth was the victim of social prejudice and contempt on ac-
count of his ‘provincial’ clothes and speech. The case in favour of
Wordsworth’s economic plight is even weaker than the social one. Michael
Friedman, for instance, quotes the following passage from M. Halevy’s
history of England to prove his economic argument that Wordsworth
was, comparatively speaking, poor and refused to face his long-term
prospects with courage and determination:
During the seven months of the term the wealthiest could spend
several thousands. It was difficult to live in a town [like Cambridge]
where these rich spendthrifts set the fashion, under L.100 to L.150 a
year. The poor student was condemned to a precarious and humili-
ating existence in an environment necessarily unfavourable to serious
study.30
Friedman, however, presents no convincing evidence that Wordsworth

was indeed a ‘poor student’. Christopher Cookson was quite upset that
Wordsworth had spent close to three hundred pounds at Cambridge,
in only two years, which he thought ‘a very shameful sum’ for a boy
of his background and ‘expectations’.31 The family accounts, however,
qualify Cookson’s view. They reveal that Wordsworth had been given
about 220 pounds by the end of 1789.32 Nevertheless, the cost of keep-
ing Wordsworth at Cambridge was considerable and worthy of remark
by the responsible guardian. For his part, the ‘shameful’ Wordsworth
was keeping up appearances at College by ‘Smooth housekeeping within’,
whilst being ‘Liberal’ without – as suited ‘Gentleman’s array!’33 Clearly,
by Halevy’s standards, he was not poor, spending over one hundred
pounds a year. By his own standards, he ‘was rich in monies, and attir’d/
In splendid clothes’ and often spent his time and money in the ‘week-
day works of youth’:
Companionships,
Friendships, acquaintances, were welcome all;
We sauntered, play’d, we rioted, we talk’d
Unprofitable talk at morning hours,
Drifted about along the streets and walks,
Read lazily in lazy books, went forth
To gallop through the country in blind zeal

Of senseless horsemanship, or on the breast
Of Cam sail’d boisterously; and let the stars
Come out, perhaps without one quiet thought. 34
The poet, moreover, was not without ‘expectations’ – for example, of a

fellowship in law under the influence of William Cookson, or a curacy,
and eventual living, in Harwich under the patronage of John Robinson.
The fact that he refused to conform to these ‘expectations’ is no grounds
for thinking that he was ‘deeply wounded’ by his comparatively ‘low’
status in the University and adopted the ‘devious’ defence of denying
academic scholarship and preferment altogether. 35 Why then did
Wordsworth ‘opt-out’ of the honours system and fail to fulfil the
reasonable ‘expectations’ of his family and friends? Much of the prob-
lem lay in the honours system itself. It is difficult to describe the old
system of reading and examination in a clear way. It lacks any compar-
able course work and assessment today. 36 It is sufficient to state here,
however, that students in each college read prescribed texts in classical
literature and higher mathematics and were given oral and written
examinations on their contents. Those who wanted to compete for prizes
and ‘honours such as fellowships, medals, and higher degrees fought
against their classmates as well as men from other Colleges’.37 In gen-
eral, the system gave the laurels to hard-working and intelligent students
regardless of their social rank or standing, but corruption was common
enough to make some students suspicious of grades and awards. For
example, examiners were often accused of doing a ‘job’ for a powerful
person by placing a favoured student of ‘his higher on the honours list
than he deserved’. As Dr Schneider observed: ‘One can hardly believe
that this juggling happened very often, but Henry Gunning, who re-
sided in the University for seventy-two years beginning in 1782, wrote
that favouritism in examinations “prevailed” during the latter part of
the eighteenth century’.38 In consequence, competition could be fierce
and undignified. And Wordsworth, who was highly observant, witnessed
a great deal of emotional and intellectual energy wasted on prizes which
were not, in his eyes, worth the pains of study and self-interest:
– of important Days,
Examinations, when the Man was weigh’d
As in the balance, – of excessive hopes,
Tremblings withal, and commendable fears,
Small jealousies, and triumphs good or bad . . .
Such glory was but little sought by me,
And little won.39
It was, in part, an ‘instinctive revolt’, which was rooted in his very

early independence and wholesome emotions at Hawkshead amid the
lakes and mountains:
[There] the pride of strength,

And the vain-glory of superior skill
Were interfus’d with objects which subdu’d
And temper’d them, and gradually produc’d
A quiet independence of the heart.40
The best social explanation for Wordsworth’s ‘proud rebellion’ there-

fore rests upon the poet’s ‘rural education and assumptions’, as defined
in Chapter 3 of this essay. The reader will recall that his education at
Cockermouth, Penrith and Hawkshead had been remarkably free and
desultory and therefore failed to instil in him the habits of hard work
and formal study which were requisite for a higher degree. Thus he
wrote of the academic halls and heritage of Cambridge:
– The thirst of living praise,

A reverence for the glorious Dead, the sight
Of those long Vistos, Catacombs in which
Perennial minds lie visibly entomb’d,
Have often stirr’d the heart of youth, and bred
A fervent love of rigorous discipline.
Alas! such high commotion touched not me;
No look was in these walls to put to shame
My easy spirits, and discountenance
Their light composure, far less to instil
A calm resolve of mind, firmly address’d
To puissant efforts. Nor was this the blame
Of others but my own; I should, in truth,
As far as doth concern my single self
Misdeem most widely, lodging it elsewhere.
For I, bred up in Nature’s lap, was even
As a spoil’d Child; and rambling like the wind
As I had done in daily intercourse
With those delicious rivers, solemn heights,
And mountains; ranging like a fowl of the air,
I was ill tutor’d for captivity,
To quit my pleasure, and from month to month,
Take up a station calmly on the perch
Of sedentary peace. 41
Nevertheless, he was sometimes stricken with vague feelings of guilt

which verged on sharp pangs of conscience. Thus he confessed that:
from the first crude days

Of settling-time in this my new abode,
Not seldom I had melancholy thoughts,
From personal and family regards,
Wishing to hope without a hope; some fears
About my future worldly maintenance,
And, more than all, a strangeness in my mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place.42
Here in a nutshell was Wordsworth’s dilemma: like Hamlet he could

not escape present responsibility to his family, the needs of the future,
nor the workings of his own mind. But unlike the tragic hero, his ac-
tions were not ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’. On the
contrary, he was rendered idle by the very brightness of his mystical
vision of Nature and by his own mental activity. His inner life, more-
over, must not be overlooked as a major reason for his failure to conform
to the academic and social expectations of his family: Wordsworth’s
mystical states at Hawkshead and Cambridge help to explain his desire
for personal independence if we recall the highly egotistical nature of
his religious impulse and artistic genius – which fed upon solitude and
the landscape. Indeed, as William Hazlitt wrote in a famous review of
The Excursion, in 1814:
Mr. Wordsworth’s mind is the reverse of dramatic. It resists all change

of character, all variety of scenery, all the bustle, machinery, and
pantomime of the stage, or of real life – whatever might relieve or
relax or change the direction of its own activity, jealous of all com-
petition. The power of his mind preys upon itself. It is as if there
were nothing but himself and the universe. He lives in the busy
solitude of his own heart; in the deep silence of thought. [Emphasis
added.43]
This philosophic conclusion is equally true of the poet’s early years at

Cambridge. After a brief period of adjustment and delight in the busy
social life of the place, the poet betook himself to the beautiful coun-
tryside around Cambridge and resumed his old habits of thought and
feeling. Above all, the different surroundings gave a greater novelty
and significance to his strange sensations and religious experiences and
helped him to exercise his poetic imagination in new and productive
ways. In other words, he became more conscious than before of the
artistic powers and capabilities which he harboured, on the one hand,

and the religious perception of universal truth, on the other. Hence his
credible conclusion that:
I was a chosen Son.

For hither I had come with holy powers
And faculties, whether to work or feel . . .
And now it was, that, thro’ such change entire
And this first absence from those shapes sublime
Wherewith I had been conversant, my mind
Seem’d busier in itself than heretofore;
At least, I more directly recognised
My powers and habits: let me dare to speak
A higher language, say that now I felt
The strength and consolation which were mine.
As if awaken’d, summon’d, rous’d, constrain’d,
I look’d for universal things; perused
The common countenance of earth and heaven;
And, turning the mind in upon itself,
Pored, watch’d, expected, listen’d; spread my thoughts
And spread them with a wider creeping; felt
Incumbences more awful, visitings
Of the Upholder of the tranquil Soul,
Which underneath all passion lives secure
A steadfast life. But peace! it is enough
To notice that I was ascending now
To such community with highest truth.44
We shall deal with Wordsworth’s mystical experience and poetic selfhood

in the next paragraph. Here we must note that Wordsworth’s refusal to
conform to the patronage and honours system is largely explained by
personal traits and interests: by his rural education and upbringing; by
his experience of the corrupt and competitive examination system; and,
above all, by his very growth as a poet – in the broadest sense of the
word: the belief that he had a higher goal in life than ‘vegetating on a
paltry curacy’.45
In fact, we can now make better sense of the poet’s conclusion that
he ‘was a chosen Son’, and ‘ascending . . ./ To such community with
highest truth’, whilst still failing to fulfil his social and economic obli-
gations to his family and friends, by direct reference to Weber’s sociology
of charismatic authority. Weber clearly distinguished between two types
of social authority: patriarchal and charismatic. The former is the more
common and enduring structure of ‘household economy’ which fur-
nishes the group or society with its necessary articles and material wants;
the latter includes the provision of necessary skills or goods which lie
outside the everyday routine of social and economic life.46 In this re-
gard, Wordsworth went to Cambridge bound in conscience to fit himself
into the role of the ‘professional student’. His family expected him, in
true ‘patriarchal’ fashion, to follow his father’s footsteps in the Law or
in some other learned profession like the Church. His failure to con-
form to this social and economic pattern fits neatly into the framework
of charismatic authority in the earliest stages of its given ‘mission’. In
the first place, Wordsworth had begun to understand his genius for
poetry whilst a student at the University. His artistic creativity, how-
ever, was still tied to his mystical vision of the ‘one life . . . O’er all
that moves, and all that seemeth still’.47 Thus he often exercised his
mind in a poetic fashion without composing anything:
A track pursuing not untrod before,

From deep analogies by thought supplied,
Or consciousnesses not to be subdued,
To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the high-way,
I gave a moral life, I saw them feel,
Or link’d them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.48
This growing awareness of artistic and religious gifts was largely con-
firmed during his long summer vacation at Hawkshead, in 1788, where
he stayed with his old village dame, Ann Tyson. He now felt a greater
social sympathy and moral preference for the rural lives and occupa-
tions of the people of the vicinage. His first year at Cambridge had
given him the social and economic grounds to make a clear compari-
son between the benefits and drawbacks of life in Old Lakeland. Above
all, he struggled to overcome the vicious habits and pride of the un-
dergraduate. He was, for example, too self-conscious of his freshman’s
clothes and manner whilst visiting his old grammar school and other
recent haunts. Nevertheless, the temptations to sensual pleasures and
revelry were many, even in the vicinity of Hawkshead, and he often
found himself in the company of dancers and merry-makers. 49 Thus it
happened that one morning he had a fundamental mystical experience
of the purely emotional, as opposed to the intellectual and visionary,
kind.50 Having been uplifted by the ‘shocks of young love-liking’ and
the gaiety of a country dance, he was emotionally charged for the beauty
of the natural world which he observed on his way home:
Magnificent
The morning was, a memorable pomp,
More glorious than I ever had beheld.
The Sea was laughing at a distance; all
The solid Mountains were as bright as clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drench’d in empyrean light;
And, in the meadows and the lower grounds,
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,
And Labourers going forth into the fields.51
Having left the happy group, he now felt himself given to the practice
of poetry:
[T]o the brim

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walk’d
In blessedness, which even yet remains.52
It was all but a religious conversion in the conventional sense: on the

one hand, he was devoted to the social practice of poetry, and on the
other, he was convinced of the importance of his personal vision of
truth. Henceforth he was the Prophet of Nature. It might be objected
here that Wordsworth was unconscious of his Romantic condition. Were
not vows made for him? Weber’s sociology, however, does not demand
that a course of behaviour be understood by the agent himself. It must
only have an ‘intention’, or motive, which is more or less visible to
the observer of social behaviour. Such a motive may be known – in
part or in whole – by the person being studied but it is not a pre-
requisite for a satisfactory and objective explanation of his social life
and work:
For a science dealing with the true meaning of behaviour, explana-

tion requires: a grasp of the context of meaning within which the
actual course of action occurs. In all such cases, even those involving
emotional processes, the subjective meaning within the relevant con-
text of its meaning, will be designated ‘intended’ meaning; thus we
move beyond the customary usage which regards as intentional only
(rationally-purposive) goal-oriented behaviour. 53 [Emphasis added.]
By his own admission, the emotional process involved was only under-
stood by the poet in the subsequent decades. In particular, The Prelude;
Or, [the] Growth Of A Poet’s Mind, [1805], forced him to unravel the
social meaning of his emotional states: to show how he alone in modern
times was fit to take up a ‘noble theme’ and to bring forth ‘a glorious
work’ of English literature.54 Of course, his early life and work, at
Hawkshead and Cambridge, for example, were often based upon strong
emotions and instincts rather than formal ideas and attitudes. None-
theless, the historical study of ‘charismatic authority’ does not distinguish
between the psychological origins of thoughts, feelings, and emotions
with regards to the subject’s social behaviour. The characteristic influ-
ence of charisma is clearly felt from within: both the subject who claims
charisma and the group who recognise his ‘gift’ find certainty in their
hearts rather than in external testimony.55 In consequence, Wordsworth
was right to regard his dedication to poetry and emotional truth as if
it were part of ‘Nature’s holy plan’.56 Weber’s sociology of charismatic
authority is therefore wholly compatible with the poet’s own remarkable
biography in Romantic terms: ‘Of Genius, Power,/ Creation and Div-
inity itself’.57
Upon his return to Cambridge the young undergraduate was eager to
follow ‘a course of independent study’ which would fit him to be a
poet in the future.58 Wordsworth’s Romantic views of life, however in-
choate at this time, were new and demanded a different kind of education.
(Indeed, Max Weber concludes that charisma ‘knows only inner deter-
mination and inner restraint’.59) He was, nonetheless, troubled by thoughts
about the future. How would he live? What would his family think?
What could justify his ‘proud rebellion and unkind’? In consequence,
he kept his plan secret and tried to remain aloof from his family and
friends. Indeed, Wordsworth’s conscience – which, in his mind, was
akin to ‘cowardise’ – meant that he tempered his emotional freedom
with rational discretion and directed some of his energies to formal
studies in order to satisfy the requirements of his BA degree.60 He also
pretended that he was really considering the offer of a curacy from
John Robinson. His reluctance to offend his family, however, is no
objection to the use of Weber’s concept of charismatic authority, which
is a ‘pure type’ or scientific ‘ideal’ and therefore not found in everyday
life and society without some deviation from the norm.61 Nevertheless,
this ‘pure type’ is supposed to be based upon empirical observation in
a large number of cases and so rendered probable as a practical expla-
nation of social behaviour.62 Here, then, we come to the crux of Weber’s
sociology with regards to Wordsworth’s social and economic condition.
In order to do justice to their mission, the holders of charisma, the

master as well as his disciples and followers, must stand outside the
ties of this world, outside of routine occupations, as well as outside
the routine obligations of family life. . . . All this is indicative of the
unavoidable separation from this world of those who partake (kleros)

of charisma.63
In other words, the ‘sharp contrast between charisma and any “patriar-
chal” structure that rests upon the ordered base of the “household”
lies in this rejection of rational economic conduct’.64 Indeed, the char-
ismatic structure ‘knows no regulated “career”, “advancement”, “salary”,
or regulated and expert training of the holder of charisma or of his
aids’.65 In consequence, we can now conclude that Wordsworth’s desire
to educate himself as much as possible was not merely a ‘Romantic’
trait, but one made necessary by his assumption of charismatic auth-
ority. Likewise, Wordsworth’s break with his family and friends was
basically the result of his new-found sense of ‘mission’ as a poet whose
pursuits were not compatible with the demands of a ‘patriarchal’ body
for social and economic benefits to its members. The young poet was
unwilling to give way to widespread social and economic pressures to
conform with the professional model of the day. His charismatic per-
sonality was already asserting itself in ‘proud rebellion’ against the cultural
hegemony of England’s Old Regime.
On the other hand, his dependence upon the old patronage system,
in the 1790s, became more – not less – important to Wordsworth in his
early years of frustration and disappointment as a publishing poet. When
Wordsworth left Cambridge, in January 1791, it was still expected, in
spite of his poor showing, that he would enter the clergy under the
patronage of William Cookson and John Robinson.66 In early September,
Robinson offered him the curacy of Harwich with the reversion of the
living in the near future. Wordsworth, however, had a temporary reprieve.
Prospective clerymen had to be twenty-three years of age before they
could take orders. In consequence, the young poet could play for time.
He was only twenty-one. Although his plan was to keep his distance
from his family and friends, he ‘thought it was best to pay . . . [his]
respects to him [in] person, to inform him that . . . [he] was not of
age’.67 Likewise he half-convinced his uncle William that modern lan-
guages rather than a course in ‘Oriental Literature’ would serve him
better as a ‘travelling Companion to some young Gentleman’ in the
near future.68 Nevertheless, he was wary of giving offence to his only
real benefactors. In consequence, he felt obliged to consent ‘to pursue
the [clerical] plan upon . . . [his] return from the continent’.69 In late
November, 1791, Wordsworth went across the Channel a second time
in order to improve his command of French. (In spite of John Robinson’s
‘earnest recommendation’, in 1788, that Wordsworth ‘stick close to College
for the first two or three years’, he and Robert Jones, a fellow student,
had secretly gone to France and Switzerland during their long vacation
in the summer of 1790.70) We do not need to discuss here his role in
French politics and society. The focus of our present paragraph is the
poet’s failure to escape the system of patronage and connection into
which he had been born. Thus his guardians advanced him 40 pounds
for the purpose and he stayed in Paris, Orleans and Blois for twelve
and a half months, being forced to return only by an absolute want of
funds.71 His guardians were not willing, it seems, to let their wayward
nephew stay any longer in revolutionary France and therefore tight-
ened the purse-strings.72 Upon his return home he found that he had
offended uncle William by his failure to take seriously the curacy of-
fered to him by Robinson, and above all by the news that he had
fathered a ‘natural’ child to Annette Vallon, a Catholic opponent of
the Revolution in France. He was no longer welcome at Forncett.73
Henceforth the radical poet and Cambridge graduate was left more or
less dependent upon his older brother Richard and well-to-do friends
for food, lodgings and money. Richard’s chambers in Gray’s Inn, Lon-
don, enabled his brother to keep in touch with radical circles and to
meet publishers and men of letters. Sometimes his friends were combi-
nations of all three: for instance, the publisher Joseph Johnson.74 More
important, for our present purpose, was Wordsworth’s relationship with
several young men who came from rich and influential families: for
instance, William and Raisley Calvert – the former of whom had gone
to Hawkshead with Wordsworth. In background and upbringing they
were quite similar to the Wordsworth children. Their father, Raisley
Calvert Senior, had been land steward to the Duke of Norfolk’s proper-
ties at Greystoke, in Cumberland. Unlike John Wordsworth, however,
he had been justly rewarded for his efforts. Both Calvert boys therefore
received fair sums of money and property upon his death in 1791.75
They patronised Wordsworth in four main ways: first of all, William
Calvert offered to take Wordsworth on a free holiday or tour of the
West Country; secondly, by letting Wordsworth and Dorothy occupy
their family farm at Windy Brow, in Cumberland, between April and
mid-May 1794; thirdly, by insisting that Wordsworth share Raisley Calvert’s
income; and fourthly, by leaving a legacy of 900 pounds to Wordsworth
and his sister upon Raisley’s untimely death from ‘consumption’ in
January 1795.76 The third and fourth points are particulary interesting
with regards to Raisley Calvert’s disinterested motives: even though he
was not really fond of poetry, Raisley Calvert was convinced that
Wordsworth was destined to make a name for himself in the house of
letters. As Wordsworth wrote a decade later: ‘I had had but little con-
nection’ with Raisley Calvert, ‘and the act was done entirely from a
confidence on his part that I had powers and attainments which might
be of use to mankind’.77 In fact, the Calvert legacy was the first of
several acts of economic patronage by virtual strangers which helped
Wordsworth to forge a literary, rather than a clerical, legal or educa-
tional career in the crucial years of his artistic development: 1791–

1807. Consider too, for example, his friendship with the Pinney family
of Bristol. Wordsworth met Azariah and John Frederick Pinney in London
where they were students under the lawyer Basil Montagu. Their father,
John Pretor Pinney, was a retired West Indian merchant who owned
the ‘sugar island’ of Nevis. He presently lived in a fine house in George
Street, Bristol, but had previously improved the family property of
Pilemarsh Lodge in the North Dorset hills. The farmstead, however,
which had been renamed Racedown Lodge, was not often used by the
owner and his son John offered it, rent-free, to Wordsworth and his
sister for as long as they liked, provided only that he and Azariah might
occasionally visit as paying guests (!) for coursing and shooting in the
vicinage. Although John’s father was angered by this unexpected offer
to a virtual stranger, he did not veto it. As Mary Moorman wrote: ‘John
Pinney [ Junior] had fallen, like Raisley Calvert and [Basil] Montagu,
under Wordsworth’s spell, and without being himself in the least inter-
ested in poetry, showed his admiration by opening up for the homeless
north-countryman this haven in the west’.78 Likewise, the poet was
their father’s guest for several weeks at Bristol. In fine, the patronage
given to the poet was a reflection of the family’s high regard for
Wordsworth’s character and, perhaps too, for his increasingly whiggish
beliefs.79 A final example of patronage and protection from this early
period is afforded by Wordsworth’s lifelong friendship with Thomas
Poole, a yeoman-farmer and tanner of Nether Stowey in Somersetshire.
Poole was well educated and extended social and economic patronage
to Wordsworth and Coleridge. He was partly drawn to them by their
whig and republican beliefs, but there can be no doubt that he too was
profoundly impressed by the poetic gifts and intellectual talents of his
young friends. Furthermore, he was a well-known benefactor to many
poor families and employees in the neigbourhood. Indeed, Wordsworth
upheld him as a yeoman-farmer of the Old English type, who bound
together the lower and middle ranks of the landed order. Poole was
primarily responsible for the Wordsworths obtaining the large mansion-
house of Alfoxden, with deer park and grounds, for only 23 pounds a
year, both rate and tax free.80 Even allowing for the low war-time rents
this was a ‘coup’ for the brother and sister. Likewise, he came to their
defence whenever they and Coleridge were accused of being French
spies and ‘Jacobins’ in the period 1795–7.81 When necessary, too, he
helped both parties financially. In fact, Wordsworth and Coleridge were
quite fortunate in their friendships with patrons of the arts and letters
as well as publishers; they were often given small but timely sums of
money, or needy loans on very good terms, or received presents of
books, pamphlets and domestic items. The most important of these
casual friendships, in the period, were Joseph Cottle (the publisher of
Lyrical Ballads) and Daniel Stuart (the publisher of the Morning Chronicle),
and Josiah Wedgwood ( Junior), scion of the great Staffordshire potter
of that name.82 By 1805, moreover, the poet had begun writing to wealthy
patrons of the arts like William Sotheby, Samuel Rogers and Thomas
Norton Longman, who were eager to entertain and to encourage the
new Romantic writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey and Scott.83
Each time the aspiring poet accepted such help he was forced to ac-
knowledge the good side of the old system of patronage which guaranteed
him a measure of financial security in the costly war-time conditions.84
Nevertheless, Raymond Williams has argued strongly that the eighteenth
century saw the growth of subscription publishing, competitive prac-
tices, and popular fiction governed by a large reading ‘public’ at the
expense of the older relationships between artists, patrons and their
circles.85 And, whilst the movement from patronage to the free market
was a long-term event, its main features were evident in the early nine-
teenth century. Wordsworth’s life and work were a case in point. He
was never popular as a publishing poet in the period 1793–1815. Whereas
his close friend Sir Walter Scott was offered 500 pounds for the copy-
right of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, in 1805, and 1000 guineas in advance
for Marmion, two years later, Wordsworth and Coleridge had received
only 30 guineas each for the Lyrical Ballads in 1798.86 Likewise, Robert
Southey could make 2000 pounds or more in a year from writing popular
prose works, but Wordsworth could only manage about 20 pounds or
so a year from publishing important poems before 1820 – and perhaps
only ten pounds a year in the war period.87 Even in 1807, the critical
reviews of Poems in Two Volumes, which contained the famous ‘Ode:
Intimations of Immortality’, ‘Elegiac Stanzas’, and several new lyrics
like ‘The Celandine’ and the ‘Daisy’, were scathing: Francis Jeffrey, in
the Edinburgh Review, complaining of the ‘low, silly and uninteresting’
subjects, and Arthur Aikin, in the Annual Review, concluding that the
poet ‘appears to starve his mind in solitude; hence the undue import-
ance he attaches to trivial incidents’. Only Daniel Stuart, his faithful
friend and patron, reprinted eleven of the poems in the Courier, be-
tween July and November, in order to induce sales, but to no avail. 88
Over eight years had passed since the publication of the Lyrical Ballads
but the ‘public’ was still not ready for the Romantic poet’s ‘innova-
tions’ in content and style. In consequence, he was very lucky to attain
a modest regular income of 70 pounds a year, a measure of artistic
independence, and a circle of select friends and readers at a time of
evident financial failure as a publishing poet. As the correspondent of
a major publisher in the period put it: ‘Poetry, as the wise know, re-
quires judgment, genius, and patronage’.89
Finally, we must consider Wordsworth’s standard of living in the years
of his highest creativity, 1797–1807. There is no evidence to support
Table 5.1 Nominal annual earnings for England and Wales in the years 1781,
1797 and 1805
Occupation Nominal earnings in current pounds (L.)
1781 1797 1805
Government low-wage 46.02 46.77 52.48
Government high-wage 104.55 133.73 151.09
Clergymen 182.65 248.50 266.42
Solicitors and barristers 242.67 165.00 340.00
Clerks (excl. government) 101.57 135.26 150.44
Surgeons, medical officers 88.35 174.95 217.60
Teachers 16.53 43.21 43.21
Engineers, surveyors 170.00 190.00 291.43
the claims of Michael H. Friedman, David Simpson and others that

Wordsworth was, objectively speaking, ‘poor’. Consider, for instance,
the ‘Nominal Annual Earnings . . . [for] England and Wales’ in the years
1781, 1797 and 1805 (Table 5.1).90
Wordsworth’s regular income from the Calvert legacy and other in-
vestments averaged 70 pounds a year, but his earnings were eked out
by the small profits from his published poems and by the advances
made on his inheritance. In consequence, he earned about 100 pounds
a year. For example, Dorothy told Richard that their total expenses for
1797 were 110 pounds.91 Clearly this was a fair sum of money for a
couple without ‘gainful employment’. Their gross income, however, ranks
well with the earnings of the better sort of civil servants, clerks in
private companies and, perhaps, medical officers before their services
were rendered scarce and lucrative by the long French war. We might
even compare him with the less successful lawyers of the day – like the
young Walter Scott, who entered the bar in July 1792, and earned the
modest income of 144 pounds in the year 1797.92 Likewise the nomi-
nal earnings for the clergy are misleading: for example, they ignore the
practice of ‘pluralism’ in the period. Out of 11 000 livings, in 1806–7,
there were over 6000 where the incumbent was absent. Moreover, in
4000 livings, the income did not exceed 50 pounds a year. And, fi-
nally, of the 3998 livings whose incomes did not even exceed 150 pounds
a year, 2438 were given to curates by the incumbents.93 In consequence,
the ‘curate’ who filled the position in practice was normally much poorer
than his clerical employer. We might therefore suspect that the poet’s
income was more plentiful than the meagre stipend of many ‘a paltry
curacy’. It was certainly more than the lowly teacher’s salary.94 Above
all, it compares very favourably with Raisley Calvert’s ‘independent
income’ of 100 pounds a year in the period of his wardship; and the
yearly legacy of 100 pounds given to Henry Crabb Robinson by his
uncle, who died in 1797. According to Robinson, this sum gave him
social and economic ‘independence’.95 Taken together, these figures suggest

that Wordsworth was not ‘poor’ by the professional and social stan-
dards of the day. Here, however, the subjective element in Wordsworth’s
supposed ‘poverty’ becomes more important than his objective income
to our understanding of his artistic ‘mission’ in life and his long-term
relationship to the social and economic system of patronage and con-
nection. Both he and Dorothy were able to live comfortably and even
travel on their varied income. Nevertheless, their ‘habits of strict fru-
gality and self-denial’ were often very important to their communal
values, on the one hand, and the poet’s pursuit of personal freedom,
virtue and happiness, on the other.96 In this regard, the poet has been
much maligned by some Marxist historians and critics who have used
terms like ‘bourgeois’ and ‘rentier’ to heap opprobrium upon his per-
son and ideas rather than using them in a value-free sense. Wordsworth’s
shifting about was neither (1) irresponsible behaviour, (2) evidence of
nascent ‘class consciousness’, (3) ‘bourgeois’ fear of poverty, nor (4)
‘displaced’ guilt over the type and nature of artistic labour. 97 It was a
‘bohemian’ lifestyle which met his basic need to find himself as a poet.
This brings us back to Weber’s theory of charisma. Wordsworth’s de-
pendence upon the patronage system and his artistic lifestyle fit neatly
into the structure of charismatic domination, in general, and the agent’s
social ‘mission’, in particular:
In its ‘pure’ form, charisma is never a source of private gain for its
holders in the sense of economic exploitation by the making of a
deal. Nor is it a source of income in the form of pecuniary compen-
sation, and just as little does it involve an orderly taxation for the
material requirements of its mission. If the mission is one of peace,
individual patrons provide the necessary means for charismatic struc-
tures; or those to whom the charisma is addressed provide honorific
gifts, donations, or other voluntary contributions. . . . ‘Pure’ charisma
is contrary to all patriarchal domination (in the sense of the term
used here). It is the opposite of all ordered economy. . . . In these
respects [too], the economic conditions of participation in charisma
may have an (apparently) antagonistic appearance, depending upon
the type of charisma – artistic or religious, for instance – and the
way of life flowing from its meaning. Modern charismatic move-
ments of artistic origin represent ‘independents without gainful
employment’ (in everyday language, rentiers). Normally such per-
sons are the best qualified to follow a charismatic leader.98
His ‘mission’, in Weber’s terms, was purely artistic and therefore, ‘ap-
parently’, incompatible with the bourgois values of the ‘rentier’ and
the old patronage system regarded as ‘household economy’. But it was
not a problem if the bearer of ‘charisma’ was not ‘brought down to

earth’. Thus Wordsworth’s ‘extreme frugality’ was not so much the re-
sult of economic necessity as the inner compulsion of the pure artist
who wanted to keep apart from the material values and vices of the
commercial world. Hence, too, his ideal, at Racedown Lodge, Alfoxden
and Grasmere, was to be ‘a water drinking bard’, who espoused the
eternal truths of ‘Plain living and high thinking’.99 But he was always
profoundly conscious of the philosophic and moral tension between
his Romantic mission (to ‘arouse the sensual from their sleep/ Of death’)
and the poet’s need to live in the world by publishing poems for money,
by living off investments, and receiving patronage.100 Thus he told Joseph
Cottle, for example, that ‘nothing but pecuniary necessity’ could com-
pel him to publish.101 (His favourite wish was to have his verses published
after his death.) Even when his brother’s ill-fated voyage, in 1805, brought
the spectre of economic hardship to his door, the poet confessed him-
self both physically and mentally unfit for work as a ‘professional’ writer.102
Likewise, he wrote to Sir George Beaumont who was eager to help him,
both socially and economically, that ‘a man of Genius, regardless of
temporary gains[,] whether of money or praise’, ought to fix ‘his atten-
tion solely upon what is intrinsically interesting and permanent’ and
find ‘his happiness in an entire devotion of himself to such pursuits as
shall most ennoble human nature’.103 Nevertheless, the role of patron-
age was always important in giving Wordsworth a material base upon
which to build his mission in the world. For example, Sir George Beaumont
gave him the small paternal estate of Applethwaite, in Westmorland,
entertained the Wordsworths for long periods at Coleorton Hall, in
Leicestershire, and gave economic help to the family: for instance, he
gave Wordsworth a large sum of money, in 1805, for a long holiday –
if needed – to help him get over the pain and grief of his brother’s
death. (He even left Wordsworth a legacy of 100 pounds a year for life
for the purposes of travel and self-improvement.104) In the same way,
he was the object of Lord Lonsdale’s ‘unexampled generosity’ and
patronage. For example, the nobleman helped him to buy the goodly
yeoman-estate of Broad How in Cumberland; settled his predecessor’s
debt with interest; and offered him money in times of economic hard-
ship.105 In short, the poet’s dependence upon the middle and upper
ranks of the Old Regime, whether whig or tory, was a potential threat
to his charismatic authority and artistic mission in a ‘pure’ sense; but
it was always the social and economic base of his ‘high calling’.106
The origins of Wordsworth’s early radicalism: the Lowther

debt and the ideology of the Old Regime
We here face a difficult question. Was Wordsworth’s charismatic mis-

sion in Weber’s sense the reason for his early radicalism as well as his
rejection of the family system of patronage? In a word, ‘No’. Wordsworth
was led directly into the radical camp of democrats and dissenters, in
the period 1789–94, by his personal grudge against the upper ranks of
the old landed order as represented in his mind by Sir James Lowther.
Unlike other scholars who have used this argument, I will contend
that Wordsworth’s ideal of paternal relationships amongst the lower
and middle ranks of the old rural society was partly responsible for his
failure to see the full patriarchal structure and aristocratic code of the
so-called ‘Old Regime’ in England.107 In consequence, he condemned
the actions of his father’s employer from the particular standpoint of
the dependent ranks of the old landed order. Lowther owed about five
thousand pounds in legal fees and political expenses to the estate of
John Wordsworth.108 He not only ignored his strong social obligations
to care for his former law-agent’s family but also defied the Assize Court’s
order for him to pay the debt in full. Wordsworth scholars have rightly
stressed the importance of this economic setback to the fortunes of the
Wordsworth children in the period 1783–1802. Michael Friedman, how-
ever, has gone too far, in my view, with his Freudian account of the
effects of this harsh treatment on Wordsworth himself.109 He claims
that the young poet was already pre-disposed to reject the old landed
order and authority, in the period 1783–97, on account of unconscious
feelings of guilt and desire which he had, respectively, for his father
and mother. Wordsworth is supposed to have resented his father as a
figure of social and political authority and constraint, on the one hand,
and as a stumbling block to his ‘princely self’, on the other. This ‘princely
self’ was the poet’s proudly independent, creative and heroic side, who
desired mastery over the world of sense. As a child it was aroused by
his mother; after her untimely death in 1777 it found a surrogate in
Nature; and later in radical politics. Its psychological cause is supposed
to have been the poet’s sense of ‘oneness’ in such relationships: that is
to say, between subject and object; the former’s affective life, or feel-
ings, shaped the latter and therefore gave the poet a sense of ‘expansive’
power and mastery over the world. In clinical terms this experience is
called ‘oceanic feeling’ and Friedman argues that it was the emotional
impetus behind the poet’s mystical experience of Nature.110 In this re-
gard Wordsworth is studied as a strange case of Oedipal desire and
guilt and internal conflict.111 I am not, in fact, competent to judge
Freud’s ideas as such, but a few doubts may be shared about their his-
torical significance. For example, the study of the poet’s early relationship
with his parents in the previous chapter suggested that Wordsworth’s

feelings for his mother (and father) were not merely ‘natural’ but ‘social’
and ‘cultural’; they were, in part, the product of the modern idea of
childhood as found amongst the modern ‘middle-class’ family. Secondly,
this historical argument has much in common with the findings of
Havelock Ellis and Otto Rank, who both concluded that Freud’s theory
distorts the role of social and cultural causes in the development of
the child.112 Rank, in particular, was active in developing the concep-
tion of the Oedipus complex in its early stages: for example, he surveyed
the varied uses of the Oedipus motive in the form of dramatic poetry.113
Nevertheless, twenty years later, he remarked in Modern Education
that ‘the Oedipus complex, as the attraction to the parent of the oppo-
site sex and jealousy of the parent of the same sex, is not so clearly
found in practice as mythology represents it and as Freud at first be-
lieved’; adding that it has not been easy for psychoanalysts themselves
to maintain it. Above all, he observes elsewhere ‘that the famous “mother
complex” is not so much a real fixation of the child on the mother as
merely a sign of the prevalence today of the belief in the influence of
the mother in the child’s education’.114 The social historian is under
no obligation, it seems, to accept Friedman’s conclusions about the
emotional origins, growth and significance of the poet’s beliefs about
‘Man, Nature, and Society’. On the other hand, his study of Wordsworth’s
life and work adds considerable weight to Stephen Gill’s biographical
conclusion that Wordsworth’s childhood was far from happy and his
personal relationships were much more important to his character and
identity than he admitted in The Prelude or, the ‘poem on . . . [his]
own earlier life’.115 We must therefore strike a balance between the two
extremes of ‘oceanic feeling’, on the one hand, which strips the spiri-
tual meaning from the subject’s life and work, and mystical experience,
on the other, which veils important social and economic events from
view. Here we can benefit from the work of Hunter Davies, who has
written a remarkably shrewd biography of William Wordsworth, which
is similar to Friedman and Gill on this topic, but one which moves
freely between Wordsworth’s social life, economic dependence, and
mystical states: ‘There is no doubt’, he writes, that Wordsworth ‘had
enormously enjoyed the freedom of his days at Hawkshead’. They were
‘a great relief from the [social] constraints’ of his grandparents’ house
at Penrith.
The strange visions, the sudden feelings of being at one with nature,
could possibly have contained an element of escape, subjugating the
deeper fears and insecurities caused by the deaths of his mother and
father, the lack of love from his [maternal] relations and his worries
about the future.116
This explanation is based upon a range of social and psychological causes;

the elements of Wordsworth’s early life and work being many. Like-
wise, F. M. Todd has argued that the ‘Crackanthorpes’ of Newbiggin
Hall and Penrith ‘gave the poet his first taste of tyranny’.117 The reader
will recall how Dorothy Wordsworth complained to Jane Pollard of her
maternal grandparents’ lack of affection and humour. She was most
upset by the servants’ contemptuous talk about her father’s financial
affairs and her siblings’ poor expectations. Thus she wrote to the same
correspondent in 1787:
Many a time have W[illia]m, J[oh]n, C[hristopher], and myself shed

tears together, tears of the bitterest sorrow, we all of us, each day,
feel more sensibly the loss we sustained when we were deprived of
our parents, and each day do we receive fresh insults. . . . The ser-
vants [at Penrith] are every one of them so insolent to us as makes
the kitchen as well as the parlour quite insupportable. James has
even gone so far as to tell us that we had nobody to depend upon
but my Grandf[athe]r, for that our fortunes we[re] but v[ery sma]ll,
and my Br[other]s cannot even get a pair of shoes cleaned without
James’s telling them they require as much waiting upon as any gentle-
men [sic], nor can I get anything done for myself without absolutely
entreating it as a [fav]our. James happens to be a particular favour-
ite [with] my Uncle Kit, who has taken a dislike to my B[rothe]r
[and] never takes any notice of any of us, so that he thinks [whi]le
my Uncle behaves in this way to us he may do anything. We are
found fault with every hour of the day both by the servants and my
Grandf[athe]r and Grandm[othe]r, the former of whom never speaks
to us but when he scolds, which is not seldom.118
We must, of course, allow for a measure of self-interest in the letter:

Dorothy was a wild, warm-hearted and emotional girl, and might well
have dwelt upon her family’s sufferings more than necessary. More-
over, William was not always well behaved. Indeed, his mother once
confided to her friend, Miss Hamilton, ‘that the only one of her five
children about whose future life she was anxious, was William’ and
she said that he ‘would be remarkable either for good or for evil’. He
was, in fact, ‘of a stiff, moody, and violent temper’ and punishments,
whether merited or not, were often a spur to further misdemeanours.119
Nevertheless, he must have found life at Hawkshead Grammar School
and its environs much better than at Penrith. In consequence, his re-
bellious behaviour was, in part, a reflection of his liking for Old Lakeland
life and manners over the cold and loveless conventions of the com-
mercial classes as typified – in his mind – by Dorothy and William
Cookson, their haughty servant James, and especially ‘Uncle Kit’, who
was being groomed for the respectable role of ’squire of Newbiggin

Hall. In brief, both Todd and Davies offer valuable explanations of the
poet’s visionary experience at Hawkshead and radicalism at Cambridge
which do not reduce the poet’s experience to one clinical cause or
social condition. Above all, their conclusions are quite compatible with
my own account of Wordsworth’s vague and ill-defined status in the
Lake Counties. On the one hand, he had been born into the middle
ranks of well-to-do professionals in rural society, but he had also lived
for many years among the lower-middle ranks of farmers, artisans and
shopkeepers in Old Lakeland. In consequence, his vision of paternal
relationships was impressed vividly upon his character and actions by
everyday events. Not only the system of patronage and connection,
but social and economic bonds between the farming classes were part
of his daily life and experience. (Consider, for example the poem called
‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, quoted in the Introduction.120) On the
other hand, he remained ignorant of the different codes of behaviour
among the upper and ruling classes. Thus he saw Sir James’s refusal to
take care of his former employee’s estate from the position of a de-
pendant and judged it as a flagrant breach of duty. His gut reaction
was no doubt understandable but it betrays the social and economic
beliefs of his rank rather than those of the nobility. J. C. D. Clark, for
example, has shown that such unworthy acts by a social superior could
be sanctioned by the ‘aristocratic code’ which formed one of the pillars
of the Old Regime in England, and which demanded fair play only
between equals. Archdeacon Paley, for instance, began his classic work
on Moral and Political Philosophy by recognising that men were gov-
erned by three codes: ‘The Law of Honour’; ‘The Law of the Land’; and
‘The Scriptures’ – in that order.
The Law of Honour is a system of rules constructed by people of

fashion, and calculated to facilitate their intercourse with one an-
other; and for no other purpose . . . this law only prescribes and
regulates the duties betwixt equals; omitting such as relate to the
Supreme Being, as well as those which we owe to our inferiors. For
which reason, profaneness, neglect of public worship or private de-
votion, cruelty to servants, rigorous treatment of tenants or other
dependents, want of charity to the poor, injuries done to tradesmen
by insolvency or delay of payment, with numberless examples of
the same kind, are accounted no breeches of honour; because a man
is not a less agreeable companion for these vices, nor the worse to
deal with, in those concerns which are usually transacted between
one gentleman and another.121
Clearly the ideology of the Old Regime as given by Paley did not ac-
cord with Wordsworth’s ideal of social life and moral relations as found
in the farming and professional classes of the remote North.122 Sir James
Lowther’s behaviour, both in public and private, seemed anything but
‘honourable’ to the Wordsworths.123 William vented his formidable anger
against the greatest landlord in the region by turning towards radical
and egalitarian notions of society in the early years of the French Rev-
olution – before its distant events acquired ‘a personal interest’ from his
contact with Michel Beaupuy and other patriots.124 In this respect, per-
haps, he was like the professional and mercantile men who, John Brewer
maintains, were the leaders of the radical movement in the time of
George III.125 They were drawn towards political activity for several reasons,
including the cost of indirect taxation on their moveable property, their
vulnerability to economic problems arising from the revolution in credit
and money lending, the growth of statute law, and the stranglehold of
government regulations.126 But the moral motives were social and econ-
omic freedom from the patronage system:
The patron-client nexus was regulated by only one of the two part-
ners involved, and he was answerable to no one but himself. The
abuse of patronage, in other words, was only constrained by the
benevolence and good offices of an all-powerful patron: he held a
veritable sword of Damocles over the head of his client.127
This striving for social, economic and political independence was the
radical corollary, so to speak, of William Paley’s conservative views of
aristocratic behaviour. Both Brewer and Clark, however, provide cred-
ible accounts which are more or less compatible with Perkin’s thesis
that the birth of ‘class’ in England was possible, in the period 1780–
1820, because the traditional rulers were now unwilling to protect the
social and economic interests of their dependent ranks, but were still
very keen to demand their ‘paternal discipline and filial obedience’.128
Herein lies the full significance of Clark’s argument for understanding
Wordsworth’s Romantic politics in the period 1790–8. If the poet’s
charismatic mission put him outside the ‘patriarchal structure’ of the
‘household economy’, in Weber’s sense, then the Lowther debt forced
him, for the first time, to confront the ‘patriarchal structure’ of the
Old Regime, in Clark’s sense, and to ally himself, awkwardly, with the
reform movement in France and England. I say ‘awkwardly’ with good
reason; for the young poet was a ‘populist’ at heart, rather than a rad-
ical democrat or a Jacobin leveller.
Cambridge: ‘something . . . / Of a Republic’
Before we examine the ‘populist’ elements in Wordsworth’s radical cri-

tique, we must deal with the problem of Wordsworth’s political life at
Cambridge. Was it ‘republican’? And, if so, how do we account for it?
Wordsworth, for one, thought that his views were republican and traced
them, in part, to his experiences in Old Lakeland, and, in part, to his
years at Cambridge ‘and an academic life’.129 Our earlier accounts of
Wordsworth’s formal education need not be repeated here. We have
already seen something of his life and manners at Hawkshead and
Cambridge, as well as his formal studies and examinations. Suffice it to
say that there was some truth to the poet’s claims. Unfortunately, even
sensible writers persist in pushing the point too far. For example, John
Williams, in an otherwise admirable book, insists that Wordsworth’s
republican beliefs can be traced back to the academic writings and moral
standpoint ‘of the dissident Whigs and Commonwealthmen of the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’.130 The poet, of course, was
not a ‘Real Whig’ or ‘Commonwealthman’, but the notions of rural
retirement, moral education and political virtue were pervasive features
of his life and work.131 ‘The seeds of an eighteenth-century tradition of
dissidence’, writes Williams, were ‘sown in the literature he had en-
countered at Hawkshead by, among others, [ James] Thompson, [Mark]
Akenside, [James] Beattie, and subsequently [William] Crowe’.132 Like-
wise, at Cambridge, Wordsworth found ‘something . . . / Of a Republic’.
Republican beliefs of the sort mentioned by Williams were never com-
patible with the official Church–State ideology of the ‘Old Regime’ and
the Old University, but traditions of constitutional liberty and religious
toleration were widely canvassed by academics and their associates. Here
John Williams acknowledges the work of Nicholas Roe on the institu-
tion’s radical culture. The poet ‘was certainly aware’ of the ‘lively and
pervasive tradition of religious and political dissent . . . which owed its
inception to the writings of [Robert] Molesworth, [ John] Clarke, [Edmund]
Law and others’, and which flourished ‘well on into the 1790s’.133
Moreover, his study of modern languages, his ‘veneration for the name
of Newton’, and his wide reading of contemporary poetry and prose
were evidence, if it were needed, of Wordsworth’s ‘absorption of edu-
cational theories developed in dissident whig circles’.134 If nothing else,
‘we can agree that a number of Golden Age ideas and traditions are
needed to define fully the intellectual debts and background of
Wordsworth’s Romantic critique of ‘Man, Nature, and Society’. Never-
theless, the same writers have missed the anti-modernist elements of
their own ‘whig’ sources. For example, John Brewer and Isaac Kramnick
have found a large, though ambiguous, role was played by the ‘Real
Whigs’ and ‘Commonwealthmen’ of the eighteenth century in the origins
and significance of the radical movement. The former argued that the
Commonwealthmen and the dissenters rather than the Wilkite camp
provided reformers with a fairly coherent platform.135 The latter revealed
the complex response of Real Whigs and Commonwealthmen to the
social and economic changes in Augustan England. On the one hand,
they wanted to get rid of widespread corruption in Parliament. Hence
their support for frequent elections, borough reform, and a system of
checks and balances in the executive and legislative branches of govern-
ment.136 On the other hand, they were devoted to the old constitution,
which gave legislative authority to the three ‘estates’ of the realm, but
executive power to the king or queen. Above all, perhaps, they were
unwilling to accept the political importance of the ‘new wealth’.
Molesworth, Moyle and Toland, for example, all supported the Landed
Qualification Bill which ‘stipulated that no man could sit in the Com-
mons as a Knight of the Shire unless he had [land worth] six hundred
pounds’ a year in rental, or, ‘if he represented a borough, three hun-
dred hundred pounds’.137 Therefore they were like Lord Bolingbroke
and his circle who steered the Bill into the statute books in 1711. Both
Real Whigs and Commonwealthmen were basically unable ‘to come to
terms with the new England, and its social and economic changes’.
Indeed, ‘they fled to the past, to Harrington’s seventeenth-century gen-
try utopia[,] or even beyond’ to Bolingbroke’s ideal of ‘the commonwealth
of Elizabeth, Smith, or Elyot’.138 But what about Wordsworth? It is cer-
tainly true that ‘Real Whig’ views of ‘constitutional liberty’ and civic
virtue were integral parts of his larger vision of parliamentary reform
in the war years 1793–1815. But it is not true to say that this ‘Real
Whig’ influence was always ‘liberal’ by the standards of the day. At
least, it is possible that Wordsworth’s ‘Real Whig’ beliefs were drawn
from several writers whose works contained ‘anti-modernist’ elements
which might have confirmed his Golden Age ideal of Old England as
defined in Chapters 1, 2 and 3 of this book. That is to say, the poet’s
social and economic assumptions and experience, in my opinion, were
always more important to him than political ideas per se. Nor must we
exaggerate the poet’s involvement with dissenting groups and republi-
cans at Cambridge University. Even Ben Ross Schneider concluded his
exhaustive study of the radical culture at Cambridge University with
the confession that there ‘is no evidence’ to date ‘that Wordsworth
ever knew’ the leading reformers of the 1780s like Henry Gunning,
Felix Vaughan, Thomas Malthus, William Otter or Edward Daniel Clarke.
Nor did he record any contact with the younger generation of whig
reformers such as Francis Wrangham, Basil Montagu or John Tweddell
when still a student at St John’s College.139 Likewise, Nicholas Roe found
that Wordsworth’s ‘active commitment to a political life’ in the 1790s
‘was never so extensive or as consistent as Coleridge’s, nor was it inte-
grated with religious belief as with Coleridge’s unitarianism’.140 There-

fore, the common focus upon Wordsworth’s formal schooling, both at
Hawkshead and Cambridge, as opposed to his rural experiences and
assumptions has been misplaced, in my opinion, as the best explana-
tion of his early republican ideas and democratic sympathies in the period
1789–98.
Wordsworth, Paine and Golden Age ideas during the

French Revolution: 1789–95
The relevance of Golden Age ideas to the known facts of Wordsworth’s

life and work in the 1790s is supposedly weakest with regards to his
radical ideas in revolutionary France and England. He believed
That a benignant spirit was abroad

Which might not be withstood, that poverty
Abject . . . would in a little time
Be found no more, that we should see the earth
Unthwarted in her wish to recompense
The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil,
All institutes for ever blotted out
That legalised exclusion, empty pomp
Abolished, sensual state and cruel power
Whether by the edict of the one or few;
And finally, as sum and crown of all,
Should see the people having a strong hand
In framing their own laws; whence better days
To all mankind.141
What are we to make of this strikingly democratic stage of Wordsworth’s

life and work? E. P. Thompson has concluded that these retrospective
lines ‘recapture more than any other the optimism of those revolution-
ary years’: a radical vision of Man’s innate goodness, reason and common
sense ‘which Wordsworth was soon to lose . . . but to which [English]
Radicalism clung tenaciously’. Moreover, they were based for their theor-
etical framework upon Paine’s book, Rights of Man.142 Most critics would
accept Thompson’s assessment of Wordsworth’s radical platform in the
early 1790s.143 The point, in fact, was settled long ago by Edward Niles
Hooker, who revealed that the poet’s radical programme drew most
heavily upon Paine’s Common Sense and Rights of Man for its political
content. For example, he called for republican over monarchical forms
of government, based upon universal rather than virtual systems of
representation. In the same vein, he attacked the aristocratic bases of
borough-mongering and ‘Old Corruption’ in unreformed England. The
list of debts could be lengthened greatly.144 What Wordsworth scholars

have overlooked, however, is Paine’s use of Golden Age ideas and tra-
ditions: for example, his significant debt to Lord Bolingbroke’s reactionary
critique of financial and landed elites and the related ideas of the so-
called ‘country party’ of eighteenth-century ‘opposition’ politics. Lord
Bolingbroke argued that ‘the expansion of public credit and the na-
tional debt under Sir Robert Walpole had created a new ruling class of
corrupt and avaricious financiers, centred in the City of London, closely
allied to the ruling aristocracy who were themselves often from new
rather than old families. These groups, together with the impact of the
national debt, were responsible for the perilous decline of the smaller
gentry, yeomanry and farming classes’, who were deemed ‘the tradi-
tional backbone of English liberty and prosperity’.145 This social and
economic critique was crucial to the complex of political positions known
as the ‘country party’: for example, the ‘Real Whig’, Robert, Lord
Molesworth, held much in common with Lord Bolingbroke and his
circle on such matters as government corruption and excessive taxa-
tion of the lesser gentry, and, especially, the political pretensions of
the new financial elites. At least his essay, Principles of a Real Whig
(1711), ‘said nothing that would not fit in Bolingbroke’s Opposition’
and ‘much that would’, including ‘the proposal for parliamentary re-
form’, which was also advocated in Lord Bolingbroke’s newspaper, The
Craftsman, and in George Lyttleton’s famous work called the Persian
Letters.146 Likewise, ‘the Commonwealthmen’, John Trenchard and Thomas
Gordon, echoed the content and style of Bolingbroke’s outbursts against
the new social and economic order in England. Thus they wrote in
Cato’s Letters (1724), that:
The resurrection of honesty and industry can never be hoped for

while this sort of vermin is suffered to crawl about, tainting the air,
and putting everything out of course, subsisting by lies, and practis-
ing vile tricks. . . . They are rogues of prey, they are stockjobbers.
They are a conspiracy of stockjobbers! . . . Well, but monstrous as
they are, what would you do with them? The answer is short and at
hand, hang them.147
The Commonwealthmen and the Real Whigs were both believers in

the ‘liberal’ values of personal freedom and legal rights; but neither
group could square its ‘progressive’ ideas with the economic individual-
ism and moveable wealth of the new moneyed order in Augustan
England. Here we find a parallel with the later Wordsworth, whose
‘Whig’ sonnets on ‘National Independence and Liberty’, published between
1802 and 1815, were set firmly against the corruption of ‘the Pitt system
of government’ (in Cobbett’s sense), the problems of urban living, and
the commercial values of England’s traders and investors regarded as

objects of national greatness and moral fulfilment. Nevertheless, the
highly conservative views of Lord Bolingbroke were given a democratic
and republican bias by the English radicals like Tom Paine, William
Cobbett and Major John Cartwright. As W. D. Rubinstein observes:
The merger of Bolingbroke’s [reactionary] critique of the financial

and aristocratic elites and their depredations against the smaller land-
owners and common people, with a thoroughgoing belief in popular
sovereignty and greater democracy, fully explicit in Cobbett, was gradu-
ally introduced into . . . [the] ‘country party’ tradition by such radical
thinkers as Thomas Paine and John Cartwright. Although Paine and
Cartwright are primarily known for their radical and democratic cri-
tiques of Britain’s hereditary system of government . . . it is important
not to lose sight of the now-neglected fact that they also attacked
the financial . . . [and] aristocratic elites of their time, the great in-
crease in national indebtedness, the new creditor class, and the harm
this did to the ‘ordinary man’, in much the same terms as either
Bolingbroke or Cobbett.148
The focus of this study is Paine’s influence upon Wordsworth. In con-

sequence, we cannot dwell too long upon Cartwright’s legacy to the
poet. Most importantly, one gathers that Wordsworth was probably ex-
posed to Cartwright’s ideas during his early sojourn in radical London.
For example, between 1793 and 1795, he was well acquainted with the
dissenting shopkeeper, Samuel Nicholson, and the dissenting publisher
and bookseller, Joseph Johnson, who were both active members of
Cartwright’s Society for Constitutional Information.149 This body was
obsessed with the ‘Norman yoke’ theory of ‘lost rights’, but was also
favourably impressed by the views of Lord Bolingbroke on the evils of
financial capitalism and public corruption. Likewise, Wordsworth drew
heavily upon this modified ‘country party’ tradition for his radical content
and theory: for example, like Cartwright and Cobbett, he blamed the
Norman Conquest for the imposition of feudal relations into England
which had degenerated down the centuries into the present system of
aristocratic corruption, pride and idleness:
The bastard gave some favourite stocks of peers

Patents of Manhood for eight hundred years.
Eight hundred years uncalled to other tasks
Butlers have simply broached their Lordships’ casks.
My Lady ne’er approached a thing so coarse
As Tom – but when he helped her to her horse –
A Norman Robber then, & c. & c.150
On the one hand, his comments on the evolution of English society

under the Normans is quite typical of the reform movement of the
day. For example, the anonymously written Historical Essay on the English
Constitution (1771) paid particular attention to the supposed virtues
of King Alfred’s Free Constitution and its subversion by the Norman
invaders who ‘destroyed all the elective power, constitutionally placed
in the people of England, and reversed the Saxon form of government
which was founded on the common rights of mankind’.151 The people
finally recovered their elective power in Parliament thanks to the
‘immortal barons who rescued the constitution from the Norman tyranny’
by means of Magna Carta.152 The Essay was certainly suspect on historical
grounds: most constitutional experts today would agree with the tory
writer, Robert Brady, who argued, in the late seventeenth century, that
the Norman Conquest had completely changed the character and direction
of English law and government by the imposition of feudal tenures
upon the whole population. Above all, he denied William Peyt’s view
that a class of freeholders, retaining their Anglo-Saxon rights, had survived
the Conquest.153 In fact, the medieval Parliament never over-stepped
its function as a feudal council directly linked to the tenure of the
crown. 154 Even Magna Carta was not so much the great charter of
English freedoms as a feudal document with slight relevance for later
societies.155 Brady sensibly concluded that it was, basically, ‘a demand
for [the] relaxation of feudal service and a call to the more powerful
barons to implement feudal privileges of council and advice’; it was
never inspired by Anglo-Saxon precedents or traditions.156 Neverthe-
less, the Essay was given prominence by Major Cartwright in the
well-known essay Take Your Choice, and was issued under his direction
by the Society for Constitutional Information in April 1780.157 How-
ever, when the Essay was reprinted with interpolations by The Patriot,
in 1792, the political attack on the aristocracy, echoed in Wordsworth’s
life and work, was reinforced by footnotes: for example, the statement
that the Conquest saw ‘the origin of the immense, overgrown landed
property of our race of nobles and rich commoners, a right founded in
murder, desolation and proscription’.158 For his part, Tom Paine rejected
both the reformer’s historical notion of ‘lost rights’ and the royalist’s
belief in ‘divine right to rule’. Nevertheless, he too declared in Common
Sense (1776) that: ‘A French bastard landing with an armed banditti
and establishing himself [as] King of England, against the consent of
the natives, is, in plain terms, a very paltry, rascally original. It certainly
hath no divinity in it’.159 Moreover, he reasoned, in Rights of Man (1791)
that: ‘If the succession runs in the line of the Conqueror, the nation
runs in the line of being conquered, and ought to rescue itself from
this reproach’. The English Constitution ‘was erected by patents from
the descendants of the Conqueror. The House of Commons did not
originate as a matter of right in the people, to delegate or elect, but as

a grant or boon’. The ‘Free-born Englishman’ should therefore forget
old traditions about ‘lost rights’ and follow instead the example of the
modern French republic.160 His message certainly appealed to the young
Wordsworth: in a much quoted letter to William Mathews, dated 8
June 1794, the poet declared that:
I disapprove of monarchical and aristocratical governments, how-

ever modified. Hereditary distinctions, and privileged orders of every
species I think necessarily counteract the progress of human improve-
ment: hence it follows that I am not amongst the admirers of the
British constitution.161
His position, however, was subject to much qualification. He states, for

example, in the same letter that he ‘recoil[ed] from the bare idea of a
revolution’; and ‘deplore[d] the miserable situation of the French’ who
were then reckoning the cost of the Jacobin ‘Terror’. (Between March
1793 and 10 June 1794, over twelve hundred political prisoners were
executed in Paris as part of the government’s emergency measures against
known or reputed enemies of the Revolution.) Hence the poet’s Cobbett-
like plan to avoid it: (1) ‘by oeconomy in the administration of the
public purse’; (2) by ‘a gradual and constant reform of those abuses
which, if left to themselves, may grow to such a height as to render
even a revolution desirable’; and (3) by the establishment of a free
press in the period, which might criticise the Pitt government, on the
one hand, whilst holding out rational alternatives to revolution, on
the other:
Freedom of inquiry is all that I wish for; let nothing be deemed too
sacred for investigation; rather than restrain the liberty of the press
I would suffer the most atrocious doctrines to be recommended: let
the field be unencumbered, and truth must be victorious.162
His private wish was half-granted in the closing months of that year
(1794) by the jury’s acquittal for treason of John Horne Tooke, Thomas
Hardy and John Thelwall. Wordsworth did not like the inflammatory
addresses and subversive activities of the ‘English Jacobins’. He believed
that the ‘destruction of those institutions’ which he himself condemned
was ‘hastening on too rapidly’ for the continued safety of the state
and the nation.163 Still he shared the radical euphoria of the men’s
release and concluded, with some reason, that the events in question
were crucial for the reform movement:
They will convince bigotted enemies to our present constitution that

it contains parts upon which too high a value cannot be set. To
every class of men occupied in the correction of abuses it must be
an animating reflection that their exertions, so long as they are tem-
perate will be countenanced and protected by the good sense of the
country.164
Clearly, the poet’s democratic ideas were dovetailed wherever possible

into the Common Law and constitutional framework of Old England.
On the other hand, his levelling tone was even more important than
the content and activities of his early life and work. This is not merely
‘the optimism of those revolutionary years’ as noted by E. P. Thompson.
Rather, it is a new element in the social life of the nation. In the lines
just quoted, from Wordsworth’s ‘Imitation of Juvenal’, the radical’s
sympathy for poor ‘Tom’ (the stable-boy) is certainly more memorable
than his obvious dislike of the nobility, which provides the ostensible
theme for the poem. He was, in this regard, like Tom Paine (and William
Cobbett) whose writings, as Professor Rubinstein observed, gave expression
to the harm done to the ‘ordinary man’ by the new money economy
and war policy.165 This is best seen in the powerful poem called ‘Guilt
and Sorrow; or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain’, which was ‘written by
the close of 1794’, and whose principal purpose was to show the ‘ca-
lamities . . . consequent upon war, to which, more than other classes
of men, the poor are subject’.166 In the first place, he observed the
heavy burden of the ‘press-gang’ in plebeian society and the habitual
brutality of naval life and service in the Empire which together kept
the Fleet strong enough to protect the social and economic interests of
England’s aristocratic government.167 Secondly, he saw the social injus-
tice of huge stacks of corn and enclosed fields of wheat during a time
of hunger and food shortages amongst the ‘rural poor’, which, in ‘A
Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, he attributed to ‘the unnatural mon-
ster of primogeniture’, the ‘monopolising system of legislation’, and
the nation’s ‘enormous debt’ of 240 million pounds, incurred by the
unreformed Parliament in direct opposition to the people’s welfare and
collective interests.168 Thirdly, he deplored the widespread poverty of
the smallholder, artisan and labourer in the face of high prices, low
wages and irregular trade of the war economy: the ‘empty loom, cold
hearth, and silent wheel’ being apt symbols of the family’s loss of social
and economic independence in the war period.169 Above all, perhaps,
he noted the profound loss of family feeling and social sympathy which
followed long-term unemployment and economic distress – especially
in the rural south.170 The scope of the present chapter does not permit
us room to examine the truth or falsity of these four statements. The
reader, however, will find all but the first reviewed in some detail in
previous chapters.171 What then can we observe about their ‘political’

meaning here? On the one hand, it seems that ‘Guilt and Sorrow’,
rather than ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, formed the social and
economic backbone of Wordsworth’s radical critique of England’s dom-
estic and foreign policy in the period 1791–8. It was clearly pacifist,
democratic and populist – one might almost say Jeffersonian – in its
emphasis upon the need for social and economic equality in rural society.
On the other hand, his rural education and upbringing in the broadest
sense lay behind his abiding sympathy for the ‘common man’, who
could not brook the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ nor yet
‘take arms against a sea of troubles/ And by opposing end them’.172
(The famous ‘strikes’ at Spithead and the Nore, for example, over pay
and conditions in the Navy, did not occur until 1797.173) In this regard
he was always like Cobbett: ‘The Poor Man’s Friend’ – whether soldier,
sailor or labourer. Indeed the comparison, made in Chapter 3, between
Wordsworth and Cobbett is given greater credibility by the poet’s
conscious debt to Tom Paine’s social and economic critique of financial
and landed elites – as discussed by Professor Rubinstein – and not just
his beliefs about the ‘rights of man’ and republican models of government.
It seems true to say, at least, that Wordsworth’s private life was given
a clearer focus in political activity by Paine’s views of revolutionary
democracy in France. Nevertheless, he was still moved by the spirit of
constitutional liberty and freedom which he had imbibed at Cambridge
University; and, above all, by the egalitarian impulse of English ‘populism’
which he had found in the Lake District community.
Conclusion
E. P. Thompson has argued that Wordsworth and Coleridge, in the

years 1798–1814, were both prototypes of the disillusioned radical of
the twentieth century. Both men failed to keep their faith in the power
of sweeping social, economic and political reforms to improve the material
and moral lot of mankind. Their ‘disenchantment’, however, was the
emotional source of their best poetry, in which, for example, Wordsworth
questioned the failure of revolutionary idealism both in France and
England. It was clearly different to the tory ‘apostasy’ of the poets in
their later years.174 The ‘creative impulse’ writes Thompson, ‘came out
of the heart of this conflict’:
There is a tension between a boundless aspiration – for liberty, reason,

égalité, perfectibility – and a peculiarly harsh and unregenerate
reality. So long as that tension persists, the creative impulse can be
felt. But once the tension slackens, the creative impulse fails also.
There is nothing in disenchantment inimical to art. But when aspiration
is actively denied, we are at the edge of apostasy, and apostasy is a

moral failure, and an imaginative failure.175
The strength of Thompson’s thesis is two-fold: it focuses upon ‘the

actual lived historical experience’ of the Romantic poets involved, and
shows the relevance of their political ideas and activities to their Ro-
mantic art – especially The Prelude, which recaptures the spirit of
revolutionary events in France and the affirmation of humanist values
in spite of fifteen years of counter-revolution both at home and abroad:
. . . if in these times of fear,

This melancholy waste of hopes o’erthrown,
If, ‘mid indifference and apathy
And wicked exultation, when good men,
On every side fall off we know not how,
To selfishness, disguis’d in gentle names
Of peace, and quiet, and domestic love,
Yet mingled, not unwillingly, with sneers
On visionary minds; if in this time
Of dereliction and dismay, I yet
Despair not of our nature; but retain
A more than Roman confidence, a faith
That fails not, in all sorrow my support,
The blessing of my life, the gift is yours,
Ye mountains! thine, O Nature!176
One can readily accept Thompson’s reasoning that the poet’s greatest
poetry was tied to his strongest emotional commitments, of which the
French Revolution was one, but it does not follow that only political
events and crises inspired the poet to self-exploration and success. Even
in the passage just quoted by Thompson it is hard to avoid the conclu-
sion that the historian’s ‘humanist’ values and ideas were largely
handmaids to the poet’s Romantic religion of ‘Nature!’ In this regard,
Thompson’s social and political beliefs might be said to obscure
Wordsworth’s emotional and intellectual priorities. We have already
seen abundant evidence of Wordsworth’s ability to give lasting expres-
sion to personal and social feelings which were based upon Golden
Age ideals of Old Lakeland farmers and labourers: the social, economic
and political implications of such views were ‘populist’ rather than
‘Jacobin’ in a strict sense, and, in Wordsworth’s case, were revolution-
ary in their egalitarian concern for the moral character and dignity of
the common man rather than the promulgation of democratic ideas as
such. On the other hand, they were mainly anti-modernist in scope
and character – especially when compounded by his advocacy of tory
hegemony in the unreformed Parliament. This point must be stressed.

Poems like ‘Michael’, ‘The Brothers’, and the first book of ‘The Rec-
luse’, called ‘Home at Grasmere’, provide incontrovertible evidence, if
it were needed, that Wordsworth’s imagination could deal with con-
flicts of thought and feeling in society which were less visible to urban
contemporaries: namely, the long-term revolution in English farming,
industry and commerce in the countryside. Golden Age ideals were clearly
compatible with political poetry – whether radical, whig or tory – if
the focus was the lives and character of the small independent produc-
ers of the Lake District. For example, in ‘Home at Grasmere’, Wordsworth
keeps the ‘populist’ and ‘tory’ elements of his moral critique in clear
harmony. On the one hand, he gives a profoundly moving vision of
the statesman system of farming, the advantages of rural life and natu-
ral pursuits over urban and artificial ones, and the long-term benefits
of a post-feudal regime whose influence is confined to the general pol-
itical stability of the countryside. The result is a perfect example of
Burke’s ‘organic’ society with only a stylistic echo of the great corpora-
tion of human society:
From crowded streets remote

Far from the living and dead wilderness
Of the thronged World, Society is here
A true Community – a genuine frame
Of many into one incorporate.
That must be looked for here; paternal sway,
One household, under God, for high and low,
One family and one mansion; to themselves
Appropriate, and divided from the world
As if it were a cave, a multitude
Human and brute, possessors undisturbed
Of this Recess, their legislative Hall,
Their Temple and their glorious Dwelling-place.177
We can contrast Wordsworth’s fine integration of form and content, in

this work, with the frequent failure of his pedagogic art in general.
Consider, for example, the ‘Anglican’ prayer for the nation’s aristo-
cratic government at the start of Book Six in The Excursion:
Hail to the crown by Freedom shaped – to gird

An English Sovereign’s brow! and to the throne
Whereon he sits! Whose deep foundations lie
In veneration and the people’s love;
Whose steps are equity, whose seat is law.
– Hail to the State of England! And conjoin
With this a salutation as devout,

Made to the spiritual fabric of her Church;
Founded in truth; by blood of Martyrdom
Cemented; by the hands of Wisdom reared
In beauty of holiness, with ordered pomp,
Decent and unreproved. The voice, that greets
The majesty of both, shall pray for both;
That, mutually protected and sustained,
They may endure long as the sea surrounds
This favoured Land, or sunshine warms her soil.178
These somewhat stilted lines reveal Wordsworth’s growing reverence

for the nation’s post-feudal order, and its given institutions of Church–
State authority, which he held to be responsible for the general welfare
and happiness of the English people in the period. He was, of course,
right to portray the dependent ranks of Old England as essentially con-
servative in their views of religion and their traditional obedience to
the aristocratic government of the day. Both Harold Perkin and J. C.
D. Clark, for instance, have given strong, if different, arguments that
the greatest threat to the fabric of the Church–State of unreformed
England lay in the rise of alternative ideologies amongst dissenting groups
in new urban centres – especially, the industrial and commercial towns
of the north.179 Wordsworth looked most eagerly, in the post-war period,
to the Church–State Establishment to protect the common people and
their customs from the corruptions of modern society. But it was,
artistically speaking, a bad move. In this respect, E. P. Thompson is
half right to conclude that:
Wordsworth fell back within the forms of paternalistic sensibility. If

there is a moral, it is not that he became a poorer poet because he
changed his political views, but that his new ‘good views’ were not
held with the same intensity and authenticity. They are too dutiful,
too much the product not of the poet but of his inner moral censor;
he wrote, not out of belief, nor out of the tension between beliefs,
but out of a sense of what he ought to believe.180
This conclusion is ‘half right’ in so far as it focuses upon the poet’s

lack of inspiration in defending the Constitution in Church and State
compared, for example, with his successful integration of old social
and religious values and economic traditions of charity and poor relief
in great poems like ‘The Brothers’, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, the
soldier’s story in Book Four of The Prelude, or the early versions of
‘Margaret’ in Book One of The Excursion. It is wrong, however, in so far
as it confounds Wordsworth’s ‘paternal’ views of the old landed order

with the ‘patriarchal’ creed of the ruling elites themselves: ‘If I speak
of apostasy’, writes Thompson, ‘then, it is one way of saying that in
area after area the [Lake] poets fell back within the traditional frame of
paternalism, Anglican doctrine, [and] fear of change’.181 Clearly, his
definition of ‘paternalistic sensibilities’ is too broad for our purposes.
The ‘Paternal sway’ mentioned by Wordsworth, in ‘The Recluse’, points
to his persistent need for a wider political context in which to fit the
facts of the statesmen system of farming. We have seen evidence, for
example, in Chapters 1 and 2, that the poor clergy and lesser gentry
were widely involved in the daily lives and activities of the ‘statesmen’
farmers, and their families, and so deserved a mention in his vision of
life at Grasmere. Nevertheless, the hegemony of the aristocratic classes
and the patriarchal framework of the Anglican Church–State was not
the cause of the ‘true Community’ of which he speaks. That was rooted
in the ‘republican’ values and comparative equality of the ‘Shepherds
and Agriculturists’ in question. Above all, he ‘declined’ as a poet be-
cause his tory ideology gave precedence to the demands of a ‘patriarchal’
order of natural authority and hierarchy, which was largely outside of,
and incompatible with, his ‘paternal’ experience and assumptions of
the small independent producers of the day. Whereas Wordsworth could
recall the ‘inner’ lives and values of the statesmen farmers and their
families, he had no such vivid memories, or imaginative understand-
ing, of the ruling families and their aristocratic code. Clearly, he could
not feel the Old Regime’s ideology, even though he made great efforts
to understand its historical origins and symbolic meaning for the de-
pendent ranks of society:
Lowther! in thy majestic Pile are seen

Cathedral pomp and grace, in apt accord
With the baronial castle’s sterner mien;
Union significant of God adored,
And charters won and guarded by the sword
Of ancient honour; whence that goodly state
Of polity which wise men venerate,
And will maintain, if God his help afford.182
If he found friendship and protection in the post-war period in the

drawing rooms and libraries of the Lowthers, the Beaumonts and other
noble families it failed to modify his ‘paternalistic sensiblity’ for the
better. On the contrary, it obscured his real feelings and concerns for
the common man.
Hourly the democratic torrent swells;

For airy promises and hopes suborned
The strength of backward-looking thoughts is scorned.183
In such eulogistic lines to the great landed estates we find the poet’s
Golden Age ideal of Old England hardened by the ‘fear of change’, in
Thompson’s sense, into a rigid defence of the aristocratic government;
but, as we saw in Chapter 4, his strongest feelings and sympathies for
the statesmen farmers and domestic weavers of the north remained
unchanged: in other words, his tory paternalism, in the narrow sense,
shared more in common with Chartist critiques of the modern economy
and society than his tory patrons would care to admit.184 If, however,
Wordsworth’s ‘patriarchal’ creed was a powerful weapon in the war of
words and ideas to defend the old agrarian order from all ‘sweeping
change’, it was, at best, a normative argument against ‘the democratic
activities of the great Towns and of the Manufacturing Districts’, in
favour of ‘the sedentary power of large estates, continued from genera-
tion to generation in particular families’.185 Moreover, it was always
better suited to Wordsworth’s highly wrought prose and partisan let-
ters to Lord Lonsdale, the Carlisle Patriot (1815), and the Kendal Gazette
(1818), and so on, than to his highly fitful and spontaneous kind of
poetic composition. In fact, his ‘patriarchal’ creed, at worst, was often
inimical to the emotional impetus of his great Romantic poetry which
focused upon the Natural Man and the local landscape, as epitomised
in the ‘dalesmen’ of the north.186 Whenever Wordsworth tried to cross
the gulf between the ‘patrician’ and ‘plebeian’ elements of his mental
world, he was without a strong emotional basis for argument.
Wordsworth’s tory standpoint, however, was not the only social cause
of his relative decline as a poet. Just as important, in my view, was the
‘specifically unstable’ nature of his ‘charismatic authority’ as defined in
the early part of this chapter. Weber found that charisma, in its ideal
type, was short-lived and inherently unstable vis-à-vis the particular
group to whom the ‘divine gift’ was vouchsafed. When the charismatic
group grew too large, or too worldly, or both, the leader and his dis-
ciples moved closer to the forms of patrimonial or legal authority at the
expense of their earlier social freedom and artistic independence. In
consequence, they were no longer charismatic figures, who lived ‘out-
side the ties of this world, outside of routine occupations, as well as
outside the routine obligations of family life’.187 This must be emphasised.
Several critics have reviled Wordsworth for his excessive concern with
family affairs and domestic values at Grasmere and Rydal Mount, in
the years 1802–32, and even more so for his involvement in public
affairs and civil office in the period 1813–32; but no one, to my knowl-
edge, has given a really convincing explanation of the poet’s long-term
change from a ‘bohemian’ artist to ‘patrimonial’ figure of the Old Re-

gime. Most radical scholars simply restate, in one form or another, the
standard accounts of political ‘disenchantment’, retirement to a moun-
tain retreat, or growing dependence upon tory patronage and support
as major reasons for Wordsworth’s new lifestyle, values and habits.188
Weber’s concept of ‘routinization’, however, provides a credible alterna-
tive to these conventional views of the poet’s private life and public
behaviour. Whereas William and Dorothy Wordsworth, in the years
1795–1802, had lived like ‘independents without gainful employment’
– for example, at Alfoxden and Nether Stowey – the settlement of the
‘Lowther debt’ (with interest) by Sir William Lowther, in 1802, made it
possible for the poet to marry his boyhood friend, Mary Hutchinson,
and so to begin his own family and domestic life in the last years of
his Romantic greatness, 1802–7. Thereafter his life became more staid
and predictable in its mode of conduct and ideas. Indeed, it slowly
assumed the nature and character of the old landed order it had tried
to escape, and for a while, to replace, in the 1790s. For example, he
wanted to give his growing family a range of social and economic ad-
vantages which lay largely outside the strict frugality and domestic
competence which he and his sister had practised for so long. The
moral and emotional cost of his wishes for domestic comfort and security
were unwanted stress and distraction over the health, education and
housing of his family and close friends.189 Even Dorothy Wordsworth,
who was scarcely less worldly than her brother, in the early years, could
fly off the handle when he refused to publish a poem, ‘The White
Doe of Rylstone’, in 1808, and so betrayed his lack of ambition and
self-confidence:
We are exceedingly concerned, to hear that you, William! have given

up all thoughts of publishing your Poem. As to the Outcry against
you, I would defy it – what matter, if you get your 100 guineas into
your pocket? Besides it is like as if they had run you down, when it
is known you have a poem ready for publishing, and keep it back. It
is our belief, and that of all who have heard it read, that the Tale
would bear it up – and without money what can we do? New House!
new furniture! such a large family! two servants and little Sally [Green]!
we cannot go on so another half-year; and as Sally will not be fit for
another place, we must take her back again into the old one, and
dismiss one of the Servants, and work the flesh off our poor bones.
Do, dearest William! do pluck up your Courage – overcome your
disgust to publishing – It is but a little trouble, and all will be over,
and we shall be wealthy, and at our ease for one year, at least.190
Although he ignored her vehement advice on this matter, the economic

situation only got worse over next few years and finally reached a head
in 1812–13, when the poet’s aversion to publishing made it almost
inevitable that he should call upon the Earl of Lonsdale for further
patronage: thus in 1813 he became Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland.
This well-paid position was not a sinecure and so demanded a great deal
of the poet’s time and attention as principal supervisor of the several
sub-agents involved. Clearly, the poet of genius had moved into the
realm of the ‘patrimonial’ order and behaved accordingly. Over the
next decade or so it became quite obvious to Wordsworth’s wife and
sister that his original plan to write ‘The Recluse’ in three books would
not be completed, in part, because of his growing habits of procrasti-
nation and delay, and, in part, because of his busy social, economic
and political life.191 By 1830, Hartley Coleridge noted, somewhat drily,
that Wordsworth seemed ‘yearly less of the Poet, and more of the re-
spectable, talented, hospitable Country gentleman’.192 Indeed, he turned
more and more readily to ‘respectable’ topics of religious and political
significance which could be treated in rigid and traditional metres like
the sonnet and the rhyming couplet: for example, he wrote the learned
series of Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822), which were widely read in their
day, and even contained ‘some strong lines’, but have since been ig-
nored by the reading public.193 His tory poems, however, were rendered
dull, in part, because he wrote about orthodox ideas and beliefs which
did not truly gel with his own unorthodox ideas and Romantic feel-
ings about the Natural Man and Innocence: for example, he could never
feel the ‘need of a [personal] redeemer’, nor deny the visionary aspects
of the poet’s relationship with Nature as evinced in The Excursion.194
His poetry, however, was also rendered dull, in part, because it was
built upon the rigid classical and neo-classical foundations of the eight-
eenth-century culture itself: in this respect we might find a stylistic
symmetry in the nature of Wordsworth’s late poetry and his loss of
charismatic purpose and authority. For example, T. S. Eliot argued, in
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, that Wordsworth’s Romantic
writings were often quite ‘as turgid and artificial and elegant’ as any-
thing written by the Augustan poets whose language and ideas he had
attacked so strongly in the ‘Preface to’ the Lyrical Ballads (1798–1802).195
In other words, the production of a neo-classical poem, in the post-war
period, like ‘Ode to Lycoris’ (1817), is more like a return to something
left unsung since the poet’s student days at Hawkshead and Cambridge,
and the ‘High Culture’ of the eighteenth century, than a new element
in his life and work as such. At least, he wrote of the poem’s opening
stanza, which contained a difficult classical allusion and invoked the
name of Lycoris as used by Virgil and Ovid, that:
surely one who has written so much in verse as I have done may be
allowed to retrace his steps into the regions of fancy which delighted
him in his boyhood, when he first became acquainted with the Greek
& Roman Poets. . . . Classical literature affected me by its own beauty. . . .
No doubt the hackneyed & lifeless use into which mythology fell
toward the close of the 17th. century, & which continued through
the 18th., disgusted the general reader with all allusion to it in modern
verse. And though, in deference to this disgust, & also in a measure
participating in it, I abstained in my earlier writings from all intro-
duction of pagan fable, – surely, even in its humble form, it may
ally itself with real sentiment – as I can truly affirm it did in the
present case.196
These sentences, dictated to Isabella Fenwick in 1843, misrepresent the

sheer depth of the Romantic poet’s hostility in the period 1797–1807
to ‘the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers’ in
the late Augustan period and his own preference for a ‘language really
spoken by men’ of the lower and middle ranks of society.197 Neverthe-
less they are highly instructive. They remind us that Wordsworth’s
charismatic ‘mission’ in Weber’s sense lay in the very depiction of ‘low
and rustic life’ in poems mainly intended for the middle and upper
ranks of society.198 He hoped thereby to effect a long-term change in
the nature of feeling and emotion among the ruling elite and their
dependent ranks which was complementary to, but not necessarily based
upon, the social and political principles of the French Revolution. Later
when his radical and whig sympathies were cooled by twenty years of
war and ‘unregenerate reality’, in Thompson’s sense, and his own repu-
tation as a great poet was largely assured, he found it easy to bridge
the gap between his tory paternalism and High Church politics, on the
one hand, and his poetic practice, on the other. For example, he was
no longer worried about bringing his verses within the ambit of neo-
classical literature and polite behaviour which continued to influence
(like his own creative works!) the most important poets of the nine-
teenth century, from Shelley to Swinburne. In the years 1797–1807,
Wordsworth had been inspired to write about the Natural Man and
Nature as fit subjects for the highest art and morality. He focused, in
particular, upon the ‘statesmen’ of the dales and their dependent ranks
of farm labourers and live-in servants. He was clearly moved by the
social spirit of ‘charisma’ no less than the Romantic Imagination itself
– which he defined as ‘the vision and the faculty divine’. Hence his
best poems, the Lyrical Ballads (1798), The Prelude (1805) and ‘Home at
Grasmere’ (1806) were mostly written on this social and economic group.
Nonetheless, when his charismatic ‘mission’ was basically complete –
without his being wholly conscious of the fact – he fell back into the
conventional forms and material of the Old Regime’s High Culture,

which he had so boldly rejected in the years of his Romantic creativity.
It was in many respects a sad reversal of roles and values; but also the
‘inevitable’ result of the ‘specifically unstable’ nature of his ‘divine gift’
and the social mission which he had set for himself.
Appendix I Wordsworth’s Use of
the Words ‘Peasant’ and ‘Peasantry’
in his Poems, 1787–1850
See J. O. Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth: The Poems (1977), Vol. 1. The word
‘peasant’ appears 22 times in this volume of Wordsworth’s poems, from the
years c.1787–c.1817. The poem ‘Descriptive Sketches’ (1793), however, is printed
twice to show Wordsworth’s stylistic improvements in the period 1793–1849/
50; thus 3 of these examples are redundant. Of the 19 instances of the word
peasant we find 3 of them in this early account of Swiss farmers and their
ancient ‘Republic’; 5 examples appear in the historical play The Borderers (1797;
pub. 1842): here the word is used only to signify social rank in ‘feudal’ Eng-
land, during the thirteenth century. Two similar examples are found in the
historical poem called ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’ (1815), which relates the
religious and social struggles of the English Reformation. Further instances are
given in the poet’s reflections upon the famous monastery at Chartreuse, in
France, during the late eighteenth century: see ‘A Tuft of Primroses’ (1808; pub.
1949), and a sonnet on the feudal ranks and traditions of Biscayan society in
Spain: see ‘The Oak of Guernica’ (1815). A satirical use of the word occurs in
connection with the lewd conduct of the upper classes of English society: see
‘An Imitation of Juvenal – Satire VIII’ (1800; pub. 1940). Of the remaining in-
stances 1 is a proper term of reproach for a churlish rural labourer who has just
beaten his poor boy: see ‘Guilt and Sorrow’ (1800; pub. 1842). Elsewhere the
word ‘peasant’ is used twice by Wordsworth to describe a rural labourer whom
the poet wrongly suspects of wasting his time fishing, whilst ‘reapers’ all around
him are taking advantage of the high wages offered at harvest time. When he
sees that the man is a poor cripple, who is trying to maintain his self-respect
and independence, the poet is smitten with remorse at his own ‘rash judge-
ment’ and the derogatory word ‘peasant’ is dropped in favour of the simple and
democratic epithet ‘The Man’: see ‘A Narrow Girdle Of Rough Stones And Crags’
(1800). Likewise in ‘A Poet’s Epitaph’ (1800), Wordsworth commands a war-
proud soldier ‘to lean upon a peasant’s staff’. Because this poem deals with
whole groups or classes of men and occupations – such as statesmen, physi-
cians, lawyers and divines – rather than their social ranks and degrees, the phrase
‘a peasant’s staff’ is a satisfactory answer to the soldier’s ‘sword’. The word is
used allusively, in a verse letter to Sir George Beaumont to convey the image of
a country girl in the Lake Counties, who greets the poet from the door of her
hill-side cottage. He thereupon compares her high situation and pleasing looks
to the Swiss pastoralists whom he had seen, in his youth, upon the Alpine
steeps: see ‘Epistle to Sir George Howland Beaumont’ (1811; pub. 1842). Like-
wise, Wordsworth described a peat-gatherer as a peasant, in ‘An Evening Walk’
(1793), but again we have no way of telling whether or not the man was a rural
labourer, statesman, or other engaged in some seasonal work. It was a general
word for a rural worker or countryman seen from a distance. (Even The Prelude
(1805 text) uses the word ‘peasant’ as a noun only three times; twice with reference
199
200 Appendix I
to the Swiss pastoralists; and once with reference to the poet’s walking along a
country road ‘like a Peasant’.)
See too J. O. Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth. The Poems (1977), Vol. 2. In
this volume of poems the word ‘peasant’ occurs 12 times as a proper noun and
only 4 times as an adjective. Of the former, 2 refer properly to Swiss peasants;
3 to Scots; and 1 to an Italian peasant: see, respectively, The Excursion (1814),
Bk 7, p. 243; sonnet XX, ‘Effusion in the Presence of the Painted Tower of Tell,
at Altorf’ (1822); The Excursion (1814), Bk 5, p. 181; ‘Stanzas Suggested in a
Steamboat off Saint Bees’ Heads, on the Coast of Cumberland’ (1833); ‘The Black
Stone Of Iona’ (1833); and ‘The Eclipse of the Sun [Seen at Italy]’ (1820). Of
the English uses, 2 are redundant as they appear in the ‘Argument’ to Book
Seven of The Excursion (1814), p. 221, and their use in the text is general, refer-
ring to a lowly timber wain and a young boy of rustic character: see pp. 236
and 244. The 2 other uses of the word involve formal depictions of post-feudal
relations between king and subjects in the old landed order: see ‘By the Side
Rydal Mere’ (1835). As for the adjectival uses of the word, it serves as a stylistic
equivalent to ‘rustic’. It occurs in a formal contrast between ‘the monarch’s
tower’ and ‘the peasant’s cell’: see ‘Ode: The Morning of the Day Appointed for
a General Thanksgiving. January 18, 1816’ (1816); and is also used as a syno-
nym for ploughman, or farmer, in the phrase ‘the peasant’s whistling breath’:
see ‘On the Power of Sound’ (1835). Two other uses of the word refer to Italian
peasants: see ‘At Rome’ (1837) and ‘At Albano’ (1837). In brief, the word ‘peas-
ant’, in Volume 2 of the said poems, refers to 3 Englishmen in modern times,
none of whom are ‘statesmen’ proper, and only one of whom is a ‘farmer’ in
general. Indeed, the statesmen are usually called ‘dalesmen’ – a typically native
word: see, for example, The Excursion (1814), Bk 6, p. 203, Bk 7, pp. 247 and
323. Wordsworth’s several uses of the word ‘peasant’, in this highly representa-
tive sample of poems, does not support J. V. Beckett’s view that the Romantic
poet invariably portrays the statesmen and yeomen of the Lake District without
respect to their English customs, character and idiom. The examples given above
do not detract from the national character of the Englishman, in general, or
the small holder, in particular. Nor does it confound the different social and
political traditions on both sides of the Channel – either in the past or in the
present.
Appendix II Wordsworth and
‘the vices of an archaic tenurial
law’: a Rebuttal of Criticisms by
V. G. Kiernan
Radical historians have frequently claimed that Wordsworth did not deal enough
with the social and economic constraints of the statesmen system of farming.
As V. G. Kiernan observed:
Neither in the ‘pastoral poems’ nor in the letter to Fox did he speak of the
vices of an archaic tenurial law in this old Border country, still burdened
with ‘numerous and strong remains of vassalage’, covered with customary
manors demanding heriots, boon services, and worst of all those arbitrary
fines on succession which did as much as anything to make it hard for fami-
lies to cling to their little holdings.1
Although customary rents were fixed at low rates for the time, comparatively
heavy fines were often paid, for example, ‘on the death of tenant or of lord’.
Likewise the heriot, or feudal due, owed to the lord on the death of a tenant
often took the form of the best beast, such as a cow. A succession of such fines
could force a poor or ill-prepared statesman to sell his estate and join the ranks
of tenant farmers or rural labourers.2 Moreover, Wordsworth’s contemporaries
would have agreed with Kiernan’s argument.3 They too dismissed these ‘base
tenures’ as nothing more than states of vassalage; but their own detailed ac-
counts of the sheer variety of customary dues and obligations in the Border
counties must surely qualify, if not disprove, their views of the topic.4 Isaac
Gilpin declared quite accurately, in the 1650s, that:
Customes[,] especially in the Northern Parts of this nation [,] are so various
& differing in themselves as that a man might almost say That there are as
many severall Customes as mannors or Lordshipps in a County, yea and
almost as many as there are Town[s]hipps or Hamletts in a mannor, or
Lordshipp each one differing from [the] other in some particular Cases [or]
other . . . 5
It is regrettable that Wordsworth’s critics have universally ignored this remark,

and exaggerated the burden of customary dues and obligations, which were
usually fixed at satisfactory rates or traditional scales. Some fines in the Barony
of Kendal, for example, were ‘certain’.6 Some fines were ‘arbitrary’ in the legal
sense of ‘unfixed’, or ‘discretionary’, but we must not forget the mitigating ef-
fects of ‘time and chance’ upon this post-feudal system of landholding. First of
all, manors were normally mixed and contained different rates of freeholders,
customary tenants and copyholders, who all qualified for the term ‘statesmen’
in the widest sense, but were not subjected to equal customs and impositions.
201
202 Appendix II
Great Dalston, for example, was ‘a mixed manor, consisting of 20 freehold ten-
ements, 114 copyholds, 40 customary tenements, [and] 40 leaseholders for lives.
A copyholder, on death or alienation’ paid ‘to the lord a year’s rent for a fine’.
The customary tenants, however, paid two years’ rent on change of tenant, but
nothing on change of lord. In the parish of Caldbeck, moreover, some of the
tenants at Greenrigg paid arbitrary fines to Lord Wharton, whilst others in the
parish paid a 10d fine certain by decree. In the parish of Scaleby three cottagers
paid 2s per annum rent and a 20d fine certain, whilst the 40 freeholders in the
area were exempt from paying rent and services (except ‘suit of court ‘). Like-
wise, the Howards, in the Barony of Graystoke, received about 120 pounds
customary rent per year from 257 customary tenants, and only suit of court,
one gathers, from the 106 freeholders in the area. Finally, consider, for exam-
ple, the parish of Kirklinton, where 23 customary tenants paid L1 17s 2 1/4d in
rent, suit of court, and a 20d fine. However, for their part, 62 freeholders paid
no fines nor rents, only a free or quit rent of L5 18s 11 3/4d for ‘the late
improved commons’.7 Second, the Border tenants were not necessarily conscious
of anything irrational in the old system of fines, rents, boon days and heriots;
if anything they generally agreed with the way in which things were done ‘time
out of mind’.8 Third, they often used this traditional standard as a rod with
which to beat their landlords. Innumerable Border tenants took their ‘archaic
tenurial law’ for the best guarantee of their ancient rights and duties. Indeed,
they had acquired, since Elizabethan times, a just reputation for independence
of mind and manners during long legal battles with their lords. In his scathing
attack upon the character and activites of customary-tenants in the Border counties,
in 1617, Robert Snoden, the new Bishop of Carlisle, declared, to King James I,
that ‘the vulgar people are subtill, violent, litigious, and pursuers of endless
suites by appeals, to their utter impoverishment, the poor wretches [moreover]
finde admittance of their most unreasonable appeales, both at York and London,
for which those higher Courts deserve to be blamed’.9 Many examples could be
given, even down to the poet’s time. Thus, for example, the tenants of Lowther
Parish readily disputed with Wordsworth’s would-be patron, Sir William Lowther,
over the issue of arbitrary fines, upon his succession to the lands of Sir James
Lowther.10 Fourth, as a result of such litigation and the dangerous situation of
tenant right in the seventeenth century, tenants often compounded with their
lords for confirmation of their estates and customs. Ironically, for example, the
Prince of Wales, in the sixteenth year of James I, was more than willing to
compound with his Westmorland tenants for the huge sum of L2700. About
the same time, the tenants of Plumpton Park in Lazonby compounded with the
Earl of Annandale for L800. Such practices continued piecemeal for many decades
to come.11 Fifth, many tenants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries slowly
released themselves, and their heirs, from many ‘ridiculous and disagreeable
burdens’, by means of money payments, and moved towards the full status of
freeholders. Thus, the tenants of Cumwhitton, who numbered about 80 in the
late eighteenth century, used ‘to pay each one shilling in lieu’ of services other
than suit of court. Even whole manors were bought by their tenants, or were
left to them in trust by noble minded or obliging landlords. Thus John, Lord
Ashburnham, in 1715, readily sold the Manor of Martindale ‘to the tenants for
1825L’, whose heirs or counterparts, in Wordsworth’s day, were all freeholders,
and numbered about 46 when Nicolson and Burn wrote their famous account
(1769–70). (They still, of course, paid a quit rent of L3 4s 10d to the Earl of
Appendix II 203
Egremont.12) Sixth, tenants did not normally pay general fines on the death of
the landlord if he was the head of a religious or academic corporation, which,
in legal jargon, never died. Likewise, Crown tenants were usually free of such
fines on the death of the monarch, though there were exceptions to this rule.13
Seventh, there were sometimes significant differences between the reputed or
confirmed customs of a manor and their execution. This applied to everything
from the rights of customary tenants to pasture so many sheep on a fell-side,
moor or waste, to the number of boon days or tasks performed for the local
lord. It is easy to confuse legal rights with everyday usage14; and just as easy to
forget that customs often lapsed with time,15 or were forfeited by landlords
during periods of religious, political or economic distress. Of course, religious
upheavals, civil war and depressions could also provide impoverished landlords
with added incentives to squeeze their tenants into new conditions of tenure
and dependence. Thus the courts, in the seventeenth century, were encouraged
to ignore both the freehold elements and the military basis of tenant right
estate, and to place it on a par with copyholds and tenures at will, in response
to the union of the two countries under James I.16 Nevertheless, the so-called
‘vices’ of ‘an archaic tenurial law in this old Border country’ were not over-
whelming objections to the viability of the statesmen system of farming.
204 Notes
Notes
Introduction
1 The legal definition of tenant right is the subject of Chapters 1 and 2 of this
book. It is sufficient here to define it as a special form of customary tenure
in the Lake Counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire (north
of the Sands). Its peculiar features of self-sufficient farming and strong social
ties, however, were also adopted over the centuries by many enfranchised
tenants and freeholders in the area. These small landholders, on account of
their hereditary farms, or ‘estates’, were called ‘statesmen’, or ‘estatesmen’,
in the remote north of the country. In consequence, the definition of ‘the
statesmen system of farming’ is as much social as legal in character.
2 The following books and articles are indispensable to the student of Golden
Age theories during the Industrial Revolution: M. D. George, England in
Transition (London: Penguin Books, 1953), esp. Chs 1, 2 and 5; E. P. Thompson,
The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1968), esp. Ch. 4, ‘The Free-born Englishman’; idem, ‘Eighteenth-century
English Society: Class Struggle without Class?’, SH I ( Jan. 1978), pp. 13–165;
C. Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in J. Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour
Movement (London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd, 1956), pp. 11–66; E. J.
Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (New York and Toronto: The
New American Library, 1962), Ch. 14, ‘The Arts’, pp. 299–326, and Ch. 12,
‘Ideology: Religion’, pp. 271–6; R. Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin Books, 1961), Part One; and idem, Culture and Society 1780–1950
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), esp. Chs 1, 2 and 3; and H. Perkin,
Origins of Modern English Society (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1969), esp. Part
Four, ‘The Birth of Class’.
3 Cf. C. Hill, op. cit., pp. 14–15. Cf. N. Hampson, The Enlightenment (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 206.
4 Ibid., pp. 11–12.
5 H. A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History (Montreal: Harvest House/
Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1982), pp. 56–9.
See too H. Butterfield, The Englishman and his History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1945), pp. 38–40.
6 C. Hill, op. cit., p. 11.
7 W. Wordsworth, A Guide Through the District of the Lakes in the North of England,
5th edn (1835), in W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (eds), The Prose Works of
William Wordsworth, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 196–8.
8 C. M. L. Bouch, Prelates and People of the Lake Counties. A History of the
Diocese of Carlisle 1133–1933 (Kendal: Titus Wilson And Son Ltd, 1948), p. 21.
9 Cf. W. Wordsworth, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 224.
10 William Wordsworth to C. J. Fox, letter dated 14 January 1801, in A. G.
Hill (ed.), Letters of William Wordsworth. A New Selection (Oxford: Oxford
11 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy [1848] (London: Longmans, Green
and Co., 1929), Ch. 6, ‘Of Peasant Proprietors’, pp. 256–7 (incl. n. *). J. V.
204
Notes 205
Beckett, ‘“The Peasant in England”: a Case of Terminological Confusion’,

AHR, 32 (1984), pp. 120–2; and R. N. Soffer, ‘Attitudes and Allegiances in
the Unskilled North, 1830–1850’, IRSH, 10 1965, pp. 445–54.
12 See the following works: G. Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of
Common Fields (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1968 reprint [1st edn: Lon-
don: Archibald Constable and Co. Ltd, 1907]), pp. 257–60; P. Mantoux, The
Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (rev. and reset by T. S. Ashton)
(London: Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1961), p. 136. The effect of Wordsworth’s
poetry and prose on the Hammonds is real but diffuse. The same holds true
for G. M. Trevelyan, M. D. George and E. P. Thompson. See: J. L. and B.
Hammond, The Bleak Age (rev. edn) (West Drayton: Penguin Books, 1947),
passim; G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: a Survey of Six Centuries[:]
Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1942), passim;
M. D. George, op. cit., passim; and E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English
Working Class (1968), pp. 242–3 and 378.
13 A. C. Gibson, The Old Man; Or Ravings and Ramblings Round Conistone (Kendal:
James Robinson, Fish-Market, 1854), passim; J. D. Marshall, ‘“Statesmen” in
Cumbria: the Vicissitudes of an Expression’, CW2, 72 (1972), pp. 248–73;
and J. V. Beckett, op. cit., pp. 113–23.
14 Cf. A. H. Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1910), Ch. 1: ‘England and France Compared. Influence of
Land Laws’.
15 J. V. Beckett, op. cit., pp. 113–23.
16 A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement 1783–1867 (London: Longman Group Ltd,
1959), p. 40.
17 W. Wordsworth, ‘Near Anio’s stream, I spied a gentle Dove’ (1837), l. 14 in
J. O. Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth. The Poems, Vol. 2 (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1977), p. 854. Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘French Revolution As It
Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement’ (1809), ll. 32–40, ibid., Vol. 1,
p. 637:
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty

Did both find, helpers to their heart’s desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, – the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
18 W. Wordsworth, ‘Prospectus to’ The Excursion (1814), ll. 47–55 in J. O. Hayden,

ibid. Vol. 2, pp. 38–9.
19 W. Wordsworth, ‘Home at Grasmere’ (comp. by 1806; pub.1888), l. 754 in
J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 717.
20 M. Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’, in idem, Essays in Criticism: Second Series (London:
Macmillan and Co., 1888), p. 153.
21 Rousseau argued that man ‘is naturally good’ but easily corrupted by the
material comforts and machinations of social and political life. He there-
fore contrasted the simplicity, innocence and freedom of man in ‘the state
206 Notes
of nature’ to ‘the secret pretensions’ of the civilised man – for property,

power and artificial pleasures. J. J. Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality, in idem, The Social Contract and Discourses (tr. and intro. by G. D.
H. Cole) (rev. by J. H. Brumfitt and J. C. Hall) (London: J. M. Dent and
Sons Ltd, 1973), pp. 27–113. The quotations are taken from pp. 106–8 of
the said text.
22 H. Perkin, op. cit.; J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social
Structure, and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985); idem, Revolution and Rebellion (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986); A. J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old
Regime: Europe to the Great War (London: Croom Helm, 1981); and W. D.
Rubinstein, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History (Sussex: Harvester
Press, 1987); and idem, Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain 1750–1900
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
23 See, for example, Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1963),
pp. 23–39.
24 W. Cobbett, PR, 32 (1817), pp. 498–9. Cf. idem, Cottage Economy (London:
Peter Davies, 1926 edn), p. 4.
25 G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and After (1782–1919),
new edn (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1939), p. 28 incl. n. 1. W. Wordsworth,
‘Home at Grasmere’, (1806), l. 10 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 697.
26 A. V. Dicey, The Statesmanship of Wordsworth: an Essay (London: Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1917), pp. 9–10 and 12–13.
27 Most critics have paid lip-service to Wordsworth’s upbringing in Old Lake-
land as relevant to his radical convictions about ‘the government of equal
rights/ And individual worth’. Only V. G. Kiernan, however, has revealed
its Golden Age significance for students of Wordsworth’s early politics. The
poet’s definition of ‘the People’ links him ‘with the long tradition . . . of
Populism’. In fact his retirement to the north of England, in 1799, after his
revolutionary activities in France, ‘meant withdrawal to . . . a fortress pro-
tected by mountains and by their inhabitants, like himself sturdy individualists
but with strong social ties’. These valuable conclusions were drawn almost
twenty years after Kiernan wrote his famous essay called ‘Wordsworth and
the People’, first published in 1956, but reprinted with a ‘Postscript’ in 1975.
Nevertheless, they were not supported with sufficient evidence to warrant
their reception as fact. Kiernan was content to assume what he ought to
have proved. Moreover, his radical framework diminishes the significance
of his account. The ‘statesmen’, for example, were defined as ‘a free peas-
antry’ whose ‘tenacious . . . individualism’ was similar to that of the kulaks
of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. The peculiar features of the
statesmen, which endeared them to the poet, were lost in the historian’s
love of comparative terms. (Cf. V. G. Kiernan, ibid., pp. 198–201, 204–5 and
elsewhere.) Nevertheless, his ‘populist’ perspective adds considerable weight
to my comparison of William Wordsworth with William Cobbett, in Chap-
ter 3, which reveals their ‘Old English’ habits and agrarian values. Wordsworth’s
views of the people, like Cobbett’s, were basically the lives of the petty-
producers writ large.
28 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude, or ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’ (Text of 1805), 2nd
edn (ed. by E. De Selincourt; corrected by S. Gill) (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1970), Bk 13, ll. 107–10, p. 232.
Notes 207
29 I have drawn upon several primary documents for this survey of the poet’s
family in Cumberland and Westmorland. Some of these sources may be
found in the ‘Appendix’ to Christopher Wordsworth’s book, Memoirs of
Wordsworth (London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, 1851), Vol. 2, pp. 510–24.
30 W. Wordsworth, ‘Autobiographical Memoranda’ (comp. Nov. 1847; pub. 1851)
in J. O. Hayden, William Wordsworth. Selected Prose (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin Books, 1988), p. 3.
31 The manor house dated from 1533. R. S. Ferguson, A History of Westmorland
(London: Elliot Stock, 1894), p. 285.
32 Charles Howard (1746–1805), the 11th Duke of Norfolk, held a large estate
around Greystoke Castle. Cf. Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard, letter
dated late July 1787, in E. De Selincourt (ed.), The Letters of William and
Dorothy Wordsworth: the Early Years 1787–1805, 2nd edn (rev. by C. L. Shaver)
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), [=Vol. 1], p. 4. Cf. W. Parson and W. White,
History, Directory, and Gazetteer of the Counties of Cumberland and Westmorland,
with that Part of the Lake District, Forming the Lordships of Furness and Cartmel,
Etc. (Leeds: W. White and Co., 1829), pp. 560–1: the writers record that
most of the estates were sold to freehold during 1818. This might have
been part of the election contest between the whigs and the tories.
33 S. Gill, William Wordsworth. A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989),
p. 429, n. 17.
34 Cf. the letter and ‘pedigree’ sent by Charles Robinson to his cousin, Christopher
Wordsworth (jnr), dated 18 July 1850, in idem, op. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 522–4.
35 W. Wordsworth, op. cit., pp. 3–4. Cf. J. Hunter, History of the Deanery of
Doncaster, [–], extracts therefrom, reprinted in Christopher Wordsworth (jnr),
op. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 520–2.
36 Charles Robinson quoted in Christopher Wordsworth (jnr), ibid., Vol. 2, pp.
522–3.
37 Cf. too C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, A Short Economic and Social History
of the Lake Counties 1500–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1961), p. 271. Between 1739 and 1740, for instance, about four and a half
million pounds of tobacco passed through the port of Whitehaven from
Virginia. C. M. L. Bouch, op. cit., p. 345.
38 John Robinson (1727–1802) was articled to William Wordsworth’s grandfather,
Richard. (He was the nephew of Mary Wordsworth, née Robinson.) Upon
Richard’s death he was appointed law-agent and land-steward to Sir James
Lowther. Through the Lowther interest he became MP for Westmorland
(1764–74), but when his employer turned ‘whig’ over foreign policy, in 1770,
he left his position as land steward in favour of his cousin John Wordsworth
(the poet’s father). Lord North made him Secretary of the Treasury (1770–82)
and he served as MP for Harwich from 1774 till his death in 1802. He
declined a peerage in 1784. In 1787 William Pitt made him surveyor-general
of woods and forests; and both of his employments, as statesman and farmer,
earned him the high regard of King George III. His role as patron and adviser
to the several branches of the Wordsworth and Robinson families is seen in
the present paragraph: for example, both the poet’s cousin (Hugh Robinson)
and brother ( John Wordsworth) became captains in the East India Service
through John Robinson’s influence. DNB, XVII, pp. 26–8.
39 Strictly speaking he was an ‘attorney-at-law, as lawyers of this class were
then called and law agent to Sir James Lowther’. William Wordsworth quoted
208 Notes
in J. O. Hayden, op. cit., p. 3. He was also Coroner of the Seignory of Millom

in the south-west part of Cumberland and the Bailiff and Recorder of the
Borough of Cockermouth in the north-west of the county. Amanda M. Ellis,
Rebels and Conservatives. Dorothy and William Wordsworth and their Circle
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 10–11. For a brief ac-
count of the career and income of Sir James Lowther, see A. Valentine’s The
British Establishment, 1760–1784. An Eighteenth-Century Biographical Dictio-
nary (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), Vol. 2, p. 550.
40 Mary Wordsworth, widow, died 1770. She lived with her eldest son, Richard,
at Whitehaven in order to leave the Sockbridge estate as a residence for her
youngest son, John. Cf. Charles Robinson quoted by Christopher Wordsworth,
op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 523. Cf. too M. Moorman, William Wordsworth. A Biography:
the Early Years 1770–1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957) [= Vol. 1],
pp. 5–6.
41 Cf. E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), pp. 3 n. 3 and 25 n. 4.
Richard was also left a legacy by John Robinson in 1802. DNB, Vol. XVII, p. 28.
42 M. Moorman, William Wordsworth, a Biography: the Later Years 1803–1850
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) [= Vol. 2], p. 246: ‘When he had held the
post a year he reckoned that, with the necessary deductions, he was mak-
ing about L.200 by it, but he was not disturbed, and said [that] he found
the employment “salutary”, and of consequence in a pecuniary point of
view’.
43 Cf. DNB, XXI, pp. 922–3 and XI, pp. 1288–9 (re. Priscilla’s brother, Charles).
Although Christopher Wordsworth did not become Master of the said Col-
lege until 1820, his distinguished patrons had guaranteed that his career
was always profitable and secure. Consider, for example, the following sum-
mary given in the DNB: ‘The bishop in 1804 presented him to the rectory
of Ashby with Oby and Thinne, [in] Norfolk, a preferment which enabled
him to marry. In 1805, when Manners-Sutton became archbishop of Can-
terbury, he made Wordsworth his domestic chaplain, and transferred him
first to the rectory of Woodchurch, [in] Kent (1806), and next (1808) to the
deanery and rectory of Bocking, [in] Essex, to which Monks-Eleigh, [in] Suffolk,
was afterwards added (1812). In 1816 these preferments were exchanged for
St. Mary’s, [in] Lambeth, and Sundridge, [in] Kent. . . . In 1817, when his
old pupil [Manners Sutton jnr] was elected speaker of the House of the
Commons, Wordsworth became chaplain’ (ibid., XXI, p. 922).
44 See the pedigree cited in footnote 34 above.
45 See the standard biographies of the poet by Mary Moorman and Stephen
Gill listed in the bibliography of this book.
46 Cf. R. Woof, ‘Introduction’ to T. W. Thompson, Wordsworth’s Hawkshead
(London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. xix.
47 J. Housman, A Topographical Description of Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire,
and a Part of the West Riding of Yorkshire (Carlisle, 1800), p. 105.
48 W. Parson and W. White, op. cit., p. 11. He was even unfairly listed in the
famous radical indictment against ‘Old Corruption’, called The Black Book:
or, Corruption Unmasked (1820). See: V. G. Kiernan, ‘Wordsworth and the
People’ (1956; rev. 1973) in D. Craig (ed.), Marxists on Literature: an Anthology
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 114, n. 102.
49 No doubt the pattern of education, amongst the middle and upper classes,
was changing markedly in the eighteenth century with the use of private
Notes 209
tutors, and rapidly in the early nineteenth century with the growth of the
great public schools – especially in the south of England – but the average
gentleman’s son in the Lake District, before the nineteenth century, received
his formal education at the local grammar school. F. J. G. Robinson, ‘The
Education of an 18th Century Gentleman: George Edward Stanley of Dalegarth
and Ponsonby’, CW2, 70 (1970), p. 181.
50 Cf. M. Moorman, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 72.
51 A. Valentine, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 550. The Lowther pedigree is given by Joseph
Nicolson and Richard Burn in their book, The History and Antiquities of the
Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell,
The Strand, 1777), Vol. 1, pp. 428–37. Cf. Burke’s Peerage, Baronetcy and
Knightage (1970), pp. 1650–1. William Wordsworth the younger was usually
called ‘Willy’ by family and friends. John Wordsworth, the poet’s eldest
son, ‘had taken orders, and at the end of 1828 was preferred to the rectory
of Moresby, [in] Cumberland, by Lord Lonsdale. He afterwards became vicar
of Brigham’ in the same county. DNB, XXI, p. 938.
52 M. H. Friedman, The Making of a Tory Humanist: William Wordsworth and the
Idea of Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), passim, esp.
the ‘Introduction’, pp. 4–5, Chs 1 and 2, and the ‘Conclusion’ pp. 295–302.
53 W. Salmon, Logic, 2nd edn (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1973), pp. 11 and 96.
54 W. D. Rubinstein, ‘Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure of Modern Britain’,
in idem, loc. cit., p. 65.
55 W. Wordsworth, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ (1800), ll. 87–105 in J. O.
Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 265.
56 H. Perkin, op. cit., pp. 176–83, and passim.
57 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (1985), pp. 64–93, ‘The Survival of
Patriarchalism; or, Did the Industrial Revolution Really Happen’, and pp.
93–118, ‘The Social Theory of Elite Hegemony’.
58 Cf. J. Brewer, ‘English Radicalism in the Age of George III’, in J. G. A. Pocock
(ed.), Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 345–50.
59 M. Weber, ‘The Sociology of Charismatic Authority’, in H. H. Gerth and
C. Wright Mills (trs and eds), From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1948), pp. 245–52.
60 Ibid., p. 245.
61 Ibid., pp. 246–7.
62 Ibid., p. 248.
loc. cit., Vol. 2, p. 39. Cf. idem, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 13, ll. 435–45,
p. 241. Addressing Coleridge, Wordsworth’s tongue was loosed:
Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak

A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason and by truth; what we have loved,
Others will love; and we may teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this Frame of things
(Which, ‘mid all revolutions in the hopes
210 Notes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)

In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of substance and of fabric more divine.
64 Cf. H. Davies, William Wordsworth, A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and

Nicolson, 1980), p. 119. W. Wordsworth, The Excursion – ‘Preface to the
Edition of 1814’, in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 2, p. 36.
65 M. Weber, op. cit., p. 245.
66 P. L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology. A Humanistic Perspective (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 147–8.
67 V. G. Kiernan, op. cit., pp. 161–206; M. H. Friedman, op. cit.; D. Simpson,
Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination. The Poetry of Displacement (New York:
Methuen, 1987); J. Williams, Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution
Politics (Manchester University Press, 1989); and J. Lucas, England and
Englishness. Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry 1688–1900 (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1990).
68 Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘Ode to Duty’ (1807), l. 27 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit.,
Vol. 1, p. 606.
69 H. Bloom and L. Trilling (eds), Romantic Poetry and Prose (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973), p. 126. The editors, however, wrongly concluded
that ‘the facts of Wordsworth’s own mature biography do little to explain
his poetic decay’. They surmise instead that a failure to resolve the ‘conflict
between [his] questing [poetical] self and adherence to nature may be the
[artistic] clue to Wordsworth’s rapid, indeed catastrophic decline after 1807,
at the very latest’.
70 W. Wordsworth, ‘The Warning’ (1835), ll. 140–6 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit.,
Vol. 2, p. 740.
71 S. Gill, op. cit., p. 379.
72 F. D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (ed. and rev. by A. Elton)
(London: Paladin, 1968), pp. 91–104. Two other exceptions are Crane Brinton’s
classic essay, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (New York: Russell
and Russell, Inc., 1962), and Alfred Cobban’s brilliant exposition of the Lake
Poets in his book, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century,
2nd edn (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1960).
73 Ibid., p. 103.
74 Ibid., p. 104.
75 W. Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), Bk 5, l. 29 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit.,
Vol. 2, p. 158.
76 W. Wordsworth, ‘Blest Statesman He, whose Mind’s unselfish will’, l. 14 in
J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 819.
77 W. Wordsworth, ‘Not in the lucid intervals of life’ (1835), l. 30 in J. O.
Hayden, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 783. Idem, ‘To the Utilitarians’ (comp. 1833; pub.
1885), l. 2 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 744. Wordsworth’s evident ‘de-
spair’ over material progress and science and especially his proto-Christian
pessimism about the nature and meaning of man’s spiritual life in a world
‘of low pursuits’ and economic abundance are also revealed in his poems
called ‘The Warning’ (comp. 1833; pub. 1835) and ‘Memorials of a Tour in
Italy, 1837’ (comp. c. 1840–1; pub. 1842), ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 736 ff. and pp.
839 ff. These poems can be compared usefully, from a social point of view,
with the various conclusions of C. G. Jung, in ‘The Spiritual Problem of
Notes 211
Modern Man’ (1933), in idem, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (tr. by W. S.

Dell and C. F. Bayne) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1961), pp.
226–54; Vance Packard, in The Hidden Persuaders (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books [orig. pub. 1957], 1960), esp. Ch. 23, ‘The Question of Morality’; and
Sidney Pollard, in The Idea of Progress (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968),
Ch. 4, ‘A Digression: Doubters and Pessimists’ and Ch. 5, ‘The Challenge of
Progress Today’.
78 F. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair. A Study in the Rise of the Germanic
Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974; orig-
inally published in 1961).
79 W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Modern Britain 1750–
1900 (1993), p. 52. For further details of Dr. Rubinstein’s thesis about Britain’s
unique culture and its relevance to the nation’s social, economic and political
life (and vice versa) see: ibid., pp. 49, 51, 69–70, 76, 84–5, 87, and 100–1.
80 W. D. Rubinstein, ‘The End of “Old Corruption” in Britain, 1780–1860’, in
idem, loc. cit., pp. 270 and 278 (respectively). Cf. pp. 274–5: ‘Rewards did
not accord with effort or duty; promotion did not occur according to merit
or seniority even in a nominal sense; the highest and most lucrative places
had the fewest duties, and, often, the least raison d’être. Indeed, the most
lucrative and impressive offices frequently had no duties at all, and their
holders no objective qualifications for holding them. Succession to responsible
office was often determined by hereditary succession to that office or by
open sale, criteria which even the Victorian period would find unacceptable’.
81 For a broad definition of ‘populism’ in the period 1789–1914, see: E. J.
Hobsbawm, op. cit., pp. 85–6. Cf. too the case of the Mittelstand in pre-war
Germany. The independent Mittelstand of peasant proprietors, artisans, small
businessmen and shopkeepers has been studied as a model ‘of deeply rooted
anti-modernist and illiberal ideas in industrializing Germany’, though its
unity as a ‘class’ which stood boldly between organised labour and organised
capital has been somewhat exaggerated for the period 1871–1914. See the
illuminating article by David Blackbourn, called ‘The Mittelstand in German
Society and Politics, 1871–1914’, SH, No. 4 Vol. 7 (1977), pp. 409–33.
82 W. Wordsworth, ‘Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off Saint Bees’ Head, on
the Coast of Cumberland’ (1835), l. 12 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 2,
p. 749. Idem, ‘Humanity’ (1835), l. 44 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 690.
And idem, The Prelude (1805 Text), Bk 13, ll. 261–4, p. 225. His social argu-
ment against the shallow equation of moral and material progress is the
first of many such works on the topic in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries – especially by Catholic and Protestant theologians in England,
Europe and America. Cf. Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1968), p. 198.
83 M. Moorman, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 503. Cf. G. M. Harper, William Wordsworth:
His Life, Works, and Influence (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, W.,
1916), Vol. 1, p. 420.
84 W. Wordsworth, ‘Prospectus to’ The Excursion (comp. 1798; pub. 1814), ll.
14 –18 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 37–8. Cf. too Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
first conversation with Wordsworth at Rydal Mount on 28 August 1833:
Wordsworth said he ‘preferred such of his poems as touched the affections to
any others; for whatever is didactic – what theories of society, and so on –
might perish quickly; but whatever combined a truth with an affection was
212 Notes
ktema es aie, good to-day and good forever’. R. W. Emerson, English Traits
[Unabridged, 1856] (London: George G. Harrap and Co., Undated), p. 15.
85 W. Wordsworth, ibid., ll. 7 and 10 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 37.
1 Old Lakeland: a Golden Age Ideal

1
J. D. Marshall, ‘“Statesmen” in Cumbria: the Vicissitudes of an Expres-
sion’, CW2, 62 (1972), pp. 248–73.
2 Ibid., pp. 250 and 254–5.
3 Ibid., pp. 260–72.
4 Ibid., p. 259.
5 Ibid., pp. 258–9.
6 Ibid., pp. 253, 255–6 and 258–9. The editors of the Oxford English Diction-
ary (1933) III, D-E, p. 301 used two quotations from pp. 85–6 of the 1823
edition of Wordsworth’s ‘Guide to the Scenery of the Lakes’, first pub-
lished in 1820, to illustrate the sense of the term ‘estatesman’: ‘The family
of each man, whether estatesmen or farmer, formerly had a two-fold sup-
port’; and ‘The lands of the estatesmen being mortgaged . . . they fell into
the hands of wealthy purchasers’. Nonetheless, Dr Marshall’s study of the
word’s local use in parish registers and legal documents shows that
Wordsworth was not responsible for its formation: For example, ‘Samewell
[= Samuel] Lancaster’ of Barton, in Westmorland, was described by the
constable-enumerators of the Census for that county, in 1787, as an
‘Estatesman’ ( J. D. Marshall, op. cit., p. 256). In consequence, the editors
of the Oxford Dictionary were wrong to describe Wordsworth’s usage of
the word ‘estatesman’ as an ‘etymologizing perversion of [the word] STATES-
MAN’. As for the latter word, they found the earliest, if doubtful, instance
of its provincial use in the opening remarks and final farewell of a letter
dated Oxford, 16 July 1695, ‘from James Fleming to his brother Robert
Fleming’ (‘att Rydall’), which begins with ‘Quondam Staits Man’, and con-
cludes with ‘I am Your affectionate Statets Man’ (op. cit., X, p. 858). The
rules of etymology, moreover, require that the latter word be formed by
eliding the ‘e’ from the former. Nevertheless, the evidence to hand does
not prove that this happened. Where then does this leaves us? The two
terms, ‘statesman’ and ‘estatesman’, were probably two distinct words for
the owner of a small landed estate which vied for the privilege of being
used by the Lakelanders – with the shorter word seeming to win favour at
a very early date.
7 Ibid., pp. 255–6.
8 ‘Isaac Dobson’, for example, ‘who founded one of the great cotton-spinning
firms of Lancashire, was the youngest child of an old yeoman family,
established in Westmorland since the fourteenth century’. (P. Mantoux,
The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (1961 edn), pp. 371–2.)
Likewise, Issac Wilkinson, the father of the famous iron master John
Wilkinson, ‘was a Lake District farmer who became the foreman of a
neighbouring iron works at 12s. a week’ (ibid., p. 372).
9 J. D. Marshall, op. cit., pp. 260–1. Marshall calls this method of deduction,
an argumentum e silentio, or an argument from silence.
10 A list of early literary accounts on the Lake District is also given by Chris-
topher Wordsworth (junior), in his Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851),
Notes 213
Vol. 1, pp. 446–8. The earliest of these writers – Bishop Burnet (1643–
1715), John Evelyn (1620–1706), and Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–74) – were,
respectively, horrified, scared stiff, and disappointed by England’s version
of the ‘Alps’.
11 C. M. L. Bouch, Prelates and People of the Lake Counties (1948), p. 353.
12 Ibid., p. 353.
13 Ibid., pp. 353–4.
14 Ibid., pp. 355 and 370.
15 Ibid., p. 414.
16 W. Hutchinson, The History of the County of Cumberland, Vol. 2 (Carlisle,
1794), p. 415; cf. p. 413.
17 A. Pringle, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Westmoreland
(Edinburgh, 1794), pp. 40–1.
18 Wordsworth’s Description of the Scenery of the Lakes was written as an anony-
mous introduction to the series of drawings by his acquaintance Joseph
Wilkinson, whose work, Select Views of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and
Lancashire, appeared in 1810. Wordsworth’s text was probably written be-
tween mid-June and early November 1809. See J. O. Hayden (ed.), William
Wordsworth. Selected Prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 9.
19 J. D. Marshall, op. cit., p. 259.
20 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, A Short Economic and Social History of the
Lake Counties 1500–1830 (1961), p. 95.
21 Ibid., p. 95. Thus, for example, Anthony Ward, of Killington and Dillicar,
owned 149.5 acres, and Adam Cooke, also of Killington, owned 86 acres,
whilst some of their neighbours owned as little as 4 or 5 acres; ibid., pp.
94–5 (incl. n. 1). As for customary tenants, ‘there are indications that in
some places [, at least,] they were not very large’; ibid., p. 69. For example,
in Aspatria, in 1578, the average size of holdings was 13.7 acres; and in
Ravenstonedale, in 1541, the customary estate averaged 5.64 acres; ibid.,
p. 69.
22 According to Andrew Pringle, op. cit., p. 35, a statute acre in Westmorland
was 4840 square yards; a customary acre was 6760 square yards; and a
customary acre in the Borderlands of Lancashire was 7840 square yards.
Cf. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, The History and Antiquities of the Counties of
Westmorland and Cumberland (London, 1777), Vol. 1, p. 2.
23 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op. cit., p. 70.
24 J. Bailey and G. Culley, General View of the Agriculture of the County of
Cumberland (London, 1794), p. 11.
25 A. Pringle, op. cit., pp. 40–1.
26 William Hutchinson using John Housman’s Notes recorded the incomes
for statesmen in several parishes in Cumberland during the early 1790s:
Parish of Bridekirk: L.60–70, some L.200 (op. cit., Vol. II, p. 259). Parish of
Aspatria: L.30–100 (ibid., Vol. II, p. 259). Parish of Cumwhitton: L.5–50 or
60 (ibid., Vol. I, p. 177). Parish of Ousby: L.3–70 (ibid., Vol. I, p. 223).
Parish of Edenhall: L.13 (average) (ibid., Vol. I, p. 271). Parish of West-
ward: L.15–100 (ibid., Vol. II, p. 397). Parish of Stapleton: L.40–50, some
L.80, a few L.100 (ibid., Vol. II, p. 581).
27 There is also a place of that name in Durham. In both counties the term
‘statesman’ was used to mean a ‘small independent proprietor’ in
Wordsworth’s sense. Moreover, John Housman notes that the manners of
214 Notes
the statesmen in Yorkshire were very similar to those of rural Lancashire –

especially, Lancashire North of Sands, which were little different from those
of inner Westmorland. J. Housman, op. cit., pp. 175 and 158.
28 T. W. Thompson, Wordsworth’s Hawkshead (1970), p. 80. Cf. p. 81.
29 W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 415. Frederick, Lord North (1732–92)
was created 2nd Earl of Guildford in 1790. He had been ‘leader of the
house’ of Commons between 7 October 1767 and 20 March 1782, before
he angered King George the III by joining a coalition government with
Charles James Fox between 2 April 1783 and 18 December of that year.
Lord North was well known for his fine sense of humour and no doubt
relished the idea of a small landowner in Cumberland being called a ‘states-
man’. DNB, XIV, pp. 604–9.
30 C. Wordsworth (jnr), op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 52.
31 W. Wordsworth, ‘Preface to’ Lyrical Ballads (1802) in J. O. Hayden, William
Wordsworth. The Poems (1977), Vol. 1, p. 867.
32 A. L. Becker, ‘Text Building, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow
Theatre’, in A. L. Becker and A. Yengoyan (eds), The Imagination of Reality
(Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1979), p. 236.
33 Cf. C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op. cit., passim. See too T. W. Thompson,
op. cit., pp. 270–83.
34 P. Mantoux, op. cit., p. 137 incl. n. 1. Cf. G. E. Mingay, English Landed
Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963),
p. 88: ‘“Yeoman” might indicate a freeholder, but just as well a copyholder
or leaseholder whose interest in the land was more than an annual ten-
ancy but less than a freehold.’
35 Freeholders were most common in Cumberland in the 1790s. At least, the
following sample of Parishes, composed from ‘J[ohn] Housman’s Notes’,
finds no parallel in Furness or Westmorland, where customary tenures were
most entrenched. (Source: W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vols 1 and 2.) The Par-
ish of Cleator was ‘wholly freehold’ (Vol. 1, p. 532). But the rest of this
list of Parishes were described as ‘chiefly freehold’: Aspatria (Vol. 2,
p. 287), Bassenthwaite (Vol. 2, p. 237), Lamplugh (Vol. 2, p. 97), Millom
(Vol. 1, p. 532), Skelton (Vol. 1, p. 516), Torpenhow (Vol. 2, p. 358), and
Uldale (Vol. 2, p. 370). Of course, no figures were given. In consequence,
we cannot know the actual numbers of customary tenants or freeholders
in any of these parishes. Nonetheless, Housman implies that these par-
ishes were not consolidated into large estates so much as owned and occupied
by small farmers. Consider too the following examples of ‘mixed manors’
which varied greatly in their size and composition. The Manor of Great
Dalston, in Cumberland, contained 40 freehold tenements, 114 copyholders,
40 customary tenants and 40 leaseholders for lives. (Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 446 n.
T.) The Barony of Graystock, in Cumberland, contained 106 freeholders
and 257 customary tenants (ibid., Vol. 1, p. 405). The Manor of Linstock,
in Cumberland, in the 1770s contained 10 freehold tenements, 90 cus-
tomary tenements, and about 14 leaseholders [for lives?] ( J. Nicolson and
R. Burn, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 454).
36 Consider, for instance, Winder township in the Parish of Lamplugh in
Cumberland. This Parish, in 1794, was ‘chiefly’ composed of freeholders.
By 1829, Parson and White report that it was all held by yeomen; but
because they do not distinguish between statesmen who were customary
Notes 215
tenants and those who were freeholders it is possible that some tenements
were still ‘estates of inheritance’. Several examples of manors which were
enfranchised in whole or in part during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries were given by W. Parson and W. White, History, Directory, and
Gazetteer of the Counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, with that Part of
the Lake District in Lancashire, Forming the Lordships of Furness and Cartmel
Etc. [Hereafter: Directory] (Leeds, 1829), pp. 204, 516–18, 567–9, 616–17,
627, 646, 653, and 683–4.
37 R. Williams, The Long Revolution (1961), pp. 120–31. In this regard it is
interesting to note that my father, in 1963, was described on my English
birth-certificate as a ‘journeyman’ electrician and not as a ‘tradesman’ which
was the more current term for a skilled worker.
38 G. E. Mingay, op. cit., p. 89. Cf. pp. 87–9. Richard Ferguson, the original
editor of The Victoria County History of Cumberland, wrote, in 1894, that: ‘In
Westmorland and Cumberland . . . proprietors are called “estatesmen” or
“statesmen”. In these two counties a “yeoman” is used only of a horse soldier,
or by a lawyer.’ R. S. Ferguson, A History of Westmorland (1894), p. 291, n. 1.
39 J. D. Marshall, op. cit., p. 258.
40 Ibid., pp. 268–71.
41 W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 413.
42 Cf. C. Moor, ‘The Old Statesman Families of Irton, Cumberland’, CW2, 10
(1910), p. 148.
43 J. V. Beckett, ‘The Peasant in England: a Case of Terminological Confu-
sion’, loc. cit., pp. 113–23.
44 Marshall also refers to the statesmen as a self-sufficient ‘peasantry’, work-
ing within the constraints of a ‘subsistence economy’. Many statesmen,
however, were involved in the highly profitable sheep and cattle trade in
the Lake District; and ‘even the very modestly placed yeomen had a chance
of forming a surplus of grain for sale’. In spite of this tension in his argu-
ment, Marshall concludes that ‘the yeoman or husbandman’ belonged to
a ‘basic or subsistence economy [which] demanded that he should be a
mixed farmer, growing his own food and selling any surplus, just as he
grew his own hemp and flax. His domestic organisation and farm work
[therefore] rested upon family labour’. J. D. Marshall, ‘The Domestic Economy
of the Lakeland Yeoman, 1660–1749’, CW2, 73, (1973), pp. 196–8, 212
and 199–200.
45 Cf. Oxford English Dictionary (1933), III, D-E, p. 12: ‘Dalesman . . . [= dale’s
man from DALE.] A native or inhabitant of a dale; esp. of the dales of
Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire, and the adjacent northern counties
of England’.
46 W. Wordsworth, A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, 5th edn (1835)
in J. O. Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth. Selected Prose (1988), pp. 38–9
and 60–1; cf. too pp. 18, 33–7.
47 Cf. J. Lucas, England and Englishness (1990), p. 135. Professor Lucas would
disagree with my interpretation of the word ‘peasantry’, but I have culled
the quotations from his book it seems only fair to acknowledge him as
my source.
48 See the copy of Bewick’s engraving in Kenneth MacLean, Agrarian Age: a
Background for Wordsworth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 47,
Plate 6: ‘A Bold Peasantry’.
216 Notes
49 Robert Anderson quoted in Alexander Craig Gibson, The Old Man; or Rav-
ings and Ramblings Round Conistone (1854), p. 67.
50 William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis (ed.), The Fenwick Notes of William
Wordsworth (Bristol Classical Press, 1993), p. 20. Re. Westmorland, John
Housman observed, in 1800, that: ‘Flax and hemp are now rarely seen in
this county, though, fifty years ago, they were sown by almost every cot-
tager and statesman’ (idem, op. cit., pp. 98–9).
51 E. J. Evans and J. V. Beckett, ‘Cumberland, Westmorland and Furness’, in
Joan Thirsk (ed.), AHEW, V, 1640–1750, Pt i, Regional Farming Systems (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 29.
52 W. Wordsworth, ‘An Evening Walk’ (comp. 1788–9; pub. 1793), ll. 128–67
in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 80–1.
53 W. Wordsworth, ibid., l. 337 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 87. Thomas
Gray mentions, with regards to the Kent River, ‘the thumping of huge
hammers at an iron forge not far distant’. See his Journal entry, dated
9 October 1769, reprinted in Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium 1660–1886:
the Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (ed. by Mary-Lou
Jennings and Charles Madge) (André Deutsch, 1985), doc. 54. See too
W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 8, ll. 498–510. pp. 139–40.
55 Cf. G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society (1963), p. 98. ‘Within half a mile
of Carlisle’, wrote John Housman in the early 1790s, land ‘is [let] from 3L.
to 5L.10s. per acre. In old enclosures, and pretty good soils at a greater
distance, from 1L. to about 2L.10s.’ ‘40 years ago’, adds William Hutchinson,
‘land which did not rent for more than 8s. per acre’ was now let ‘for 2L.
to 3L.10s. per acre. “It was at that period in common field”’. W. Hutchinson,
op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 678.
56 W. Wordsworth, ‘Home at Grasmere’ (comp. 1806; pub. 1888), l. 615 in
J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 713.
57 W. Wordsworth, A Guide Through the District of the Lakes (1835) in J. O.
Hayden, loc. cit., p. 43.
58 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 9, ll. 218–26, p. 157.
59 F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963),
pp. 114–17. Thompson used John Bateman’s figures from the New Domesday
Books of 1873 for his different tables of the Greater Gentry, Squires, and
Small Landowners in England. For the 1883 edition see: John Bateman,
The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (Intro. by David Spring)
(Leicester University Press [Reprints], 1971). Re. the greater gentry, the counties
of Lancashire (12 per cent), Westmorland (11 per cent), and Cumberland
(10 per cent) were all considerably below the national average of 17 per
cent. Re. the smallest estates of 1 to 100 acres, we find Cumberland (16
per cent), Lancashire (18 per cent), and Westmorland (16 per cent) were
all above the national average of 12 per cent. Re. other groups of small
landowners, we find estates of 100 to 300 acres were more common in
Cumberland (22 per cent) and Westmorland (18 per cent) than in Lancashire
(12 per cent), which was just below the national average of 12.5 per cent.
Estates of 300 to 1000 acres were also more common in Cumberland (16
per cent) and Westmorland (16 per cent) than Lancashire (13 per cent),
which fell just short of the national average of 14 per cent. These figures
suggest that the Lake Counties were well endowed with squires and wealthy
Notes 217
yeomen, whose social and economic interests were closely connected with
the smaller landowners rather than a demographically scarce peerage and
gentry. Thompson, for example, concluded that ‘Cumberland and
Westmorland formed a region in which the more genuinely agricultural
yeomen groups were strong, although in Westmorland their independence
of the higher orders[, in 1873,] was limited by the presence of an above
average quota of great estates [that is 300 to 1000 acres]’ (ibid., p. 118).
60 Ibid., pp. 115–18.
61 W. Wordsworth, ‘Home at Grasmere’ (comp. 1806; pub. 1888), ll. 347–67
and 376–83 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 706–7.
62 William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, op. cit., pp. 64–5.
63 J. Housman, A Topographical Description of Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire,
and a Part of the West Riding of Yorkshire (Carlisle, 1800), pp. 104–5.
64 W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 516. Parson and White wrote, in 1829,
that: ‘Crime does not prevail so much here as in most other counties in
this kingdom, and the inhabitants are generally of a peaceable disposi-
tion, though it has been erroneously said [by William Hutchinson?] that
the Cumbrians “are uncommonly litigious” owing to the very minute manner
in which their property is divided’. Their several comments on crime were
probably based upon the lists of criminal convictions for 1810 and 1818
which they reprinted in their Directory of the Lake Counties in 1829. W.
Parson and W. White, op. cit., p. 30.
65 J. D. Marshall, ‘Some Aspects of the Social History of 19th-Century Cumbria:
(II) Crime, Police, Morals and the Countryman’, CW2, 70 (1970), pp. 222–3;
cf. pp. 233–4.
66 Ibid., p. 223.
67 Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal gives several examples of the Wordsworths’
old-fashioned hospitality and alms-giving to the vagrants who came to
their door or whom they met on the public roads. We shall see later that
this paternal attitude was part of the ‘moral economy’ of Old Lakeland,
which saw public relief as a customary right of the poor no less than a
traditional duty of the rich. On the other hand, Dorothy and her brother
were also aware of the reckless character of many travellers and vagrants.
D. Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), pp. 2, 3, 9–10, 12, 31, 52, 95, passim. Cf. too J. Housman, op. cit.,
p. 105.
68 Ibid., p. 30.
69 ‘In 1822–3 the poor-rates in Cumberland came to L.58 540 and those of
Westmorland to L.28 447, the former being about 55 times and the latter[,
more significantly,]a little under 15 times the income from charities.’
C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op. cit., p. 293.
71 T. W. Thompson, op. cit., p. 281. Wordsworth himself wrote of the
neighbourliness of the farming classes in a footnote to the third edition of
his famous guide book to the Lakes. The note may have provided a model
for T. W. Thompson’s own remarks about Hawkshead in the poet’s child-
hood. ‘One of the most pleasing characteristics of manners in secluded
and thinly-populated districts, is a sense of the degree in which human
happiness and comfort are dependent on the contingency of neighbourhood.
This is implied by a rhyming adage common here, “Friends are far, when
218 Notes
neighbours are nar” (near). This mutual helpfulness is not confined to out-
of-doors work; but is ready upon all occasions. Formerly, if a person became
sick, especially the mistress of a family, it was usual for those of the
neighbours who were more particularly connected with the party by ami-
cable offices, to visit the house, carrying a present; this practice, which is
by no means obsolete, is called owning the family, and is regarded as a
pledge of a disposition to be otherwise serviceable in a time of disability
and distress.’ W. Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes, 5th edn (ed. by E. De
Selincourt) (London: Henry Frowde, 1906), p. 67, n. 1.
73 Ibid., pp. 291 and 303.
74 F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor ([Facsimile of the 1797 edition] London:
Frank Cass and Co. Ltd, 1966), Vol. 2, pp. 57–8. The passage from Eden’s
book might also remind the reader of George Crabbe’s famous description
of the typical poor house in the Rural South – with ‘The moping idiot and
the madman gay’. Wordsworth, however, objected to these lines on agrar-
ian grounds. In a letter to John Wilson, dated 7 June 1802, he wrote (that):
‘Persons in the lower classes of society have little or nothing [of ] this
[feeling of “loathing or disgust . . . at the sight of an Idiot”]: if an Idiot is
born in a poor man’s house, it must be taken car[e of ] and cannot be
boarded out, as it would be by gentle folks, or sent [to a] public or private
receptacle for such unfortunate beings’. Poor people ‘seeing frequently among
their neighbours such objects, easily [forget what]ever there is of natural
disgust about them, and have t[h]erefore a sane state, so that without
pain or suffering they [perform] their duties towards them’. Perhaps he
was thinking of the idiot son of Willy Park, a statesman who lived near
the Wordsworths at Rydal. G. Crabbe, ‘The Village’ (1783) in W. H. Auden
and N. H. Pearson (eds), The Portable Romantic Poets: Blake to Poe
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 70. William Wordsworth to John
Wilson, letter quoted in A. G. Hill (ed.), Letters of William Wordsworth. A
New Selection (1984), p. 53. See the next paragraph for more information
about the Park family.
75 William Wordsworth to Thomas Poole, letter dated 9 April 1801, in E. De
Selincourt, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Volume I, The
Early Years 1787–1805, 2nd rev. edn (1967) [= Vol. 1], p. 266.
76 William Wordsworth to Richard Sharp, letter dated Grasmere, 13 April 1808,
in E. De Selincourt (ed.), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth,
Volume II, The Middle Years, Part I, 1806–1811, 2nd rev. edn (1969) [= Vol.
2], p. 211.
77 William Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, letter dated 17 April 1808, in
E. De Selincourt, ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 213–14.
78 Dorothy Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, letter dated 28 March 1808,
in E. De Selincourt, ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 205–6.
79 W. Wordsworth, ‘The Brothers’ (1800), ll. 201–2 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit.,
Vol. 1, pp. 407–8.
80 W. Wordsworth, ibid., ll. 344–5 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 411.
81 William Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, op. cit., in E. De Selincourt,
loc. cit., Vol. 2, Pt. i, p. 214.
82 Cf. P. Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1965), pp. 11–13.
Notes 219
83 Cf. J. V. Beckett, ‘English Landownership in the Later Seventeenth- and

Eighteenth Centuries: the Debate and the Problems’, loc. cit., p. 572.
84 R. W. Emerson, English Traits (1956), in M. Van Doren (ed.), The Portable
Emerson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 403. Perhaps he was
thinking of the Yorker family of Lowther Parish in Westmorland, whose
forebears came to England with William the Conqueror, and had ‘been
park-keepers at Lowther upwards of 300 years’ (W. Parson and W. White,
op. cit., p. 594). Or maybe he had heard of the Tyson family of Ravenglass
in Cumberland, who farmed the main stock of Lord Muncaster’s famous
breed of Herdwick Sheep. Their forebears were said to ‘have lived in this
sequestered spot above four hundred years’ ( J. Bailey and G. Culley, op.
cit., p. 16). Unfortunately, I have not found any evidence that such fami-
lies and events were discussed in Emerson’s conversations with Wordsworth
in 1833 and 1848. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (London: George
G. Harrap and Co., n.d.), pp. 12–16 (re. Emerson’s visit to Rydal Mount
on 28 August 1833); and E. M. Tilton (ed.), The Letters of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Vol. 7 (1807–44) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990),
pp. 51–2 (editor’s note re. Emerson’s visit to Wordsworth’s home in late
February, 1848).
85 William Wordsworth to Charles James Fox, letter dated 14 January 1801,
in A. G. Hill, op. cit., pp. 42–3.
86 William Wordsworth to Thomas Poole, letter dated 9 April 1801, in E. De
Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 322.
87 W. Wordsworth, ‘Michael’ (1800), ll. 361–71 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1,
p. 465.
88 A. Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978),
passim; idem, The Culture of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), esp. Ch. 1;
idem, A Guide to English Historical Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), passim; and idem, ‘The Myth of the Peasantry; Family and
Economy in a Northern Parish’, in R. M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-
Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 333–49. For a recent
debate over the methods and sources used by Macfarlane, see: PP, No. 146
Feb. (1995): ‘Debate: the Family Land-Bond in England: Comment’ by R. W.
Hoyle, pp. 151–73; and ‘Reply’ by Govind Sreenivasan, pp. 174–87.
89 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op. cit., pp. 331–2. A similar conclusion
was reached by Dr Charles Moor in his major study of the statesmen fami-
lies of Irton in Cumberland between c.1575 and 1775, which he took to
be fairly representative of other parishes in the area. By carefully listing
the names of statesmen, who had left wills and inventories for the pro-
bate register, he found considerable evidence that several of the yeomen
families involved had moved ‘from one part of the parish to another’.
Very few, indeed, were ‘found always in the same place’ and almost all of
the specific locations studied showed ‘a succession of different names’. He
therefore concluded ‘that their families cannot be clearly traced through
two centuries without reference to the neighbouring parishes. If they moved
at all, it is unlikely that they confined their removals within the borders
of one parish’. Charles Moor, ‘The Old Statesmen Families of Irton,
Cumberland’, CW2, 10 (1910), pp. 148 and 195–8. On the other hand,
even William Blamire, a hard-headed advocate of enclosure, remarked can-
didly that: ‘A considerable portion of the property’ in Cumberland and
220 Notes
Westmorland, ‘is copyhold, and I have frequently seen admittances from

the time of Queen Elizabeth in the same family name’. See the ‘Select
Committee on Agriculture with Minutes of Evidence’, BPP, 5 (1833), p. 309.
90 T. W. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 201–2. The local historian referred to, by
Thompson, was M. L. Armitt.
91 At least I am reminded here of Judith Richard’s approach to Golden Age
theories: ‘Throughout the ages the idea of community has inhabited the
imagination as ideal or mythical presence; it is not less real on that ac-
count and, varying with time and place, has exercised more or less importance
in giving meaning or shape to human experience, to the ways in which
people perceive the world in which they live. Because the ideal and the
actual have interacted, both must be studied together in their interaction;
because they are different and because their interaction is variable, each
must also be studied separately’. J. Richards, ‘Unpublished Seminar Paper’,
LaTrobe University, Victoria, (1990): a copy in the author’s possession.
92 The main issues are discussed in the following books and articles: T. S.
Ashton, The Early Industrial Revolution 1760–1850 (London: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1948), passim. J. V. Beckett, ‘English Landownership in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: the Debate and the Problems’, in
loc. cit., pp. 567–81. Idem, ‘The Decline of the Small Landowner in Eigh-
teenth- and Nineteenth-Century England: Some Regional Considerations’,
loc. cit., pp. 97–111. J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain:
the Early Railway Age: 1820–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 1967, passim.
C. Clay, ‘Landlords and Estate Management in England’, in J. Thirsk (ed.),
AHEW, 5, 1640–1750, Pt II, Agrarian Change (1985), Ch. 14. P. Deane, op.
cit., passim. P. Mantoux, op. cit., Ch. 3. G. E. Mingay, ‘The Size of Farms in
the Eighteenth Century’, ECHR, 2nd ser. 14, No. 3 (1962), pp. 469–88.
J. H. Porter, ‘The Development of Rural Society’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.),
AHEW, 6, 1750–1850 (1989), Ch. 9. The general rate and size of the small
holders’ decline is discussed in works dealing with the land tax assess-
ments. See the second article mentioned by Beckett; E. Davies, ‘The Small
Landowner, 1780–1832, in light of the Land Tax Assessments’, ECHR, 1
(1929), pp. 87–113; G. E. Mingay, ‘The Land Tax Assessment and the Small
Landowner’, ECHR, 2nd ser.. 17. No. 2 (1964), pp. 381–8; and the celebrated
lectures on the topic by A. H. Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small
Landowner (1910), passim.
93 Cf. D. Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination. The Poetry of Displacement
(1987), p. 87.
94 J. D. Marshall and C. A. Dyhouse, ‘Social Transition in Kendal and
Westmorland, c. 1760–1860’, NH, 12 (1976), p. 140 incl. n. 62.
95 See the table composed by F. W. Garnett in his book Westmorland Agriculture
1800–1900 (Kendal: Titus Wilson, Publisher, 1912), p. 15; cf. too p. 13.
96 J. Bateman, op. cit., p. 503.
97 Garnett seems to rely upon the following works for his figures of the states-
men in Westmorland: W. Parson and W. White, Directory (1829); [–]. Mannex,
History, Topography, etc., of Westmorland (1849); and [–]. Bulmer, History,
Topography, etc., of Westmorland (1885), F. W. Garnett, op. cit., p. xii.
98 W. Parson and W. White, op. cit., p. 26.
100 J. D. Marshall and C. A. Dyhouse, op. cit., p. 140, n. 63.
Notes 221
101 J. Bateman, op. cit., p. 503.

102 The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, Volume XXXVI for the
Year M.DCC.LXVI [1766], (London).
103 Cf. K. MacLean, op. cit., pp. 38 and 101–2. V. G. Kiernan, op. cit., p. 182,
n. 57. J. Lucas, op. cit., p. 104.
104 According to David Simpson, Wordsworth occupied ‘the classic bourgeois
site, an unstable and amorphous middle ground’ of dependence, which
disabled him ‘from validating any orthodox social role in a whole hearted
manner’. The ‘insecure poet’ of the war period could therefore no longer
be ‘at one with the rural “owner-occupiers” who’, in his eyes, ‘were econ-
omically and spiritually “their own upholders, to themselves/Encourage-
ment, and energy, and will”’. D. Simpson, op. cit., pp. 126 and 155. Cf.
W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 13, ll. 262–3 p. 225.
105 G. E. Mingay, op. cit., p. 97.
106 E. P. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 242–4. According to Karl Marx, ‘The expro-
priation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, his separation from
the soil, is the basis of the whole process [of primitive accumulation of
capital in the formative years of urban and industrial society]’. Neverthe-
less, he wrongly concluded that the process received its ‘classical form’ in
the Enclosure Movement in England. Karl Marx, extract from Das Kapital
(1867), Vol. II reprinted in T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel (eds), Karl Marx.
Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (tr. by T. B. Bottomore),
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), Part Three, Ch. 1, ‘The Origins
and Development of Capitalism’, pp. 142–51 (esp. pp. 144–5).
107 J. Bailey and G. Culley, op. cit, p. 36.
108 Richard Watson quoted in Andrew Pringle, op. cit., p. 7.
109 Cf. A. Pringle, ibid., p. 21; and J. Housman, op. cit., p. 90.
110 Ibid., pp. 26–8.
111 Ibid., pp. 26–8.
112 W. H. R. Curtler, The Enclosure and Redistribution of our Land (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1920), p. 228.
113 Figures taken from ‘Appendix D’, in E. C. K. Gonner, Common Land and
Enclosure (London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd, 1966 [1st pub. 1912]), pp. 278–81.
114 P. Deane, op. cit., p. 44.
115 Figures taken from B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 235.
116 J. Bailey and G. Culley, op. cit., p. 9.
117 J. H. Clapham, op. cit., pp. 99–100. Consider, for instance, the testimony
of William Blamire to the ‘Select Committee on Agriculture’, in June 1833:
The ‘parties have had large families, and they have, from a miscalculation
of their real situation, been induced to leave to their children larger for-
tunes than ought to have been done, and to saddle the oldest son with
the payment of a sum which it was impossible he could provide for. This
has been the case to a very great degree, particularly where the lands so
devised were lands of inferior quality. I know some remarkable instances
where parents have left a provision for younger children out of estates
which have not been sold during the continuance of high prices, and which
have fallen so much within their calculations as to leave to the eldest son
hardly anything’. ‘Report from the Select Committee on Agriculture with
Minutes of Evidence’, BPP, 5 (1933), pp. 309–10.
222 Notes
118 C. M. L. Bouch, op. cit., p. 342.

119 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op. cit., pp. 236–7. Cf. too the account of
the death and birth rates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries given
by M. W. Flinn, Origins of the Industrial Revolution (London: Longmans,
Green and Co Ltd, 1966), Ch. 2.
120 J. D. Marshall, ‘The Domestic Economy of the Lakeland Yeomen, 1660–
1749’, p. 213.
121 W. Wordsworth, ‘The Brothers’, (1800), ll. 214–15 and ‘Michael’, (1800),
ll. 374–9 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 407–8, and 465.
122 Cf. J. V. Beckett, ‘The Decline of the Small Landowner in Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century England: Some Regional Considerations’, p. 104. J. V.
Beckett and E. J. Evans, loc. cit., pp. 24–5. Cf. too the fate of Wordsworth’s
Quaker friend, Thomas Wilkinson of Yanwath: William Wordsworth quoted
in Jared Curtis, op. cit., pp. 38–9.
123 W. Wordsworth, ‘Chatsworth! thy stately mansion, and the pride’ (comp.
1830; pub. 1835) in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 695–6.
Hayden, loc. cit., pp. 60–1.
126 C. M. L. Bouch, op. cit., pp. 242–3.
127 W. Wordsworth, ‘Song for the Spinning Wheel – Founded upon a Belief
Prevalent among the Pastoral Vales of Westmoreland’ (comp. between 1806
and 1812; pub.1820); ‘Grief, thou hast lost an ever ready friend’ (comp.
between 1807 and 1814; pub.1819); and ‘Through Cumbrian wilds, in many
a mountain cove’ (comp. between 1806 and 1814; pub. 1896). These poems
can be found in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 732, 737, and 733.
128 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op. cit., p. 267; and W. Parson and W.
White, op. cit., p. 615.
129 William Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont, letter dated 21 August 1806,
in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 2 Pt. i p. 76.
131 It is likely that ‘the national rate of growth was retarded, though not actually
checked, by the French Wars’. P. Deane, op. cit., p. 240. Cf. too E. Halevy,
op. cit., pp. 311–13.
132 E. J. Evans and J. V. Beckett, op. cit., p. 12. J. Thirsk, op. cit., p. 81.
A. Pringle, op. cit., pp. 23–4. Cf. J. Bailey and G. Culley, op. cit., p. 19.
133 R. S. Ferguson, A History of Westmorland (1894), p. 167.
134 Ibid., pp. 263–4. ‘Kendal Cottons’ were, in fact, coarse woollens; the term
is supposed to be a corruption of ‘coatings’, to which use they were ap-
plied: ibid., pp. 165–6.
135 William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, op. cit., p. 41.
136 D. Wordsworth, op. cit., p. 3.
137 Cf. J. V. Beckett, ‘The Decline of the Small Landowner in Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century England: Some Regional Considerations’, p. 106.
139 See, respectively, D. Simpson, op. cit., pp. 87–8 and C. M. L. Bouch and
G. P. Jones, op. cit., p. 237.
140 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, ibid., p. 237; C. M. L. Bouch, op. cit., p. 343;
and G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: a Survey of Six Centuries [from]
Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1942), p. 375 n. 1.
Notes 223
141 G. M. Trevelyan, ibid., p. 275 n. 1. Certainly Trevelyan’s statement sounds

like a paraphrase of Wordsworth’s guide book: ‘In the Lake District,
Wordsworth observed that between 1770 and 1820 the number of the freehold
“statesmen” was halved and the size of their holdings doubled: the little
farms were amalgamated, because they proved insufficient to support families
when the invention of the “spinning jenny” concentrated spinning in fac-
tories and so took away profitable work from the peasant’s wife and children.
Thus the change was not in that district due to enclosure, for the dales
had long before been covered by a network of stone walls which the small
freeholders themselves had erected round their own fields’. It is ironic
that Trevelyan’s remarks have been used by other historians to prove the
opposite point. For his part, Trevelyan might well have misunderstood the
poet’s views of the ‘statesmen’ as a compound of several groups of small
landowners in the area, and not just freeholders; but until Wordsworth’s
statement can be tracked down to a specific source this view of the topic
must remain more speculation than proof.
2 Land Tenure: a Lake District Survey

1 In his classic survey of the evolution of the English landscape, W. G. Hoskins
wrote that: ‘The facts of topography, soils and climate explain much [about
the appearance of the countryside], but beyond them lie purely historical
facts like the laws of property and inheritance. The peculiar field-patterns
and other features of the Kent and Norfolk landscapes can probably only
be explained in the last resort by the social and legal history that lie be-
hind them; and they still await their interpreter’. (W. G. Hoskins, The Making
of the English Landscape (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1970 [1st pub.
1955]), pp. 146–7.) The reader might well consider the present chapter as a
social and legal explanation of the ‘peculiar field-patterns and other fea-
tures’ of the Lake District landscape in Wordsworth’s time.
2 J. D. Marshall, ‘“Statesmen” in Cumbria: the Vicissitudes of an Expression’,
CW2, 72 (1972), pp. 258–9.
3 See the Introduction for further details.
4 A. Pringle, op. cit., pp. 40–1. Cf. too J. Housman, op. cit., pp. 64, and 67–8,
re. the statesmen’s independence, domestic competence, and close relations
with family members and farm servants.
5 D. Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (Cambridge University Press, 1993),
pp. 173–4 and 183–4. Wordsworth’s interest in Fox as a whig statesman
might have arisen from his possible use of the Stowey Book Society in 1797–8.
Among the works listed by Duncan Wu in this regard were: C. J. Fox, A
Letter from the Right Honourable Charles James Fox, to the Worthy and Indepen-
dent Electors of the City and Liberty of Westminster (1793) and idem, ‘Fox’s Letter
to the Electors of Westminster’ (ibid., p. 174).
6 S. Gill, William Wordsworth: a Life (1989), p. 80.
7 The Hammonds gave examples of Fox’s support of several policies which
were favourable to the rural labourers of the South. J. L. and B. Hammond,
The Village Labourer (1978 reprint), pp. 41, 82, 87, 140, 151–2.
8 A. Pringle, op. cit., p. 18.
9 Cf. W. Parson and W. White, op. cit., p. 26; and [–]. Mannix and [–]. Whellan,
op. cit., pp. 35–6. Cf. too J. Housman, op. cit., p. 97.
224 Notes
10 J. Bailey and G. Culley, op. cit., p. 11; and J. Housman, op. cit., pp. 64–5.
11 I use the words ‘semi-feudal exactions’ on account of the famous Statute of
12 Charles II, c.24, which ended feudal tenures, such as knight’s service,
but retained certain customary rents, fines, heriots, and suits of court. Cf.
W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 40, and T. West, op. cit. (1774 edn), pp.
144–7. Cf. F. E. Huggett, The Land Question and European Society since 1650
(London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1975), pp. 69–70: copyhold tenures were
continued until 1925. According to Annette Bagot, these modified tenant-
right customs were not abolished or assimilated until the passing of the
Agricultural Holdings Act of 1948. A. Bagot, ‘Mr. Gilpin and Manorial Cus-
toms’, CW2, 62 (1962), p. 225.
12 We have dealt with the second assumption in the previous chapter.
13 Lord Ellenborough’s decision in the Case of Doe d Reay v. Huntington and
others, quoted in Wilson Butler, ‘The Customs of Tenant Right Tenures of
the Northern Counties, with Particulars of those in the District of Furness’,
CW2, 26 (1925), pp. 321–2. See p. 322 of Butler’s essay for similar court
decisions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lord Ellenborough
was the son of Bishop Law of Carlisle.
14 See note 18 of the present chapter.
15 VCH Cumb., Vol. 1, pp. 326–7. The editors (R. S. Ferguson and J. Wilson)
declare, on p. 321, that ‘when we touch on tenure by cornage or the pay-
ment of noutgeld we are at the roots of that historic burden on the Border
counties which afterwards grew into the Border service, that is to say, that
the military liability of freeholders in Cumberland was confined to the de-
fence of their own lands’. In consequence, they were excused from giving
money to the scutages for the general defence of the country (ibid., pp.
324–5).
16 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 324. Re. Border service, see also pp. 325–7 incl. n. 1, pp.
329–30. Cf. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 14 and 21. Cf. too
W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 19–20, where Border service is said to be
‘totally unconnected with other military service’; and C. M. L. Bouch and
G. P. Jones, A Short Economic and Social History of the Lake Counties 1500–
1830 (1961), pp. 11–12.
17 Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 318–19. Cf. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 219,
re. the Court of Chancery’s confirmation of the customs of the Manor of
Burgh in c.1674. F. W. Maitland studied a similar case from Cumberland,
about a thirteenth-century tenant who held lands ‘by cornage’ and was ‘bound
to follow the king against the Scots, leading the van when the army’ was
‘advancing’ and ‘bringing up the rear during its return’. He concluded that
this Border service looked ‘like an ancient trait, for at the time of the [Norman]
Conquest there were men on the Welsh march who were bound to a simi-
lar service, to occupy the post of honour when the army marched into
Wales or out of Wales’. (Canon Bouch, however, concluded that the two
types of Border service, in England were distinct, at least in Norman and
Tudor times.) F. W. Maitland, ‘Northumbrian Tenures’, EHR, 5 (1890), p. 629.
18 Sir Charles Elton, Custom and Tenant Right (1882), p. 25 quoted in Richard S.
Ferguson, A History of Westmorland (1894), p. 128. The following account of
the difference between copyhold tenure and tenant right is based largely upon
pp. 127–8 of Ferguson’s admirable book. Cf. S. B. Chrimes, English Constitu-
tional History, 4th edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 60–6.
Notes 225
19 R. S. Ferguson, ibid., p. 128.

20 Judge William Blackstone quoted in William Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1,
pp. 38–9.
21 Cf. R. S. Ferguson, ibid., p. 127, and C. M. L. Bouch, Prelates and People of
the Lake Counties (1948), p. 18. Cf. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op. cit., Vol. 1,
pp. 40–60, re. a report, composed in 1572, for Queen Elizabeth, about the
nature of tenant right in the Marquis Fee of the Barony of Kendal in
Westmorland: the said tenants had ‘neither copy nor other evidence to show
for their title’. Contrast the fate of customary tenants in the manors of
Wark and Harbottle, in Northumberland, during the 1620s, who lost their
traditional status because they could not prove their title by means of court
rolls or other documents: S. J. Watts, ‘Tenant-Right in Early Seventeenth-
Century Northumberland’, NH, 6 (1971), p. 79.
22 C. M. L. Bouch, op. cit., p. 18.
23 Cf. ibid., pp. 20–2.
24 R. S. Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 127–8. Cf. W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp.
36–40: Cumberland estates, held in villeinage, ‘were under a species of ten-
ure, neither strictly Feodal, Norman, or Saxon; but mixed and compounded
of them all’ (ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 37–48).
25 Ibid., p. 128. Cf. T. West, The Antiquities of Furness, 2nd edn (Ulverston,
1805), p. 169, re. the common features of tenant right in Low Furness, and
pp. 155–6. See too J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 40–60 re.
customary services, such as Border duty, in the Marquis Fee in the Barony
of Kendal. Cf. W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 124–5, re. an inquisition
of 31 Elizabeth I, which records the different tasks performed by the cus-
tomary tenants, farmers and cottagers.
26 C. M. L. Bouch, op. cit., p. 21. In pre-Reformation times the tenants of
Furness abbey held their estates by means of pure villeinage: T. West, op. cit.,
pp. 155– 6, and pp. 123–4. (Likewise William Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1,
p. 60, noted that the tenants of the priory of Lanercost also surrendered
their estates in courts – as a species of copyhold(?).) In consequence,
Wordsworth’s reliance upon West as a source for his book, A Guide Through
the District of the Lakes (1820/1835), might have led him at times to regard
tenant right as a species of copyhold in the region of Furness; but that was
a reasonable conclusion to draw from the Seignory’s ‘feudal’ foundation
and charter no less than its subsequent history, which fits into the pattern
described by Canon Bouch.
27 The classic account of the court case was written by J. Nicolson and R. Burn,
op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 51–9. Re. the Proclamation of 1620, see pp. 53–4.
A shrewd modern account of the court case and its significance is found in
S. J. Watts, op. cit., pp. 71–8.
28 The Proclamation was partly compromised by the willingness of several land-
lords, including the Prince of Wales, to compound with their tenants for a
clear confirmation of their tenant right estates and customs. J. Nicolson and
R. Burn, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 51–2 re. the Prince of Wales; p. 501 re. Sir John
Lowther of Lowther; and ibid., Vol. 2, p. 479 re. Sir Robert Graham of Eske.
29 Star Chamber’s decision quoted in Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn, op. cit.,
Vol. 1, p. 58.
30 J. Nicolson and R. Burn, ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 45–6 re. the rental and survey
ordered by Elizabeth I, in 1572, for the Marquis Fee of the Barony of Kendal.
226 Notes
Cf. pp. 48–9, re. the tenant right customs of the Marquis and Richmond
Fees when they came into the Queen’s possession in the sixteenth year of
her reign. See pp. 525–8, re. a detailed account of the tenant right customs
for the parish of Ravenstonedale; ibid., Vol. 2, p. 17 re. the Duchy court of
Lancaster, which settled the customs of the Queen’s tenants, who had once
belonged to the abbey of Furness; pp. 183–8 re. the inquiry made by the
Queen’s commissioners into the customs and tenure of the manor and demense
of Holm Cultram. T. West, op. cit., pp. 155–6, noted that tenant right estate
was a ‘precarious’ tenure in the whole Reformation period.
31 J. Nicolson and R. Burn, ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 45–6. It is interesting to note, in
this respect, that F. W. Maitland arrived at a similar conclusion on the evol-
ution of tenant right estate in the early feudal period: speaking of these
tenures in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he declared that: ‘In
Northumbria we seem to see the new tenure by knight’s service, that is by
heavy cavalry service, superimposed upon other tenures which have been,
and still are in a certain sort, military. In Northumbria [by which he meant
the five northernmost counties] there are barons and knights with baronies
and knights’ fees; but there are also, thegns and drengs holding in thegnage
and drengage, doing the king’s utware [or foreign service], taking the post
of honour and of danger when there is fighting to be done against the
Scots. But as with the Lancashire thegns of [the] Domesday Book, so with
these thegns and drengs of a somewhat later day, military service is not the
chief feature of their tenure – in a remote past it may have been no feature
of their tenure, rather their duty as men than their duty as tenants – they
pay substantial rents, they help the king or their other lord in his plough-
ing and his reaping, they must ride on his errands [and so on]’, F. W. Maitland,
op. cit., p. 632. In consequence, he believed ‘that many of the [servile] ten-
ures in drengage went to swell the mass of “customary freeholds” which
appear[ed] in the north of England’ (ibid., p. 631). Nevertherless, we have
seen much social and economic evidence against his ‘legal’ conclusion, at
least, with regard to the Lake Counties.
32 S. J. Watts, op. cit., p. 67.
33 Cf. W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 132–3, re. the customs of Gilsland,
where they held ‘their lands in almost as base a tenure as the ancient
villeinage’. Although they were comparatively rare in the Border counties,
copyholders were found in considerable numbers in some Cumbrian manors.
J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 311 re. the manor of Dalston; p. 345
re. the parish of Sowerby. See [–]. Mannix and [–]. Whellan, op. cit.,
pp. 219–20 re. the manor of Scotby; p. 268 re. Hesket-in-the-Forest;
pp. 464–5 re. the parish of Holme Cultram. All (but the last?) of these
places were held by great landlords such as the Bishop of Carlisle, Lord
Cavendish (6th Duke of Devonshire) and Rowland Edmund Stephenson, Esq.
34 J. Housman, op. cit., p. 69.
36 Cf. VCH Cumb., Vol. 2, pp. 268–9 and 305. The parish of Kendal, in
Westmorland, was no less famous than Carlisle, in Cumberland, for the
bravery of its bowman:
These are the bows of Kentdale bold,

Who fierce will fight and never flee.
Notes 227
See the ‘Battle of Flodden’ quoted in Richard S. Ferguson, op. cit., p. 164.
37 J. L. Kirby, ‘Border Service, 1662–1757’, CW2, 48 (1949), pp. 125–9. Cf. R.
S. Ferguson, loc. cit., Ch. XVII, pp. 249–79; and idem, A History of Cumberland
(London: Elliott Stock, 1890), Ch. XIX, pp. 269–76.
38 W. Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper’ (comp. 1805; pub. 1807), l. 20 in J.
O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 657. Dorothy Wordsworth quoted in Mary
Moorman, William Wordsworth: a Biography (1957) Vol. 1, p. 30. William
Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), Bk 6, ll. 392–521 in J. O. Hayden, op. cit.,
Vol. 2, pp. 197–200.
39 D. Wu, op. cit., passim; idem, ‘The Hawkshead School Library in 1788: a
Catalogue’, CW2, 91 (1993), pp. 173– 97. See too J. Burton, Catalogue of the
Varied and Valuable Historical, Theological, and Miscellaneous Library of the
Late Venerated Poet-Laureate, William Wordsworth, Esquire, D.L.C. (Preston[?],
1859), passim. (Hereafter: C. Reprinted by permission of the Wordsworth
Trust.) It is not known when, or even if, Wordsworth read all of the books
in his library, but most of the works listed in this footnote were either read
in whole or in part; at least, their contents have been observed to some
extent in the poet’s letters, conversation, poetry or prose. The young
Wordsworth was familiar with the following works on local and regional
history: Dr John Brown, A Description of the Lake at Keswick (1767); James
Clark, Survey of the Lakes (1789); Sir Frederick Eden, State of the Poor (1797);
William Gilpin, Observations on the Lakes, 2 Vols (1786); Thomas Gray, Jour-
nal of the Lakes (1775); John Housman, Guide to the Lakes (1800) (C., p. 19);
William Hutchinson, Excursion to the Lakes (1774); Joseph Nicolson and Richard
Burn, The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland,
2 Vols (1777); George Ridpath, The Border History of England and Scotland
(1776); Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes (1794) – Wordsworth owned a
copy of the 1807 edition; idem, The Antiquities of Furness (1774) – Wordsworth
owned a copy of the 1805 edition; Thomas Dunham Whitaker, The History
and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven (1805). Wordsworth also read a large
number of legal, travel and antiquarian books which were relevant to the
topics of tenant right estates, Border service, and domestic economy in the
North of England, including: William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws
of England, 4 Vols (1768) [C., p. 2.]; William Nicolson (the Bishop of Carlisle),
Border Laws (1705) = Leges Marchiarum (1249?) [C., p. 2.]; Sir Matthew Hale,
History of the Common Law (1779) [C., p. 6.]; William Woodfall, The Law of
Landlord and Tenant (1804) [C., p. 11.]; Edward Baines, History and Directory
of the County Palatine of Lancaster, 2 Vols (1822; 1823) [C., p. 12.]; Guide to
Perthshire, History of Glasgow, and other guide books [C., p. 14.]; W. Parson
and W. White, History and Directory of Durham and Northumberland, 2 Vols
(1827) [C., p. 16]; Stephen Oliver (jnr), Rambles in Northumberland and on
the Scottish borders [sic.] (1835) [C., p. 16.]; John Close, Book of the Chronicles
of Westmorland, Vol. 1 (1742) [C., p. 16.]; Giles Jacob, Law Dictionary
(1736) [C., p. 37.]; Andrew Fletcher(?), The Freeholder – Political Essays (1739)
[C., p. 7.].
Re: British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books (1965):
Edward Baines – 1822, 1823 [Vol. 10, p. 134]
John Housman – 1800 [Vol. 107, p. 619]
A. Fletcher of Saltoun – [Cf. Vol. 74, pp. 333–4]
N.B. According to Duncan Wu, Wordsworth read only William Hutchinson’s
228 Notes
early work, an Excursion to the Lakes (1774). It is possible, however, that he

also read the same author’s History of the County of Cumberland, published
in 1794. At least, the copy of this work which is kept in the State Library
of Victoria (Australia) lists Richard Wordsworth of Whitehaven as one of its
subscribers. According to Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth and his sister stayed
for several weeks at Whitehaven in that year. If the book was already pub-
lished and printed in Carlisle and received by Richard Wordsworth’s family
at Whitehaven, or his son’s family at Branthwaite, before the middle of
that year, it is possible that William Wordsworth read it – in whole or in
part – between c.mid-May and 18 June in 1794. Cf. M. L. Reed, Wordsworth.
The Chronology of the Early Years 1770–1799 (1967), p. 154.
40 Cf. W. Hutchinson, op.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 429–36 re. the influence of the pic-
turesque tradition on his description of Ullswater, in Cumberland.
41 J. R. Nabholtz, ‘Wordsworth’s “Guide to the Lakes” and the Picturesque Tra-
dition’, MP, 61 (1963–4), pp. 289–90.
42 Ibid., p. 294.
43 M. Bloch, ‘Mediaeval Inventions’, in M. Bloch (ed.), Land and Work in Mod-
ern Europe (tr. by J. E. Anderson) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966),
p. 170.
44 Cf. M. Bloch, French Rural Society. An Essay on its Basic Characteristics (tr. by
J. Sondheim) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 50.
45 W. Wordsworth, A Guide Through the District of the Lakes (1835) in W. J. B.
Owen and J. W. Smyser (eds), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, Vol.
2, pp. 194–207 Section Two: ‘Aspect of the Country as Affected by its In-
habitants’.
46 T. West, The Antiquities of Furness, 2nd edn (1805), p. 23. Cf. the ‘Preface to’
the edition of 1774, pp. XXIII–XXIV.
47 Ibid., p. 96. West argues that the Agreement between Alexander (the abbot
of Furness) and his customary tenants in 17 Henry VIII was ‘A Key to the
ancient state of the tenants in Furness’. The district contained some
copyholders in Wordsworth’s time (p. 124) but most were customary ten-
ants with estates of inheritance (pp. 123–4). Cf. pp. 155–6, re. the three
types of tenants in feudal times, namely: (1) free homagers; (2) copyholders;
and (3) customary tenants.
48 The editors of the VCH Cumb., Vol. 1, pp. 332–3, record that drengage was
rare in that county but was considerable in some parts of Westmorland.
Nonetheless, this base tenure, like other tenures in the Border counties (with
the exception of tenure by knight’s service), was ‘free from royal service
beyond their own borders’. Cf. C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op.cit., pp.
12–14.
49 J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op.cit., Vol. 1, p. 135. The authors continue: ‘So
where a man has two tenements, he serves the office of constable [for] two
years; or if he has half a tenement, he joins with another who has also half
a tenement, for the finding a constable for one year. And so for the rest in
like proportion. One of which ancient military tenements, at the present
improved value, may be deemed to be worth about 10L. a year’. Cf. W.
Hutchinson, op.cit., Vol. 1, p. 38.
50 Old fell-side enclosures were called ‘quillets’ in the Lake Counties. Cf. H. R.
Trevor-Roper, ‘Fernand Braudel, the Annales, and the Mediterranean’, JMH,
44 (1972), pp. 468–79. This essay deals with the topic of ‘total history’.
Notes 229
51 Cf. J. Langton, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Regional Geography of

England’, TIBG, New Series, 9, No. 1 (1984), pp. 147–8 re. the significance
of ‘county communities’.
Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth. Selected Prose (1988), pp. 43–4.
53 W. Wordsworth, ibid., pp. 37–8.
54 See, respectively: W. Hutchinson, op.cit., Vol. 2, p. 516. T. West, op.cit. (1774
edn), p. XVII. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 527–8.
55 Cf. too the following examples of Old Cumberland life: the parish of Ullswater
by William Gilpin, in W. Hutchinson, op.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 446–7; the Parishes
of Buttermere and Barrowside by Thomas West and William Gilpin, in W.
Hutchinson, ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 127–9; the Parish of Loweswater by John
Housman, in W. Hutchinson, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 135; and the Parish of Stapleton
by W. Hutchinson, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 561. A systematic account of the cus-
toms and manners of the Lake Counties is found in John Housman, op.cit.,
pp. 67–80.
56 J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 527–8.
57 M. Osborne, ‘Wordsworth’s “Borderers” and the Landscape of Penrith’, CW2,
76 (1976), pp. 144–58. Cf. too note 49 above.
58 T. B. Macaulay, History of England, Vol. 1 (1849) in The Works of Lord Macaulay,
Vol. 1 (ed. by Lady Trevelyan) (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866),
Ch. III, p. 258.
59 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op.cit., p. 187.
60 W. Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), Bk 7, l. 352 in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit.,
Vol. 2, p. 231.
61 Whittle-gate was a way of providing poor parishes with a clergyman, school-
master, or both. Instead of a stipend for his own support, the poor curate
received a small amount of money, several payments in kind (for example,
a suit of clothes, two pairs of shoes and one of clogs), and lived with each
family, in the parish, for several days or weeks every year. Since he took his
knife (or ‘whittle’) with him, the practice was known as ‘whittle-gate’. Re.
the custom of ‘whittle-gate’ and the old institution of ‘Readers’ in the Lake
District, see: C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op.cit., pp. 183–92. Cf. W.
Hutchinson, op.cit., Vol. 2, pp. 119–20.
62 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op.cit., pp. 186–7. See too W. Wordsworth,
Memoir of the Rev. Robert Walker (1820) in J. O. Hayden, William Wordsworth.
Selected Prose (1988), pp. 127–36.
63 W. Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), Bk 7, ll. 232–9 (see too ll. 240–360)
in J. O. Hayden, The Poems (1977), Vol. 2, pp. 230–1.
64 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op.cit., pp. 186–7.
65 A. C. Gibson, The Old Man; Or Ravings and Ramblings Round Coniston (1854),
p. 57.
66 C. Wordsworth (jnr), Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851), Vol. 1, pp. 42,
174–5, and 177–8. Cf. C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op.cit., pp. 195–202;
and J. H. Porter, ‘The Development of Rural Society’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.),
loc.cit., pp. 891–906.
67 J. Housman, op.cit., p. 105.
68 William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, The Fenwick Notes of William
Wordsworth (1993), pp. 64–5.
69 William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, ibid., p. 65.
230 Notes
70 For example: The Rev. Alexander Naughley (Threlkeld) [W. Hutchinson, op.cit.,
Vol. 1, pp. 422–3; cf. W. Parson and W. White, op.cit., pp. 477–8; and [–].
Mannix and [–]. Whellan, op.cit., pp. 202–3]. The Rev. Mr Mattison (Patterdale)
[W. Hutchinson, op.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 431–4]. The Rev. Josiah Relph [ibid., Vol.
2, pp. 415–19]. The Rev. Thomas Denton [ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 419]. Richard
‘Happy Dick’ Dixon (Orton) [ibid., Vol. 2, p. 516; cf. W. Parson and W.
White, op.cit., p. 377; and [–]. Mannix and [–]. Whellan, op.cit., pp. 202–3].
The Rev. William Robinson and the Rev. Jeremiah Reed (Rockcliff) [W. Parson
and W. White, op.cit., pp. 378–9; cf. [–]. Mannix and [–]. Whellan, op.cit.,
p. 204]. The Rev. P. Threlkeld (Kirkby Thore) [ibid., p. 554]. The Rev. J.
Bowstead (Brampton Park) [ibid., pp. 575–6]. The Rev. Joseph Wise (Holme
Cultram) [ibid., p. 469]. The Rev. Thomas Jefferson (Holme Cultram) [ibid.,
p. 469]. The Rev. Joseph Halifax (Kirkbride) [ibid., p. 475]. The Rev. Joseph
Bell (Bridekirk) [ibid., p. 513].
71 See, respectively: C. Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’ (1956), pp. 14–15. V. G. Kiernan,
‘Wordsworth and the People’ (1956), pp. 175–6. W. Wordsworth, ‘Postscript.
1835’, in W. Knight (ed.), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. 4
(Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1883), pp. 361–87.
72 Wordsworth’s contemporaries portrayed social happiness and economic equality
in decidedly moral terms. Sometimes their assumptions were romantic, some-
times pastoral. John Housman, perhaps, epitomises the former position. In
the north, he claimed, that ‘human nature may frequently be found in her
original dress – neither ornamented by the refining hand of art, nor con-
taminated with the vices of the world’ (J. Housman, op.cit., p. 1). The Old
Lakeland community was living proof of natural goodness, he argued, and
ought not to be ignored by the wealthy gentleman, or by the legislator
( J. Housman, ibid., pp. 67–8). (Compare Wordsworth’s letter to C. J. Fox.)
The latter position was emphasised by William Hutchinson, Thomas West
and William Gilpin. They too upheld the statemen’s ‘mountain virtue and
pastoral hospitality’ as a model of personal independence and social con-
tentment (W. Hutchinson, op.cit., Vol. 2, pp. 127–8). Of course, such ‘happiness’
and ‘innocence’ could also be deemed acceptable to the proponents of so-
cial stability and political deference: Civility to strangers was always noted
with unrestrained pleasure (Cf. T. West, op.cit. (1774 edn), p. XVII; W.
Hutchinson, op.cit., Vol. 1, p. 535; and J. Housman, op.cit., p. 69). Never-
theless, this social vision of political deference and paternal relationships
was only a perspective; it was still different to the perceived ‘facts’.
73 Thomas Gray’s salute to Grasmere was echoed in a curious way by Wordsworth,
who as a boy had also stumbled upon ‘paradise’:
Once to the verge of yon steep barrier came

A roving School-boy; what the Adventurer’s age
Hath now escaped his memory – but the hour,
One of a golden summer holiday,
He well remembers, though the year be gone.
Alone and devious from afar he came;
And, with a sudden influx overpowered
At sight of this seclusion, he forgot
His haste, for hasty had his footsteps been
As boyish his pursuits; and, sighing said,
Notes 231
‘What happy fortune were it here to live!

And, if a thought of dying, if a thought
Of mortal separation, could intrude
With paradise before him, here to die!’
W. Wordsworth, ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1806), ll. 1–14 in J. O. Hayden, The

Poems, Vol. 1, p. 697.
74 W. Cobbett, Tour in Scotland and in the Four Northern Counties of England
(1833), p. 245.
75 William Wordsworth to S. T. Coleridge, letter dated 27 December 1799, in
E. De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), p. 275.
76 Dorothy read Ben Jonson’s poems to William on Thursday, 11 February 1802.
She observed that the poems were ‘too interesting for him & would not let
him go to sleep’. The editor of her Journal, Pamela Woof, adds that Dorothy
re-read the poem ‘To Penshurst’, on 14 February. On the previous day ‘William
had read aloud parts of his Recluse to her; one part was probably the lines
about the “true Community” in a glorious dwelling place which he had
composed for “Home at Grasmere”’, and ‘these clearly have “to Penshurst”
behind them’ (D. Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals (ed. by P. Woof ) (1993),
pp. 65–6 and 204). He was also well read in the Golden Age writings of
Samuel Daniel’s ‘A Pastoral’ (1592, 1601), Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ (1590),
George Wither’s ‘Philarete’ (1615?), Edmund Spenser’s ‘The Shepherdes
Calendar’ (1579), and John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ (1637).
77 W. Wordsworth, ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1806), l. 380 in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit.,
Vol. 1, p. 707.
78 J. Housman, loc.cit. p. 70. The rest of the quotation is also relevant to the
topic of social and economic equality in Old Lakeland: ‘In a village it is com-
mon to see the laird of 50L. or 100L. a year in the most cordial manner associating
with the tinker, beggar, and cobler [sic]. If a man is reputed honest, no other
qualification is required for his admission into any village company’.
79 W. Hutchinson, op.cit., Vol. 1, p. 38. G. P. Jones concluded that ‘in this
respect [the statesmen] are to be compared rather with the Roman farmer-
citizens of republican times than with English tenants in villeinage whence
in general the class of copyholders was derived’ (G. P. Jones, ‘The Decline
of the Yeomanry in the Lake Counties’, p. 198). Cf. too the description of
the Old English yeomen-farmers given by G. M. Trevelyan, English Social
History (1942), pp. 123–4. Cf. too W. Parson and W. White, op.cit., pp. 24–5,
re. the importance of the Reformation in England to the growth of Old
Lakeland life, manners, and society.
3 Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison

1 W. Wordsworth, ‘Blest Statesman He, whose Mind’s unselfish will’, l. 14 in
J. O. Hayden, The Poems (1977), Vol. 2, p. 819.
2 ‘All that I can boast of in my birth’, wrote Cobbett, ‘is that I was born in
Old England.’ William Cobbett quoted in Daniel Green, Great Cobbett: the
Noblest Agitator (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983), p. 12.
3 Joseph Nicolson and Richard Burn, The History and Antiquities of the Coun-
ties of Westmorland and Cumberland (1777) quoted in F. W. Garnett,
Westmorland Agriculture 1800–1900 (1912), p. 14.
232 Notes

Lake Counties 1500–1830 (1961): see the map entitled ‘Industries of the
Lake Counties’ facing p. 247 and the text of p. 252.
5 E. J. Evans and J. V. Beckett, ‘Cumberland, Westmorland, and Furness’, in
J. Thirsk (ed.), loc.cit., Vol. 5, Pt i, p. 29.
6 B. M. Short, ‘The South-East: Kent, Surrey, and Sussex’, in J. Thirsk, ibid.,
Vol. 5, Pt i, pp. 271, 286, 292 and 294.
7 Ibid., pp. 294–6.
8 These tables are composed from figures given by B. R. Mitchell, in British
Historical Statistics (1988), p. 235. Cf. too the following figures (Table N1)
taken from ‘Appendix D’, in E. C. K. Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure
(1912), pp. 280–1:
Table N1 Enclosures under Act in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth

Centuries to 1870: Percentage of Land Enclosed for Kent, Surrey and
Sussex
County 1760 1761–70 1771–80 1781–90 1791–1800 1801–10 1811–20 1821–70 Total
1
Kent C – – – – – – – – –
T1 – – – – – 0.1 0.2 0.2 0.5
Sur. C – – * – 1.3 2.4 1.4 0.9 6.0
T – * * – 1.7 3.4 1.5 3.5 10.1
Sus. C – – – – * 0.8 0.5 0.4 1.7
T – 0.2 * * 0.1 0.9 1.0 1.4 3.6
1
The abbreviations C and T, respectively, stand for ‘common field’ and ‘total’
land enclosed, both common field and commons. An asterisk [*] refers to a small
amount.
9 J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books, 1951), pp. 151–2.
10 Cf. W. H. R. Curtler, The Enclosure and Redistribution of our Land (1920),
pp. 244–7. We are not here concerned with the truth or falsity of Cobbett’s
beliefs about the benefits of traditional rights to the rural poor.
11 M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin Books, 1965), pp. 36, 39–40 and p. 321, n. 15. Cf. P. J. Corfield, The
Impact of English Towns 1700–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982),
pp. 66–70 and 190–1 (notes 1 and 2).
12 J. P. Cobbett (ed.), Rural Rides, Vol. 2 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd
[orig. pub. 1830] 1912), entry dated 22–03–1830, p. 226. The same point
was made a century before by Daniel Defoe: ‘The magnitude of the city of
London adds very considerably to the Inland Trade, for as the City is the
centre of our trade, so all the manufactures are brought hither, and hence
circulated again to all the country . . .’. Daniel Defoe quoted in Lewis
Mumford, The City in History: its Origins, its Transformations, and its Pros-
pects (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 498.
13 Even Whitehaven, however, was a model of town planning.
14 J. Housman, A Topographical Description of Cumberland, Westmorland, [and]
Lancashire[etc.] (1800), p. 266. Cf. W. Hutchinson, The History of the County
of Cumberland (1794), Vol. 2, p. 153.
15 J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 67–8.
Notes 233
16 R. S. Ferguson, A History of Westmorland (1894), pp. 170–1. For a broad

account of guilds and corporations in the eighteenth century, see P. J.
Corfield, op.cit., pp. 86–91.
17 Even the ‘realistic picture of mediaeval pageantry’, composed every twenty-
one years, in the guild-festival of Kendal only ceased in 1759 when it was
carried ‘to such an extravagant height that many of the tradesmen were
ruined by the expenses’. R. S. Ferguson, ibid., p. 171. I can find no evi-
dence that Wordsworth visited Kendal before 1788, or Carlisle before 1803.
In consequence, his knowledge of manufacturing and market towns, in
Cumberland, Westmorland and Furness, was mainly limited to old agricul-
tural centres for primary produce and domestic goods, rather than new
cotton, woollen, or finishing industries. M. L. Reed, Wordsworth. The Chro-
nology of the Early Years 1770–1799 (1967), p. 87; and idem, Wordsworth.
The Chronology of the Middle Years (1975), p. 222.
18 W. Parson and W. White, History, Directory, and Gazetteer [of the Lake Coun-
ties] (1829), pp. 58 and 62.
19 Ibid., pp. 562–4.
20 Ibid., pp. 499–500.
21 PR, 32 (1817), p. 683. Cobbett’s social and economic description of the
‘labouring classes’ was not unique. It was used, for example, by Sir Frederick
Eden in 1797. Nor was it forward-looking in a class sense. At least, Robert
Owen had already used the term ‘working class’ in a new ideological sense
in 1815. Cf. P. J. Corfield, op.cit., p. 138.
22 W. Cobbett, 22–10–1826 in E. W. Martin (ed.), Rural Rides (London:
Macdonald and Co. Ltd, 1958), p. 487.
23 W. Wordsworth, ‘The world is too much with us; late and soon’ (comp. by
1804; pub. 1807), ll. 1–2 in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 1, p. 568. Cf. Daniel
Defoe’s remarks on the idleness of some women shoppers in the middle
and upper ranks of society: ‘I have heard that some ladies, and these, too,
persons of good note, have taken their coaches and spent a whole after-
noon in Ludgate Street or Covent Garden, only to divert themselves in
going from one mercer’s shop to another, to look upon their fine silks and
to rattle and banter the shopkeepers, having not so much as the least
occasion, much less intention, to buy anything’. Daniel Defoe quoted by
Lewis Mumford, op.cit., p. 496.
24 M. D. George, England in Transition (1953), pp. 31–5. Defoe also seized
upon ‘the progressive encroachment of luxury trades on old and basic
industries, and the supplying of new wants and amenities in addition to
the necessities of life’.
25 W. Cobbett, 22–10–1826, op.cit., p. 486.
26 Ibid., p. 487. Forestalling was the practice of buying ‘victuals or merchan-
dise on its road to the market, or before the market-bell had rung’, in
order ‘to sell it again for profit’. Regrating was the buying of ‘provisions
to sell again for a profit’. Such practices in Carlisle, for example, were
‘severely repressed’ by the people’s ancestors. R. S. Ferguson, A History of
Cumberland (1890), pp. 216–17. Cf. Elie Halevy, England in 1815 (1960),
pp. 232–3 for a strong rebuttal of Cobbett’s attack on regrating and fore-
stalling in the corn trade, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, in the rural south.
27 R. S. Ferguson, op.cit., Ch. XIII, ‘The Norman Settlement: III. – The City of
234 Notes
Carlisle’, pp. 191–219. See esp. the excerpts from, and interpretation of,
the Dormont Book of 1561, which held a detailed code of by-laws for the
City’s government, ibid., pp. 210–19. The bailiffs, for example, ‘were bound
by their oath to “suffer noe forestallers ne regrators to be within the pre-
cincts of this citie, ne the liberties thereof”. Once expelled, they were not
permitted again to dwell therein, and anyone who “reset” them or harboured
them was fined’, ibid., p. 217.
28 W. Cobbett, Tour in Scotland (1833), p. 243.
29 Ibid., pp. 243–4: ‘It was Martinmas’, he added, ‘the morning that I was
coming out of the city, and the streets were all crowded with farm ser-
vants, who were there for the purpose of hiring; and a more pleasant sight
I had not seen for a very great while. Innumerable carts in the streets, all
ranged nicely in rows, [and] loaded with various things, especially small
pigs and poultry’. He found Penrith, eighteen miles away, ‘equal in neat-
ness to that of GODALMING in Surrey’ (ibid., p. 245). His notion of the
Old English market-town was sometimes stretched to include the better
commercial ports and towns like Bristol, Hull, Nottingham and Ipswich,
which seemed to balance the rural and urban demands of modern society;
but even this compromise was tempered by sober reflection upon the
movement of millions of pounds of money to such places from neighbouring
counties, which made them similar to the great Wen itself. Consider, for
instance, William Cobbett’s account of Ipswich written on 22 March 1830
in J. P. Cobbett, op.cit., Vol. 2, pp. 225–6.
30 Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3,
1802’ (comp. 1802; pub. 1807), l. 14 in J. O. Hayden, The Poems (1977),
Vol. 1, p. 575.
31 Thomas Clarkson, the famous Quaker and abolitionist, used to reside in
the Lake District before his broken health and work commitments forced
him away. His wife Catherine was a particular friend of Dorothy Wordsworth.
Sir George and Lady Beaumont’s town-house was situated in Grosvenor
Square, Mayfair; Lord Lonsdale’s London residence was located in Charles
Street, Berkeley Square, Mayfair.
32 William Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, letter dated 21 May 1807, in E.
De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 2, Pt i (1806–1811), pp. 145–6.
33 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1968), pp. 504–5.
See too G. Spater, William Cobbett: the Poor Man’s Friend, Vol. 1 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Ch. 11 ‘Westminster elections’,
pp. 175–90.
34 PR (2 May 1835) quoted by G. D. H. Cole in The Life of William Cobbett,
3rd rev. edn (London: Home & Van Thal, 1947), pp. 428–9. Cf. G. Spater,
op.cit., Vol. 2, pp. 442–3.
35 W. Wordsworth, ‘The Reverie of Poor Susan’ (1800), ll. 4–12 in J. O. Hayden,
loc.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 260–1.
36 J. L. and B. Hammond, The Bleak Age, rev. edn (West Drayton, Middlesex:
Penguin Books, 1947), pp. 34–6 and 74. Cf. G. M. Trevelyan, op.cit.,
p. 474. See too Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854) and The Old Curiosity
Shop (1840–1). Re. Dickens’s vision of ‘Coketown’ (Preston) as the arche-
type of industrial ugliness and alienation, see Lewis Mumford, op.cit., Ch.
15: ‘Palaeotechnic Paradise: Coketown’ pp. 508–48. Re. the slums of Old
London, see: M. D. George, op.cit., Ch. 1: ‘Life and Death in London’, pp.
Notes 235
35–72, and Ch. 2: ‘Housing and the Growth of London’, pp. 73–115. The
reader is also directed to the companion piece to ‘The Reverie of Poor
Susan’ (1800) called ‘The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale’ (comp. 1800; pub. 1815)
in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 259–60.
37 W. Wordsworth, ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1806), ll. 598–601 in J. O. Hayden,
loc.cit., Vol. 1, p. 713.
38 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 Text), Bk 7, ll. 118–20, p. 108. In the
Lake District it was not uncommon for children to be known by their
birth-place or nickname because family names were so common.
39 Ibid., Bk 7, ll. 597–8, p. 121.
40 R. Williams, Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings (ed. by A.
O’Connor) (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 6.
41 W. Wordsworth, op.cit., Bk 7, l. 696, p. 124; Bk 7, ll. 209–14, pp. 110–11;
and the note on the text recorded on p. 281.
42 Re. Charles Lamb, Washington Irving and Charles Dickens see: W. D.
Rubinstein, ‘Charles Dickens, R. Austin Freeman and the Spirit of Old Lon-
don’, in idem, loc.cit., Ch. 10.
43 W. Wordsworth, ‘Preface to’ Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802) in J. O. Hayden,
loc.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 872–3.
44 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (London: Oxford University Press,
1938), passim, esp. pp. 69–77, ‘Magical Art’, and 78–104, ‘Art as Amusement’.
45 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 Text), Bk 7, ll. 672–5, p. 123.
46 William Cobbett quoted by E. P. Thompson, op.cit., p. 494.
47 William Cobbett quoted by E. P. Thompson, ibid., p. 494.
48 The major drawback to the hiring fairs of Cumberland, Westmorland and
Furness seems to have been the high incidence of bastardy, which had
several social rather than moral causes. See the valuable article by J. D.
Marshall, ‘Some Aspects of the Social History of 19th-century Cumbria:
(II) Crime, Police, morals and the Countryman’, CW2, 70 (1970), pp. 221–46.
49 Aldous Huxley, for example, offered a very interesting account of the crowd’s
liking for ‘illuminations’, fireworks, pageants, and parades which delves
deeply into the individual’s need for visionary experience in a very dull
world. Cf. A. Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1972), pp. 130–42 (Appendix 3).
50 It is worth adding that towards the end of his long life, William Cobbett
defended the Englishman’s right to human liberty by opposing a bill to
render the dissection of corpses a legal act; one suspects that more than
normative rights lay behind his position: Cobbett, at least, on several oc-
casions revealed a very old – and even superstitious – character and agrarian
view of the world. Cf. K. W. Schweizer and J. W. Osborne, Cobbett in his
Times (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1990), p. 154.
51 Cf. P. Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons’, in D. Hay,
P. Linebaugh, J. G. Rule, et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in
Eighteenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), pp.
65–117, esp. 83, 99–100, 102 and 115.
52 E. P. Thompson, ‘Eighteenth-century English Society: Class Struggle with-
out Class?’, SH, 3, No. 1, Jan. (1978), pp. 133–65 esp. p. 144 ff; the quotations,
however, are taken from p. 159.
53 Consider, for example, his conclusion to The Prelude (1805 Text), Bk 7, ll.
706–41, pp. 124–5. Wordsworth claims to see the parts of London as parts,
236 Notes
yet also to feel the whole. But even this glimpse of the city’s spiritual
significance was attributed to his ‘early converse with the works of God/
Among all regions; chiefly where appear/ Most obviously simplicity and
power’. In a word, communion with Nature:
This did I feel in that vast receptacle.

The Spirit of Nature was upon me here;
The Soul of Beauty and enduring life
Was present as a habit, and diffused,
Through meagre lines and colours, and the press
Of self-destroying, transitory things
Composure and ennobling harmony.
His revelation was obviously the result of his favoured upbringing and expe-
rience of rural life and Nature in the remote north. It was a guarantee against
complete estrangement from himself, and his fellow man, in the metropolis.
54 Ibid., Bk 7, l. 655, p. 123.
55 Ibid., Bk 7, ll. 701–5, p. 124.
56 Ibid., Bk 7, l. 29, p. 126.
57 W. Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), Bk 2, ll. 120 and 134–7 in J. O.
Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 2, pp. 71–2.
58 William Wordsworth to C. J. Fox, letter dated 14 January 1801, in Alan G.
Hill (ed.), Letters of William Wordsworth. A New Selection (1984), pp. 42–3.
59 William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, The Fenwick Notes of William
Wordsworth (1993), pp. 66–7.
loc.cit., Vol. 1, p. 881. Even the naming of plants in Old England gave
proof of imagination’s power to weld ‘Man, Nature, and Human life’ together.
Consider, for example, the drooping ‘red Flower’ called ‘Love Lies Bleeding’.
Pangs of depised love ‘that Lover knew’, wrote Wordsworth:
Who first, weighed down by scorn, in some lone bower

Did press this semblance of unpitied smart
Into the service of his constant heart,
His own dejection, downcast Flower! could share
With thine, and gave the mournful name which thou
Wilt ever bear.
W. Wordsworth, ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ (1842), ll. 20–4 in J. O. Hayden, ibid.,

Vol. 2, p. 776.
61 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 Text), Bk 13, l. 103, p. 231; and idem,
‘Home at Grasmere’ (1806), ll. 465–70 in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 1,
p. 709. Cf. idem, ‘Preface to’ Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802) in J. O. Hayden,
ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 869–70.
ibid., Vol. 1, p. 709.
63 Ibid., ll. 380–3 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 707.
64 For details of this letter, see note 58 of the present chapter.
Notes 237
66 C. J. Calhoun, ‘Community: Toward a Variable Conceptualisation for Com-

parative Research’, SH, 5 (1980), p. 114. Cf. L. Reissman, ‘Urbanism and
Urbanisation’, in J. Gould (ed.), Penguin Survey of the Social Science 1965
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 36–55.
67 Ibid., p. 114.
68 PR, 28 (1815), pp. 366–7. Wordsworth also bemoaned the loss of life wrought
by the British government’s unjust war with France and noted with bitter-
ness the frequent incompetence of aristocrats on the battlefield.
69 Re. the Peace of Amien, see Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement 1783–1867
(1959), pp. 144–5.
70 W. Wordsworth’s sonnets on national independence and liberty: for example,
‘England! the time is come when thou shouldst wean’ (comp. 1802; pub.
1807) in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 1, p. 560.
71 W. Wordsworth, ‘When I have borne in memory what has tamed’ (comp.
1802; pub. 1803), ll. 3–4 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 561.
72 William Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont, letter dated 11 February 1806,
in E. De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 2, Pt i (1806–11), p. 7.
73 W. Wordsworth, ‘Written in London, September, 1802’ (comp. 1802; pub.
1807), ll. 7–10 in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 1, p. 580.
74 William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, op.cit., p. 28.
75 G. M. Trevelyan quoted by Asa Briggs, op.cit., p. 167. This observation is
the best qualification of Wordsworth’s Romantic conviction that modern
men and women craved ‘extraordinary incident’; but the two views were
not incompatible. For example, thousands of sober and respectable mem-
bers of the middle ranks of society awaited and rejoiced at news of the
naval and military fortunes of Lord Nelson, Admiral Collingwood, Sir John
Moore, and General Wellesley and so on. No doubt the length of the French
War – which lasted twenty-odd years – was a general cause of compla-
cency amongst the people.
76 A. Briggs, ibid., pp. 161–7. See also the lucid treatment of this topic in
M. W. Flinn’s book The Origins of the Industrial Revolution (1966), Ch. 4:
‘The Commercial Origins’.
77 Re. the origins and growth of the funded debt see: ibid., pp. 121–2. Ac-
cording to Cobbett the yearly interest of the National Debt was forty million
pounds in 1816, and the armed forces and other public expenses were
fixed at twenty-six million, making a total of seventy million a year, PR,
32 (1817), pp. 788–90 and 258–9 – a staggering sum in comparison with
the pre-war levels of fifteen million pounds in 1783 and nine million in
1764, ibid., 29 (1815), p. 262; the government received an average of seven
pounds sixteen shillings a year in taxation from everyone in the country,
ibid., 27 (1815), p. 753.
78 Cf. G. D. H. Cole, op.cit., p. 408.
79 PR, 31 (1816), pp. 347–9. Cf. W. Cobbett, 31–10–1825, in E. W. Martin,
loc.cit., p. 261.
80 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1968), pp. 820–37;
and W. D. Rubinstein, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History (1987),
esp. Ch. 9: ‘The End of “Old Corruption” in Britain, 1780–1860’ and Ch. 11:
‘British Radicalism and the “Dark Side” of Populism’. Cobbett’s conspiracy
theory took its earliest form in his critique of the so-called ‘Pitt-system of
Government’. See PR, 29, No. 23 (1815), pp. 713–17. It achieved its final
238 Notes
form in the journalist’s account of England’s long demise from Anglo-Saxon

times to the present, called A History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’ in En-
gland and Ireland (Dublin: James Duffy and Co., undated).
81 Ibid., Ch. 11, esp. pp. 345 and 360. As E. P. Thompson observed: ‘His
outlook approximated most closely to the ideology of the small producers’.
But Cobbett ‘stopped short of any radical critique of property-rights’. E. P.
Thompson, op.cit., p. 834. The same point is made more theoretically by
W. D. Rubinstein, op.cit., p. 343: ‘Populism lacks a consistent world-view
and is largely lacking in the systematic element of the critique found in
historical materialism’. Populism’s place in American history is sketched
very well by Professor Rubinstein in his comparative essay, but the student
might also refer to the various essays in J. P. Roach (ed.), American Political
Thought from Jefferson to Progressivism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967),
and J. F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine. Technology and Republican Values in
America 1776–1900 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1976). The fol-
lowing works are a good introduction to the study of populism in Australia;
especially, its social and economic relationships to racism, millennialism,
utopianism, imperialism and radical nationalism: R. Gollan, ‘American
Populism and Australian Utopianism’, Labour History, No. 9, Nov. (1965),
pp. 15–21; H. McQueen, A New Britannia (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1975) and P. Love, Labor and the Money Power: Australian Labour Populism
1890–1950 (Melbourne University Press, 1984). English agrarian radicalism
and populism are also treated in very different ways by the following writ-
ers: G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’ in idem, Languages of Class.
Studies in English Working Class History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), pp. 90–178; I. McCalman, ‘Unrespectable Radicalism: Infidels
and Pornography in Early Nineteenth-Century London’, PP, No. 4 (Aug.
1984), pp. 74–110; and P. Joyce, Visions of the People. Industrial England
and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
82 W. D. Rubinstein, ibid., Ch. 9, pp. 266–72 and Ch. 11 esp. p. 357; cf. E. P.
Thompson, op.cit., p. 834.
83 E. P. Thompson, ibid., pp. 836–7.
84 W. Cobbett, 17–11–1821, in J. P. Cobbett, op.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 33–4.
85 L. Mumford, op.cit., Plate 37, called ‘Pride of Bath’ – and the long note
attached thereto. Cf. P. J. Corfield, op.cit., Ch. 4: ‘Spas and resorts’ and
p. 173. Corfield points out elsewhere that: ‘The lengthy London winter
and spring seasons [of social engagements and entertainments] dovetailed
with the summer popularity of Bath and the resorts [like Tunbridge Wells
and Brighton]’ (p. 75).
86 W. Cobbett, 30–09–1826, in J. P. Cobbett, op.cit., Vol. 2, p. 126.
87 W. Wordsworth, ‘Imitation of Juvenal – Satire VIII’ (comp. by April, 1796;
pub. 1940), ll. 163–73, in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 146–7. Accord-
ing to Hayden’s notes, set down on pp. 936–7 [Wilston?] and Wright were
probably two provisioners of the period; and James Graham (1745–94) was
a well-known quack who built a ‘Temple of Health’ at the Adelphi.
88 R. M. Ogilvie, Roman Literature And Society (London: Penguin Books, 1980),
pp. 242 and 248.
89 In his unfinished ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, the poet also con-
demned the aristocracy for their gaming and horse-racing; their debauchery;
Notes 239
their ‘dissimulation’; and their readiness to accept places, pensions and

sinecures. His critique could have been written in content, if not in style,
by Cobbett, about a decade later. W. Wordsworth, ‘A Letter to the Bishop
of Llandaff’ (comp. 1793) in J. O. Hayden, William Wordsworth. Selected
Prose (1988), pp. 153–7.
90 W. Cobbett, 31–10–1825, in E. W. Martin, op.cit., p. 261. A short but sub-
stantial account of Cobbett’s anti-semitism is found in K. W. Schweizer
and J. W. Osborne, op.cit., pp. 70–7.
91 W. Cobbett, 02–10–1826, in E. W. Martin, ibid., p. 414.
92 Ibid., p. 415. The notion of the ‘great wen’, however, had arisen in Eliza-
bethan times. M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1965),
pp. 36 and 73.
93 Richard Hofstadter quoted by W. D. Rubinstein in ‘British Radicalism and
the “Dark Side” of Populism’, p. 349.
94 W. Cobbett, 30–09–1826, in J. P. Cobbett, op.cit., Vol. 2, p. 127.
95 Thus he railed at length against the bill presented to Parliament, in 1830,
‘to put Jews on a level with Christians’. If the bill was passed he con-
cluded, ‘if those who called Jesus Christ an imposter were thus declared to
be as good as those who adored him, there was not’, he ‘hoped a man in
the kingdom who would pretend that it would be just to compel the people
to pay tithes, and fees, and offerings to men for teaching Christianity’, es-
pecially if the clergy made no attempt to oppose the bill. W. Cobbett,
11–04–1830, in J. P. Cobbett, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 240. Cf. J. W. Osborne and
K. W. Schweizer, op.cit., pp. 72–5.
96 Cf. L. Mumford, op.cit., p. 475: ‘In its emphasis on speculation, not secu-
rity, upon profit-making innovations, rather than value-conserving traditions
and continuities, capitalism tended to dismantle the whole structure of
urban life and place it upon a new impersonal basis: money and profit’.
97 W. Cobbett, 30–08–1826, in E. W. Martin, op.cit., pp. 311–12 and 386; and
idem 04–12–1821 in J. P. Cobbett, op.cit., Vol. 1, p. 43.
98 W. Cobbett, 04–12–1821, in J. P. Cobbett, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 43. These last
few quotations must surely give the lie to Penelope Corfield’s conclusion
that: ‘Although there were many criticisms of the towns [in the late eighteenth-
century], there was nothing like the virulence of the anti-urbanism found
in some intellectual traditions (as in nineteenth-century America, for ex-
ample). English towns were accepted’ and their ‘achievement was a positive
one’. See P. J. Corfield, op.cit., p. 188.
99 W. Cobbett, 18–11–1821, in J. P. Cobbett, ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 34–5; and idem,
27–09–1822, in E. W. Martin, op.cit., pp. 12–13.
100 W. D. Rubinstein, ‘British Radicalism and the “Dark Side” of Populism’,
p. 344 and passim.
101 A. V. Dicey, The Statesmanship of Wordsworth (1917), pp. 9–10.
102 A. Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century, 2nd
edn (1960), p. 139 and passim.
103 G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the 19th Century and After (1782–1919),
2nd edn (1937), p. 28 incl. n. 1.
104 H. Davies, William Wordsworth. A Biography (1980), p. 10 and M. Moorman,
William Wordsworth: A Biography (1957) [=Vol. 1], p. 15: ‘She was insis-
tent’, for example, ‘that her scholars should keep the country festivals of
Shrove Tide, Easter, and May Day with all due rites’.
240 Notes
105 Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘Autobiographical Memoranda’ (comp. 1847) in J. O.

Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth. Selected Prose (1988), p. 5.
106 G. M. Trevelyan, op.cit., p. 28.
107 When Wordsworth visited his old dame, in 1788, during his first summer
vacation from Cambridge University, he was struck by her traditional lifestyle
and manners:
With new delight,

. . . did I view my grey-hair’d Dame,
Saw her go forth to Church, or other work
Of state, equipp’d in monumental trim,
Short Velvet Cloak (her Bonnet of the like)
A Mantle such as Spanish Cavaliers
Wore in old time. Her smooth domestic life,
Affectionate without uneasiness,
Her talk, her business pleas’d me, and no less
Her clear though shallow stream of piety,
That ran on Sabbath days a fresher course.
With thoughts unfelt till now, I saw her read
Her Bible on the Sunday afternoons;
And lov’d the book, when she had dropp’d asleep,
And made of it a pillow for her head.
W. Wordsworth, The Prelude Text of 1805, Bk 4, ll. 207–21, pp. 58–9.

108 A. V. Dicey, op.cit., pp. 9–10. The cost of Wordsworth’s board with Ann
Tyson, however, in 1787, was 6s 4d a week, ‘so that, when fees, books,
clothes, postages and other expenses are considered, it is clear that only
relatively well-to-do parents could afford such an education for their sons’.
C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, A Short Economic and Social History of the
Lake Counties 1500–1830 (1961), p. 200.
109 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 2, ll. 85 and 82, p. 22. Cf.
T. W. Thompson, Wordsworth’s Hawkshead (1970), p. 76: Ann Tyson cooked
oat bread, or ‘haver bread’ as it was called locally, because ‘there was no
baker or confectioner in Hawkshead in those days’.
110 G. M. Trevelyan, op.cit., p. 28, n. 1.
111 T. W. Thompson, op.cit., p. 166.
112 Thomas Cowperthwaite’s rhymes were sent by Isaac Swainson to his father,
Joseph, who was a wool merchant in Kendal. In 1949 T. W. Thompson
found the author’s version of this rhyme in the church safe at Hawkshead.
The first two lines were the same, and the third and fourth read:
They live by their Trade in fair and foul Weather,

And pay scanty heed to the Mighty Ones Blether.
Ibid., pp. 171–2.

113 Ibid., pp. 171–2.
114 Ibid., p. 198 (see the note on p. 198 by Robert Woof with regard to the last
example given in the paragraph). Cf. too, pp. 111–14, 173–4, 193 and 243–4.
115 Ibid., pp. 187–90. Even the local solicitor, John Gibson, was a well-known
wag, who played practical jokes on men and boys alike.
Notes 241
116 Ibid., pp. 239–44 and 245–6.

117 Cf. M. Moorman, op.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 73–4 and 10–11.
118 From W. Cobbett, The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, August 1796,
in A. D. M. Hughes (ed.), Cobbett. Selections with Hazlitt’s Essay and other
Critical Estimates (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 33.
119 William Cobbett quoted in A. D. M. Hughes, ibid., p. 32.
120 William Cobbett quoted in Daniel Green, op.cit., p. 21. Cf. too W. Wordsworth,
The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 1, ll. 305–50 (Bird-nesting), pp. 9–10; and
idem, ‘The Childless Father’ (1800) in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 1, p. 451.
121 William Cobbett, 27–09–1822, in E. W. Martin, op.cit., pp. 12–13.
122 William Wordsworth to Hugh Seymour Tremenheere, letter dated
16 December 1845, in E. De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 7, Pt iv (1840–53),
p. 733.
123 Cf. W. Cobbett, Cottage Economy [1st pub. in 1822] (London: Peter Davies,
1926 edn), p. 4.
124 William Cobbett quoted in Daniel Green, op.cit., pp. 13–14.
125 Even his occasional encounter with ‘manorial’ life was unattended by any
radical change in his outlook. (Consider, for example, his employment as
a garden-boy at the Castle of Farnham, which was home to the Bishop of
Winchester; or more briefly his similar role at Kew Gardens, in 1787(?),
where Prince George and two of his brothers laughed at the sight of his
blue-smock frock and red garters.) The aristocracy and gentry were clearly
part of the old rural order and their scattered mansions and great estates
appeared to be permanent features of the rural landscape. William Cobbett
quoted in G. D. H. Cole, op.cit., p. 17.
126 G. D. H. Cole, ‘William Cobbett (1762–1835)’, in idem, Persons and Periods:
Studies by G. D. H. Cole (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1969), pp. 54–5.
Cole actually uses the terms ‘Tory’ and ‘Radical’. For a recent discussion of
the vexed question of Cobbett’s early status as a ‘Tory’ see: W. D. Rubinstein’s
essay on populism (op.cit., pp. 351–2).
127 D. Green, op.cit., pp. 35–6.
128 W. Wordsworth, ‘Simon Lee’ (1798), esp. ll. 1, 5–6, 13–16, 25–32, and 40–8
in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 300–3. See too William Wordsworth
quoted in Jared Curtis, op.cit., p. 37.
129 Cf. M. D. George, England in Transition (1953), pp. 87–8.
130 William Cobbett quoted in Daniel Green, op.cit., p. 13.
131 W. Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1926 edn), p. 4. Cf. too the PR, 31 (1816),
p. 166 – ‘The patriotism which is inspired by the wants of the belly is of
a sort that I do not admire. . . . I want to see the people animated by the
principle of liberty and not by the calls of hunger’.
132 Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘Guilt and Sorrow’ (1800; pub. 1842), esp. stanzas 52–7
in J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 134–6. See too C. Brinton, English
Political Thought in the 19th Century (1962), p. 75.
133 PR, dated 14 April 1821, quoted by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society
1780–1950 (1963), p. 33. Cobbett believed that the rural labourers had
been degraded to a point at which they no they longer owed a duty to
obey their social superiors and traditional leaders. He felt that the ‘con-
spiracy’ to deprive Englishmen of their birth-rights had reached its final
stage, for example, with the ‘Captain Swing’ riots, in the south, and the
sinister attempts, in Scotland, to clear the labourers from the land to create
242 Notes
‘huge manufactories of meat and corn’. Cf. D. Green, op.cit., p. 295;

G. D. H. Cole (ed.), Rural Rides, dated 26–09–1832 (1930), Vol. 3, p. 714;
and W. Cobbett, Tour in Scotland (1833), dated 14–10–1832, p. 84, and
22–10–1832, pp. 160–1.
loc.cit., Vol. 1, p. 714. Idem, ‘Prospectus to’ The Excursion (1798/1814),
l. 55 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 39.
135 William Wordsworth quoted in Christopher Wordsworth (jnr), op.cit., Vol.
2, pp. 184–5; and Transcript of Wordsworth’s speech on the occasion of
laying the first stone of a new school at Bowness, Windermere, on
13 April 1836, [hereafter, ‘Transcript of speech at Bowness’] in C. Wordsworth
(jnr), ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 201–3.
136 W. Wordsworth, ‘Transcript of speech at Bowness’, in C.Wordsworth (jnr),
ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 202–3.
137 William Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, letter dated 5 June 1808, in
E. De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 2, Pt i (1806–11), p. 247.
138 See the standard biographies: M. Moorman, op.cit., Vol. 2, pp. 178–9 and
340 and S. Gill, William Wordsworth: a Life (1989), pp. 290–1 incl. n. 1.
139 William Wordsworth to the Rev. Hugh J. Rose, letter dated 11 December
1828, in C. Wordsworth (jnr), op.cit., Vol. 2, p. 181.
140 William Wordsworth quoted in Christopher Wordsworth (jnr), ibid., Vol.
2, p. 190. It is worth adding here that Hawkshead Grammar School, in the
late eighteenth century, still distinguished between students who were seeking
a basic education in reading, writing, and accounts from those learning
the classics. In other words, the poet was not really proposing anything
new. Cf. too T. W. Thompson, op.cit., pp. 89 and 185.
141 William Wordsworth quoted in Christopher Wordsworth (jnr), ibid., Vol. 2,
pp. 187–8.
142 William Wordsworth to Christopher Wordsworth (sr), letter dated 27 April
1830, in C. Wordsworth (jnr), ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 192–3.
144 W. Wordsworth, ‘Michael – A Pastoral Poem’ (1800), ll. 95–109 and 110–22
in J. O. Hayden, The Poems (1977), Vol. 1, p. 458.
145 J. Housman, op.cit., p. 78.
146 Wordsworth’s landlord at Hawkshead, Hugh Tyson, was an exception. He
had been born the ‘natural’ son of ‘Issabell Tysons of foulyeat [Foldgate]’,
and so had fallen upon the parish for relief. It was finally decided to make
him a ‘Sandys Charity boy’ – which entitled him to free board, clothing
and basic instruction at the grammar school. T. W. Thompson, op.cit.,
pp. 5–6.
148 E. P. Thompson, ‘Eighteenth-century English Society: Class Struggle with-
out Class?’, p. 153 (Thompson’s emphasis).
149 For details of Cobbett’s remarkable success as a self-taught grammarian,
farmer, economist, barrack-room lawyer, and would-be historian, see the
standard biographies listed in the main bibliography of this book.
151 Nor did ‘education’ interfere with the child’s daily routine of farm work
Notes 243
and fun. For example, he taught his own children whilst riding around
the countryside, when sitting about ‘the scrabbling table’ at home, or rest-
ing at friends’ houses and inns. G. Spater, op.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 158–9.
152 Cf. W. Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1926 edn), p. 147: ‘Good [domestic] man-
agement . . . leaves the man’s wages to provide an abundance of good food
and raiment; and these are the things that make happy families; and these
are the things that make a good, kind, sincere, and brave people; not little
pamphlets about “loyalty” and “content”. A good man will be contented
fast enough, if he be fed and clad sufficiently; but if a man be not well fed
and clad, he is a base wretch to be contented’.
153 PR, 12 (29 Aug. 1807), pp. 331–2.
154 R. Frost, ‘The Death of the Hired Hand’ (1914) in R. Frost (ed.), Robert
Frost. Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 37.
155 W. Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1926 edn), pp. 8–9.
156 W. Cobbett, 17–11–1822, in E. W. Martin, op.cit., pp. 51–2. Re. William
Wilberforce see: PR, 32 (1817), pp. 998–9.
157 W. Wordsworth, ‘Transcript of speech at Bowness’, in C. Wordsworth (jnr),
op.cit., Vol. 2, p. 200.
158 Cf. W. Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1926), p. 9: ‘It is upon the hungry and
wretched that the fanatic work[s]. The dejected and forlorn are his prey.
As an ailing carcase engenders vermin, [wrote Cobbett,] a pauperised com-
munity engenders teachers of [religious] fanaticism, the very foundation
of whose doctrines is, that we are to care nothing about this world, and
that all our labours and exertions are vain’.
159 Ibid., pp. 2–3.
161 William Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, letter 5 June 1808, in E. De
Selincourt, ibid., Vol. 2, Pt i, p. 249; and idem to Allan Cunningham, letter
dated 23 November 1825, ibid., Vol. 4 [wrongly labelled Vol. 3], Pt i (1821–8),
pp. 401–3. In fact, one cannot help concluding that Wordsworth had im-
bibed much of the tastes and standards of the lower-middle ranks of rural
society towards human nature and art. At least, John Clare, the ‘peasant
poet’ of Northumberland, was also glad to sit by village fire-sides and hear
‘from old wives of Jack the Giant Killer, Cinderella, Tom Thumb’ and to
listen ‘with pleasure to the ballads sung by the home-ward wending rus-
tics – “Peggy Band”, and “Sweet Month of May”’. The Border counties, it
seems, were still largely based upon oral culture and traditions. K. MacLean,
Agrarian Age: a Background for Wordsworth (1950), p. 46.
162 Cf. W. Cobbett, 20–11–1825, in J. P. Cobbett, op.cit., Vol. 2, p. 19. On hot
summer days, old Ann Tyson appears sometimes to have worshipped, with
her Anglican lodgers, at the dissenting church near Colthouse because it
was closer than the Anglican church in Hawkshead.
163 William Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, letter dated 5 June 1808, in E.
De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 2, Pt i (1806–11), p. 247. The Bible remained
the staple reading for the labouring classes on the Sabbath-day: after com-
ing home from Church, ‘some one turns to the Bible’, explains Wordsworth,
‘finds the Text and probably reads the chapter whence it is taken, or per-
haps some other; and in the afternoon the Master or Mistress frequently
reads the Bible, if alone; and on this day [too] the Mistress of the house
244 Notes
almost always teaches the children to read, or as they express it, hears
them a Lesson’ (ibid., p. 247).
164 Cf. R. Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1963), pp. 36–7; and E. P.
Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, in M. W.
Flinn and T. C. Smout (eds), Essays in Social History (1974). Cf. too M. D.
George, op.cit., pp. 138–9.
165 See Chapters 1 and 2 for further details.
E. De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 2, Pt i, p. 250.
167 ‘In general’, writes, J. H. Porter, ‘the [literacy] rate was higher in the far
north than in the south, the rates being highest in Northumberland,
Cumberland, Westmorland, Durham, and the East and North Ridings, and
lowest in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Buckinghamshire,
Essex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk.’ J. H. Porter, ‘The Develop-
ment of Rural Society’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.), loc.cit., p. 900. Cf. William
Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, letter dated 5 June 1808, in E. De
Selincourt, op.cit., Vol. 2, Pt i, p. 250.
E. De Selincourt, ibid., Vol. 2, Pt i, pp. 250–1.
169 For the source of this quotation, see note 58 of the present chapter.
170 PR (27 November 1817) quoted in Raymond Williams, Cobbett (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 44–5. We might well compare this
passage with the following account of the important role played by Eton
in the formation of class consciousness and superiority among the upper
and middle classes in the early twentieth century. George Orwell wrote
of his schooling that: ‘WHEN I WAS fourteen or fifteen I was an odious
little snob, but no worse than other boys of my own age and class. I
suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-
present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in
an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English “edu-
cation” fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few
months of leaving school – I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and
now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet – but your
snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is,
sticks by you till your grave’. G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989 [1st pub. by Victor Gollancz; 1937]),
p. 128.
171 William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, op.cit., pp. 6–7.
172 William Wordsworth to John Wilson, letter dated 7 June 1802, in A. G.
Hill (ed.), Letters of William Wordsworth. A New Selection (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984), p. 52.
173 J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain. The Early Railway
Age: 1820–1850 (1967), p. 66.
174 P. Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (1965), p. 14.
175 W. Wordsworth, ‘Transcript of speech at Bowness’, in Christopher Wordsworth
(jnr), loc.cit., Vol. 2, p. 199. Cobbett believed in the ‘natural progress’, or
slow movement, between the ranks of rural society, but was convinced
‘that nine-tenths’ of men and women were ‘from the very nature and
necessities of the world, born to gain’ their ‘livelihood by the sweat of’
their brows. W. Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1926 edn), p. 7.
Notes 245

E. De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 2, Pt i, p. 250.
177 Cf. J. Langton, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Regional Geography of
England’, pp. 145–67; and P. Joyce, Visions of the People. Industrial England
and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
178 Cf. P. Joyce, ibid., p. 267.
179 W. Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), Bk 8, ll. 117–47 and 196–213 in
J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 2, pp. 254–6.
180 W. Wordsworth, ibid., Bk 8, ll. 151–2 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 255.
181 Ibid., Bk 8, ll. 156–85 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., pp. 255–6.
182 Re. ‘such unnatural proceedings’ as night work in the factories see: Will-
iam Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, op.cit., p. 89. The owner of
water-driven wheels, who could not extract full use of his men and ma-
chines, often laid-off workers to suit the flow of water and the needs of
the market.
183 E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’,
pp. 56–98.
184 PR (30 Aug. 1823) quoted and paraphrased in G. D. H. Cole, op.cit.,
pp. 260–1.
185 Cf. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1968), pp.
486–7: ‘During the years between 1780 and 1840 the people of Britain
suffered an experience of immiseration, even if it is possible to show a
small statistical improvement in material conditions’.
186 PR (30 Aug. 1823) quoted in G. D. H. Cole, op.cit., p. 259. Cf. too I. Pinch-
beck and M. Hewitt, Children in English Society (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1969), Vol. 1, p. 407: in 1832, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe was
published in Manchester. In this plebeian work, William Wilberforce was
strongly criticised ‘for only pleading the black slave’s cause, never that “of
that homely kind, as to embrace the region of the home-cotton-slave-trade”’.
Blincoe had been ‘taken at seven years’ of age ‘as a parish apprentice from
St Pancras workhouse [in London] to Lowdham Mill, near Nottingham,
and subsequently moved to Litton Mill, near Tideswell, Derbyshire’. His
Memoir was ‘intended to show that the comparison between the lot of the
young factory worker and that of the slave was not without substance’.
For example, at ‘Lowdham Mill, “from morning till night he was continu-
ally being beaten, pulled by the hair of his head, kicked or cursed” by the
overseers who had to have so much work produced or be dismissed. His
hours of work were fourteen a day for a six-day week, plus frequent over-
time, despite Peel’s Factory Act of 1802, which was then in “operation”,
and laid down that no poor law apprentice was to work more than twelve
hours a day’.
187 W. Wordsworth, ‘Humanity’ (comp. c.1829; pub. 1835), ll. 83–94 in J. O.
Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 2, pp. 691–2.
188 Cf. William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, op.cit., pp. 66–7.
189 S. Pollard, The Idea of Progress (1968), p. 71. Adam Smith believed that
‘every individual . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor
knows how much he is promoting it . . . by directing . . . industry in such
a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his
own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible
246 Notes
hand to promote an end which has no part of his intention’ (Adam Smith
quoted by Sidney Pollard, ibid., p. 72).
190 Ibid., pp. 73–5. Pollard points out that the ‘extreme partisanship for laissez-
faire evident’ in some passages from The Wealth of Nations ‘was, contrary
to public belief, never part of the fixed canon of the science founded by
Adam Smith’. At least, ‘he admitted important exceptions to his own rules’
(ibid., p. 73).
191 A. Ure, from The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835) in A. Clayre (ed.), Nature
& Industrialization (1977), p. 71.
192 Malthus made several assumptions: first, that population ‘is necessarily limited
by the means of subsistence’; second, that population ‘invariably increases
where the means of subsistence increase, unless prevented by some very
powerful and obvious check’; and third, that these ‘checks . . . are all re-
solvable into moral restraint, vice and misery’. His theory was later
characterised, for good reason, as the ‘dismal science’: his argument had
grave consequences for the future behaviour and living standards of the
vast majority of mankind, namely, that there will always be misery and
vice in society unless the majority live with moral restraint and refrain
from having too many children. His argument, however, was logically flawed,
and given the lie by England’s staggering rise in population, on the one
hand, and increased food production, on the other. Nevertheless, it was
adopted in the period by well-to-do employers, poor law agencies, and
privileged groups because it justified the increasing gulf between rich and
poor on moral grounds, whilst forcing the latter to work harder and in
worse conditions under the New Poor Law of 1834. Cf. Thomas Malthus,
An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of
Society . . . [etc.], 6th edn (1826) quoted in Sidney Pollard, op.cit., pp. 165–6.
193 W. Cobbett, entries for 08–08–1823, 30–08–1826, and 01–09–1826 in E. W.
Martin, op.cit., pp. 147–50, 314–15 and 335–7. See too the entries for
28–08–1826, ibid., pp. 295–6; and 04–09–1826, ibid., p. 349. Cf. W. Cobbett,
Tour in Scotland (1833), p. 100 re. ‘the moral restraint of the nasty-pensioned-
parson MALTHUS’.
194 See the following entries and leading articles from William Cobbett’s Rural
Rides and Political Register. Re. cheap government and Dr John Black:
07–10–1832, in J. P. Cobbett, op.cit., Vol. 2, pp. 295–7. Re. Scottish ‘feelosofers’:
22–10–1832 in W. Cobbett, Tour in Scotland (1833), p. 157. Re. Dr John
Black: 02–08–1823, in E. W. Martin, op.cit., pp. 110–11. Re. Henry Brougham:
31–10–1825 and 04–09–1826, ibid., pp. 110–11 and 351. Re. William
Huskisson: 06–11–1825, ibid., pp. 110–11 and cf., pp. 256–8, 269–70, and
351. Re. the supposed ‘aristocracy in trade’ and different kinds of labourers
in the north and the south of the country: PR quoted in Raymond Williams,
Cobbett (1983), pp. 26 and 36. Re. factory slavery: PR, 31 (1816),
p. 775, and 32 (1817), pp. 770–1.
195 For a brief but insightful account of Cobbett’s changing views of the fac-
tory system and the growth of large towns in the industrial north, see:
E. W. Martin, op.cit., pp. 396–400.
196 Cf. W. Cobbett, 01–08–1823, in E. W. Martin, ibid., pp. 98–100. Cf. too
R. Williams, op.cit., pp. 61–3 and idem, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1963),
pp. 33–4.
197 K. Marx, from Das Kapital (1867) in A. Clayre, loc.cit., p. 80.
Notes 247
198 Ibid., pp. 80–1. Cf. too R. Williams, op.cit., pp. 62–3. For a clear account of
Marx’s views of ‘patriarchal industries’ and the ‘natural’ division of labour
and property in pre-industrial times, see the helpful extracts from Das
Kapital (1867), in T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel (eds), Karl Marx. Selected
Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (1963), Part Two, Ch. 1: ‘Forms
of Property and Modes of Production’, passim.
199 F. D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution [pub.1947], rev.edn (1968),
p. 103. Klingender argued that Wordsworth’s strong stand against the fac-
tory system was the result of his earlier hopes that science and technology
would liberate men from heavy labour and improve the material quality
of their lives. Such a view was evident in the poet’s famous ‘Preface to’
the Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802): see, for example, the statements made in
J. O. Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 1, p. 881. Unfortunately, Dr Klingender’s marxisant
study of the poet’s ‘Romantic’ writings missed the wider rural assumptions
and ‘populist’ perspective involved in Wordsworth’s Golden Age theories
during the Industrial Revolution in England: 1770–1850.
200 Cf. W. Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1926 edn), p. 7; PR (14 April 1821) quoted
in G. D. H. Cole, op.cit., pp. 266–7; and R. Williams, op.cit., pp. 35–7. On
these grounds, too, they argued against the rise of trades unions. Such
bodies, whether legal or not, undermined the independence of the indi-
vidual worker to make his way in the world and set master against man.
See William Wordsworth’s cancelled ‘Postscript’ to the Yarrow Revisited vol-
ume of poems, published in 1835, printed in W. J. B. Owen and J. W.
Smyser (ed.), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth (1974), Vol. 3, pp.
268–9 and 272–3; G. D. H. Cole, op.cit., pp. 261–3 and 266–8.
201 Cf., for example, Phyllis Deane, op.cit., p. 97: ‘Between about 1820 and
about 1845 the [cotton] industry’s total output quadrupled and total in-
comes generated in Britain increased by 50 per cent, but the workers’ wages
barely rose at all’. See too Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1968), p. 18.
202 William Wordsworth quoted by Henry Crabb Robinson, diary entry dated
31 May 1812, in Thomas Sadler (ed.), Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspon-
dence of Henry Crabb Robinson (London: Macmillan and Co., 1869), Vol. 1,
p. 389. See too William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, op.cit., p. 90.
Cf. PR (14 April 1821) quoted in Raymond Williams, op.cit., p. 36: address-
ing the Nottingham stocking-weavers, who wanted to keep ‘bagmen’ out
of the industry, and thereby prevent competition with the factory workers,
Cobbett wrote: ‘You are for cutting off the chain of connection between
the rich and the poor. You are for demolishing all small tradesmen. You
are for reducing the community to two classes: Masters and Slaves’.
203 Wordsworth’s views of the Old Poor Law were revealed in the following
verses: ‘Guilt and Sorrow’ (1842); ‘The Baker’s Cart’ (comp. 1797; pub.
1940); ‘The Cumberland Beggar’ (1800); ‘The Last of the Flock’ (1798); The
Excursion (1814), Bk 8; and ‘The Warning’ (1835); but his best defence of
the principle of the Poor Law is found in the cancelled ‘Postscript’ to the
Yarrow Revisited volume of poems published in 1835, and printed in W. J.
B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, loc.cit., Vol. 3, pp. 240–8. Cobbett’s writings on
the Old and New Poor Laws are immense. To save space I will refer the
reader to the standard works, biographies and studies mentioned in the
notes of this present chapter.
248 Notes
204 Wordsworth was first incensed by the new doctrines when they were applied
to the old beggars and vagrants who made regular rounds in the Lake
District. Cf. William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, op.cit., p. 56.
205 W. Wordsworth, ‘Postscript’ (1835) in W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser,
op.cit., Vol. 3, p. 240.
206 W. Cobbett, 14–10–1832, Tour in Scotland (1833), p. 101.
op.cit., Vol. 3, pp. 241–2.
208 William Cobbett, 13–11–1830, quoted in Raymond Williams, op.cit., p. 26.
209 Cf. B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1984), p. 607.
210 W. Cobbett, ‘COBBETT’S ADVICE TO THE CHOPSTICKS’ (Edinburgh,
14–10–1832) in Daniel Green (ed.), Cobbett’s Tour in Scotland by William
Cobbett (1763–1835) (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984), pp. 28–9.
211 W. Cobbett, 16–11–1832, ibid., pp. 240–1.
212 William Wordsworth to Daniel Stuart, letter dated 22 June 1817, in E. De
Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 3, Pt ii (1812–20), p. 387.
214 A. Brundage, The Making of the New Poor Law: the Politics of Inquiry, Enact-
ment and Implementation, 1832–1839 (London: Hutchinson, 1978), passim,
esp. Chs 1 and 7.
215 Cobbett gives a list of land transfers in his Rural Rides, during 1825. See:
William Cobbett, entry dated 31–10–1825, for the ride between Winchester
and Burghclere, in E. W. Martin, op.cit., pp. 264–5. The two leading histo-
rians of modern landed society, G. E. Mingay and F. M. L. Thompson,
argue that the long-term effect of land transfers, especially, in the nine-
teenth century, was to reduce the number of yeoman and old-gentry estates
rather than the number of old peerage and greater gentry estates. There
was certainly a growth of new gentry families, in the period under study,
at the general expense of the old ones, but the basic number of gentry
estates remained the same as before. Nor does Thompson attribute the
buying and selling of old gentry estates to sweeping impersonal forces of
social and economic change, or to any conspiracy theory in Cobbett’s sense;
rather it was a recurrent feature of Old English society which probably
reflected the changing domestic fortunes and personal needs and proclivi-
ties of the gentry families involved. G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in
the Eighteenth Century (1963), pp. 26–8 and 72–3; and F. M. L. Thompson,
English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963), pp. 60–3 and 121–7.
216 W. Cobbett, 28–09–1822, ibid., p. 16 incl. n. 1.
218 On the other hand, we have seen the social and economic advantages of
this relative scarcity of gentry and peers, in the region, for the different
groups of yeomen and artisans in the ‘pre-industrial’ period.
219 J. H. Porter, op.cit., pp. 840–1; and esp., J. D. Marshall and C. A. Dyhouse,
‘Social Transition in Westmorland, c.1760–1860’, NH, 12 (1976), pp. 156–7.
220 William Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, letter dated 15 June [1825], in
E. De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 4 [wrongly numbered Vol. 3], Pt i (1821–5),
p. 370.
221 William Wordsworth to Daniel Stuart, letter dated 7 April 1817, in E. De
Selincourt, ibid., Vol. 3, Pt ii (1812–20), pp. 375–6.
Notes 249
222 William Wordsworth to Daniel Stuart, letter dated 7 April 1817, ibid., Vol. 3,
Pt ii (1812–1820), p. 376.
223 William Cobbett, 14–10–1832, Cobbett’s Tour in Scotland, quoted in Daniel
Green, op.cit., p. 13.
224 William Cobbett quoted in Daniel Green, ibid., p. 13.
225 William Cobbett, PR, 29 (16 Dec. 1815), p. 330.
226 Cf. PR, 30 (1816), p. 44.
227 D. Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, and ‘Poaching and
the Game Laws on Cannock Chase’, in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, J. G. Rule
et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England
(1975), pp. 17–63 and 189–253.
228 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Crime of Anonymity’ and ‘Appendix: a Sampler of
Letters’, in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, G. J. Rule et al., ibid., p. 279 and passim.
229 Ibid., p. 307.
230 Thomas Carlyle quoted in Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society
(1969), p. 182. W. Cobbett, A History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’ in Eng-
land and Ireland (1824), pp. 106–7, sec. 105. Cobbett wrote in glowing
terms of Alfred’s government and legacy to the English people: ‘he, in
fact, was the founder of all those rights, liberties and laws which made
England to be what England has been, which gave her a character above
that of other nations, which made her rich and great and happy beyond
all her neighbours, and which still give her whatever she possesses of that
pre-eminence’.
231 Cf. Cobbett’s self-exile to Long Island, in the USA (1817–19). G. Spater,
op.cit., Vol. 2, p. 426.
232 PR, 32 (1817), pp. 770–1.
233 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (1985), p. 354.
234 William Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, letter dated 21 January 1818, in
E. De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 3, Pt ii (1812–20), p. 413.
235 The former were called ‘Barons’ and the latter ‘Franklins’ in the work men-
tioned. The following account of Coleridge’s constitutional ideas owes a
clear debt to Crane Brinton’s lucid essay on the topic. Idem, English Politi-
cal Thought in the 19th Century (1962), pp. 74–86.
236 They were estranged for most of the second decade of the nineteenth century.
237 It must be remembered that Cobbett had no sympathy for the great capi-
talists formed by the factory system. As G. D. H. Cole observed: ‘He objected
strongly to the new social consideration, the new influence in the State,
which they were gaining: he had no desire for the “moderate Reform”
which would install them in power instead of the old aristocracy’. Hence
his ironic titles for the new factory owners: ‘Seigneurs of the Twist, sover-
eigns of the Spinning Jenny, great yeomen of the Yarn’. ‘Parliament,’ he
added, ‘seems to have been made for you, and you for it’. G. D. H. Cole,
op.cit., p. 260.
238 Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland’
(1818) in W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (eds), loc.cit., Vol. 3, pp. 192–3.
239 The following account of Catholic Emancipation and Irish Nationalism
draws heavily upon the first two volumes of Elie Halevy’s history of the
English people in the nineteenth century. E. Halevy, The Liberal Awakening
(1815–1830) (tr. by E. I. Watkin) (London and New York: Ark Paperback,
1987), passim; and idem, England in 1815 (1960), pp. 473–82.
250 Notes
240 W. Cobbett, A History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’ in England and Ireland

(1824), p. 86, sec. 152.
241 Ibid., p. 103, sec. 183; cf., p. 428.
242 R. Williams, The Long Revolution (1961), pp. 121–31; idem, Culture and So-
ciety 1780–1950 (1963), pp. 37–8.
243 W. Cobbett, op.cit., passim, esp. pp. 93–7, 220–9, 246–50, 259–61, and 271–2.
244 R. Williams, Culture and Society 1750–1950 (1963), pp. 37–8; and G. D. H.
Cole, The Life of William Cobbett (1947), p. 288; See too G. K. Chesterton,
William Cobbett (undated), pp. 181–2. As W. D. Rubinstein observes: ‘His
group prejudices . . . were not general and were not necessarily those which
were most widely shared. They were quite specific, aimed at groups which
appeared to predominate in the financial and commercial elite, and which
appeared to be the bearers of modern and rational values as opposed to
those of rural and traditional England. The link between this and later
populism seems plain, especially bearing in mind the very real democratic
beliefs of Cobbett and his fellow radicals’. W. D. Rubinstein, ‘British Radi-
calism and the “Dark Side” of Populism’, p. 357.
245 Cf. the letters, ‘On the Church of Rome’, in C. Wordsworth (jnr), loc.cit.,
Vol. 2, pp. 132–53. The breadth and depth of Wordsworth’s reading on
the Catholic and Irish Questions can be gauged from the following books
and pamphlets listed in the catalogue of the poet’s library books made by
J. Burton in 1859(?). (Reprinted by permission of the Wordsworth Trust.)
Sir H. R. Inglis, Speeches on the Roman Catholic question [sic.] (1828), C.,
p. 6; J. Ryan, A Disclosure of the principles [sic.], & c. of the Popish Revolu-
tionary Faction in Ireland (1838), C., p. 6; James I, Apologie for the Oath of
Allegiance (1609), C., p. 8; Dr N. Johnson, The Excellency of Monarchical
Government, especially of the English Government (1686), C., p. 8; Sir D. Lindsay,
The Monarchie (1566), C., p. 8; G. Burnet (Bishop of Sarum), An Exposition
of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England (1714), C., p. 20; idem,
History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1683–1715) – Vols 2 &
3 were put up for sale, but Wordsworth had also owned Vol. 1, C., p. 20;
Parliamentary Abstracts – ‘the substance of all Important Papers laid before the
two Houses of Parliament during the Sessions 1825–26’, 2 Vols, C., p. 9; Par-
liamentary History and Review of the Principal Measures of the Sessions
1825–26–27, 4 Vols, C., p. 9; Parliamentary Papers and Abstracts & c. & c.,
1826, C., p. 9; Rev. F. Merewether, The Case between the Church and the
dissenters impartially and practically considered (1827), C., p. 21; H. N. Coleridge,
Remarks on the Roman Catholic Question (1827), C., p. 22; Rev. W. F. Hook,
The Church and the Establishment (1834), C., p. 22; S. T. Coleridge, On the
Constitution of the Church and State & c. (1830), C., p. 22; W. Warbuton,
The Alliance between Church and State (1741), C., p. 19.
246 W. Wordsworth, ‘Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off Saint Bees’ Head,
on the Coast of Cumberland’ (comp. 1833; pub. 1835), ll. 136–44 in J. O.
Hayden, loc.cit., Vol. 2, p. 753.
247 Ibid., ll. 118–26, 127–35, and 145–8 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 752–3.
248 F. W. Faber was a young friend of Wordsworth’s in the early 1840s, and
often spoke freely with the old poet on theological and political matters.
He was a leading light of the Oxford Movement, and later, like Newman,
became a Catholic. In 1844 he reprinted Wordsworth’s poem about the
Gothic church at St Bees in his Life of St Bega, in Newman’s Lives of the
Notes 251
English Saints, hymning it as ‘an instance of the remarkable way in which

his poems did in diverse places anticipate the revival of catholic doctrines
among us’. F. W. Faber quoted and discussed in Stephen Gill, op.cit., pp.
417–18.
249 Wordsworth’s views of the doctrinal and civil advantages of the Anglican
Church–State of the early nineteenth century over the Roman Catholic
hierarchy and its several spheres of influence in Europe and Ireland are
given in the following letters taken from Ernest De Selincourt (ed.), loc.cit.,
Vol. 4, Pt i (1821–8): William Wordsworth to James Losh, 4 December
1821, pp. 97–8; idem to Viscount Lowther, 12 February 1825, pp. 309–15;
idem to Lord Lonsdale, 5 May 1825, pp. 347–8; idem to Sir Robert Inglis,
11 June 1825, pp. 358–65; and idem to Benjamin Dockray, 2 December
1828, pp. 678–9.
250 Hence his conviction that the old whig and tory landowners ought to
make greater efforts to improve the religious instruction and teaching in
their neighbourhoods. After all, they often walked over ‘vast estates which
were lavished upon their ancestors by royal favouritism or purchased at
insignificant prices after church-spoliation’. W. Wordsworth, ‘Postscript, 1835’,
in W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, loc. cit., Vol. 3, p. 257.
251 E. Halevy, England in 1815 (1960), p. 477.
252 M. D. George, England in Transition (1953), p. 114.
Lake District 1500–1830 (1961), p. 62.
254 Cf. too the title of a little read but interesting poem, set in pre-Norman
times, called ‘A Fact and an Imagination or, Canute and Alfred, on the
Sea-shore’ (1820) in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 369–70.
255 The notion of the ‘organic society’ arose from the literary and philosophi-
cal movement of European Romanticism. Its influence has been most potent
in Germany. Nevertheless, most conservatives in Europe ‘view society as a
single organism, having the special cohesiveness that comes only from
being alive. They dismiss a liberal society as “atomistic”, meaning dis-
rupted dead atoms, held together merely mechanically. A society is allegedly
made organic by religion, idealism, shared historical experiences like
nationality, monarchy, or constitution, and the emotions of reverence,
cooperation, loyalty. A society is allegedly made atomistic by materialism,
class war, excessive laissez-faire economics, greedy profiteering, over analytical
intellectuality, subversion of shared institutions, insistence on rights above
duties, and the emotions of skepticism, cynicism, [and] plebeian envy’. P.
Viereck, Conservatism from John Adams to Churchill (Princeton, New Jersey:
D. Van Nostrand, Inc., 1956), p. 18. Alfred Cobban, however, has argued
cogently that Edmund Burke’s theory of the great social contract between
the generations of mankind, which the Lake Poets used to justify their
tory politics, was not strictly compatible with the Romantic notion of the
‘organic society’. Burke held that commonwealths were ‘moral essences’
rather than physical ones; they were therefore not subject to the physical
laws of growth and decay. A. Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against
the Eighteenth Century, 2nd edn (1960), pp. 89–90.
256 W. Wordsworth, ‘Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off Saint Bees’ Heads,
on the Coast of Cumberland’ (1835), ll. 154–62 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit.,
Vol. 2, p. 753.
252 Notes
257 W. Cobbett, op. cit., p. 105, sec. 182.

258 William Cobbett quoted, paraphrased and studied by G. D. H. Cole, op.
cit., pp. 293–4.
259 W. Wordsworth, ‘Postscript, 1835’, in W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, loc.
cit., Vol. 3, p. 257; cf. pp. 255–6 for a valuable summary of Wordsworth’s
main objections to the ‘voluntary system’ of church building and religious
instruction both in town and in country.
260 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (1985), passim; idem, Revolution
and Rebellion (1986), passim; and A. J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old
Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981), passim.
261 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (1985), p. 354.
262 E. Halevy, The Liberal Awakening (1815–1830) (1987), pp. 216–17.
263 J. C. D. Clark, op. cit., pp. 354–5 and 270–3. Cf. too R. K. Webb, Modern
England (1980), pp. 141–3.
264 Ibid., p. 354. Wordsworth maintained with some justice that the tory lead-
ership itself, from Canning to Peel, was more responsible than the whigs
for the defeat of the landed interest on all three reform questions. The
party’s principles were their political strength, not expedience and cun-
ning. They had clearly allowed the question of reform to gain ground, in
the post-war period, and were therefore left wide open for attack by the
opposition whigs and their temporary allies, the radicals. Thus he wrote
to Henry Crabb Robinson in November, 1833: ‘[M]y opinion is, that the
People are bent upon the destruction of their ancient Institutions, and
that nothing since, I will not say the passing, but since the broaching of
the Reform Bill could, or can prevent it’. William Wordsworth to Henry
Crabb Robinson, letter dated 14 November 1833, in E. De Selincourt, loc.
cit., Vol. 5, Pt ii (1829–34), p. 657.
4 Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast

1 Cf. William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, The Fenwick Notes of William
Wordsworth (1993), p. 41.
2 It is, perhaps, worth reminding the reader here that the ‘Lake Poets’ were
William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge. It is also cus-
tomary to include Sir Walter Scott in the group on account of his personal
friendship with its members, his residence in the Borderlands of Scotland,
and his immense contribution to the early Romantic movement. Never-
theless, he was a conservative thinker from first to last.
3 W. Wordsworth, ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff ’ (unfinished 1793) in
J. O. Hayden, William Wordsworth. Selected Prose (1988), p. 158.
4 W. Wordsworth, ‘Descriptive Sketches’ (1793), ll. 520–9, in J. O. Hayden,
The Poems (1977), Vol. 1, p. 911.
5 Thomas Paine quoted in Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: the Radi-
cal Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 68–9.
6 N. K. O’Sullivan, Conservatism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1976), pp. 11–12.
7 Jean Jacques Rousseau quoted in Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Phil-
osophy (1984), pp. 669–71.
8 Nor could he accept Bishop Watson’s Burkean conclusion that republi-
can government was the ‘most oppressive to the bulk of the people’ who
live ‘under the most odious of all tyrannies, the tyranny of their equals’.
Notes 253
W. Wordsworth, ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ (1793) in J. O. Hayden,

loc. cit., pp. 144–5. For a detailed qualification of Rousseau’s doctrine of
the ‘general will’, both in theory and practice, see: Bertrand Russell, op.
cit., pp. 672–4.
9 See Chapter 5.
10 W. Wordsworth, ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ (1793) in J. O. Hayden,
loc. cit., pp. 142, 144–5, and 147.
11 P. Viereck, Conservatism from John Adams to Churchill (1956), p. 13; and A.
Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century, 2nd
edn (1960), pp. 135–6.
12 Thus Napoleon reflected, at Saint Helena, in his diary entry for 3 March
1817, that: ‘I raised myself from nothing to be the most powerful mon-
arch in the world. Europe was at my feet. I have always been of opinion
that the sovereignty lay in the people. In fact, the imperial government
was a kind of republic. Called to the head of it by the voice of the nation,
my maxim was, la carrière est ouverte aux talens without distinction of birth
or fortune, and this system of equality is the reason that your oligarchy
hates me so much’. R. M. Johnston (ed.), ‘The Corsican: a Diary of Napoleon’s
Life in His Own Words’ (1910), excerpts reprinted in Dennis Sherman (ed.),
Western Civilisation: Images and Interpretations, Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf Inc. 1983), p. 116.
13 Cf. W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 10, esp. ll. 83–127, pp.
179–80 and ll. 128–88, pp. 180–2.
14 Ibid., Bk 10, ll. 179 and 185–6, p. 182. Thus he wrote, in 1809, that Bonaparte
and his cohorts were clear proof of ‘how wicked men of ordinary talents’
were ‘emboldened by success’. W. Wordsworth, ‘The Convention of Cintra
[: A Tract]’ (1809) in W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 302.
See too the superb sonnets on Napoleon Bonaparte called ‘1801’ and ‘Calais,
August, 1802’ in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 558–9 and 575–6.
15 A. Cobban, op. cit., p. 141. Cf. A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement 1783–
1867 (1959), pp. 144–5.
16 Ibid., pp. 141–2. See too W. Wordsworth, ‘The Convention Of Cintra[: A
Tract]’ (1809) in W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 226.
17 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 9, ll. 125–6 p. 154; and
idem, The Prelude (1850 text), Bk 11, ll. 206–9, p. 355.
18 A. Cobban, op. cit., pp. 133–4 and 141–2.
19 C. Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (1962), p. 106;
F. M. Todd, Politics and the Poet: a Study of Wordsworth (1957), p. 12; and
N. Roe, op. cit., pp. 274–5.
20 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 Text), Bk 7, l. 512.
21 R. Kirk, The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot, 6th rev. edn (1978), pp.
44–5.
22 H. Melville, Typee. A Peep at Polynesian Life ([1st pub. 1846] Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1972), p. 140. For a brief review of the ‘noble savage’ in
French and English literature see: Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Back-
ground. Studies in the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period [1st pub.
1940] (London and New York: Ark Paperbacks, 1986), pp. 12–14.
23 P. Viereck, op. cit., pp. 17, 36–7, and 102–3. The cultural conservative wages
war against the shallowness of liberal material progress; to use Wordsworth’s
description of the poet, he is the ‘rock and defence of human nature’. His
254 Notes
emphasis is upon the dark depths and diversity of human experience and
the different drives which move him to moral action – both good and
evil. Man, not politics, is the object of his study.
24 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790] (London: J. M. Dent
and Sons Ltd, 1910), p. 138.
25 Ibid., pp. 74–5. For a fine account of Burke’s prophetic statements on the
French Revolution and its aftermath, see: Lord Hugh Cecil, Conservatism
(London: Williams and Norgate [undated]), pp. 45–8.
26 In other words, ‘the restraints on men, as well their liberties’ were ‘to be
reckoned among their rights’, Ibid., pp. 57–8.
27 Ibid., p. 137.
29 Edmund Burke quoted in Alfred Cobban, op. cit., p. 77.
30 William Wordsworth to Charles James Blomfield (Bishop of London), letter
dated 1 March 1829, in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 5, Pt ii (1829–34),
p. 42.
31 N. Roe, op. cit., p. 274.
32 Jean Jacques Rousseau quoted in Bertrand Russell, op. cit., p. 666. Cf. too
N. Hampson, The Enlightenment (1968), p. 206.
33 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 9, l. 238, p. 157.
34 Ibid., Bk 9, l. 239, p. 157; and idem, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey’ (1798), ll. 122–3 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 361.
35 Cf. William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, loc. cit., p. 65.
37 Edmund Burke quoted in Russell Kirk, op. cit., p. 45. He might well have
agreed with Shakespeare’s Prolixenes that ‘Nature is made better by no
mean/ But Nature makes that mean’ (The Winter’s Tale, IV. iv. 89–90).
38 E. Burke, op. cit., p. 74.
40 Ibid., Bk 12, ll. 208–19, pp. 223–4.
41 Cf. Edmund Burke quoted in Russell Kirk, op. cit., pp. 40–1; and Edmund
Burke, op. cit., p. 76.
42 W. Wordsworth, ‘Preface to’ the Lyrical Ballads (1800/2) in J. O. Hayden,
loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 881. Cf. J. Lucas, England and Englishness. Ideas of Nationhood
in English Poetry 1688–1900 (1990), pp. 91–2. I have alluded to John Lucas’s
chapter on this point because it is one of the most recent and controversial
accounts. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the study of Wordsworth’s
poetry from a political point of view is very old: if I were asked to give a
sketch of its history I would start with Christopher Wordsworth (jnr) who
wrote, in his Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851), Vol. 1, p. 125, that:
‘The clue to his poetical theory’, in the Lyrical Ballads, ‘in some of its more
questionable details, may be found in his political principles; these had
been democratical and still, though in some degree modified, they were of
a republican character’. By the early twentieth century, both G. M. Harper
and T. S. Eliot recognised that ‘any radical change in poetic form is likely
to be the symptom of some very much deeper change in society and in
the individual’. Or, to put the matter another way, the poet’s poetry and
criticism must be read with ‘the purposes and social passions which ani-
mated its author’. See T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
([1st pub. 1933] 1964), pp. 72–6.
Notes 255
43 R. Frost, ‘Letter to’ The Amherst Student, dated 25 March 1935, in H. Cox
and E. C. Latham (eds), Selected Prose of Robert Frost (New York: Collier
Books, 1968), p. 105.
44 Cf. E. Burke, op. cit., pp. 94–5, 165–6, and passim.
45 Ibid., pp. 87–96 and 168–9. In this regard Alfred Cobban rightly argued
that, for Burke, ‘the State itself’ had ‘a religious sanction’. The church was
‘a national church not by accident but by its essential nature’. On the
other hand, he went too far when he inferred from this political fact that
Burke’s standpoint was ‘even more than Anglican’ (op. cit., p. 93). J. C. D.
Clark, for instance, has shown that Burke’s conservative views of society,
in general, and the state, in particular, were based to a large extent upon
the widely shared assumptions of Anglican political theology which formed
‘a considered and long-standing component of the Whig defence of 1688
in the first half of the eighteenth century’. In fact, ‘the stress on political
theology accounts far more fully’, in Clark’s eyes, ‘for the anti-utilitarian,
anti-contractarian, “irrational” component of Burke’s account of political
action and motivation’, in the last years of his life, than the conventional
view of his ‘sudden wild reaction to [events in] 1789’. J. C. D. Clark, English
Society 1688–1832 (1985), p. 257.
46 Ibid., p. 93.
47 Contrast the comments on this passage made by Raymond Williams, in
Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1963), p. 29.
48 Edmund Burke quoted and discussed in Russell Kirk, op. cit., pp. 48–9.
50 Edmund Burke quoted and discussed in Russell Kirk, op. cit., pp. 48–50.
Cf. too E. Burke, op. cit., pp. 56–7.
51 Edmund Burke quoted and discussed in Peter Viereck, op. cit., p. 28.
52 E. Burke, op. cit., pp. 58–9.
53 His career as a statesman, for example, was memorable for its eloquent
defence of established whig principles of constitutional justice and liberty.
On four great occasions he found himself at odds with the English govern-
ment, large sections of the ruling class, or his own party. He thereby helped
to restrain royal authority; opposed Lord North’s oppressive taxation of
the American colonies; called for the impeachment of Hastings for his
arbtitrary rule in India; and defended the ancien régime in France. For details
see: R. Kirk, op. cit., p. 14 and P. Viereck, op. cit., pp. 28–9.
55 Edmund Burke quoted in Raymond Williams, op. cit., p. 29.
56 E. Burke, op. cit., pp. 243–4.
57 See, for example, the ‘French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at
its Commencement’, in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 636–7. This poem
was written in 1804 as part of The Prelude but also published five years
later in The Friend. It is interesting to note, moreover, that Wordsworth
made only a few minor changes of spelling and grammar to the final ver-
sion of this affirmation of his early Romantic involvement in the French
Revolution: W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1850), Bk 11 (‘France con-
tinued’), ll. 105–44, pp. 352–3.
58 According to Duncan Wu, in Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (1993), pp.
22–3, Wordsworth had read most of Burke’s major works on politics in the
1790s: he suggests the following works were read at the stated times (or
256 Notes
thereabouts): Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): spring 1791, by

1793; A Letter from Mr. Burke, to a Member of the National Assembly (1791):
by spring 1793; A Letter From the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble
Lord (1796): 1796–7, by 1797; Two Letters Addressed to a Member of the
Present Parliament on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of
France (1796): after 20 March 1797; A Letter to the Duke of Portland (1797):
after 20 March 1797. My own research into the books owned by the poet
at his death, in 1850, revealed a great interest in Burke’s social and politi-
cal writings. For example he owned 54 volumes of the Annual Register,
from its commencement (under the auspices of Edmund Burke), 1758 to 1820.
J. Burton, Catalogue of the Varied and Valuable Historical, Theological, and
Miscellaneous Library of the late Venerated Poet-Laureate, William Wordsworth,
Esquire, D.L.C. (1859), p. 2. According to Alfred Cobban, Burke ‘almost
certainly wrote the Annual Register from 1758 to 1765. Thomas English
then began to work for it, and subsequently other assistants came in; though
there is some evidence that as late as 1744 Burke was still the “principal
conductor” and that he continued to be associated with the Register up to
1789’. A. Cobban, op. cit., ‘Note’ facing p. xiv.
59 William Wordsworth to (Sir) William Rowan Hamilton, letter dated 22
November 1831, in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 5, Pt ii (1829–34),
p. 455.
60 Cf. N. K. O’Sullivan, op. cit., p. 91; and E. Burke, op. cit., p. 243.
61 William Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, letter dated 24 February 1832, in
E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 5, Pt ii (1829–34), p. 500. Cf too E. Burke,
op. cit., pp. 168–9.
62 William Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, letter dated 24 February 1832, ibid.,
Vol. 5, Pt ii (1829–34), pp. 500–1.
63 S. T. Coleridge to George Coleridge (elder brother), letter dated April 1798,
in S. Potter (ed.), Coleridge. Select Poetry & Prose (London: The Nonesuch
Press, 1971), p. 576.
64 A point also emphasised in Peter Viereck’s conclusion to Conservatism from
John Adams to Churchill (1956), p. 108.
65 N. K. O’Sullivan, op. cit., pp. 11–12.
66 A. Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection: the Religious and Secular Traditions
of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (London: Faber
and Faber, 1978), pp. 22–3.
67 Ibid., pp. 65–6.
68 See Chapter 5.
69 C. Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (1962), p. 106;
and F. D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, rev. edn (1968), pp.
103–4. It was also a direct result ‘of the horrors perpetrated before his
own eyes, in the sacred name of Liberty and Reason’ during the French
Revolution; see: C. Wordsworth (jnr), op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 252. Indeed
Wordsworth pre-empted, by a hundred years, George Orwell’s sceptical views
of revolutionary idealists and academics who think ‘any ends can be so
good as to justify wrong means for attaining them’: William Wordsworth
quoted in Christopher Wordsworth (jnr), ibid., Vol. 2, p. 254. Cf. George
Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, in W. F. Bolton and D. Crystal
(eds), The English Language. Volume Two: Essays by Linguists and Men of
Letters 1858–1964 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 224–6.
Notes 257
In the next chapter we will see that Wordsworth learnt this lesson the
hard way, by once subscribing to such revolutionary views. See, for ex-
ample, his unfinished ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ (1793).
70 W. Wordsworth, ‘Not in the lucid intervals of life’ (1835), ll. 16–31 in
J. O. Hayden, The Poems (1977), Vol. 2, p. 783.
71 W. Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood’ (comp. 1802–4; pub. 1807), ll. 58–77 in J. O. Hayden,
loc. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 525–6.
72 William Wordsworth quoted in Christopher Wordsworth, op. cit., Vol.
2, p. 476.
ibid., pp. 700–1.
74 M. H. Friedman, The Making of a Tory Humanist: William Wordsworth and
the Idea of Community (1979).
75 P. Aries, Centuries of Childhood: a Social History of Family Life (tr. by R.
Baldick) (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), pp. 26 and 413–14.
76 Ibid., p. 42.
77 Ibid., p. 43.
78 Ibid., p. 131.
79 Ibid., pp. 131–2.
80 Ibid., pp. 133 and 413–14.
81 R. A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450–1700 (London and New York:
Longman Group Ltd, 1984), p. 6. See too A. Wilson, ‘The Infancy of the
History of Childhood: an Appraisal Of Philippe Aries’, HT, 19 (1980), pp.
132–53; P. Laslett, ‘Philippe Aries & “La Famille”’, Encounter, 46, No. 3
(March 1976), pp. 80–3; and idem, ‘Characteristics of the Western Family’,
in P. Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 18–19 incl. n. 6.
82 William Wordsworth to Unknown Correspondent, letter dated by the editor
about 1808(?), in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 2, Pt i (1806–11), p. 285.
83 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 Text), Bk 5, l. 279, p. 74.
84 H. Davies, William Wordsworth. A Biography (1980), p. 10.
85 She ‘was’, wrote Wordsworth, ‘the heart/ And hinge of all our learnings
and our loves’. W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 Text), Bk 5, ll. 275 and
257–8, p. 74. Cf. A. M. Ellis, Rebels and Conservatives. Dorothy and William
Wordsworth and their Circle (1967), pp. 4–5.
86 Ernest De Selincourt gives a short but insightful account of the poet’s dislike
of contemporary ideas of education; see: The Prelude (1805 Text), pp. 265–6.
87 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 Text), Bk 5, ll. 286–7, p. 75.
88 J. Nicolson and R. Burn, The History and Antiquities of the Counties of
Westmorland and Cumberland (1777), Vol. 1, pp. 370–1.
89 Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard, letter quoted in Amanda M. Ellis,
op. cit., pp. 11–12.
90 This statement will be qualified in the next chapter which deals with the
topic of patronage.
91 Cf. A. M. Ellis, op. cit., p. 6.
92 Cf. W. Wordsworth, Sonnet XXII, ‘Catechising’, in Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822)
in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 492–3; and W. Wordsworth, ‘Autobio-
graphical Memoranda’ (1847) in J. O. Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth.
Selected Prose (1988), p. 4.
258 Notes
93 Moreover, are we wise to ascribe every instance of strong affection be-

tween parent and child to deeply rooted disturbances and unconscious
crises in the parties involved? Compare, for instance, the second stanza
composed, in 1762, by the Old Lakeland poet, Dr John Langhorne, author
of ‘The Country Justice’, for the tomb of his mother, Isabel, in the Church
at Kirkby Stephen in Westmorland:
For her I mourn,

Now the cold tenant of the thoughtless urn –
For her bewail these strains of woe,
For her these filial sorrows flow,
Source of my life, that led my tender years,
With all a parent’s pious fears,
That nurs’d my infant thought, and taught my mind to grow.
The poem contains four stanzas in like strain, any one of which could
have been written a decade later by the young Wordsworth for his own
mother’s headstone. Clearly, social ‘class’ or conditioning was also very
important to the emotional attachments and personal involvements be-
tween mother and son in Old England. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op. cit.,
Vol. 1, pp. 549–50.
94 William Wordsworth, ‘Autobiographical Memoranda’ (1847) in J. O. Hayden,
ibid., p. 5. ‘Gil Blas’ refers to the work by Alaine Rene Le Sage called Histoire
de Gil Blas de Santillane.
95 Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘Preface to’ Lyrical Ballads (1800/2) in J. O. Hayden,
loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 873.
96 Amanda M. Ellis claims that Ann Wordsworth taught her children ‘to scorn
the fashionable Sandford and Merton books before they were nine’, op.
cit., p. 6. She must mean ‘in principle’ because Thomas Day did not begin
publishing his famous trilogy, called the History of Sandford and Merton,
until 1783, when William Wordsworth was a teenager, and his mother
had been dead for about five years. Likewise, Mrs Sherwood did not pub-
lish her popular History of the Fairchild Family until 1788. Furthermore,
Maria Edgeworth’s The Parent’s Assistant did not appear until 1792. I. Pinch-
beck and M. Hewitt, Children in English Society (1969), Vol. 1, pp. 299–300.
97 William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, letter dated late 1827,
in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 4, Pt i (1821–8), p. 565.
98 William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, op. cit., pp. 74–5.
99 S. Gill, op. cit., pp. 33–4.
100 Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘Autobiographical Memoranda’ (1847) in J. O. Hayden,
loc. cit., p. 4. According to his death certificate, John Wordsworth died of
‘dropsy’. S. Gill, op. cit., p. 428, n. 89.
101 W. Wordsworth, ‘The Vale of Esthwaite’ (comp. 1786–8; pub. 1940), ll.
435–41 and 445–8, in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 62.
102 F. M. Todd, op. cit., pp. 27–30; and S. Gill, op. cit., pp. 30–2.
103 Thomas Bowman Jnr quoted in T. W. Thompson, Wordsworth’s Hawkshead
(1970), p. 344. These remarks were made by Bowman, in 1885, during the
grammar school’s three hundredth birthday celebrations. Hence no spe-
cific date can be given for the poet’s letter to him regarding the schoolmaster
and his famous pupil.
Notes 259
104 William Wordsworth to Samuel Carter Hall, letter dated 15 January 1837,
in A. G. Hill (ed.), Letters of William Wordsworth (1984), p. 277.
105 F. M. Todd, op. cit., pp. 28–9. Such works were highly charged with the
Golden Age ideas and emotional energies of eighteenth-century humani-
tarianism and the cult of sensibility which began to bring objects of common
life and concern into the public’s view.
106 The connection between Wordsworth’s radical politics and his boyhood
interest in ‘pastoral’ poetry will be reviewed in Chapter 5.
107 Cf. S. Gill, op. cit., p. 27; E. De Selincourt’s edition of The Prelude (1805
Text), p. 303; and M. L. Reed, Wordsworth. The Chronology of the Early Years
(1967), p. 67. Re. the teaching staff at Hawkshead Grammar School: cf.
Robert Woof’s long and interesting note in T. W. Thompson, op. cit., pp.
342–5.
108 M. Moorman, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 26.
109 H. Davies, op. cit., p. 30. Cf. too the following poem which was based in
part upon the life and character of William Taylor: ‘Address to the Scholars
of the Village School of 1798’ (comp. 1798–9; pub. 1842) in J. O. Hayden,
loc. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 389–90.
110 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805 Text), Bk 10, ll. 489–514, pp. 190–1.
111 Philippe Aries quoted in Adrian Wilson, op. cit., pp. 137–8.
112 W. D. Rubinstein, ‘Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure in Modern Brit-
ain’, in idem, loc. cit., p. 65. Cf. too idem, Capitalism, Culture, and Decline
in Britain 1750–1990 (1993), pp. 143–4.
113 W. D. Rubinstein, ‘The End of “Old Corruption” in Britain, 1780–1860’,
p. 280. Cf. too J. C. D. Clark, op. cit., pp. 318–19.
114 A. J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981),
pp. 9–11. Cf. too J. C. D. Clark, op. cit., p. 74.
115 Cf. A. Macfarlane, The Origins of Modern English Individualism (1978), passim.
116 Alexis de Tocqueville quoted in Russell Kirk, op. cit., p. 18.
117 J. C. D. Clark, op. cit., p. 74.
118 Ibid., p. 76.
119 P. Laslett, ‘Introduction: the necessity of a historical sociology’, in idem,
Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (1977), pp. 4–5. Re. ‘the
religious motive in the establishment and conduct of schools’, in the ‘Re-
nascence’ period in England 1518–59, and especially in the ‘Puritan’ period
1559–60, see: I. Pinchbeck and M. Hewitt, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 276–7.
120 M. D. George, England in Transition (1953), p. 136. Re. the role of religion
in the Puritan and Anglican home, see: I. Pinchbeck and M. Hewitt, op.
cit., Vol. 1, pp. 223, 265, 267; and ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 359–60.
121 Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, who flourished in the late eighteenth century,
captured many delightful features of childhood innocence and freedom.
122 Cf. J. L. and B. Hammond, The Town Labourer 1760–1832 (London: Longmans,
Green and Co. Ltd, 1966), pp. 190–1. Cf. too I. Pinchbeck and M. Hewitt,
op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 299–300.
123 Cf. P. Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (rev. edn)
(1961), pp. 370 and 372–3; and R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art
(1938), pp. 99–101. Cf. too ‘The Factory Master’s Portrait’ by P. M. McDouall.
This brilliant but biased composition from the pen of a leading Chartist
helps one to focus upon the theoretical points made by Mantoux and
Collingwood. ‘Examine him, and you will find that his whole knowledge
260 Notes
extends to the revolution of wheels; and although possessed of immense

wealth, he knows nothing except the process of making cotton cloth or
the most cunning way to drive a bargain. Every action of his life is mea-
sured by a foot-rule, and every thing he does is regulated by pounds, shillings
and pence. He is grossly ignorant on all other subjects, and will express as
much surprise at the mention of any subject for discussion on religion or
politics, as if he was only a machine for producing calico, or a patent
ledger for calculating profit and loss.[ . . .] He lives for no other purpose
than to calculate, and the only end of his existence is to gain.’ P. M.
McDouall, Chartist Journal and Trades’ Advocate, 25 September 1841, quoted
in Neville Kirk, ‘In Defence of Class. A Critique of Recent Revisionist Writing
upon the Nineteenth-Century English Working Class’, IRSH, 32 (1987), p. 28.
124 For his part, Houlbrooke claims that ‘the elementary or nuclear family
typically occupied a central place in the life and aspirations of the individual
between 1450 and 1700 as it still does today’. R. A. Houlbrooke, op. cit.,
p. 16.
125 J. Housman, A Topographical Description of Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire,
and a Part of the West Riding of Yorkshire (1800), p. 64 re. Cumberland and
p. 105 re. Westmorland.
126 J. H. Porter, ‘The Development of Rural Society’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.),
AHEW, VI, 1750–1850 (1989), p. 873.
127 Ibid., p. 875. See too G. P. Jones, ‘Continuity and Change in Surnames in
Four Northern Parishes’, CW2, 73, 10 (1973), pp. 143–47.
128 J. Thirsk, ‘Industries in the Countryside’, in F. J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the
Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (1961), pp. 83–4.
129 Cf. M. Arnold, ‘Wordsworth’, in idem, Essays in Criticism. Second Series (1888),
p. 153.
130 W. Hutchinson, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 415.
131 Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 419.
132 Cf. A. Pringle, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Westmoreland
(1794), p. 30.
133 For example, common weavers and their families, in the seventeenth cen-
tury, were often reliant upon ‘cottoneers’, or clothiers, who normally lived
in towns, for the purchase of their webs. C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones,
A Short Economic and Social History of the Lake Counties 1500–1830 (1961),
pp. 140–1.
134 J. H. Clapham quoted in C. M. L. Bouch, Prelates and People of the Lake
Counties (1948), pp. 408–9.
135 Henry Brougham quoted in F. W. Garnett, Westmorland Agriculture 1800–
1900 (1912), p. 5.
5 Wordsworth: a Weberian Account

1 V. G. Kiernan, ‘Wordsworth and the People’ (1956) and ‘Postscript’ thereto
(1973), pp. 174–5, 184, 187–8, 196, and 204–5. E. P. Thompson, ‘Disen-
chantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, in C. C. O’Brien and W. D. Vanech
(eds), Power & Consciousness (London: University of London Press Ltd, 1969),
p. 173 ff; and idem, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, in PP, 142, Feb. (1994),
p. 130 ff, esp. pp. 136–7.
Notes 261
2 D. Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination. The Poetry of Displacement

(1987), p. 155.
3 Ibid., p. 126: ‘As Wordsworth is unsure of his own place in this ideal economy,
so too is his portrayal of it as an objective entity also unstable and in-
scribed with conflict’. Similar arguments have been used to understand
and stigmatise the Golden Age ideals of Oliver Goldsmith’s poem, ‘The
Deserted Village’ (1770). Ibid., pp. 22–5 and passim; and J. Lucas, England
and Englishness. Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry 1688–1900 (1990), pp.
5 and 55–70 and passim. The weaknesses of their historical arguments about
enclosure, population growth and distribution and so on have been dealt
with in Chapters 1–3.
4 J. Lucas, ibid., p. 106. Of course, the post-structural standpoint is not so
steady as the Marxist upon the precise nature of social and economic forces
of change. Nonetheless, Professor Simpson accepts much of the Marxist
critique of social and economic relations and re-fashions the notions of
‘ideology’, ‘alienation’ and ‘false-consciousness’ to suit his own ‘material-
ist literary criticism’: D. Simpson, op. cit., pp. 15–18.
5 Robert Browning labelled Wordsworth as the ‘lost leader’ of radical poetry,
but Shelley had already attacked the Lake poet in similar terms for his
tory politics in The Excursion (1814). See, for instance, J. K. Chandler,
‘“Wordsworth” after Waterloo’, in K. R. Johnston and G. W. Ruoff (eds),
The Age of William Wordsworth. Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition
(New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 84–111.
6 E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), p. 11 n. 2.
7 Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard, letter dated 6 and 7 August 1787, in
E. De Selincourt, ibid., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), p. 7. Wordsworth’s liking for
the legal profession was, one gathers, mainly the result of his father’s role
model. Nevertheless, it was also highly conventional. At least, nearly 60
per cent of Cambridge graduates entered ‘the Anglican clergy until after
the 1860s and another significant portion’ entered the bar. W. D. Rubinstein,
Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain 1750–1990 (1993), p. 137.
8 Cf. A. M. Ellis, Rebels and Conservatives. Dorothy and William Wordsworth
and their Circle (1967), p. 16.
9 B. R. Schneider Jr, Wordsworth’s Cambridge Education (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1957), pp. 15–16 and 28–9.
10 Ibid., p. 11.
11 Ibid., p. 21.
12 Ibid., p. 22. The professors too looked upon their positions as sinecures
rather than employments (ibid., p. 20).
13 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 3, ll. 531–9, pp. 48–9.
14 Ibid., Bk 3, ll. 626–43, pp. 51–2.
15 Ibid., Bk 3 passim.
16 B. R Schneider, op. cit., p. 40.
17 Ibid., pp. 40–7.
18 Ibid., p. 40.
19 Ibid., pp. 40–1.
20 Cf. B. R. Schneider, ibid., p. 42.
21 Cf. M. Moorman, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 86; and Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard,
letter dated [–] November 1787, in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805),
p. 11; and W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 3, ll. 35–43, p. 35.
262 Notes
22 B. R. Schneider, op. cit., p. 41. Watson cut a quaint figure at Cambridge:

his rustic dress earning him the nickname of the ‘Westmorland Phenom-
enon’ (W. Parson and W. White, History, Directory, and Gazetteer [of the
Lake Counties] (1829), p. 622). See too DNB, XX, p. 935.
23 Clement Carlyon, Early Years and Late Reflections (1836) quoted in F. M.
Todd, Politics and the Poet. A Study of Wordsworth (1957), pp. 19–20.
24 Cf. B. R. Schneider, op. cit., p. 42. It is interesting to note, in this regard,
that Wordsworth’s Hawkshead friend, Robert Greenwood, worked hard and
became a fellow of Trinity College. We have already seen in Chapter 1
that Greenwood was the son of a ‘statesman’ farmer in Ingleton, York-
shire. It is hard to square his success, at Cambridge, with Schneider’s
argument.
25 Cf. W. Wilberforce, Journey to the Lake District from Cambridge 1779. [A
diary written by William Wilberforce] (ed. by C. E. Wrangham) (Stockfield:
Oriel Press, 1983), passim.
26 B. R. Schneider, op. cit., pp. 44–6. Cf. the strictures on whig historians
in J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (1985), p. 102 incl. n. 196.
27 J. C. D. Clark, ibid., pp. 102–3.
28 R. Williams, The Long Revolution (1961), p. 247.
29 J. C. D. Clark, op. cit., p. 103, n. 198.
30 Elie Halevy quoted in Michael H. Friedman, The Making of a Tory Human-
ist: William Wordsworth and the Idea of Community (1979), p. 77.
31 Christopher Cookson to Richard Wordsworth (the poet’s brother), letter
dated 18 December 1789, in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805),
Appendix 1, p. 667.
32 M. Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography (1957) [= Vol. 1], p. 124.
34 Ibid., Bk 3, ll. 35–43, p. 35 and, ll. 249–58, p. 41.
35 Cf. B. R. Schneider, op. cit., p. 47.
36 Dr Schneider, however, offers a very fine account of this system of reading
and examination in his review of Wordsworth’s Cambridge years: ibid., pp.
28–38.
37 Ibid., p. 24 ff.
38 Ibid., pp. 23–4 and 14–15 re. the ‘Winthrop Case’.
39 W. Wordsworth, op. cit., Bk 3, ll. 64–8 and 71–2, pp. 35–6. See too Bk 3, ll.
630–1, p. 51. And cf. B. R. Schneider, op. cit., p. 25 re. the cult of ‘expedi-
ency’ or ‘self-interest’ by the students.
40 Ibid., Bk 2, ll. 69–73, p. 22. Cf. B. R. Schneider, op. cit., p. 39.
41 Ibid., Bk 3, ll. 343–66, pp. 43–4.
42 Ibid., Bk 3, ll. 73–81, p. 36.
43 William Hazlitt, ‘Character of Mr. Wordsworth’s New Poem, The Excursion’,
published in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, 21 August, 28 August, and 2 October
1814, quoted and discussed in Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: a Life
(1989), p. 304.
44 W. Wordsworth, op. cit., Bk 3, ll. 82–4 and 101–20, pp. 36–7.
45 William Wordsworth to William Mathews, letter dated 23 September 1791,
in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), p. 59.
46 M. Weber, ‘The Sociology of Charismatic Authority’, in H. H. Gerth and
C. Wright Mills (ed. and tr.), From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology (1948),
pp. 248–54. A more extensive translation of Max Weber’s views of the
Notes 263
difference between bureaucratic, patriarchal, and charismatic authority is

found in W. G. Runciman and E. Matthews (ed. and tr.), Max Weber. Selec-
tions in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Ch.11:
‘The Nature of Charismatic Domination’, pp. 226–50.
47 William Wordsworth, ‘The Pedlar’ (draft comp. 1798), quoted in John Wil-
liams, Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics (1989), p. 86.
48 W. Wordsworth, op. cit., Bk 3, ll. 121–9, p. 37.
49 Ibid., Bk 4, ll. 33–67 and 268–316, pp. 53–4 and 61.
50 Three types of mystical experience present themselves most often to the
historian of art and culture. At least, I have evolved this three-fold typol-
ogy from several works of philosophy, art, religion and psychology as a
guide to understanding Wordsworth’s varied religious experience. An ‘emo-
tional’ type is epitomised by the ‘heart’ of the subject which knows inner
certainty and truth by a powerful awareness of, and belief in, the impor-
tance of a religious emotion, or feeling, in bringing personal salvation: for
instance, the religious conversions of the Quaker, George Fox, and the
Methodist, John Wesley. An ‘intellectual’ type of mystical experience is
known to the subject through the faculties of self-conscious thought and
reason: for instance, the ‘infused contemplation’ of St Thomas Aquinas,
the deductive validity of Spinoza’s monistic theory, the logical ‘truth’ of
Hegel’s ‘dialectic’, and the philosophical intuition of F. W. J. Shelling’s
Romantic metaphysics. Last, but not least, in this triumvirate, the ‘vision-
ary’ type of experience is epitomised by the element of imaginative truth
– even if the subject is not artistic in the technical sense: his ‘visions’ may
be dreamt, or invoked by waking consciousness, or given spontaneously
by the pressure of outward events; in any case, they reveal spiritual values
and complex meanings to the subject: for instance, the obscure religious
writings of Jacob Boehme, the personal mythology of William Blake, the
bizarre revelations of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, and the haunt-
ing landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. This distinction, however, is not
rigid in theory or fixed in practice. All three elements may be present in
the head and heart of the subject – for example, Plato’s sublime allegory
of the cave and Nietzsche’s prophetic book of ‘Zarathustra’. Be this as it
may, one or two elements usually prevail. Thus Wordsworth’s ‘poetic dedi-
cation’ is, primarily, an emotional conversion in the sense that his heart
rather than his head was the seat of its artistic and religious significance.
On the other hand, the ‘spots of time’, mentioned in Book 11 of The
Prelude (Text of 1805) are, basically, ‘visionary’ events and reveal their sev-
eral truths in, and to, the imagination – or ‘the vision and the faculty
divine’.
51 Ibid., Bk 4, ll. 330–9, p. 62.
52 Ibid., Bk 4, ll. 340–5, p. 62.
53 M. Weber, Basic Concepts in Sociology (tr. and intro. by H. P. Secher) (Lon-
don: Peter Owen, 1962), p. 36; cf. pp. 30–2 and 15–16 Secher’s ‘Introduction’.
54 W. Wordsworth, op. cit., Bk 1, ll. 139 and 158, pp. 4 and 5.
55 Cf. M. Weber, ‘The Nature of Charismatic Domination’, pp. 231–2.
56 Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ (1798), l. 22 in J. O.
Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth. The Poems (1977), Vol. 1, p. 312.
58 Ibid., Bk 6, l. l39, p. 86.
264 Notes
59 M. Weber, ‘The Sociology of Charismatic Authority’, p. 246.

60 Cf. W. Wordsworth, op. cit., Bk 6, ll. 19–54, p. 86.
61 M. Weber, Basic Concepts in Sociology (1962), pp. 31–2.
62 Ibid., p. 14, Secher’s ‘Introduction’.
63 M. Weber, ‘The Sociology of Charismatic Authority’, p. 248.
64 Ibid., p. 247: in its ‘pure’ form, ‘charisma is never a source of private gain for
its holders in the sense of economic exploitation by the making of a deal’.
65 Ibid., p. 246.
66 William Wordsworth graduated BA on 21 January 1791.
67 William Wordsworth to William Mathews, letter dated 23 September 1791,
in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), pp. 57–8.
68 Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard, letter dated 7 December 1791, in
E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), p. 66.
69 William Wordsworth to William Mathews, letter dated 23 November 1791,
70 John Robinson to William Wordsworth, letter dated 6 April 1788, in E. De
Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), p. 18 n. 4.
71 Richard Wordsworth to his uncle Richard Wordsworth of Whitehaven, let-
ter dated 7 November 1791, in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805),
p. 61 n. 1.
72 Cf. M. Moorman, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 208–9.
73 Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 212–14.
74 Johnson was ‘considered [to be] the father of the book trade’ in London.
He was also publisher of the Analytical Review, between 1788 and 1799:
see DNB, X, pp. 909–10.
75 Until Raisley Calvert Junior was twenty-one years of age, his father’s legacy
was held in trust by the Duke of Norfolk. M. Moorman, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp.
229–30.
76 The most credible view of Wordsworth’s friendship with the Calverts, in
the period 1794–5, is given by Mary Moorman, ibid., Vol. 1, Ch. 8; but a
shrewd account of the poet’s dependence is found in Hunter Davies’s book,
William Wordsworth. A Biography (1980), pp. 68–74.
77 William Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont, letter dated 23 February 1805,
in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), p. 546. Cf. too W.
Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 13, ll. 342–59, pp. 238–9.
78 M. Moorman, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 266–7.
79 Cf. J. Williams, op. cit., p. 82.
80 M. Moorman, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 325.
81 The best account of the spy story and its meaning for social historians is given
by E. P. Thompson, in ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’ (1969).
82 Re. Cottle see: DNB, IV, pp. 1221–2 and MEB, 1, pp. 727–8. Re. Stuart see:
DNB, XIX, pp. 75–6.
83 Re. Sotheby, see: DNB, XVIII, pp. 673–6. Re. Longman, see: DNB, XII,
p. 123. Re. Rogers, see: DNB, XVII, pp. 139–42.
84 No doubt too it made the plight of the rural poor seem even more desper-
ate and unjust.
85 R. Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1963), Ch. 2, esp. pp. 49–51;
and idem, The Long Revolution (1961), Part Two. See too the standard ac-
counts of ‘Arts and Letters’ at the time, for example, E. Halevy, England in
1815 (1960 edn), Pt III, Ch. ii.
Notes 265
86 Cf. E. Halevy, ibid., p. 509. The ‘copy-right’ to the Lyrical Ballads was more
lucrative to the poet than we might think: For instance, Joseph Cottle
bought the copyright to Lyrical Ballads (1798), for the sum of 60 guineas:
thirty each for the poets (Coleridge and Wordsworth). By a strange series
of events the copyright was returned to Wordsworth, in 1799, because
Cottle gave up publishing books and Longman did not want it. In conse-
quence, when a second edition of the Lyrical Ballads was called for, in
1800, Longman offered the owner (Wordsworth) 80 pounds ‘for the right
of printing two editions of 750 each of this vol. of poems and . . . one of
1000 [and] another of 750 of another volume of the same size’. Cf. Thomas
Norton Longman quoted in Mary Moorman, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 486–7;
and W. J. B. Owen, ‘Costs, Sales and Profits of Longman’s Editions of
Wordsworth’, Library, 5th ser. 12 (1957), pp. 93–4 incl. n. 4.
87 Cf. H. Davies, op. cit., pp. 262–3.
88 Cf. M. Moorman, William Wordsworth. A Biography (1965) [= Vol. 2], pp.
100–1.
89 Letter to [–] Constable, dated 1808, quoted in Elie Halevy, loc. cit., p. 499.
90 These figures are drawn from the table of ‘Nominal Annual Earnings . . .
[for] England and Wales, 1710–1911’, in B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British
Historical Statistics (1988), p. 153.
91 In a letter to her aunt, Elizabeth Rawson, in 1798, Dorothy wrote that:
‘Our expenses last year [were] 23 L. for rent, our journey to London, clothes,
servant’s wages & c included, only amounted to 110 L.’ That ‘only’ is
perhaps worth noting. Dorothy Wordsworth to Mrs W. Rawson, letter dated
13 June and 3 July 1798, in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805),
p. 224.
92 Cf. DNB, XVII, pp. 1020 and 1022. In December 1799, he was appointed
to the position of Sheriff-deputy of Selkirkshire, in Scotland, for the hand-
some salary of 300 pounds a year.
93 Cf. E. Halevy, op. cit., pp. 396–8. Cf. too the account of Lake District cura-
cies given in Chapter 2.
94 Wordsworth’s friend, William Mathews, was a case in point. His mental
and physical health failed quickly in the teaching profession – in part,
from the poor income and, in part, from the office itself. For his part,
Wordsworth was convinced that ‘even less than’ a hundred pounds a year
would be sufficient to secure ‘that independence’ which his friend so ar-
dently wished for. Cf. W. Wordsworth to W. Mathews, letters dated 23
September and 23 November 1791, in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1
(1787–1805), pp. 59 and 62.
95 M. Moorman, op. cit., 1, p. 251; and DNB, XVII, pp. 15–17.
96 William Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont, letter dated 12 March 1805,
97 Cf. the books and page references given in notes 1–3 above.
98 M. Weber, ‘The Sociology of Charismatic Authority’, pp. 247–8.
99 Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘Written in London, September, 1802’ (1807), l. 11 in
J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 580. Regarding Wordsworth’s stringent diet
and frugal lifestyle, see the standard biographies by Moorman and Gill.
loc. cit., Vol. 2, p. 39. M. Weber, ‘The Sociology of Charismatic Authority’,
p. 247.
266 Notes
101 Cf. William Wordsworth to Joseph Cottle, letter dated 27 July 1799, in
E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), p. 267.
102 Cf. William Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont, letter dated 12 March
1805, in E. De Selincourt, ibid., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), p. 555.
103 William Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont, letter dated 20 July 1804, in
E. De Selincourt, ibid., Vol. 1, (1787–1805), p. 491. In a letter to the same
patron, dated 12 March 1805, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 554, he wrote candidly that
‘with regard to money received from strangers or those with whom a Man
of Letters has little personal connection, nothing can justify this but strong
necessity, for the thing is an evil in itself; the right or the wrong in this
case will be regulated by the importance of the object in view, and the
inability to attain it without this or other means being resorted to. With
respect to personal Friends; according to the degree of Love between them
and the value they set upon each other the necessity will diminish of
weighing with scrupulous jealousy and fear whether such gifts should be
received and to what amount: nevertheless in this[,] as in every other
species of communication[,] good sense, strict moral principle, and the
greatest delicacy on both sides ought to prevail’.
104 Cf. M. Moorman, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 586–8; and Vol. 2, pp. 36–7 and 428.
Sir George Beaumont died in 1827.
105 Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 559–61; and Vol. 2, pp. 59–63, 241 and 243–4. In 1806
Wordsworth bought the freehold estate of Broad How, in Patterdale,
Westmorland, for L1000. Lord Lonsdale, without Wordsworth’s prior knowl-
edge, gave L200 towards the purchase price. (Wordsworth used his wife’s
400 pound dowry to pay off the mortgage in 1809.)
106 Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘To B. R. Haydon’ (1816), l. 1 in J. O. Hayden, The
Poems (1977), Vol. 2, p. 317.
107 See the following books for examples of this argument: M. Moorman, op.
cit., Vol. 1, pp. 167–9; F. M. Todd, op. cit., pp. 18 and 21; and S. Gill, op.
cit., pp. 34–5.
108 The debt – excluding interest – was c. 4700 pounds. M. Moorman, ibid.,
Vol. 1, p. 71.
109 M. Friedman, op. cit., passim – esp. ‘Introduction’, pp. 4–5, Chapters 1 and
2, and ‘Conclusion’, pp. 295–302.
110 Ibid., Ch. 1, passim.
111 The argument given by Friedman has two basic elements. On the one hand,
he maintains that Wordsworth’s mother was ‘the prototype for all subse-
quent experience of affective community’. In other words, his imaginative
‘sense of vastness and omnipotence’, his ‘sentiment of being’, in boyhood
was based upon his emotional bond to his mother. Her ‘love seems to
have constituted this golden age. Without her love and in communities
without sufficient affective relations’, like London, ‘he was a solitary whose
very solidity of being was threatened’ (ibid., pp. 10–11). On the other hand,
he claims that Wordsworth’s ‘egoistic strivings for his mother’ and ‘fear of
paternal retribution belong to a later period of Wordsworth’s psychic his-
tory than do the origins of the sentiment of being and the [oceanic] feelings
of mastery over the outside world’ (ibid., p. 15).
112 H. Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex (London: Pan Books Ltd, 1959), p. 85.
In the same way, the anthropologist Malinowski argued that Freud over-
looked the culture-specific nature of the ‘Oedipal complex’, which could
Notes 267
only arise in the patriarchal family of modern times (ibid, pp. 85–6).
113 Ibid., p. 85. Cf. too S. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (tr. by
J. Riviere) (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1923), p. 175.
114 Otto Rank quoted and paraphrased in Henry Havelock Ellis, ibid., pp. 88–9.
115 Cf. S. Gill, op. cit., ‘Introduction’ and Pt I, Ch. 1: 1770–1789. Cf. too William
Wordsworth quoted in Ernest De Selincourt, The Prelude (Text of 1805), p. x.
116 H. Davies, op. cit., p. 26.
117 F. M. Todd, op. cit., p. 17.
118 Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Pollard, letter dated late July 1787, quoted
in F. M. Todd, ibid., pp. 16–17.
119 W. Wordsworth, ‘Autobiographical Memoranda’, in J. O. Hayden, William
Wordsworth. Selected Prose (1988), pp. 4–5.
120 Cf. too the note on this famous poem in Jared Curtis, The Fenwick Notes of
William Wordsworth (1993), p. 56.
121 William Paley quoted and discussed in J. C. D. Clark, op. cit., p. 115.
122 Compare the admirable treatment of the Calvert family by the Duke of
Norfolk.
123 Nor was the ‘thorny labyrinth of litigation’ easily forgotten. Its costly de-
lays and strange procedures were received by the young poet as insults
added to injury. See: W. Wordsworth, ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’
(1793) in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., p. 157. Cf. W. Wordsworth, ‘Imitation of
Juvenal – Satire VIII’ (comp. 1795–6), ll. 12–13 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit.,
Vol. 1, p. 142. Likewise, he wrote scathingly of Hugh Percy, who was knighted
in 1788:
But ye who make our manners, laws, and sense,

Self-judged can with such discipline dispense,
And at your will what in a groom were base
Shall stick new splendour on his gartered grace. (Ibid., Bk 2, ll.
53–6, p. 143)
The lines were no less appropriate to Sir James Lowther – from the
poet’s point of view.
124 N. Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: the Radical Years (1988), pp. 36–7 and
45–6.
125 J. Brewer, ‘English Radicalism in the Age of George III’, in J. G. A. Pocock,
loc. cit., p. 331.
126 Ibid., p. 334 ff.
127 Ibid., p. 347.
128 H. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (1969), p. 182.
129 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 9, ll. 218–49, pp. 157–8.
Wordsworth’s actual school life at Hawkshead was spent, as G. M. Trevelyan
observed, ‘amid the healthy companionship of north-country yeomen’s sons’.
Nor was it burdened with ‘organised athleticism, examination, inspection
or competition’. When combined with his ‘scrambling and rambling’ among
the hills and dales of the north, and other ‘boyish pursuits’, we can better
balance the competing claims of Wordsworth’s formal education and ‘moun-
tain liberty’ as general social causes of his early republican creed. Above
all, the social and economic equality of Old Lakeland was epitomised in
the old system of endowed grammar schools as much as the statesmen
268 Notes
system of farming. No major distinctions were made between the boys in

the classroom or between them and their community. Even their ‘diver-
sions’ were the same: they wandered everywhere; they raided raven’s nests;
boated on Coniston water; went horse-riding among the ruins of Furness
Abbey; rattled hazel-trees for fresh nuts, and fished for trout, char and
pike; and so on. In consequence, ‘the poet in the child survived into the
man’. Cf. G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and
After (1782–1919) (1939), p. 28 incl. n. 1. See too idem, History of England
(1926), pp. 522–3.
130 J. Williams, Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics (1989), p. 5.
131 Ibid., p. 39. ‘This is not to argue that Wordsworth became in any strict
sense a latter-day Commonwealthman, rather that he contextualised the
issues in terms of the mid-eighteenth-century debates on liberty, property
and power where Commonwealthman ideology was a powerful and influ-
ential source of rhetoric.’
132 Ibid., p. 162. Wordsworth’s reading of classical literature at Hawkshead
Grammar School has been studied by Ben Ross Schneider as basic to his
early republican beliefs – for instance, his knowledge of Cicero’s famous
book De Officiis offered him a moral ideal of political virtue and civic re-
sponsibility like that found in ancient Rome and her provinces. Above all,
it gave him a classical version of human law and behaviour which was
subject to the universal law of Nature – even though the idea of Nature
was very different in Wordsworth’s day. Cf. B. R. Schneider, op. cit., p. 76.
Cf. too B. Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (1989 edn), passim.
133 Ibid., p. 129.
134 Ibid., pp. 128–9.
135 J. Brewer, op. cit., pp. 342–4. Cf. too R. E. Richey, ‘The Origins of British
Radicalism: the Changing Rationale for Dissent’, ECS, 7 (1973–74),
pp. 179–92. Richey concludes that: ‘Dissent had come into being in loy-
alty to Puritan ideals and Puritan objections to Anglicanism . . . But in the
course of the [eighteenth] century the language used in self-defense, the
language of the Toleration Act, of Locke and of Whiggery came gradually
to displace the objections to Anglicanism. This language was internalized
as a self-understanding and the identity of Dissent was thereby transformed.
The Dissenting radicalism of the late eighteenth century was then a work-
ing out of new roles consistent with the new sense of identity’ (ibid., pp.
191–2).
136 I. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle. The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of
Walpole (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp.
252–60.
137 Ibid., pp. 12–13. Although the Act was easily overcome, in practice, it was
a political coup, in principle, for Lord Bolingbroke’s Opposition which had
defeated the concerted efforts of Walpole’s whig administration.
138 Ibid., p. 260.
139 Cf. B. R. Schneider, op. cit., pp. 145–6.
140 N. Roe, op. cit., pp. 5–6 and 20.
141 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Bk 9, ll. 518–32, p. 331.
142 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1968), pp. 103–4.
143 See the short bibliography on the subject of Wordsworth’s debt to the
French and English radicals in John Williams, op. cit., pp. 66–7.
Notes 269
144 E. N. Hooker, ‘Wordsworth’s Letter to the Bishop Of Llandaff’, SIP, 28 (1931),

pp. 522–31. Wordsworth probably read Paine’s books during the spring of
1791 (Rights of Man, Part 1 [1791], and Common Sense [1776]) and the
spring of 1792–3 (Rights of Man, Part 2 [1792]). He definitely read the said
books by the spring of 1793. D. Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (1993),
pp. 109–10.
145 W. D. Rubinstein, ‘British Radicalism and the “Dark Side” of Populism’, in
idem, loc. cit., p. 354. See too I. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle. The
Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole, passim.
146 I. Kramnick, ibid., p. 253.
147 John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon quoted in W. D. Rubinstein, op. cit.,
p. 354.
148 W. D. Rubinstein, ibid., p. 355. Cf. too A. Quinton, The Politics of Imperfec-
tion: the Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England
from Hooker to Oakeshott (1978), p. 44.
149 Cf. N. Roe, op. cit., p. 28.
150 W. Wordsworth, ‘Imitation of Juvenal – Satire VIII’ (comp. 1795–6), ll.
156–62 in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 146.
151 An Historical Essay on the Constitution of England (1771) quoted in Christo-
pher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’ (1954), p. 43. It is worth noting that
Bolingbroke was also one of the ablest defenders of the Englishman’s ‘spirit
of liberty’. According to Hugh MacDougall, he ‘skilfully used what can
only be called a Whig interpretation of history to attack the policy of
Robert Walpole’. Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, quoted and dis-
cussed in Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History (1982), pp.
79–80.
152 C. Hill, ibid., p. 43.
153 Dr Robert Brady paraphrased by Isaac Kramnick in op. cit., p. 128. The
reader, however, is referred back to Sir Charles Elton’s views of the feudal
system of government as a legal fiction and the actual growth of land-
tenures in the countryside, especially in the Lake Counties of England,
from comparatively free Anglo-Saxon and Danish communities. See Chap-
ter 2. Cf. also S. B. Chrimes, English Constitutional History, 4th edn (1967),
p. 75 ff, and H. Butterfield, The Englishman and his History (1945), pp. 75–7.
154 Cf. H. A. MacDougall, op. cit., p. 78.
155 Ibid., p. 127.
156 Dr Robert Brady paraphrased by Isaac Kramnick in op. cit., p. 128.
157 C. Hill, op. cit., pp. 43–4. The Essay was quoted verbatim in the address
which Cartwright drafted for the said Society.
158 Ibid., p. 44 incl. n. 3.
159 Thomas Paine quoted in Christopher Hill, ibid., pp. 46–7.
160 Ibid., pp. 46–7.
161 William Wordsworth to William Mathews, letter dated 8 June 1794, in E.
De Selincourt, loc. cit.,Vol. 1 (1787–1805), pp. 123–4.
162 Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 124–5. The reader, however, is reminded that Cobbett
was a very strong supporter of the Pitt government throughtout the 1790s.
Cf. too William Wordsworth to William Mathews, letter dated 23 May 1794,
in E. De Selincourt, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 119.
163 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 125.
164 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 124; and William Wordsworth to William Mathews, letters
270 Notes
dated c. 24 December 1794 and 7 January 1795, in E. De Selincourt, ibid.,

Vol. 1, p. 137.
165 Cf. the interesting remarks by Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish on the
democratic tone and direct style of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine
and their relevance to the American War of Independence. J. Bronowski
and B. Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition: from Leonardo to Hegel
(New York and Evanston: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962), pp. 376–9.
166 W. Wordsworth, ‘Advertisement’ prefixed to the first edition of ‘Guilt and
Sorrow’, (pub. in 1842) in J. O. Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 1, p. 119.
167 W. Wordsworth, ‘Guilt and Sorrow; or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain’ (comp.
by late May 1794; pub. 1842) in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 1: Stanzas VI–VII,
pp. 120–1; LXVI–LXVII, pp. 138–9; cf. XXXI, p. 128 and XXXIV, pp. 128–9.
168 Ibid., Stanzas IV–VI, pp. 119–20. And idem, ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’
(1793) in J. O. Hayden, William Wordsworth. Selected Prose (1988), pp. 152
and 157.
169 Ibid., Stanzas XXX–XXXI, p. 128.
170 Ibid., Stanzas XXXI, p. 128; LII–LVII, pp. 134–6; cf. XLVIII, p. 133. This
idea was most powerfully expressed in the early drafts of ‘Margaret’.
171 See Chapters 1 and 3 for further details.
172 W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III. I. 58–60.
173 G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the 19th Century and After (1782–1919),
2nd edn (1937), pp. 90–1.
174 E. P. Thompson, ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, in C. C.
O’Brien and W. D. Vanech, loc. cit., pp. 149–81. Thompson’s time-frame
for Wordsworth is difficult to determine precisely. He implies that the poet
was ‘disenchanted’ with radical politics in the years 1794–1805, but kept
his faith in the ‘humanist’ values and ideas of the French Revolution.
Thereafter he drifted more quickly to the ‘apostasy’ of the tory paternalist
as expressed in the ‘good views’ of The Excursion, published in 1814. (Cf.
too idem, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, PP, 142, Feb. (1994), pp. 94–140.)
175 Ibid., pp. 152–3.
176 Ibid., pp. 150 and 171–2. See too W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805),
Bk 2, ll. 448–62, p. 32.
177 W. Wordsworth, ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1806), ll. 612–24, in J. O. Hayden,
loc. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 713–14.
178 W. Wordsworth, The Excursion, Bk 6, ll. 1–16 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 2,
p. 186.
179 H. Perkin, op. cit., pp. 179–81 re. urbanisation; 188–9 re. reluctance of the
‘lower orders’ to reject old paternal relationships and codes; and 271–3 re.
the imposition of the new middle class ideal upon the rest of society. On
the one hand, Perkin argues that ‘urbanisation was, in part the link be-
tween industrialism and class’ – though he distinguished between the
traditional towns of the old kind where paternal relationships and disci-
pline were still comparatively common and effective and the large industrial
towns where they were not. On the other hand, he shows that the ‘mid-
wife of class’ was sectarian dissent in the nation’s new towns and cities:
his statistical tables show two trends, namely, ‘the larger the town the
smaller the proportion of the population attending any place of worship’;
and, ‘the larger the town, with the exception of London, the smaller the
proportion of Anglican to all attenders’ (ibid., p. 200; cf. pp. 196–208). For
Notes 271
his part, J. C. D. Clark does not see industrial and urban growth as re-
sponsible, in itself, for ‘a rejection of Anglican doctrine by the labouring
population’ in the period 1800–1832: ‘What changed was not the theo-
retical validity or potential success of Anglicanism in an urban or industrial
society, but the emergence of that society very largely beyond the pale of
the traditional Anglican parochial structure. First, new industrial centres
were very often located in places which had never been within the nexus
of squire and parson, and the Church did not act swiftly to extend her
parochial ministrations to such areas. Secondly, English society in the early
nineteenth century experienced unprecedentedly rapid demographic change’.
J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (1985), pp. 372–3 and 375; and E.
J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (1962), Ch. 12, pp. 258–64.
180 E. P. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 175–6.
181 Ibid., p. 176.
182 W. Wordsworth, ‘Lowther! in thy majestic Pile are seen’ (comp. 1833; pub.
1835), ll. 1–8, in J. O. Hayden, The Poems, Vol. 2, pp. 769–70.
183 W. Wordsworth, ibid., ll. 9–11 in J. O. Hayden, ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 769–70.
184 How else can we explain the famous visit to Rydal Mount by the Chartist,
Thomas Cooper, in September, 1846?
Nothing struck me so much in Wordsworth’s conversation as his

remark concerning Chartism – after the subject of my imprisonment
had been touched upon. ‘You were right’, he said; ‘I have always
said the people were right in what they asked; but you went the
wrong way to get it.’ I almost doubted my ears – being in the presence
of the ‘Tory’ Wordsworth. He read the inquiring expression of my look
in a moment, – and immediately repeated what he had said. ‘You were
quite right: there is nothing unreasonable in your Charter: it is the
foolish attempt at physical force for which many of you have been
blameable.’
T. Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper. Written by Himself (London: Hodder

and Stoughton, 1872), p. 290.
185 W. Wordsworth, ‘Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland’ (1818)
in W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, loc. cit., Vol. 3, pp. 152–204. (The
quotations are taken from p. 160 of the said text; and l. 14 of the tory
sonnet, ‘Blest Statesman He, whose Mind’s unselfish will’ (1838) in J. O.
Hayden, loc. cit., Vol. 2, p. 819.)
186 Thus his ‘Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland’ (1818) which
defend the Lowther candidates and interest in Westmorland make better
reading today than his several sonnets on the family and their affairs such
as ‘TO THE EARL OF LONSDALE’ (comp. 1833; pub. 1835) in J. O. Hayden,
ibid., Vol. 2, p. 770. Re. the strengths and weaknesses of Wordsworth’s
‘ethical’, or ‘scientific’, system in poetry, see: M. Arnold, Essays in Criticism:
Second Series (1888), pp. 148–53 esp. pp. 152–3. Re. the political bases of
newspapers in the Lake District see: C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, A Short
Economic and Social History of the Lake Counties 1500–1830 (1961), p. 208.
187 M. Weber, ‘The Sociology of Charismatic Authority’ (1948), p. 248.
188 See the typical accounts of Wordsworth’s development given by V. G. Kiernan,
in ‘Wordsworth and the People’ (1956; 1973), pp. 161–206; and J. Lucas,
272 Notes
in England and Englishness (1990), pp. 89–118. Even E. P. Thompson sub-

scribed in a great measure to this view in ‘Disenchantment of Default? A
Lay Sermon’ (1969), pp. 176–81 and ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’ (1994), pp.
128–39.
189 These facts are well known and can be found in any biography. The best
accounts, however, are given by Mary Moorman and Stephen Gill in their
respective volumes.
190 Dorothy Wordsworth to William Wordsworth, letter dated 31 March 1808,
in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 2, Pt i (1806–1811), p. 207.
191 Cf. S. Gill, op. cit., pp. 367–8.
192 Hartley Coleridge quoted in Stephen Gill, ibid., p. 351.
193 Cf. S. Gill, ibid., pp. 343–4. Although he mainly wrote ‘Petrarchan’ sonnets,
his ‘Republican’ sympathies and regional interests often found expression
in Miltonic ones: see the brief but interesting paper by Jonathan Bate,
called Romantic Regionalism, Romantic Nationalism (The Centre for British
Studies, Occasional Papers, No. 2: The University of Adelaide, 1994).
194 William Wordsworth quoted in Stephen Gill, ibid., p. 344.
195 Cf. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1964), p. 72.
196 William Wordsworth quoted in Jared Curtis, op. cit., p. 42. Cf. Basil Willey,
‘On Wordsworth and the Locke Tradition’, in M. A. Abrams (ed.), English
Romantic Poets. Modern Essays in Criticism, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1975), pp. 112–22.
197 W. Wordsworth, ‘Preface to’ the Lyrical Ballad (1800/2) in J. O. Hayden,
loc. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 869 and 876, and cf. pp. 892–3.
198 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 869.
Appendix II Wordsworth and ‘the vices of an archaic

tenurial law’: a Rebuttal of Criticisms by V. G. Kiernan
1 V. G. Kiernan, ‘Wordsworth and the People’ (1956/1973), pp. 182–3.
2 Cf. C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, A Short Economic and Social History of
the Lake Counties (1961), p. 201. We might here recall the case of the Park
Family of Rydal. ‘George Park did not come into his inheritance until either
1759 or 1760, when he was admitted to it on paying a Fine of L.5. 16s.
8d., Lord’s Rent, Fines being much higher in the Manor of Rydal [in
Westmorland] than in the manor of Hawkshead [in Furness]’. T. W.
Thompson, Wordsworth’s Hawkshead (1970), p. 202. J. Nicolson and R. Burn
define a customary fine as equal to ‘the value of one year’s rent’, besides
the usual rent for that year. See J. Nicolson and R. Burn, The History and
Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland (1777), Vol. 2,
p. 185. Thus different fines were still paid according to the customary rent.
For example, a 10d fine certain required the customary tenant to pay 10d
per penny of his customary rent; and a 20d fine, 20d per penny of rent
and so on.
3 For his part, John Stuart Mill thought that the statesmen’s ‘customary dues, . . .
being fixed, no more affect their character of [small independent] propri-
etor, than the land-tax does’. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy [1848]
(1929), p. 257.
4 Cf. W. Hutchinson, The History of the County of Cumberland (1794), Vol. 1,
pp. 39, 163, and 577–8; J. Bailey and G. Culley, General View of the Agricul-
Notes 273
ture of the County of Cumberland (1794), p. 11; and J. Housman, A Topo-

graphical Description of Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire, and a Part of
the West Riding of Yorkshire (1800), pp. 64–5.
5 Isaac Gilpin quoted in Annette Bagot, ‘Mr Gilpin and Manorial Customs’,
CW2, 62 (1962), p. 228. Bagot dates the MS between 1650 and 1660, ibid.,
p. 224. Cf. too W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 38–9 and 53 ff.
6 Cf. A. Bagot, ibid., p. 229. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 26.
7 W. Hutchinson, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 446 (re. Great Dalston); and J. Nicolson
and R. Burn, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 135 (re. Caldbeck), p. 459 (re. Scaleby),
p. 361 (re. Graystoke), and p. 462 (re. Kirklinton).
8 The evidence for this statement is implicit in the third point.
9 Robert Snoden [= Snowden] quoted in C. M. L. Bouch, op. cit., p. 249. For
examples of famous court cases between tenants and landlords see: J. Nicolson
and R. Burn, ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 306–8 re. the trial at bar between Sackville
Tufton (7th Earl of Thanet) and his Westmorland tenants – over the fines
imposed after the 6th Earl’s death.
10 Cf. J. Nicolson and R. Burn, ibid., Vol. 2, p. 17 (re. 7 Eliz. I), p. 383 (re. 16
Eliz. I), and pp. 616–17 (re. 44 Eliz. I); T. West, The Antiquities of Furness,
2nd edn (1805), p. 194 (re. 25 Eliz. I); and W. Parson and W. White, Direc-
tory (1829), p. 594 (re. Lowther Parish).
11 J. Nicolson and R. Burn, ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 51–2 (re. the Prince of Wales);
and W. Parson and W. White, op. cit., pp. 493–4 (re. the Earl of Annandale).
12 W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 123 (re. parish of Brampton); J. Nicolson
and R. Burn, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 494 (re. parish of Cumwhitton), p. 93 (re.
John, Lord Ashburnham and the tenants of Martindale).
13 See the following examples taken from J. Nicolson and R. Burn, ibid., Vol.
2: the parish of Croglin was held by the Provost and Scholars of Queen’s
College, Oxford (p. 435); Little Salkeld, in the parish of Addingham
(p. 449) and a manor in the parish of Sebraham (p. 325) were held by the
Dean and Chapter of Carlisle (p. 449); but the tenants of the forfeited
Derwentwater estates paid ‘fines on the death of the king, as if he were a
private person’ (p. 79).
14 Cf. the remarks above re. the right of commonage in Westmorland.
15 Cf. the case of the tenants in the Manor of Corby, who were enfranchised,
in the early nineteenth century, but whose boon days and services ‘had
long been discontinued’. ([–]. Mannix and [–]. Whellan, History, Gazetteer,
and Directory of Cumberland (Beverley, 1847), pp. 215–16.) This is impor-
tant to note, because readers of William Hutchinson’s account of the same
manor would have been struck by the detailed list of ‘feudal’ constraints
upon the said tenants. (W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 163.)
16 Cf. for example, the fate of the tenants of the forfeited Derwentwater es-
tates already mentioned.
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Index 287
Index
Advice to Young Men (1829), 103 Beckett, J. V., 5, 27 ff., 37, 48, 70
agriculture: see Old Lakeland and Bell, Andrew, 98
enclosure Bentham, Jeremy, 86
A Guide Through the District of the Bewick, Thomas, 28
Lakes (1835), 3–4, 36, 48, 61 Birkett, ‘Dame’ Ann, 91
Aikin, Arthur, 172 Birmingham, 106
Akenside, Mark, 181 Black, ‘Doctor’ John, 111
‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ Blackstone, Judge William, 54–5
(comp. 1793), 188–9 Bland family, 11
Alfoxden, 96, 171, 175, 195 Bloch, Marc, 59, 61
Alfred the Great and the Saxons’ Blois, 170
‘Free Constitution’, 2, 119, 186 Bloom, Harold, 17
alienation, 77 body-snatching, 80
Ambleside, 66, 117 Bognor, 87
Amiens, Peace of, 85 Boke of Recorde of the Burgh of Kirkby
Anderson, Robert, 28 Kendal, The (1575), 73
Anglican political theology, 19, Bolingbroke, Lord, 182, 184 ff.
118–27, 150 ff., 181, 191 ff. Bonaparte: see Napoleon
Anglican schools, catechism and Border tenant right: origins; rights
creed, 98 and duties; difference to
Anglo-Saxons, 2, 55, passim copyhold; reduction to customary
Annales, 59 estate of inheritance and
Annual Review, 172 copyhold, 3–4, 54 ff., passim
Antiquities of Furness (1805), 59–60 Bouch, Canon C. M. L., 22, 23, 30,
Appleby, 73, 84 37, 40, 44–5, 46 ff., 56
Applethwaite, 47, 175 Bowman, Thomas, 148–9
Aries, Philippe: history of childhood, Brady, Robert, 186
class relations and sentiment de Brampton Parish, 60
l’enfance, 6, 143–54 Brewer, John, 180, 181
aristocratic code, 179–80 Brighton, 87
Arnold, Matthew, 6 Brinton, Crane, 131, 140
Art and the Industrial Revolution (1968), 17 Bristol, 52, 106
Aspatria, 30 Broad How, 175
‘Brothers, The’ (1800), 6, 35, 36 192
Bailey, John, 24, 42, 51 Brougham, Henry, 98, 106, 111, 119, 154
Baring, Alexander, 115 Brown, Doctor John, 58
Baring, Sir Thomas, 115 Brundage, Anthony, 114 ff.
Bateman, John, 40–1 Burdett, Sir Francis, 76, 80
Bath, 87 Burgh by Sands, 54
Beattie, James, 148, 181 Burke, Edmund: views of original sin;
Beaumont, Sir George and Lady, 41, society as a corporation;
47, 76, 85, 155, 175 relationship of state to society;
Beaupuy, Michel, 180 patrician culture; prescriptive
Becker, A. L., 25 rights; problems of abstract
287
288 Index
theory and reason in politics; object of comparison for

defence of chivalry, 7–8, 128–41, 191 Wordsworth’s anti-modernist
Burn, Richard, 58 ff., 62–3, 69 views and activities, 7–9, 68–9,
Burns, Robert, 91, 148 183–9
populist beliefs, incl. critique of
Calhoun, C. J., 84 Old Corruption and ‘the
Calvert (junior), Raisley, 170, 173 THING’ that was crippling Old
Calvert (senior), Raisley, 170 England, 84 ff., 111–12, 123,
Calvert, William, 170 185–9
Cambridge, 31 Cockermouth, 29, 47, 62, 72, 145
Cambridge University: reading, Coke, Edmund, 3
examination and honours system; ‘Coketown’, 77
social and economic status of Cole, G. D. H., 95
students; political commitments Coleorton Hall (Leicestershire), 175
of staff and students, 2, 155, Coleridge, Hartley, 196
157–75, 181–3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 17, 52–3,
Carlisle, 55, 57, 73, 75 84, 120–1, 125, 126, 132, 139,
Carlisle Patriot (1815), 194 171, 172, 182–3
Carlyon, Clement, 159 Collingwood, R. G., 79 ff.
Cartwright, Major John, 185 ff. Colthouse, 91
Catholic emancipation 122–7 Combination Acts, 109
Catholic England, 122–7 Committee of Public Safety, 130
Cato’s Letters (1724), 184 Common Sense (1776), 183, 186
‘Celandine, The Small’ (1807), 172 Commonwealthman tradition, 181
Centuries of Childhood (1962), 143 ff., 184 ff.
Charles, Prince of Wales [= Charles Convention of Cintra, The (1809),
I], 56–7 130–1
Charles II, 150 Cookson (mother), Ann: see Ann
Chartism, 5, 194 Wordsworth
‘Chatsworth! Thy stately mansion, Cookson née Crackanthorpe
and the pride’ (comp. 1830, pub. (grandmother), Dorothy, 10,
1835), 46 145–6, 178
Cheltenham, 87 Cookson née Cowper, Dorothy: see
Chester, diocese of, 64 Dorothy Cowper
Christian, Edward, 149 Cookson (later Cookson-
‘Church-and-King’ mobs, 81 Crackanthorpe) (uncle),
Church and State hegemony: see Christopher, 10, 145–6, 161, 178
Anglican political theology Cookson (grandfather), William,
Clapham, Sir John, 43–4, 153–4 145–6, 178
Clark, J. C. D., 7, 15, 19–20, 114, Cookson (uncle), Rev. William, 10,
118, 126–7, 150–1, 179–80, 192ff. 103, 157, 160, 162, 169
Clarke, John, 181 copyhold tenure: see Border tenant right
Clarkson, Thomas, 76 cornage rent (= noutgeld), 54
clergy: role in rural society, livings, Craftsman, The, 184
absenteeism, 63 ff., 173 Craik, Rev. John, 65
Cobban, Alfred, 90, 128, 131 crime rates, 32–3
Cobbett, William Culley, George, 24, 42, 51
biographical details are discussed ‘cultural despair’, 18
under the heads (or themes) to customary estate of inheritance: see
Chapter 3 Border tenant right
Index 289
‘Daisy, The’ (1807), 172 factory system of production

Danes, 55 (textiles): hours and conditions;
Das Kapital (1867), 112 child labour; women; relations
Davies, Hunter, 144–5, 177 between workers and bosses, 107–12
Defoe, Daniel, 74 fallibility: doctrine of, 7, 131 ff., 141 ff.
demography, 106, and Chapter family life and relationships: see Old
5 – note 179 Lakeland
Denton, Rev. Thomas, 153 Farnham, 69, 74, 95
Derwent, 145 Fawcett, Joseph, 76
‘Deserted Village, The’ (1770), 28 Fenwick, Isabella, 197
Dicey, A. V., 9, 90 Fenwick, Thomas, 60
Directorate, 132 fines: definition of: see Appendix II
Directory (1829), 12, 37, 40, 73 Fisher, John, 48
domestic industry: see Old Lakeland Fleet Street, 76
Dove Cottage, Grasmere, 67 Fleming family, 66
Dublin, 19 Flodden Field, 57
Dyhouse, C. A., 40, 116 Forncett, 10, 170
Fox, Charles James, 4
Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822), 196 free-born Englishman, 1–2, 57–8,
Edinburgh, 19 103, 109
Edinburgh Review, The, 17, 111, 172 French Revolution, 130–1, 169–70
Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against Freud, Sigmund, 13, 176 ff.
the Eighteenth Century (1929), 128 Frewen, Edward, 155
education, 97 ff. Friedman, Michael H., 143, 146, 155,
Education Act, 104 161, 173, 176 ff.
Edward VI, 124 Frost, Robert, 102, 136
Eldon, Lord, 126 Furness: domestic industry and
‘Elegiac Stanzas’ (1807), 172 by-employments of, 29–30
Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 196
Elizabeth I, 124, 182 Garnett, Frank W., 40
Ellenborough, Lord, 55–4 General Enclosure Act (1801): see
Ellis, Henry Havelock, 177 enclosure
Elyot, Sir Thomas, 182 genetic fallacy, 14
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 36 Gentlemen’s Magazine (1766), 40
Emile (1762), 145 gentry estates: size of and residence
enclosure: Acts of Parliament, pace upon, 31 ff.
and extent of change, 41–6, George III, 180
70–2 George, M. Dorothy, 1, 6, 75, 151
Eng1ish Family 1450–1770 (1984), 144 Gibson, Alexander Craig, 5, 64–5
English Traits (1856), 36 Gill, Stephen, 147, 177
estatesman: see statesman Gillbanks, Rev. Joseph, 91
Eton, 160 Gilpin, William, 58
Evans, E. J., 29, 70 Golden Age theories: definition of,
Excursion, The (1814), 18, 58, 66, 1–20
81–2, 108, 124, 130, 164, 191–2, Goldsmith, Oliver, 28, 148
196 Gordon, Thomas, 184
Gosforth, 152
‘Factories Inquiry Commission . . . Gothic England, 122–7; see also
Employment of Children in Catholic England; Norman yoke;
Factories’ (1833), 209 organic society
290 Index
Grasmere, 32, 66–7, 175, 194 Huskisson, William, 111

Grasmere Journals, The, 106 Hutchinson, Mary, 91, 195; see Mary
Grasmere parish, 105 Wordsworth
Gratien, Balthazar, 143 Hutchinson, William, 22–3, 25, 32,
Gray’s Inn, London, 11, 76, 170 47, 57, 58, 62, 153
Gray, Thomas, 66–7
Great Reform Bill (1832), 139 ‘Imitation of Juvenal – Satire VIII’
Green, George and Sarah, 34, 39 (comp. 1796), 88, 188
Greenwood, Rev. Robert, 24–5, 39 Ingleton, Yorkshire, 24–5
Guildford, 2nd Earl of [= Frederick Irish Association 122
North], 25 Irish question: the Roman Catholic
‘Guilt and Sorrow; or Incidents upon Church and Irish nationalism,
Salisbury Plain’ (pub. 1842), 188–9 122–7
Gunning, Henry, 162, 182 Irving, Washington, 78
Halevy, Elie, 126, 161 Jacobins, 121, 130, 187

Hamilton, Sir William Rowan, 138 James I, 56–7
Hammond, B. and J. L., 5, 42, 77 James IV, 57
Hardy, Thomas, 187 Jeffrey, Francis, 172
Harrington, James, 182 Jews, 88 ff.
Harrison, John, 92 Johnson, Joseph, 76, 170, 185
Hawkshead, 29, 78, 82–3, 104, 166 Johnson, Doctor Samuel, 76
Hawkshead Grammar School, 2, 91, Jones, G. P., 25, 30, 37, 40, 46
105, 146, 148–9, 155, 157 Jones, Rev. Robert, 169
Hay, Douglas, 117–18 Jonson, Ben, 67
Hazlitt, William, 164 Joyce, Patrick, 19, 107
Henry VIII, 57, 123, 124 Juvenal, 88
heriot, definition of: see Appendix II
Hill, Christopher, 1–3 Kendal, 47, 62, 70, 73, 92, 116
Historical Essay on the English ‘Kendal cottons’, 48
Constitution (1771), 186 Kendale, barony of, 23, 56
History of the County of Cumberland Kendal Gazette (1818), 194
(1794), 152; see also William Kentmere, manor of, 60
Hutchinson Keswick, 29, 47, 62, 68, 72 ff.
History of the Protestant Reformation Kiernan, Victor Gordon, 16, 155, and
Part II (1827), 126 Appendix II
Hobart, Justice, 56 Kirkby Lonsdale, 37, 70
Hobsbawm, E. J., 13 Klingender, Francis D., 17–18, 112,
Hodgson, John, 92 140
Hofstadter, Richard, 88 Kramnick, Isaac, 181 ff.
Holland, Lord and Lady, 76
Holm Cultram, 56 Lamb, Charles, 78, 151
‘Home at Grasmere’ (1806), 67, 78, Lamb, Mary, 151
191, 197 Landed Qualification Bill of 1711,
Honiton, Borough of, 76 182
Hooker, Edward Niles, 183–4 Langhorne, John, 148
Hooker, Richard, 128 Langton, John, 182
Houlbrooke, R. A., 6, 144, 152 Law, Edmund, 159, 181–2
Housman, John, 21, 32, 50, 57, 58, Lay of the Last Minstrel, The (1805),
65, 67, 72, 100, 152 172
Index 291
Letter Concerning the Civil Principles of Marxist criticism, 16, 155–7

Roman Catholics (1780), 127 Mathews, William, 187
Letters of the Bath and West of Mayer, A. J., 7, 19, 126
England Society for the Melville, Herman, 76, 132
Encouragement of Agriculture, Etc., Merry Old England, 117
Vols 6 (1792) and 7 (1795), 52 ‘Michael’ (1800), 6, 36, 99
Lincoln’s Inn, London, 76 Middlesex, 31, 80
Linebaugh, Peter, 80 Mill, J. S., 5
Liverpool, 106 Milton, John, 146
Llandaff, Bishop of: see Richard Modern Education (English tr. 1932), 177
Watson Molesworth, Robert, 181–2
Lloyd, Charles, 12 Montagu, Basil, 76, 171, 182
Lloyd, Priscilla, 20 Moore, David, 93
Locke, John, 113 Moorman, Mary, 20, 171
London, 19, 76 ff., 85 ff., 106 Moral and Political Philosophy (1785),
Longman, Thomas Norton, 172 179
Long Revolution, The (1961), 160 More, Hannah, 103
Lonsdale (2nd creation), Lord: see Sir Morning Chronicle, 111, 172
William Lowther Morris, William, 103
lost rights, 2–3; see also Norman Morvill, Johanna De, 54
yoke Moses, Robert, 73
Lowther debt, 176 ff. Moss-troopers, 3, 58
Lowther (Viscount Lowther), Henry, Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland
13 and Westmorland (1786)
Lowther, Sir James, 11, 13, 84, 155, Moyle, Walter, 182
176–80 Mumford, Lewis, 87
Lowther family of Swillington, Myers née Wordsworth, Ann, 12
Yorkshire, 11 Myers, John, 12
Lowther family of Westmorland, 11 Myers ( Junior), Thomas, 12
Lowther, Sir William: 13, 41, 76, Myers (Senior), Rev. Thomas, 12
119, 155, 175, 195–6
Lucas, John, 16, 165 Nabholtz, J. R., 58 ff.
Lyrical Ballads (1801), 4, 105, 135–6, Napoleon, 130 ff.
142, 172, 197 National Convention, 130
Lyttleton, George, 184 national debt, 126, 184, 188
natural authority and hierarchy, 114,
Macaulay, Thomas B., 63, 106 150–1
MacDougall, H. A., 2 natural man, 128, 131, 136, 196
MacFarlane, Alan, 37 ff. Nether Stowey, 52, 171, 195
Magna Carta (1215), 186 Newbiggin Hall [= Newbiggen Hall],
Malthus, Rev. Thomas, 110–11, 182 Westmorland, 178
Manchester, 106, 107 Newcastle, Lord, 126
Mannix, [–], 23, 53 New Domesday, 40
Mantoux, Paul, 5, 26 Newton, Sir Isaac, 181
Margate, 87 Nicholson, Samuel, 185
Marmion (1808), 172 Nicolson, Bishop, 63
Marshall, Alfred, 18 Nicolson, Joseph, 58 ff., 62–3, 69
Marshall, J. D., 5, 21 ff., 29, 40, 45, noblesse oblige, 1, 114, 119–20
50, 116 Norfolk [= Charles Howard], 11th
Marx, Karl, 13, 112 Duke of, 10, 170
292 Index
Norman yoke, the, 1–3, 109, 185 ff. peasantry: problem of definition, 5, 27 ff.
Norwich, 106 Pennington, Isaac, 160
Penrith, 29, 72, 104, 145, 178
Oakeshott, Michael, 140 Perkin, Harold, 1, 7, 15, 180, 192
O’Connell, Daniel, 122 Persian Letters, 184
O’Connor, Feargus, 5 Perthshire hills, 93
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from ‘Peter Bell’ (1st pub. 1819), 91
Recollections of Early Childhood Pilemarsh Lodge: see Racedown Lodge
(l807) 141–2 172 Peyt, William, 186
‘Ode to Lycoris’ (1817), 196 Phillpotts, Bishop Henry, 126
Oedipus complex, 146, 176 ff. Philosophy of Manufacture, The (1835),
Old Corruption, 19, 84–9, 183–7 110
Old Lakeland picturesque tradition, 6, 58 ff.
clergy, 63 ff. Pinchbeck, Ivy, 6
crime, 32–3 Pinney, Azariah, 171
domestic industry, 29–31 Pinney, John Frederick, 171
factory system of production Pinney, John Pretor, 171
(textiles), 46–9 Pitt (the Younger), William, 84, 85,
municipal life, incl. fairs, markets 184–5
and guilds, 72 ff. Plato, 139
new and old enclosures, 41 ff, Plumb, J. H., 71
48–9 Poems in Two Volumes (1807), 172
poor relief, 14–15, 33–6, 112–15 Poetry for Children (1809), 151
relative decline of small Politics of Cultural Despair (1961), 18
landowners, and causes thereof, Pollard, Jane, 145, 157, 178
39–41, 41–9 Poole, Thomas, 52, 171
On the Constitution of Church and Poor Law, 33–4, 113–14, 140
State (1830), 120–1 populism: definition of 86 ff., social
organic society, 125, 191 and economic character of, 90 ff.
original sin, 132 post-structural criticism, 155–7
Orleans, 170 ‘Preface to’ Lyrical Ballads (1800/
Orton parish, 32, 62, 73, 154 1802), 78 ff., 196
O’Sullivan, N. K., 129, 139 Prelates and People of the Lake
Otter, William, 182 Counties (1948), 22, 49
Oxford University, 90, 160 Prelude, The (Text of 1805), 27, 78,
Ovid, 196 79, 91, 135, 142, 158, 167–8,
177, 190, 192, 197
Paine, Thomas, 129, 183–9 Principles of a Real Whig (1711), 184
Paley, Rev. William, 159, 179 Pringle, Andrew, 22–3, 24, 42–3, 51
Paris, 170 ff., 53
Park family of the Nab, Rydal, 38 ff. Privileged Villeinage, 55
parliamentary reform, 118–21, 181–9 Protestant Reformation, 114, 123 ff.
Parson, W., 12, 23, 33, 40, 53 Pure Villeinage, 54–5
paternalism, 112–18, 119–20
patriarchalism, definition of, 149–51; Quincey née Simpson, Margaret, 38
see also J. C. D. Clark; Harold Quincey, Thomas de, 38
Perkin Quinton, Anthony, 139 ff.
Patriot, The (1792), 186
Paull, James, 76 Racedown Lodge, 171, 175
Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 147 radicalism, 181–9
Index 293
Ramsgate, 87 Slater Gilbert, 5

Rank, Otto, 177 Smith, Adam, 18, 110, 111
Ravenstonedale, 62 Smith, Charlotte, 148
Real Whigs, 181–3 Social Contract (1762), 129–31
Recluse, The (unpub.), 17, 193, 196 Society for Constitutional
Reign of Terror, 130, 132, 187 Information, 185
Relph, Rev. Josiah, 153 Solway Moss, 57
Republic, The, 139 ‘Sonnets: National Independence and
‘Reverie of Poor Susan, The’ (1800), Liberty’ (1802–15), 184–5
77 Sotheby, William, 172
Rights of Man (1791 and 1792), 129, Southey, Robert, 125, 126, 139, 172
183, 186–7 Spenser, Edmund, 146
Robert the Bruce, 57 ‘Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off
Robespierre, Maximilien, 130 Saint Bees’ Heads on the Coast
Robinson, Henry Crabb, 173 of Cumberland’ (comp. 1833),
Robinson, Captain Hugh, 157 123–5
Robinson, John, 11, 12, 13, 162, 168, Star Chamber decision: Crown v.
169–70 Non-royal Tenants in Barony of
Robinson, Mary, 11 Kendale, 56–7
Roe, Nicholas, 131 statesmen:
Rogers, Samuel, 172 attachment to hereditary farms,
Romanticism, 5–7 31–3, 36–9
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 2, 6, 128–30, connection with Anglican Church
133 and old universities, 102–4
Rowlandson, Rev. Edward, 65–6 daily life, 29–31
Rubinstein, W. D., 7, 18–19, 86, 149, definition of terms statesman and
184 ff. estatesman, 1, 3–5, 21–7
Rudé, George, 14 education, reading and oral
Ruskin, John, 103 traditions, 97–107
Rydal, 116 independent characters of, 31–3,
Rydal Mount, 194 67, 82 ff.
relative drop in numbers during the
Saint Bartholomew’s Fair, London, Industrial Revolution, and causes
81 ff. thereof (esp. patrimonies and
St James’s Park, 76 decline in domestic spinning), 39
St John’s College, Cambridge, 10, ff. 41–9, cf. 69–72
182 social and economic equality of,
Sandys, Edwin, 149 31–3, 152 ff.
Schneider, Ben Ross, 157 ff. see also Border tenant right;
Scott, Sir Walter, 125, 139, 172, 173 domestic industry; enclosure;
Scottish Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, Old Lakeland
58 Steeple Langford, 95
Seathwaite, 64 Stern, Fritz, 18
Sedburgh, 12 Steuart, Sir James, 111
Shakespeare, William, 146 Stuart, Daniel, 172
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 197 Sutton (Junior), Charles Manners, 12, 158
‘Simon Lee’ (1798), 96 Sutton (Senior), Charles Manners, 12
Simpson, David, 155, 173 Swift, Jonathan, 146–7
Simpson family of the Nab, Rydal, 38 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 197
Simpson, Rev. Joseph, 66 Swindon, Wiltshire, 88
294 Index
Switzerland, 130–1, 169 Walker, Rev. Robert, 63–4

Wallace, William, 57
Take Your Choice, 186 Walpole, Sir Robert, 184
Tales from Shakespeare (1807), 151 Watson [= Bishop of Llandaff],
Taylor, Rev. William, 148–9 Richard, 42, 130, 159
tenant-right estate: see Border tenant Watts, J. S, 57
right Wealth of Nations, The (1776), 110
Test and Corporation Acts, 125 Weber, Max, 15–16, 165 ff., 194–8
Thelwall, John, 187 Wedgwood ( Junior), Josiah, 172
The Making of the English Working Wesley, John, 22, 127
Class, 1st edn (1963), 42 West, Thomas, 58 ff., 62
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Westminster, 76
Criticism (1964 [1st pub. 1933]), Westminster School, 90
196 Wey-hill fair, 95
Thirsk, Joan, 152 Whellan, [–], 23, 53
Thompson, E. P., 1, 5, 14, 42, 80, Whitbread, Samuel, 101
100, 118, 155, 183 ff., 189 ff. ‘White Doe of Rylstone, The’ (pub.
Thompson, James, 181 1815), 195
Thompson, T. W., 24, 38, 92–3 White, W., 12, 23, 33, 40, 53
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 150 Whitehaven, 72
Todd, F. M., 131, 178 whole man, cult of the, 97–107, cf.
Toland, John, 182 107–12
Tone, Wolfe, 126 Wilberforce, William, 10, 12, 109, 160
Tooke, John Horne, 186 William the Bastard, 2
‘To Penshurst’ (1616), 67 William the Lion, 57
Trenchard, John, 184 Williams, Helen Maria, 148
Trevelyan, G. M., 5, 9, 49, 87, 90 ff. Williams, John, 155, 181 ff.
Trilling, Lionel, 17 Williams, Raymond, 1, 14, 26,
Tunbridge, 87 160–1, 172
Tweddell, John, 182 Wilson, John, 105
Two Treatises on Government (1689), Winchester School, 90, 160
113–14 Windermere, 66
Tyburn, London, 80 Windsor, 11
Tyson, ‘Dame’ Ann, 9, 58, 91 ff., Windy Brow, 53, 170
146, 166 Wishert, Thomas, 93
Tyson, Hugh, 9, 91 Wordsworth née Cookson (mother),
Ann, 10, 11, 144, 146–7, 178
Ulverston, 62 Wordsworth (aunt), Anne, 12
Under-Cragg, 64 Wordsworth (junior) (nephew),
Union of 1801, 123 Christopher, 25, 142
Ure, Andrew, 110 Wordsworth (senior) (brother),
Christopher, 12, 158, 178
Vallon, Annette, 170 Wordsworth (sister), Dorothy, 48, 67,
Van Mildert, Bishop William, 126 157, 173, 178
Vaughan, Felix, 182 Wordsworth (cousin), Favell, 11
The Village Labourer, 1st edn (1911), Wordsworth (cousin), James, 11
42 Wordsworth (brother), John, 11–12
Vindication of Natural Society (1756), Wordsworth (cousin), John, 11
131 Wordsworth (father), John, 11, 146ff.,
Virgil, 196 176
Index 295
Wordsworth née Hutchinson (wife), bohemian lifestyle, 15–16,

Mary, 91, 195 157–75
Wordsworth (brother), Richard, 11, relative decline as a poet of genius,
13, 76, 170, 173 16–20, 193–8
Wordsworth (cousin), Richard, 11 Romantic mission and artistic
Wordsworth (grandfather), Richard, 11 revolution 165 ff.
Wordsworth (uncle), Richard, 11, 12, routinisation and loss of
157 charismatic authority, 194–8
Wordsworth (cousin), Robinson, 11 subjectivity, 5–7, 133, 164–8
Wordsworth, William tory politics, ideology and writings:
agrarian radicalism: see populism see Anglican political ideology
boyhood, incl. rural education and views of the factory system of
upbringing, 8–9, 90–7 production (textiles), 107 ff.
charismatic personality and views of old London, 77 ff.
authority, 15–16, cf. Romantic views of the statesmen system of
mission; subjectivity farming, incl. notions of
Distributor of Stamps for ‘disinterested imagination’,
Westmorland, 11, 196 ‘social affections’, and folk
genealogy and family background, memories, 4, 31–2, 35–6, 48–9,
10–13 82 ff.
Hawkshead Grammar School, 2, 9, whig attitudes and ideas: see Old
passim Corruption; radicalism
ill-defined status in old landed Wordsworth (son), William ‘Willy’, 13
order, 8, 90–3 Wrangham, Rev. Francis, 98, 103,
life-long dependence upon 104, 182
patronage and professional Wu, Duncan, 52
classes, 10, 157 ff.
populism and anti-modernist yeomanry:
sentiments, 2, 8–9, 16–20, definition of, 26–7, 40–1, 48–9
68–9, 86, 90–7 numbers in Lake counties, 31
radicalism: extent of, 183–9 paternalism, 152 ff.
reading of local history, relative decline in numbers during
topography, and national the Industrial Revolution, 39 ff.
history: see Chapter 2, esp. size of farms and holdings, 23–4, 30
note 39
rebellion against patriarchal Yorkshire, West Riding of, 49
authority and adoption of a Young, Arthur, 74

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Studies in Modern History

General Editor: J. C. D. Clark, Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor

1 Old Lakeland: a Golden Age Ideal 21

Appendix I Wordsworth’s Use of the Words ‘Peasant’ and

emotionally speaking, based upon backward looking ideas and pre-modern

I have a number of formal acknowledgements to make here. First, I

AHEW Agrarian History of England and Wales

comp. Date of composition.

This is a study of the origins in social and economic history of Golden

Wordsworth’s Golden Age ideas about Old England, in general, or the

argued that many seventeenth-century statesmen and antiquarian writers

the District of the Lakes, Wordsworth used the word ‘estatesman’ as a

In the two Poems, ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’ I have attempted to

Wordsworth always admired the statesmen’s manly feelings, strong at-

. . . Paradise, and groves

Sought in the Atlantic Main – why should they be

Thus he looked to ‘Man, Nature, and Human Life’, as found in the

freedom and undisciplined lifestyle whilst a student at Hawkshead

Indeed, the study of Wordsworth’s rural education and social up-

patronage of William Wilberforce and John Robinson, eventually became

. . . While from door to door,

The mild necessity of use compels

This traditional ideal of social rights and duties was compounded by

of ‘distress’ have been holders of specific gifts of the mind or body or

fitfully escaped, or partly reworked, in the wonderful decade of Ro-

Why is the Past belied with wicked art,

capitalism. These economic and social systems of class exploitation were

Professor Rubinstein’s view of the ‘post-industrial’ elite cannot be gain-

Innocence. The concept of ‘cultural despair’, if nothing else, takes us

[Men] Who are their own upholders, to themselves

Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope,

J. D. Marshall has argued that Wordsworth erred egregiously in calling

leads Dr Marshall to conclude that the word statesman was probably

A brief example: [formal] etymology A of the word history traces it

In a similar way we might ease the tension between Dr Marshall’s scholarly

changes which were occurring in the agrarian structure’.38 In conse-

as a ‘dalesman’. 45 To avoid taxing the reader at this stage of my

associations with feudal vassalage and France were therefore weakened

Textiles was the most important by-work to be found in the Border

family connections or both. In ‘An Evening Walk’ (1793), for instance,

pendence and domestic happiness, as seen in the two anecdotes, and

For, born in a poor District, and which yet

Where kindred independence of estate

Moreover, this broad ‘Republican Equality’ had several advantages for

With respect to the morals of the people, it may be observed, that

More recently, J. D. Marshall has concluded, on the statistical evidence

economy and the pauper’s self-respect, upon the traditional methods

He had as white a head and fresh a cheek

Wordsworth argued that the customary tenants’ attachments to their

control of the unfortunate situation. The overseers of the poor pro-

– Even to the utmost I have been to thee

Historians, however, have certainly questioned such ideas as general truths.

This appears, for example, by a comparison of the names of [cus-

Nevertheless, Wordsworth was largely wrong on statistical and legal

What about the fate of the small landowners in Wordsworth’s lifetime.

be supplemented by social observation to unravel this major event.

Table 1.1 Relative decline of the ‘statesmen’ in Westmorland 1829–85

Parliamentary Enclosure of wastes and commons, in the Lake Counties,

Instead of the present scarcity of grain, large quantities might be

William Wordsworth's Golden Age Theories

William Wordsworth's Golden Age Theories

William Wordsworth's Golden Age Theories