Wordsworth's Political Writings

J.W., W. J. B.; Smyser, Owen

Description

This reading text of the four main political texts produced by William Wordsworth will enable readers to follow the political peregrinations of a major poet who, as he said to Orville Dewey, an American visitor, gave twelve hours thought to social questions for each hour he devoted to poetry.

Sujets

• Politique
• European
• Literary criticism

Informations

• Publié par: Humanities eBooks
• Date de parution: 11 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847600646
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Wordsworth’s Political Writings

W. J. B. Owen & J. W. Smyser

“…have you so little knowledge of the nature of man as to be ignorant, that a time of revolution is not the season of true Liberty?”

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Wordsworth’s Political Writings

edited by W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser

HEB☼ Humanities-Ebooks, LLP

© he Estate of W. J. B. Owen, 2009

he Estate as asserted W. J. B. Owen’s rigt to be identified as te autor of tis Work in accordance wit te Copyrigt, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First publised byHumanitiesEbooks, LLP Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrit CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-064-6 Ebook ISBN 978-1-84760-076-9 Paperback

Contents

Publisher’s Preface Abbreviations A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff Introduction A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff Excursus Notes to the Letter The Convention of Cintra Introduction Advertisement Concerning the Convention of Cintra [Wordsworth’s] Appendices The Armistice The Convention [De Quincey’s] Postscript on Sir John Moore’s Letters Excursus Notes to the Cintra Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland Introduction Advertisement [Wordsworth’s] Note [Wordsworth’s]Appendix Excursus Notes to the Addresses Postscript, 1835 Introduction Postscript, 1835 Appendix to the Postscript Excursus Notes to the Postscript

7 9 13 14 23 57 59 60 69 71 236 247 249 256 273 279 280 291 349 353 370

375 376 385 413 424

Publisher’s Preface

There has never, to my knowledge, been an edition ofWordsworth’s Political Writings, to stand beside the eminently useful collection of Shelley’s, or Coleridge’s, or indeed W. J. B. Owen’s collection of Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism.This edition is an attempt to îll that gap with an affordable, convenient and (in the case of the ebook) searchable text ofA Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff;Concerning the Convention of Cintra, theTwo Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland, and the 1835Postscript. Arguably, perhaps,The Guide to the Lakes, as a work entailing both environmental consciousness and human geography, should also be included, but it is more easily available in recent editions.  The texts, introductions and notes in this collection, are taken fromThe Prose Works of William Wordsworth,as edited by W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser and published by Clarendon Press in 1974. Readers needing the detailed textual notes and textual introductions in the Owen & SmyserProse Worksare referred to the 3-volume Clarendon edition or, in the case of the îrst two texts, to the Humanities-Ebooks edition of Volume 1 (2008). Almost all of their meticulous and still invaluable commentary has been retained for this edition but for convenience most of the commentary has been converted into page by page footnotes, where its value may be more easily recognized. Some cross-referencing by line numbers in the Clarendon edition has been omitted, though some remains (the presence of a line number indicates a cross-reference to the Clarendon text or commentary). Some longer notes, which would break up the page excessively, appear as hyperlinked ‘excursus notes’ after the text in question. One or two footnotes have been added, but the edition is essentially theirs, or more exactly, Professor Owen’s in the case of the îrst three works, and Professor Smyser’s in the case of thePostscript.

8

Wordsworth’s Political Writings

 The purpose of the present volume is simple: it is to allow students of Wordsworth to follow, in a single volume, the struggle between Jacobinism, republicanism, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism and social democracy in Wordsworth’s thought.  For a book containing just four works, by a single hand, the range is remarkable. In the îrst text, of 1793, Wordsworth is an unashamed apologist for terror, a regicide, whose thinking appears ‘to the last degree’ Paineite and French (I allude, of course to Lord Macaulay’s astonished comment, on reviewing the 1850Prelude, that its author had been, in his youth, ‘to the last degree Jacobinical, indeed socialist’). In 1808, while scornful of the ‘paradoxical reveries’ of Enlightenment argument, Wordsworth remains an impassioned advocate of people’s power and (inter-)national renewal, yet his passionate conviction that Napoleon is distinguished primarily for liberticide and immoralism, makes him see his own country increasingly as the natural home of ‘true liberty’. By 1818, impelled towards Toryism by the vacillation of the Whigs in the later stages of his country’s struggle with ‘the intoxicated setter-up of Kings’, as he called Napoleon, he advocates what true Whigs called ‘old corruption’ as a necessary constitutional lubricant, or at least as preferable to the shedding of blood. Yet in the independently minded and broadly liberal 1835 Postscript, he combines some very Coleridgean arguments for a responsible (Anglican) clerisy, with an advocacy of social welfare, and a vigorous assault on the Poor Law Amendment Act and other aspects of industrial capitalism. His strategy in this work is peculiarly illustrative of the difîculty one has in assessing his later political stance. He concludes it by citing, in an overtly anti-Chartist frame of mind, a passage reecting on the kind of poetry much admired by the Chartists—poetry celebrating the dignity of the common man. To a poet who prided himself on consistency, the (overtly) Jacobin quotation on the cover of this book may well have appeared quite as apt to the last of these political texts, as to the îrst.  The Publisher and the Estate are grateful to The Wordsworth Trust for permission to reissue these invaluable texts in electronic and paperback formats. Richard Gravil, Tirril, 2009

Abbreviations

Cross-references in red—e.g.E.S.and n. [signifying Essay 138–9 Supplementary, lines 138–9 and commentary]—are to the text and apparatus ofThe Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (3 vols., Oxford, 1974).

Ad. Cintra

Address Ap. Cintra

Ap. L.B. Bord. [Burke,]ReLections

Burns Cintra C.L.

C.N.B.

C.R.

D.N.B E.E. E.S. Exc.

Advertisement toConcerning…the Convention of Cintra [Address on the Convention of Cintra] Appendix toConcerning…the Convention of Cintra Appendix toLyrical Ballads(1802, etc.) The Borderers Edmund Burke,ReLections on the Revolution in France,inWorks(Bohn’s Standard Library, London, 1886) Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns Concerning …The Convention of Cintra Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford, 1956-71) The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York, 1957– ) The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle,ed. Edith J. Morley (Oxford, 1927) Dictionary of National Biography Essays upon Epitaphs Essay, Supplementary to the Preface The Excursion,inP.W.v.

10

E.Y.

Wordsworth’s Political Writings

Fenwick note Fink

Freeholders

Godwin

Guide

Hale White

H.C.R.

Healey

I.F. note

J.E.G.P. Jordan

Knight,Prose Works L.B. Llandaff L.Y.

Mathetes M.L.N. M.L.R.

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1806,ed. Ernest de Selincourt; second edition, revised by Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967) I. F. note (see below) Z. S. Fink,The Early Wordsworthian Milieu (Oxford, 1958) Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland William Godwin,Enquiry concerning Political Justice,ed. F. E. L. Priestley (Toronto, 1946) A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England W. Hale White,Description of the Wordsworth and Coleridge Manuscripts in the Possession of Mr. T. Norton Longman(London, 1897) Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London, 1938) George Harris Healey,The Cornell Wordsworth Collection(Ithaca, N.Y., 1957) Notes dictated by Wordsworth to Isabella Fenwick in 1843 and printed inP.W. Journal of English and Germanic Philology John E. Jordan,De Quincey to Wordsworth (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA., 1962) The Prose Works of William Wordsworth,ed. William Knight (London, 1896) Lyrical Ballads(1798, 1800, 1802, 1805) A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff … The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years,ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1939) Letter of ‘Mathetes’ (John Wilson) toThe Friend Modern Language Notes Modern Language Review