Grasmere compiled by Richard Gravil. Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference

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1 Grasmere 2012 Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference compiled by Richard compiled Gravil by Richard Gravil HEB FOR ADVICE ON THE USE OF THIS EBOOK PLEASE SCROLL TO PAGE 2

2 Using this Ebook t * This book is designed to be read in single page view, using the fit page command. * To navigate through the contents use the hyperlinked Bookmarks at the left of the screen. * To search, click the search symbol. * For ease of reading, use <CTRL+L> to enlarge the page to full screen, and return to normal view using < Esc >. * Hyperlinks (if any) appear in Blue Underlined Text. Permissions Your purchase of this ebook licenses you to read this work on-screen. You may print a copy of the book for your own use but copy and paste functions are disabled. No part of this publication may be otherwise reproduced or transmitted or distributed without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. Making or distributing copies of this book would constitute copyright infringement and would be liable to prosecution. Thank you for respecting the rights of the author.

3 Grasmere, 2012 Selected Papers from The Wordsworth Summer Conference compiled by Richard Gravil on behalf of The Wordsworth Conference Foundation HEB Humanities-Ebooks, LLP

4 The Wordsworth Conference Foundation, 2012 Copyright is asserted by the Foundation on behalf of the contributing authors who retain all rights of further publication. First published by Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE Cover images Jason Goldsmith Front: Detail from Lingmoor Fell from Windermere (from Figure 9 in the last essay in the collection). Back: Figures 12 and 13 repeated. The Pdf Ebook is available to individual purchasers exclusively from and can be supplied to libraries by EBSCO, Ebrary and MyiLibrary. The paperback is available exclusively from Lulu.com ISBN PDF Ebook ISBN Paperback ISBN Kindle Ebook

5 Contents Foreword 7 Heather Glen We are seven in the 1790s 8 Judyta Frodyma Lowth, Landscape, and Biblical Echoes in Wordsworth s Home at Grasmere 34 Pamela Woof Dorothy Wordsworth, Writer: the Middle Years 45 Suzanne Stewart A Finely-Tuned Instrument: Dorothy Wordsworth and Synaesthetic Experience 68 Judith W. Page The Lonely Hills : Beatrix Potter, William Wordsworth, and the Lakeland Landscape 87 Heidi Thomson The Lyric Power of Connection in Wordsworth s Poem upon the Wye and Auden s In Praise of Limestone 104 Anthony John Harding Contempt for the Reading Public? Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Book Business 113 Peter Swaab The Poet and the Poetical Artist: Sara Coleridge as a Critic of Wordsworth 130 Paul Whickman Laon and Cythna to The Revolt of Islam: A Consideration of Shelley s Revisions in Context. 147

6 6 Grasmere, 2012 Catherine Redford The Last Man and Romantic Archaeology 160 Stacey McDowell Keats s Ode on Indolence 171 Jason Goldsmith Re-Drawing the Borders of Vision; or, The Art of Picturesque Travel 182

7 Foreword This peer-reviewed selection of lectures and papers is the fifth such to be published on behalf of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation. All five books are available in paperback from Lulu.com, and in PDF from Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk, or from MyiLibrary, EBSCO and Ebrary, to libraries. This collection will also be available from Amazon in Kindle format, though of course without quite the same layout that is possible in PDF and print form (the illustrations will suffer in this format), and with endnotes rather than footnotes. Richard Gravil, 1 December 2012

8 Heather Glen We are seven in the 1790s We are seven is perhaps the most famous, or notorious, of all Wordsworth s Lyrical Ballads. It is apparently very simple; but it has always been controversial. A close friend (James Tobin, the Jim of the first stanza), who saw it as the volume was going to press, advised Wordsworth to withdraw it, for, if published, it will make you everlastingly ridiculous. 1 But We are seven was quickly singled out for approval. It will be a very fastidious reader that will deny it has beauty and feeling, pronounced one of the first reviewers of Lyrical Ballads in In April, 1800 it appeared (unsigned) in a London daily newspaper, with a note that described its author as one of the first poets of the age. 3 This was the poem that first fired admiration of Wordsworth in fourteen-year-old Thomas de Quincey; that John Clare recalled seeing hawked about as a penny ballad one of the pieces of the living poets that have attained a common fame. 4 Throughout the nineteenth century, it was repeatedly anthologized, sentimentalized by Victorian illustrators, and appropriated for edifying purposes, especially collections on the deaths of children. It was much reprinted in school readers, and it became very popular as an elocution piece. I constantly hear little children, by order of their parents, repeating We are seven, reported a reviewer of readingbooks for children in The American writer Frances Miriam 1 Jared R. Curtis, The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth (rev.ed., Humanities Ebooks, 2007), The British Critic 4, 1799, Courier, 7 April In the same month the poem was copied to the Derby Mercury and the Lady s Magazine. 4 John E. Jordan, De Quincey to Wordsworth: Biography of a Relationship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 36; [John Clare], Popularity in Authorship, European Magazine n.s.1 (1825), The Educational Magazine, and Journal of Scholastic Literature 2 (1839), 399. David Masson, in Essays Biographical and Critical; Chiefly on English Poets (Cambridge, 1856), speaks of the poem s continuing popularity as a recita-

9 Heather Glen 9 Berry, born in 1811, was said to have recited it accurately when only two years old yet ignorant of A B C. 1 Many of those little ballads the world now has by heart. Others it will learn as it grows humbler and holier, prophesied an American review in The little child in We are Seven, has led many a strong man into the sentiments of his earlier, better days. 2 But We are seven has also had another kind of after-life. It was, as de Quincey reported, often ridiculed, even by Wordsworth s admirers. The simple ballad form and refrain-like repetition that made it easy to learn by heart made it also peculiarly susceptible to parody. In 1801, the Monthly Mirror, quoting the whole of We are seven as a sweetly-simple dialogue, warned that the poem might also provoke sentiments even of the ludicrous : Certain phrases and epithets in the preceding stanzas will be liable to this unfortunate perversion, with those whose mental associations will carry them back to the nursery, who cherish fancy more than feeling, and who prefer a witless parody to a composition that meliorates the heart. 3 True to this prediction, there were early parodies by Scott and Byron, and in Blackwood s Noctes Ambrosianae. These were to be followed by numerous others, sometimes with illustrations, throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, most making comic play with the unresolved stand-off between the two speakers, and nonsense of the girl s repeated words. 4 The most famous of these is, indeed, wordless: tion piece (381). On learning by heart in the nineteenth century, see Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 1 John Seeley Hart, The Female Prose Writers of America (Philadelphia, 1857), 498. David Masson, in Essays Biographical and Critical; Chiefly on English Poets (Cambridge, 1856), speaks of the poem s continuing popularity as a recitation piece (381). On learning by heart in the nineteenth century, see Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 2 Methodist Quarterly Review 9 (1857), Monthly Mirror 11 (1801), Malachi Malagrowther [Walter Scott], A Second Letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Weekly Journal (Edinburgh, 1826), 10; Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, noted during a Residence with his Lordship at Pisa in the Years 1821 and 1822 (London, 1824), 237 8; Noctes Ambrosianae,

10 10 Grasmere, 2012 Max Beerbohm s depiction of William Wordsworth in the Lake District, at Cross-Purposes in his volume The Poet s Corner (1904), where the encounter of We are seven is stylized as one between an elderly Wordsworth-figure (rather like the later Wordsworth of Canon Rawnsley s account) and a strangely bonnetted child. We are seven has proved oddly compelling to its readers, and in markedly divergent ways. On the one hand, many have found the poem charming (the word recurs in accounts of it); its lines and phrases find their way into the heart. On the other, it has evidently had a much more irritating memorability one that the parodies suggest is centred on its unresolved drama of insistence and resistence, the speaker s reiterated question and the child s stubborn repetition of a strangely opaque phrase. On the one hand, it has seemed to speak of common humanity, on the other, of radical difference, of a counter-perspective that challenges authority and consensus, and even rationality. There is something about this poem that seems to have prompted its readers into repeated attempts to make either sense or nonsense of it. Indeed, the first such attempt was arguably made on the day on which We are seven was composed. Thus Wordsworth recalled it years later in a Fenwick note: I composed it while walking in the grove of Alfoxden. My friends will not deem it too trifling to relate that while walking to and fro I composed the last stanza first, having begun with the last line. When it was all but finished, I came in and recited it to Mr. Coleridge and my Sister, and said, A prefatory Stanza must be added, and I should sit down to our little tea-meal with greater pleasure if my task were finished. I mentioned in substance what I wished to be expressed, and Coleridge immediately threw off the stanza thus: A little Child, dear brother Jem,. I objected to the rhyme, dear brother Jem, as being ludicrous, but we all enjoyed the joke of hitching-in our friend, James T s name, who was familiarly called Jem On later parodies, see Philip Connell, How to popularize Wordsworth, in Philip Connell and Nigel Leask, eds., Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Fenwick Notes, ed. Curtis, 42.

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