William Wordsworth's Golden Age Theories
William Wordsworth's Golden Age Theories
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
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2001 978-0-333-79436-4
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ISBN 978-1-349-42018-6 ISBN 978-1-4039-1956-4 (eBook)
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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
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
MARK KEAY
Acknowledgements
x
List of Abbreviations
xi
Introduction
1
M. Keay, William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories during the Industrial Revolution in
England, 1750–1850
2 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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:
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
8 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
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
12 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
14 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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):
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
18 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
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:
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
21
M. Keay, William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories during the Industrial Revolution in
England, 1750–1850
22 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
24 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
Old Lakeland: a Golden Age Ideal 25
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’:
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
28 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
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:
32 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
34 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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:
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:
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.
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
42 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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.
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:
46 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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:
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
48 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
Old Lakeland: a Golden Age Ideal 49
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.
50 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
50
M. Keay, William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories during the Industrial Revolution in
England, 1750–1850
Land Tenure: a Lake District Survey 51
‘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
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-
Land Tenure: a Lake District Survey 53
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
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
56 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
Land Tenure: a Lake District Survey 57
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
58 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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.
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
60 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
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
62 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
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’.
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
64 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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:
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
Land Tenure: a Lake District Survey 65
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.
68 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
3
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a
Comparison
68
M. Keay, William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories during the Industrial Revolution in
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.
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
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.
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:
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
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 73
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 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
76 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
78 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
80 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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,
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 81
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’:
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:
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
84 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 85
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:
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
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 87
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
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:
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 89
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
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
A rural education
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:
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.
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:
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 95
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
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.
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):
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,
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 101
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
102 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
104 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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 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
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 105
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
106 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
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:
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’
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 109
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:
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
112 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
Paternalism
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
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:
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
118 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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.
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
120 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 123
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.
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
Wordsworth and Cobbett: a Comparison 125
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
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:
128
M. Keay, William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories during the Industrial Revolution in
England, 1750–1850
Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast 129
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 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
130 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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’,
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’:
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
134 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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:
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,
Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast 135
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’:
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’:
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.
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
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:
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
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:
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 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:
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
Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast 145
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:
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
Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast 147
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?
* * *
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-
Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast 149
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
Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast 151
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:
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
Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast 153
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
154 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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
M. Keay, William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories during the Industrial Revolution in
England, 1750–1850
156 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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.
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
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 161
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
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
162 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
– 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
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 163
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:
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:
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 167
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:
By his own admission, the emotional process involved was only under-
stood by the poet in the subsequent decades. In particular, The Prelude;
168 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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 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
170 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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-
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 171
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
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 173
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
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
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 175
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
178 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
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.
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 181
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-
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 183
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:
188 William Wordsworth’s Golden Age Theories
Conclusion
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
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 191
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
Wordsworth: a Weberian Account 195
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
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
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
University Press, 1984), pp. 42–3.
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
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
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.
63 W. Wordsworth, ‘Prospectus to’ The Excursion (1814), ll. 60–1 in J. O. Hayden,
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:
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.
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
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.
54 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op. cit., p. 334.
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.
70 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op. cit., p. 291.
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.
72 C. M. L. Bouch and G. P. Jones, op. cit., p. 291.
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
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
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.
35 W. Hutchinson, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 38.
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:
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
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’:
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:
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.
60 W. Wordsworth, ‘Preface to’ Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802) in J. O. Hayden,
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:
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.
160 William Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, letter dated 5 June 1808, in
E. De Selincourt, loc.cit., Vol. 2, Pt i (1806–11), p. 250.
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.
166 William Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, letter dated 5 June 1808, in
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.
168 William Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, letter dated 5 June 1808, in
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
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.
207 W. Wordsworth, ‘Postscript’ (1835) in W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser,
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.
213 W. Wordsworth, ‘Postscript’ (1835) in W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser,
loc.cit., Vol. 3, p. 242.
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.
217 W. Cobbett, 21–11–1821, in J. P. Cobbett, op.cit., Vol. 1, pp. 37–8.
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
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.
28 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 12, ll. 71–6, p. 220.
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.
36 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 12, ll. 185–93, p. 223.
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.
39 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude (Text of 1805), Bk 12, ll. 223–5, p. 224.
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.
49 E. Burke, op. cit., p. 56.
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.
54 E. Burke, op. cit., p. 243.
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
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.
73 W. Wordsworth, ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1806), ll. 136–51 in J. O. Hayden,
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
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
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,
in E. De Selincourt, loc. cit., Vol. 1 (1787–1805), p. 555.
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.
100 W. Wordsworth, ‘Prospectus to’ The Excursion (1814), ll. 60–1 in J. O. Hayden,
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:
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
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?
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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
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