Wordsworth’s implicit support for the powerful in A Guide is revealed in the 1818 Westmorland Election, in which he publicly helps Lord Lonsdale, the most influential politician in Westmorland, to win the support of the freeholders. A Tory nobleman, Lord Lonsdale in this election was met with a challenge from the Whig
candidate, Henry Brougham, for two parliamentary seats in this area. Both a
government official and a public figure now, Wordsworth used his influence to seek to persuade freeholders who were against Lord Lonsdale and reported the result to his patron (Owen and Smyser III 140). In April 1818, Wordsworth published a pamphlet Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland, in which he harshly criticized Henry Brougham for his “Whiggism” (Prose III, 163). He champions Lord Lonsdale as “a faithful guardian to the several orders of the State” (155), while depicting Brougham as a Jacobin resulting from the tyranny of Napoleon (164-165).68 Besides, Brougham’s support for domestic reform, i.e., the elective franchise, was treated as sabotage to the British system. Brougham’s opinion was to extend the franchise to all males who paid tax, but for Wordsworth this was the idea of a Jacobin.
For Wordsworth, only the landed class should enjoy the privilege to vote. As for the candidate, he who has more properties should be voted for: “Men of large estates cannot but be men of wide concerns; and thus it is that they become known in proportion. Extensive landed property entails upon the possessor many duties, and places him in divers [sic] relations, by which he undergoes a public trial” (176).
According to this logic, only the richest person in Westmorland was capable of being selected as an ideal representative for this area. Brougham, due to his lack of economic status, was not an strong candidate compared with Lord Lonsdale. When Two Addresses was released, it soon aroused disgust from those who upheld the necessity of domestic reform. After reading Wordsworth’s pamphlet, Thomas Love Peacock wrote to Shelley, thus summarizing Wordsworth’s argument: “Wordsworth has published an Address to the Freeholders, in which he says they ought not to
68 A similar depiction was found in Dorothy Wordsworth’s letter: “I assure you he has nothing of a Westmoreland Countenance. I could have fancied him one of the French Demagogues of the Tribunal of Terror at certain times, when he gathered a particular fierceness into his face. He is very like a Frenchman” (qtd. in Kim 54).
choose so poor a man as Brougham, riches being the guarantee of political integrity”
(71). Responding to Peacock, Shelley regretted Wordsworth’s political conversion:
“I wish you had sent me some of the overflowing villainy of those apostates…. What a beastly and pitiful wretch [is] that Wordsworth!” (The Letter II, 25-26).
Wordsworth’s image as a “leveling muse,” as perceived from Lyrical Ballads, was contradictory with his public support for the Lowther (Lord Lonsdale’s) family. As Timothy Webb suggests:
for his contemporaries and especially for those who belonged to the next generation, Wordsworth’s complexity was increased [and]…. readings of it [Lyrical Ballads] or estimates of what it seemed to represent were overlaid or complicated or obscured or occluded by impressions of what Wordsworth had become. (215)
Wordsworth’s arguments attacking Henry Brougham, including his support for domestic reform and his economic status, all went against the image he projected in the late 1790s. His interest was no longer in social reform; on the contrary, keeping society’s status quo and preserving England’s patriarchal tradition he now saw to be his duty as a “poet-physician.” In the 1850 Prelude, Wordsworth praises Edmund Burke, the anti-revolutionary figure he attacked in his Letter to Llandaff, as a
“genius”:
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth, Against all systems built on abstract rights, Keen ridicule; the majestic proclaims Of Institutes and Laws hallowed by Time;
Declares the vital power of social ties Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the Allegiance to which Men are born― (VII. 523-530; italics mine)69 Ernest de Selincourt suggests that the insertion of this tribute to Burke might have been made some time after 1820 (XXXI), being a tribute that “revises at a stroke his text, his politics, and his account of the French Revolution in Book X” (Jacobus Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference 38).
This change on behalf of the patriarchal tradition is, as Richard Cronin points out, from “the spokesman for a particular ‘class of men’” to “a champion of the
independence not simply of the statesmen but of the state” (34). In Gypsies (1807), Wordsworth shows his intolerance for the poor. A group of gypsies, the “unbroken knot / Of human Beings,” gather in “the self-same spot” the whole day doing nothing at all (Poems I, 1-2). Their aimlessness in “this torpid life,” in the eyes of
Wordsworth, arouses the “reprove [al]” of “[t]he weary Sun,” “the mighty Moon,” and
“the very stars” (13; 19; 23), the revolving of which form a sharp contrast to the gypsies’ idleness. Though reluctant to reveal publicly his contempt for the homeless and jobless (“In scorn I speak not” [26]), Wordsworth believes these gypsies should take the blame themselves for their suffering: “they are what their birth / And breeding suffer them to be” (26-27). These “[w]ild outcasts of society” are born to suffer, and their breeding exacerbates this vicious circle. In his study of common attitudes held toward gypsies in the early nineteenth century, David Mayall points out that with mainstream society “alleging they did not perform ‘real’ work but rather occupied themselves with as little toil as was compatible with survival,” in this sense gypsies “were thought to be idle, parasitical and beggarly, with no belief in the value of work” (46). This contemporary common view is reflected in Wordsworth’s idea on gypsies, who would camp at the same place the whole day and do nothing. Thus,
69 Quotations of The 1850 Prelude are from The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979).
in contrast with the portrait of the gypsies in Wordsworth’s 1790s poems, in which the pain of their bodies was drawn out to vent his discontent with the political situation, the gypsies now aroused only feelings of disgust. They were a group cast out from society, but instead of being forced into poverty, homeless and jobless, they incurred what they suffered.
First submitted by Thomas Potter, MP for St. Germans in Cornwall in 1753, the Census Bill intended to enumerate the total number of English people, marriages, births, deaths, and the number of the poor receiving alms from every parish.
Objection to governmental intervention by parliament deferred the passage of the bill, but in 1800 changes in politics and the economy, together with strong arguments from Malthus’ theory of population and John Rickman’s national rhetoric, the Census Bill was finally passed (Garrett 14-19).70 The Census Bill functioned as a means to identify everyone in the country, their age, marital status, and occupation. Because of their nomadic homelessness, the gypsies were a group hard to exactly locate.
This “unbroken knot” is an unidentified group that cannot be separated as individuals to record, study, and control, because they are “[w]ild outcast[s] of society.” In his Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes the control of the distribution of individuals in space as the first principle of discipline on the body:
One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation; it was a tactic of anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, and anti-concentration. Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals…. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed
70 The fact that other European countries launched a national census encouraged the practice in Briton:
Norway and Denmark in 1769, the US in 1790, and Spain in 1798. A series of bad harvests and the deteriorating war with France made national census in England necessary to help calculate the import of food and recruitment for the army (Garrett 14-19).
at knowing, mastering and using. Discipline organizes and analyzes space.
(143)
Wordsworth’s anxiety derives from the fact that these gypsies contribute nothing to the economic growth of the country. While the heavenly bodies (the sun, the moon, the stars, which symbolize not just time but the labor of common people) have their routine, gypsies only wander and idle. They are an “unusable and dangerous coagulation,” bodies refusing to be disciplined. If the aim of the Census was, to use Foucault’s words, to “transform the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities” (148), then the jumbled gypsies reject being subsumed under an umbrella of control. In this way, they are a potential disease to the health of the nation. “The marginal or ‘minority’” as Homi K. Bhabha points out, “is a much more substantial intervention into those justifications of modernity― progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past― that rationalize the authoritarian, ‘normalizing’ tendencies within cultures in the name of the national interest or the ethnic prerogative” (4). The criticism on the marginals for their uselessness and uncontrollability attests to the exigency of “normalizing tendencies”
and proves the failure of the imagination to incorporate the material as claimed in the
“Prospectus.” The “unbroken knot” of gypsies defies inclusion in the “multiplicity in unity,” the premise of which is to be properly located and measured to accord with the “national interest.” After the publication of this poem, Coleridge attacked it for its “mental bombast” and its “thoughts and images too great for the subject” (qtd. in Poems I 1025). For Coleridge, the subject of low-class people is not qualified for poetry. As abstract figures on the table of the census, the imagination operates to abstract the material into the representative. Rejecting subsumption the order of the census/imagination, the description of marginals causes only “mental bombast.”
Wordsworth’s change of feeling toward the low-class people is attested in
another two poems: Composed After Reading a Newspaper of the Day (1835) and Guilt and Sorrow;or, Incidents upon Salisbury Plain (1842). Guilt and Sorrow is the third version of Salisbury Plain (1793), with the story of Traveler and the female gypsy fully extended. The Traveler in Salisbury Plain is an observer of social justice as embodied in the female gypsy; in Guilt and Sorrow, he turns into a sailor who was forced into the army and left it with no money when discharged. His poverty led him to commit murder on his way home. At the end of the story, the sailor turns himself in and receives the death penalty:
His fate was pitied. Him in iron case (Reader, forgive the intolerable thought) They hung not:― no one on his form or face Could gaze, as on a show by idlers sought;
No kindred sufferer, to his death-place brought By lawless curiosity or chance,
When into storm the evening sky is wrought, Upon his swinging corse an eye can glance,
And drop, as he once dropped, in miserable trance.71 (658-666)
Though the sailor’s experience arouses pity from the people in the neighborhood, the crime of murder he committed still needs to be redressed to maintain the order of society. The addition of the sailor’s story, instead of pointing the finger of guilt at social injustice like the final argument in Salisbury Plain, functions to remind the reader of the importance of social order even when social injustice exists. The neighbors could not gaze at the sailor’s body hung on the scaffold because gazing at it would incur more pity and produce a possible argument against the overbearing
71 Quotations from Guilt and Sorrow are from the Stephen Gill edited The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth (Ithaca and New York: Cornell UP, 1975).
authority of the political. Wordsworth’s plotting controls the range of sympathy (“Reader, forgive the intolerable thought”) as he arranges the sailor’s body in the way he describes Louis XVI’s body (Chapter 2): limited sympathy is required to the humanity of human nature, but exaggerated pity is irrational. By controlling
sympathy, Brunonian “excitement” would maintain a healthy state, and society would also be a healthier one because the criminal would have received his due punishment without arousing too much agitation.
Wordsworth’s ideal society in his later stage is not the one advocated in the 1790s, with all people in the country taken into account. As Benjamin Kim notes concerning Wordsworth’s support for patriarchal conservatism:
A healthy government is not defined as that which gives voice to the People, but as that which reflects a certain kind of ideal existence: rural, independent, traditional, and tied as much to place as to the nature of humankind…. This chain of causalities, put forward as a prescription for the health of the
individual and the body politic, gives nationalism a leg-up on universal benevolence and justice, and describes the political orientation that
Wordsworth would hold for most of his life: a conservatism that wished to conserve both a way of life and the center of political power. (56)
In Composed After Reading a Newspaper of the Day in 1835, Wordsworth publicly declares his mistrust for low-class people and any reform (political/economic) to change the status quo. These low-class people are described as mob whose demand for social reform would only sabotage the harmony of the nation, and it is better for them to stay where they are in the social hierarchy:
“PEOPLE! your chains are severing link by link;
Soon shall the Rich be levelled down--the Poor Meet them half way." Vain boast! for These, the more
They thus would rise, must low and lower sink
Till, by repentance stung, they fear to think. (Poems II, 1-5)
The social chains that tie low-class people to the bottom of the social hierarchy, even when broken, still cannot help them rise to a higher status. The Jacobin mentality to level down the rich, in the eyes of Wordsworth, only sinks the supporters to “low and lower” status because only a few among those that seize political power would enjoy the result of revolution: “[w]hile all lie prostrate, save the tyrant few / Bent in quick turns each other to undo, / And mix the poison, they themselves must drink” (6-8).
Those low-class who support revolution or believe “[k]nowledge will save me from the threatened woe” (10) are doomed to be disappointed, because
if than other rash ones more thou know, Yet on presumptuous wing as far would fly Above thy knowledge as they dared to go, Thou wilt provoke a heavier penalty. (11-14)
Using penalty as threat against either drastic revolution or social reform (here
education), Wordsworth disciplines the body of the marginals. No later than the late 1820s, Wordsworth had started to speak as guardian of the nation. In his Ode: 1814, Wordsworth uses the tone of Saint George to announce: “I, the Guardian of this Land, / Speak not now of toilsome duty;/Well obeyed was that command” (25-27).
A cultural guardian, “poet-physician” of the nation, Wordsworth endeavored to preserve the health of the nation, “bind[ing] together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time”
(“Preface” in 1850, from Prose I, 141). By heeding his advice, social disease in abuse of passion would be cured, and the marginal’s body disciplined to conform to the social system.
Conclusion
Both in his portraiture and in his poems, Wordsworth from 1830 on endeavored to create an ideal public image to the world.72 In this ideal image, reason is seasoned with feeling, and sensibility coordinated with sublimity. His dissatisfaction with Henry William Pickersgill and W. H. Watt only attested to this impossibility. His poems, extending over 50 years and often undergoing multiple revisions, produce disparate images of the poet that he could never unify or rectify, try as he might. A young pro-revolutionary, an escapist apostate, a government official; an unmarried father, a brother mistaken for his sister’s husband, a man marrying his childhood friend; a poet of sensibility, a leveling muse, a nature poet. These variegated identities resist a unifying image, therefore dooming the efforts of a single-minded Wordsworth to failure.
These images were, in the past, phrased in terms of mind. The most orthodox Wordsworthian description, and of Romantics in general, is “mind confronts nature and their interplay constitutes the poem” (Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze 78).
Deconstructionists duplicated the play on the mind, and Ecologists brought the superiority of mind back on track from New Historicists’ deviation from the
immaterial. The change of critical scenario started after the attention given to body criticism. In the field of literary history, the study of Pre-Romanticism addressed the age of sensibility as the background era for most Romantics; in the field of history of medicine, investigation into the discipline of neuroscience consolidated the relation between the Romantic poet and contemporary medical discourse. These efforts in the last decade of the eighteenth century broadened the critical scope of historical investigation into a concrete contour of the body, not just the body straitjacketed into
72 As James M. Garrett comments: “Wordsworth is “active in the creation of his own self-image” (8).
an abstracted theory often disguised as ahistorical. The contemporary understanding and disposition of the body, seen in a certain critical light, helps us read one more, critical, page in the history of the body.
Interestingly enough, two modern theorists of the body rooted their theory in nineteenth century neuroscience: Nietzsche was John Brown’s reader, and Deleuze developed such key Brunonian words as “excitation,” “vibration,” “stimulant” (What is Philosophy) into his “flow” and “energy.” Besides, Deleuze’s “machine,” a seeming metaphor for the body under capitalism, is actually commensurate with our understanding of the body since Descartes, a passive automatism separated from the soul. In this sense, the appropriation of their body criticism to the historical study of the body may not be anachronistic. It is a return to the future.
The body can be seen as a machine which has different aspects in contemporary times: aesthetic, medical, political, and sexual. The procedure of this dissertation has been to define the three aesthetics, namely the picturesque, the sublime, and the beautiful, as three body relations, or machine connections. All three aesthetic stages of Wordsworth were at the same time interspersed with different aspects of medical discourse (the sentient principle, material mind, health), political discourse
(pro-revolutionary/anti-revolutionary), and sexual relationships (Annette Vallon, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Hutchinson). The four axes in three stages therefore provide the different body aesthetics of Wordsworth.
In the second chapter, “The Politics of Pain,” the picturesque aesthetic was seen as related with Whytt’s sentient principle, Wordsworth’s pro-revolutionary rhetoric, and his love affair with Annette Vallon. The picturesque aesthetic is a body relation that channels the flow of sympathetic energy towards the sufferers. According to Robert Whytt’s “sentient principle,” the self-contained body mobilizes nerves when one feels pain in body. When one sees others in pain, their pain will be transmitted
to the viewer and generate nerve mobilization to show similar pain as a response.
This medical discourse stratified certain parts of the body (the nervous system) and regulated one’s feeling to show sympathy (to oneself as well as to others). In the age of sensibility, this medical discourse was usually applied to confirm male dominance.
Woman’s tenderness and frailty were said to make her more beautiful when she was in
Woman’s tenderness and frailty were said to make her more beautiful when she was in