Cities and Book VII

After completing his BA at Cambridge in early 1791, Wordsworth lived in London for four months (February to May), pondering his future, living on the generosity of relatives. He then went on to pursue various other projects, including his trip to Orleans in France, where he learned French, became involved with Annette Vallon, and became involved in revolutionary idealism.

Wordsworth returned to England late in 1792, and from then through 1795 he lived primarily in London, although he was far from settled: "And now it pleased me my abode to fix/Single in the wide waste. To have a house,/It was enough--what matter for a home?" (1805, VII, 75-7).

In 1793, Wordsworth had his first two poems published, Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk, neither of which received a great deal of critical attention. He also became interested in revolutionary politics in London, attending meetings and discussions, risky as this was at the time: after France declared war on England in February of 1793, the Pitt government had suspended habeus corpus and was on the look-out for insurrectionary activities. Wordsworth never encountered any real trouble however, as he was more of a thinker than a doer. He did write an attack on the Bishop of Llandaff, who represented, to Wordsworth, the worst of British aristocratic oppression; however, it was never published. Wordsworth was also quite absorbed with sorting through his feelings about the Revolution; his relationship with Annette Vallon and their illegitimate child; and his own future, still a point of great uncertainty for him--some of the emotional turmoil he was experiencing is reflected in his poem Salisbury Plain, which dates from this time (see also Prelude, Book XII [1805]).

Although London served as Wordsworth's base during this period, he did a significant amount of travelling within England, both with his sister, and with friends such as Robert Jones and William Calvert. In 1794, his association with the latter led him away from the city, and into a rather delicate situation with Raisley Calvert, younger brother to William. Calvert promised to leave Wordsworth a legacy of £600 (later changed to £900), in recognition of his artistic potential. In return, Wordsworth was happy to act as a travelling companion to Calvert, an invalid, even though the two were not really that close. But when Calvert became seriously ill, Wordsworth felt obligated to stay to the end, partly out of gratitude, partly out of a guilty desire to secure his fortune. During the period of Calvert's decline, they stayed at Calvert's home in Keswick, which was scenic and inspiring, but also far removed from Wordsworth's own family and friends--and London: "I begin to wish much to be in town; cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions" (Letters, 136).

After Calvert's death in January 1795, Wordsworth returned to London. where he became quite an adherent of Godwinian philosophy; he met with Godwin and like-minded others frequently, discussing the revolution and politics. Godwin's rationalist ideas excited Wordsworth at first (Nesbitt, 97-100), but the poet was still very much in turmoil over the implications of the revolution and England's response. He experienced moments of great "despondency" (Nesbitt, 100), and the last eight months he spent in London were characterized by a creative depression that prevented Wordsworth from writing.

During this period, Wordsworth found relief and consolation in thoughts of the country, and the restorative powers of nature (cf. Tintern Abbey); and when his friend Basil Montagu offered him and Dorothy the use of a house in Racedown, they both leapt at the chance. Thus, in the fall of 1795, Wordsworth put his city-dwelling days behind him: after a (not insignificant) period of adjustment to independent country life, Wordsworth settled down to work.

Despite the time spent in London during these years, Wordsworth did not appear to be thinking actively of the city and its place in the development of the poetic imagination; his letters from 1791-1795 scarcely mention any feelings for or against the city. However, by the time he becomes seriously involved with the composition of the Prelude, he has had nearly ten years to reflect on London's significance in his life. As a result, rather than being strictly biographically and historically accurate, his account of London in Book 7 seems more to be a conflation of his actual youthful experiences of city life, seen through the poetic lens of a more mature poet working towards a coherent artistic and philosophical goal. The 1850 version of the Prelude is even more reflective of the effects of the aging/maturing process--the revisions reflect Wordsworth's changing attitudes towards the city, the revolution, and the imagination.

Davies, Hunter. William Wordsworth: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980.

De Selincourt, Ernest, ed. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Volume I: The Early Years, 1787-1805. Second Edition. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967.

Nesbitt, George L. Wordsworth: The Biographical Background to His Poetry. New York: Pegasus, 1970.

Reed, Mark L. Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770-1799. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967.

Book VII has probably not received the kind of critical attention accorded to other parts of the Prelude, such as Book VI, or Books X-XIII. A sampling of recent criticism reveals a wide range of interpretations of this Book--no critic is interested in exactly the same moments of Book VII as his or her counterparts--leading one to speculate if such analyses say more about the Prelude or about the ideological stand-points of the critics...

Geraldine Friedman's "History in the Background of Wordsworth's Blind Beggar" (ELH 56:1, 1989, 125-148) places the figure of the blind Beggar at the centre of a complex epistemological analysis that argues "the political and erotic circumstances surrounding the origin of the text are reinscribed in the story it tells about the genesis of figuration" (127). In other words, Friedman is drawing a parallel between the interruption of Wordsworth's own life caused by his relationship with Annette Vallon, and the birth of their illegitimate child, and the interruption of autobiography, as form, by history. The blind Beggar is the focal point and symbol of this personal and textual crisis.

While this rhetorical argument is, in itself, extremely complicated and subtle, it does lead Friedman to raise some concepts that are of more practical use in understanding this Book. For example, to explain her position Friedman delves into a historicist reading of the passage, examining it in context of the French Revolution, and drawing connections between Wordsworth's own philosophical feelings about the conflict between France and England, and the ideas of Edmund Burke. She argues that Wordsworth shared Burke's belief in the inferiority of "French theatricality" to "English theatre" (the one associated with excess and revolution, the other with containment and order) as modes of national identity; this in turn leads to the suggestion that Wordsworth's position was essentially conservative at the time of the Prelude's composition. Although he had strong pro-revolutionary feelings during his youthful visits to London, by the time he wrote the Prelude both he and England had undergone adjustment to a post-revolutionary mentality; writing in 1804-5, Wordsworth looked back on his residence in London, and his pro-revolutionary leanings, with more critical distance and less sympathy for transgressive politics.

Friedman's consideration of the rhetorical structure of this particular passage points out two other useful approaches for understanding its structure, as well as the structure of Book VII as a whole:

...on the one hand, a contrastive model of "set[ting] off by foil" (7.601) which differentiates this stark passage from the theatrical riot of book 7 in general; on the other, a model of resemblance which includes specular analogy and mis-en-abyme. (125-6)

The first, "setting off by foil," allows readers to examine figures in the poem in opposition to others:

the single and singular blind Beggar looms against the plurality of the crowd, just as the sole instance of visionary salience...is set against the usual experience of blindness...Thus dark serves as a background for light, the general for the specific, the unintelligible for the intelligible, the plural for the singular...and the motion of "the moving pageant" for the stillness of "that unmoving man." (127-8)

The second approach, mis-en-abyme, refers to the process of using a larger structure to frame a smaller one, which can then be used to comment on the larger, in a kind of synechdochic relationship. This metaphorical technique allows readers to see episodes of the poem as being emblematic of Wordsworth's philosophical or autobiographical project as a whole. That is, we might see "Wordsworth's animus against London as the place of autonomous and uncontrollable representation....[as] Burke's and Wordsworth's animus against France" (134). Or, while Wordsworth's sense of being confronted and challenged by the Beggar as an individual can be seen as representing the challenge posed by "the urban poverty that...forces people to beg in the first place" (137), this moment also has an even larger significance, confronting the poet and reader with the limitations of knowledge: "'The face of every one/That passes by me is a mystery'" (7.597-8).

Lawrence Kramer's article, "Gender and Sexuality in the Prelude: The Question of Book Seven" (ELH 54:3, 1987, 619-637) takes a completely different approach to this Book; while he does consider the blind Beggar, Kramer is more interested in the connections between the Maid of Buttermere episode, and the poet's reflections on Bartholomew Fair.

At the start of his essay, Kramer establishes an important distinction between two terms used by Wordsworth in Book VII, "fancy" and "imagination." Fancy is introduced here as "the mundane, indiscriminate, and capricious manipulation of images . . . [which] . . . seduces the Romantic subject into an indiscriminate, erotically-tinged empathy with others" (622). In short, fancy is a dangerous distraction to the pure, discriminating imagination; London, as the domain of fancy, blinds and contaminates the poet's imagination, causing a kind of artistic paralysis, or impotence, represented by, among other images, the blind Beggar's blank inscrutability.

According to Kramer, this accounts for Wordsworth's interest in the Maid of Buttermere, Mary Robinson: he extols her virtue and purity--so closely connected to the nurturing, maternal, rural environment--because he sees her as a desexualized, uncontaminated alter-ego for himself, a figure who is free from the urban confines of fancy and (sexual) impurity. The children of both Mary and the prostitute also become alter-egos, removed as they both are, literally and figuratively, from the "threatening sexuality" of the city.

Kramer's approach then, is psychoanalytic, seeing Wordsworth's experiences in London in terms of gender and sexuality. And of course, the city's contaminating, castrating sexuality--or fancy--is associated with impurity that is specifically feminine. Bartholomew Fair, in particular, is seen as representing "the contaminated mother" (632) who castrates, or silences, the male poet; fancy, rampant at the Fair, "forms a vision of the fall into the (female) body . . . the grotesque body, the communal human body that is celebrated and disinhibited by such carnivalesque activities as the Fair" (634).

As a result, according to Kramer, "Wordsworth . . . hinges his imaginative survival not just on the repression of corrupted sexuality but on the repression of gendered sexuality itself" (634). That is, not only does the poet retreat from the threat of creative paralysis represented by the city by identifying with maternal, even non-sexual, rural figures such as Mary Robinson--he goes further, to a "more primary identification with the mountains that nursed her--and himself. It is 'the mountain's outline and its steady form' . . . now phallic rather than maternal, that invests the mind with a 'steady grandeur' which can resist the objects that would seduce and consume it" (633). This masculine principle, now closely associated with the imagination, offers the poet protection; because of his early exposure to imagination and its cleansing, uplifting powers, the poet is able to repress, and even transcend, the city's gendered sexuality and its threats to his poetic (masculine) abilities.

As a final example of the different stances adopted by critics in relation to Book VII, we can consider E.W. Stoddard's "'All Freaks of Nature': The Human Grotesque in Wordsworth's City" (Philological Quarterly 67:1, 1988, 37-61) Stoddard's article is perhaps the most materialist of these three presented here; in addition to looking at the Book's relationship to literary history, he considers its implications in relation to the socio-economic environment of the city as Wordsworth seems to have seen it.

Stoddard first points out that Book VII's description of the city strongly echoes the "literary tradition of epic hells" represented most notably in Dante and Milton; at the same time, he suggests that the city's hellishness also offers implicit social criticism. The city-as-hell can be seen in a diachronic sense, as a metaphor for a mental state (50); or it can seen through a synchronic reading which concentrates on material reality, "underlin[ing] the opposition between city and country as two alternative modes of life, artificial versus natural, deformed versus healthful" (50).

Stoddard also considers Book VII in light of the argument advanced in Book VIII, that "Love of Nature" leads to "Love of Man." He suggests that this is a central theme for the whole Prelude, but that its development is arrested in Book VII by the presence of the grotesque in the city. Wordsworth's ambivalence towards the city, characterized by a combination of both "attraction and repulsion" (40) represents the problematic nature of his attempt to move from the sublime to the beautiful (40), and the inescapable materiality of the grotesque, embodied by the city, raises an important question: "is the new world to be material or visionary, and is the poet to be a figure above and aloof from society, or a 'man speaking to other men'?" (40-1).

Stoddard defines the grotesque, as figured in Book VII, as the absence of "the sublime presences of nature, reason and imagination" (44); the grotesque can also be seen as a "state preceding organization" (53). But while the grotesque is problematic because it is not the sublime, it does possess a positive quality: "Whereas the sublime is associated with obscurity and formlessness and the beautiful with form, the grotesque embodies de-formity and trans-formity, suggesting the need for re-form" (40). In other words, if nothing else, the grotesque reminds us of the potential for pragmatic changes, reforms, of material life that might have more immediate applications than either the sublime or the beautiful. However, while Wordsworth raises this possibility for the grotesque, he does not seem to act on it, or follow it through poetically: "The resolution of Book 7 holds out little hope to those in city pent. Having authentically presented the crippling yet spectacular street life of the city, the poet backs off into a 'romantic' form of primitivism, or nostalgia for the pure agrarian past" (56).

The "romantic" position Wordsworth takes, as a way of freeing himself from the challenges presented by the grotesque city, is of course to call on his earlier "habit" of Imagination, his earlier experiences of the sublime and the beautiful. The stability of the imagination, its ability to relate part to whole, counters the de-stabilizing forces of the grotesque (55), and Wordsworth is able to resist the chaotic pull of the city and return to his artistic and philosophical goals. But as Stoddard suggests, this ideal, visionary solution is also one of essentially conservative privilege--what enables Wordsworth to draw power from the sublime and beautiful is essentially his possession of a certain socio-economic status, which the real, material inhabitants of the city, mired in the grotesque, are not fortunate enough to possess.