By examining the family and financial circumstances of Wordsworth’s early years, this illuminating biography reshapes our understanding of the great Romantic poet’s most creative period of life and writing.
- Features new research into Wordsworth’s financial situation, and into how the poet and his family survived financially
- Offers a new understanding of the role of his great unwritten poem ‘The Recluse’
- Presents a new assessment of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge
Table of Content
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments x
Abbreviations and Texts xii
Foreword: “The Prelude”: A Poem of My Own Life? xvii
Part I Early Years 1
1 Versions of Home: 1770–83 3
2 Hawkshead and Esthwaite: 1783–7 18
3 Cambridge: 1787–90 37
4 To the Alps: and What Followed: 1790–1 53
5 Annette Vallon, Michel de Beaupuy, and the Bishop of Llandaff: 1791–3 69
Part II Writer 91
6 Salisbury Plain and its Consequences: 1793–5 93
7 Racedown: 1795–7 113
8 Coleridge and Alfoxton: 1797–8 135
9 Lyrical Ballads: 1798 157
10 Hamburg to the Harz: 1798 173
11 Writing in Goslar: 1798–9 183
12 Sockburn to Grasmere: 1799–1800 198
Part III Town-End 213
13 “Home at Grasmere, ” the “Ode, ” “Michael”: 1800–1 215
14 Hurting: 1800–1 241
15 Marrying: 1801–2 249
16 Grasmere to Calais and on to Gallow Hill: 1802 265
17 Marriage, First Child, and the Trip to Scotland: 1802–3 284
18 “The Prelude” I: 1804 303
19 “The Prelude” II: 1804–5 315
20 “Elegiac Stanzas, ” Poems, in Two Volumes: 1806–7 328
Part IV The Light of Common Day 341
21 “The Recluse” and The Convention of Cintra: 1808–9 343
22 Loss and Grief: 1809–12 356
23 Stamp-officer and Poet of The Excursion: 1812–14 368
24 “What though it be past”: 1814 387
Part V Sketches of Late Years 397
25 Poetry, Family, and Polemic: 1815–18 399
26 Peter Bell and “the ghosts of what they were”: 1819–26 407
27 “The Recluse” and “The Prelude”: 1827–33 418
28 The Past Enshrined: 1834–42 429
29 No Resting Place: 1843–50 439
Afterword 447
Bibliography 451
Index 457
About the author
JOHN WORTHEN is Emeritus Professor, University of Nottingham, UK. His books include The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2010), Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (2007), D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (2005), The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802 (2001), and D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 18851912 (1991).
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